Glynis vows to free Erzsébet

Glynis Wright’s vow to free Erzsébet Dolingen turns a witness to Vlad Dracula’s cruelty into a would-be rescuer. The promise links two women trapped by Vlad in different ways: Erzsébet is physically impaled and imprisoned, while Glynis fears being remade into a slave who cannot escape. Erzsébet’s warning and her faith in Glynis make the vow more than an outburst of pity; it becomes an act of recognition between women whose survival and freedom remain under threat.

The vow and its warning

When Glynis sees Erzsébet impaled, she can bear the scene no longer. She steps toward the vampire and declares, “Erzsébet, I swear to you I will free you. I swear it!” The pledge is made while Vlad is present, so it also places Glynis in opposition to the person who holds Erzsébet captive. It does not immediately change the physical circumstances: Erzsébet remains fixed to the stake, and Vlad remains in control. But Glynis has publicly named an intention that his power is meant to suppress.

Erzsébet answers with a warning rather than reassurance. If Glynis escapes Vlad, she must keep running and not let him destroy her as he has destroyed Erzsébet. Her repetition gives the advice urgency: escape is possible, but remaining within Vlad’s reach risks repeating Erzsébet’s fate. Glynis’s promise therefore contains a tension from its beginning. She wants to free another captive, yet the captive herself insists that Glynis’s first duty may be to escape.

The exchange sharpens an established concern in Glynis’s life. Before her transformation, she had protested the limits imposed on women and imagined living without the constraints that governed them. Later, after becoming a vampire, she finds herself confined by new rules and subject to Vlad’s mastery. Her vow to Erzsébet carries that earlier demand for freedom into a relationship with someone who has endured Vlad’s domination for much longer.

An attempted rescue

When Glynis later approaches Erzsébet again, the other vampire brides are present. Cneajna has finished speaking with Erzsébet and tells Glynis that she need not give anything if she does not wish to. Glynis answers that she wants to know Erzsébet, then moves close enough to see the ugly wound surrounding the iron stake. Her attention shifts from the spectacle of punishment to the person suffering within it.

Glynis takes hold of the stake with trembling fingers and tries with all her strength to pull it upward and out. It does not move. Elina explains that all of them have tried, together, and failed. The attempted rescue gives the earlier vow a concrete form, but also establishes the physical limit against which it must contend: this is not a restraint Glynis can remove by herself, or one the brides have been able to overcome collectively.

The stake defines Erzsébet’s condition as more than ordinary captivity. Erzsébet tells Glynis, “There is no hope for me, my sister. I am trapped here forever. Neither alive nor dead. This is my fate.” Her words make clear why the rescue attempt fails to produce release: the imprisonment has become an enduring state between life and death. Glynis’s response is grief and protest. She grips Erzsébet’s hand and presses it to her bosom, unable to accept the cruelty as simply deserved or inevitable.

Recognition and sisterhood

The encounter is intimate as well as desperate. Erzsébet’s cold hand closes over Glynis’s; their matching ruby rings catch the torchlight, and Erzsébet draws Glynis’s hand to her lips. Glynis is struck by Erzsébet’s beauty and by a resemblance to her mortal mother. The association gives the imprisoned woman a personal significance for Glynis: she does not see only a victim of Vlad’s violence, but someone whose tenderness recalls family and care.

Erzsébet, in turn, tells Glynis that when Vlad brought her to the tomb, she saw in the younger woman her own strength, pride, and will. She believes Glynis will escape and that Vlad will not be able to hold her. The certainty matters because it answers Glynis’s fear with recognition rather than command. Erzsébet does not ask Glynis to prove her loyalty by sharing her fate; she identifies the capacity to resist that she sees in her.

The other brides gather around Erzsébet, and their affection offers a brief contrast to the violence of her confinement. As Glynis joins them and touches Erzsébet reverently, she realizes she has become a true sister in this strange family of vampire women. The bond does not release Erzsébet, but it changes Glynis’s place among the women: she is no longer merely an outsider looking on, and her vow is now part of a shared recognition of what Vlad has done to them.

Meaning and limits of the promise

Glynis’s pledge is both an ethical response to suffering and a challenge to Vlad’s authority. The scene makes the cost of action plain: the stake resists her strength, the other brides have failed to move it, and Erzsébet describes her condition as permanent. Yet the failure of the immediate rescue does not erase the promise. Glynis has seen the wound, heard Erzsébet’s warning, and tried to act rather than treating the suffering as something beyond her concern.

The promise also connects rescue to escape without making them identical. Erzsébet urges Glynis to flee before Vlad destroys her, while Glynis’s instinct is to turn back toward the captive woman. Their exchange holds both demands in view: survival may require distance from Vlad, but freedom cannot be imagined without acknowledging those he has left behind. The evidence establishes Glynis’s vow, her failed attempt to remove the stake, and Erzsébet’s confidence in her escape; it does not show that Glynis succeeds in freeing Erzsébet. The unresolved promise thus remains a measure of Glynis’s resistance and of the limits imposed by Vlad’s power.