In the Castle of the Jewel 💖 for the fic association game, please!
hey @fawn-eyed-girl 💖Sorry for the late answer!
I also think of you when it comes to In the Castle of the Jewel, so that is a nice full circle, right?
I could talk for hours about this one. As I said it already, it is based on the wicked white witch's, Angela Carter' The Lady of the House of Love, which is part of her feminist retelling of fairy tales/spooky stories. In the story the vampire is a woman feasting on young virginal men, playing with her tarot (hence the title), and when I reread the story, I knew that the sad, lonely, longing undead woman has to be Kikyou. The other part though? He has a bicycle (hehe) and he is like the sun, so that was no question for me that it needs to be Kagome. (And thus my love of our sun and moon, aka KagKik really started.) The original story is much longer, and I have more backstory based on that explored in my head (Nosferatu is Naraku, who controls the Countess, for example), but I write short-short stories, and I felt it worked as it was.
The Countess has a pet lark in the original, which I obviously changed to shinidamachu, but it made me think of this beautiful piece, which I listened to a lot while writing, and now is forever connected to Kikyou in my head. It will come back in the next KagKik story I am writing currently.