Chapter Text
It was in 1967 that the Universalmuseum Joanneum acquired the texts that would soon be known as The Memoir of A Countess, a series of diary entries recovered from an old castle—or schloss—in Styria.
It had not seen a single inhabitant in the near-century since the last diary entry was dated, and the closest traces of any human settlements—long since fallen to disrepair, its people perished—were approximately 11 kilometres to the east, and then another four to the west. While these once-villages were found in the thick of the forests grown untame, the schloss itself could be accessed through an overgrown hike up the mountains, which was a near-deadly journey for any man in the dead of winter; this would explain why the schloss had been undiscovered for nearly a century. As such, this story— of which we will tell you, dear reader—seems to have no viable historical accounts of any witness to the events the author of the diary describes. But let us lay out what we know.
The schloss had once been a magnificent thing, undoubtedly the residence of some esteemed noble family when the Duchy of Styria still reigned true. The foundation still remains, but there are indications of conflict. It is presumed that the noble family that had once inhabited the schloss' s halls had fallen victim to a violent massacre of some kind, after which the assailants attempted to burn down the place; why this attack is unfounded in historical records—including that of the Countess's diaries—is a question of heated debate amongst interested historians.
What few historical artefacts remained afterwards are few and far in between. Those bearing the crest of the aristocratic family were ruined beyond recognition, and as such, historians are unable to recognise the insignia in their known texts. It is unlikely that they will ever find it, for the family seemed relatively small and had no real relation to the greater houses of the ruling Habsburg monarchy of the time, and so the chances of their crest having ever been in any surviving collections is doubtful. The other artefacts, which had greater luck in surviving to the present day, are of little significance compared to the Countess’s diaries, but will be listed in a separate note for the reader’s perusal.
This was a story that told itself simply and well: the decrepit schloss standing high and tall, a shadow of its proud self amidst the snow-capped mountains of Styria; the fallen noble family, relevant in only its prestigious name that no member was left living to carry on for the present generation to remember; the singed stone and old stains of blood upon rotten hardboard and moth-eaten carpets that spoke of an assault on the good family’s name; the isolation of the surviving lady which granted her no choice but to spiral into depression and madness.
And yet the mystery that shrouded the short life of the young Countess persists. Why was it her who survived whatever fate befell upon the other members of her house? How was it that she continued to persevere throughout the short twenty-something years of her life despite the madness that made her dream of a lust for blood and the jagged silhouette of a Carmillan beast? How and why were her diaries preserved so carefully, such that they survived nearly a century?
And why, in a schloss of that size and then-opulence, where there should have been servants and footmen and staff to wait on her beck and call, were there only two withered bodies of bone— one with a stake through her heart; both draped in a moulding cape half-eaten by the pests—in the foyer of the decrepit castle?
The only name of any real relevance to this memoir has been lost to history. Throughout the writings of this diary, the author's name—and the names of any involved persons, really—eludes the readers. Whether this is a matter of the author's willing choice to maintain some air of mystery, thinking her diary entries to one day be displayed in a museum, or an indication of the author's mental state throughout the events foretold in the diary, what remains is that we have no name to put to the face of the author. The old portrait that sits in the Neue Galerie only has a golden plaque of the author’s aristocratic title and nothing more, and this is how it will be for the rest of time.
Mad or not, the absence of the Countess’s name and the loss of her piece of Styrian history is forever felt by the historians of today. The original journals written in her hand are preserved in the Austrian National Library, but due to the bizarre nature of her history and her written story, the complete text was not available to the public until 1987, when it was published in its original German, and then later in 25 different languages. The absurdity of it all has drawn many a curious scholar and occult fanatic to the buildings of Universalmuseum Joanneum , seeking to see what traces we have left of the Countess. Her story—befuddled in holes as it may be—and the question of how she lived and who was the one to drive a stake through her heart, remains one of history’s greatest and most bizarre mysteries.
GRAZ, AUSTRIA. 1992.