The Brides’ Starvation and Attempted Escape

The Brides’ Starvation and Attempted Escape is a crisis of confinement recorded by Glynis Wright in her journal in August 1819. When Vlad Dracula disappears from the castle, the vampire brides discover that their survival depends on a master who has left them without food and whose power still bars their way out. Their attempt to force open the great doors succeeds only in exposing a second obstacle: even with the doors open, the invisible barrier holds them inside.

Vlad Dracula’s Absence and the Brides’ Dependence

On 23 August 1819, Glynis stands with Elina on the castle’s decaying battlements, looking across the Carpathians while hunger begins to blur her vision. Vlad Dracula has not appeared in the chapel for several days, and none of the brides has seen him at the times when they retire or rise. Glynis has been secretly writing in her journal and avoiding the others, so she does not immediately understand that his absence is more than a brief disappearance. The realization comes when Elina, frightened, says that he is not there. Cneajna and Ariana are also missing from the chapel, leaving Glynis and Elina to search the castle.

The search confirms that Vlad Dracula has gone. Elina estimates that he left a few days earlier, when the gypsies stopped entering the castle. Their withdrawal is a warning: when Vlad travels, they lock the doors and stay away. Glynis initially welcomes his absence, glad to be rid of a man she despises. But Elina explains that the gypsies fear the brides and know that, as hunger grows, they will become dangerous. The practical cost of Vlad Dracula’s departure emerges at once: the brides are not only denied his presence but also deprived of the mortals he brings them to feed upon.

They had last fed on an unlucky hunter four nights earlier. By the time Glynis understands the situation, the hunger is already painful, her heartbeat sluggish, and her sense of vitality fading. Cneajna says that Vlad Dracula promised to return the following night and insists there was no reason to alarm the others. Elina counters that he has failed to return when promised before and has starved them in the past. When she asks why Cneajna did not seek permission for the brides to roam the valley and hunt, Cneajna answers that Vlad Dracula did not want Glynis away from the castle, so none of them could leave. His control of Glynis thus determines the confinement of all four women.

Hunger and the Breakdown of the Household

By 27 August, Glynis describes several days without food as a collective physical and mental collapse. The brides’ screams have filled the night; hunger is driving them toward madness. Their bodies have become thin and sinewy, their eyes deep-set, their skin pale gray. Their hearts have stopped beating, and Glynis sees them as wraithlike. These changes make the cost of starvation visible: the brides’ supernatural condition does not free them from bodily need, but makes the lack of blood a force that strips away their appearance and reason.

Each woman responds differently. Glynis rushes to the great doors and beats against them. Elina throws herself over the staircase railing and later scrapes her nails feverishly against the wood. Cneajna falls to her knees in the foyer, screaming, and later huddles on the floor, clawing at her hair. Ariana, in a flowing white gown, descends the staircase in a dreamlike manner before returning with an ancient sword. Her fear becomes explicit when she wails that she does not want to starve. The episode gathers four distinct reactions around one shared predicament: panic, despair, frantic exertion, and the need to act.

The scene also sharpens the contradiction in Glynis’s new existence. Before becoming a vampire, she had objected to a society that restricted women’s freedom; now, as she reflects elsewhere in her account, she is a slave to Vlad Dracula and trapped in the castle. She has regarded escape as necessary for survival, but the crisis makes that desire literal. The women cannot simply endure their confinement: hunger is already undoing their ability to endure anything.

The Attempt to Break Out

Ariana uses the ancient sword as a tool, jamming it into the lock of the great doors and calling for help. Glynis, weeping from the pain of hunger, grasps the hilt and joins her effort. Elina adds her hands, and together the three strain against the lock while Cneajna remains behind them in despair. Their struggle is physically costly: they are weak, the metal slowly bends, and the wood splinters. When Elina manages to tug at the giant latch, the sword falls onto the stone floor. Glynis pulls with all her strength, and the doors swing open on rusted hinges.

For a moment, opening the doors seems to promise release. Cneajna gasps with delight, and the night air reaches the women gathered in the doorway. But the barrier created by Vlad Dracula’s dark power still prevents them from racing into the night. The open entrance gives them a view of the evening sky over the courtyard and some solace, not a passage to freedom. The distinction matters: the brides can force the castle’s physical lock, but not the supernatural restraint that makes the castle their prison.

Outcome and Significance

The escape attempt fails at its decisive point. The great doors stand open, yet the brides remain unable to cross the invisible shield, and their hunger continues. Elina collapses to her knees clutching the door and fears that they will starve if no one comes; Ariana again wails. Glynis presses her body against the barrier, discovers she cannot break through, and screams and weeps against it. The episode ends without food, rescue, or release in the evidence recorded here.

The episode turns Vlad Dracula’s absence into another form of control. He is not present to command the brides, yet his power still confines them, while his restriction on Glynis’s movements has prevented all of them from seeking food outside. The failed breach separates physical resistance from actual freedom: the brides can bend a sword, splinter wood, and swing open a door, but none of these actions defeats the force holding them captive. In Glynis’s journal, the attempt is therefore both a desperate response to immediate bodily need and a concrete demonstration of how little agency the women possess within the castle.