In a crooked cottage deep within the hills, where the wind whispered secrets through the mossy eaves, lived old Mother Ursula. Bent with age and brittle as dried nettles, she sat hunched by her hearth, feeding firewood to the flames while her gnarled fingers spun yarn on a spindle as old as the forest itself. The fire crackled like old bones, and her mind wandered to days long past - days of laughter, of weeping, of warnings unheeded.

Long ago, she had a daughter. A willful child named Emilie, full of stubbornness and spirit - too much for a mother who prized obedience above all else. Emilie was bright-eyed and curious, but she had a tongue of her own and a fondness for questioning things no child ought. "Do as you're told," Ursula would hiss, "or god will mark you." But Emilie would only giggle and vanish into the meadows with the other village children.

Then came the sickness - at least, so it was said. A fever, a fit, a tragic end claimed the child, and Mother Ursula wept at the grave, clawing the earth and wailing to the heavens. "A curse from above," she whispered to her neighbors, "a god's wrath for disobedience."

But the old wives in the village - they whispered differently. They said Ursula's grief was hollow. That no god had sent that fever, but rather, her own hand. For one autumn evening, she had stirred caladar beans - bitter seeds said to wither the womb and blacken the soul - into the child's supper. A simple bowl of porridge and beans, meant to silence the girl who dared to say no.

Emilie died before the moon was high. She was buried beneath the yew tree at the edge of the woods, as was tradition for children taken by divine punishment. The village placed candles on her grave and spoke no more of her.

But Ursula, she spun. Every day. Spinning, always spinning. Hoping, perhaps, to spin away the guilt, or to thread a new child from the fibers of regret and lost chances. Her womb, though, remained empty, her belly barren, for her husband had long since passed, and the gods do not give gifts to those who take.

Years rolled on. Children, now grown, called her a witch. They dared each other to knock on her door, to steal her herbs, to sing cruel songs about the "Crone Who Boiled Her Babe." But she paid them no heed. The wheel turned. Her fingers spun. The fire crackled.

Then, one twilight - when the shadows grew long and the crows circled low - a knock came at the door.

"Mother," a voice called, light and lilting. "I've learned my lesson. May I come in?"

Old Mother Ursula froze. The spindle fell from her lap and clattered on the stone floor. That voice - it was a memory, sweet and sharp as elderflower.

"Is that you, my beloved child?" she rasped.

"Yes, Mother."

Her heart thudded like a drum at midsummer. Yet doubt lingered, as doubt always does when the dead speak.

"What is your name?" she asked.

"Emilie."

"What was the name of your doll?"

"Trick question," the voice chimed. "It was a bear. I called it Teddy."

Ursula swallowed hard. One final question remained - the old warding question, passed down from wise women of darker times.

"What was your last meal?"

A pause. Then a breathless, giddy reply: "Porridge and beans."

Something ancient stirred in Ursula's bones. Her hand trembled as it grasped the latch. She opened the door.

There stood a woman, tall and strange. Her gown shimmered like spider silk at dusk, black as coal, and her hair tumbled long and wild. Her face was pale as moonmilk, her lips painted blood red, and her eyes burned like coals under ice.

Ursula gasped. She had welcomed a vampire.

But the woman wore something familiar - a necklace strung with tiny wooden beads, worn down by the gnawing of a child's teeth. Emilie's necklace.

The creature stepped forward, silent as snowfall, and smiled with gleaming fangs.

"Who's the ungrateful brat now," she said in a voice that echoed from the grave, "you old bag of bones?"

Ursula screamed, but too late. Emilie lunged and sank her fangs into the throat that once shouted commands, draining her mother's lifeblood until there was nothing left but a sagging husk.

The next morning, the villagers awoke to find a sight that chilled their souls.

Old Mother Ursula's severed head sat atop a stake planted in her daughter's grave. A single word, carved with inhuman precision, was etched into her gray forehead:

Murderer.

From that day on, mothers in the village warned their children: Never scorn the will of the young, for even the smallest voice carries the strength to return - cloaked in shadow, teeth like knives, memory like fire.