It was the late 1700s and I was dying. Or so I thought. So I prayed to whatever god, mortal or immortal, would listen. It was impossible for me to count the number of nights that passed by while I slumbered under the cold and raw ground, as my mother, Gabrielle De Lioncuort had fallen so in love with doing. I had lost her to a life I simply could not fathom. Just as I had lost Armand Amadeo De Kiev and my beautiful violinist Nicolas. I had nothing left to live for, nothing more to give this cursed eternity, so I went deep underground to die. Or maybe to sleep the mundane bleeding of the centuries away. I wanted to die and I welcomed death with arms outstretched as if to invite a lover into a tender embrace. I had to rise if I wanted to continue to exist, but that would entail moving, turning over in the earth, and that meant giving in the maddening thirst. I wouldn’t give in. I would not seek out the evildoer and drink the dark crimson blood I craved so strongly. I simply could not. The thirst came, strong as any of Mother Nature’s glorious temper tantrums, and then the thirst went away, like the angry clouds after the storm had spent itself. It was like the rack and the fire. My brain thirsted as my heart thirsted. My heart grew bigger and bigger, and screamed louder, and louder until I thought I would shatter into tiny shards of crimson insanity. Still, I would not give in. I could not surrender to the thirst. Maybe mortals up above could hear the screaming of my preternatural heart. I saws them every now and then, burst of flames against the crushing darkness, heard their voices, babble of foreign tongues and exotic sounding words, but mostly I saw the darkness, heard only the delicious darkness. I once used to be a beautiful golden-haired fiend, now I was nothing but the thirst thing lying in the earth. I clung to my crimson sleep and my crimson dreams and the slow maddening knowledge that I was now too weak to claw my way through the soft sandy clumps, too weak to push the dirt away from my violet eyes and cast my gaze on the specter of the brilliant glimmering stars. Yet I did not die. I just prayed for death, begged for it, promised it whatever words would come to me to sweeten the deal. My hands were claws, and my alabaster skin had turned a sickly grey color and shrunk to the bones, and my eyes, oh, my beautiful, beautiful eyes bulged from the sockets. A vampire can go on forever in such a ungraceful condition. Even when we refuse to drink, refuse to surrender to the luscious and fatal elixir, we go on. I couldn’t stop thinking about my darling Nicolas De-Lenfent, my beautiful one now lost to me forever by the madness that seized him. “Nicki,” I called out to him in my mind, words screaming, pounding in my ears like the tolling of the irons bells, yet no sound escaped me. Nicki it isn’t fair what the Dark Trick did to you, my darling violinist. You deserved so much more! So much better, Nicki! I failed you! I see that now. Believe me Nicki, if I could save you I would. For all the love I had for you, I would save you! I heard laughter. That insane music, That unholy din, that never-ending shrill that worships the meaningless. I didn’t know if I was sleeping or awake. Did the crimson dreams still hold my head under the tides of insanity, or was this reality’s cruel jape? What did it matter? I knew that I was still a monster, still a devilish fiend unworthy of even a molecule of pure love. Gabrielle might be in the jungles of Africa by now. Lost in hopeless adventure with her bugs and insects and birds and monkeys. She was no help to me now, she had found a path that was truly foreign to me and I hated her for her deceptions almost as much as I loved and adored her. Sometime or other mortals found their way above me. They stank of urine. They stank of cheap liquor and they stank of mortal blood. Still I would not rise to savor that blood; I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I was too weak, too dazzled by the all-consuming thirst, the madness of the ravishing starvation. But I heard their drunken words, listened to the fright in their voices, something wicked and beautiful this way did come. A creature, they explained, with skin too smooth and eyes too amber and long hair the color of bleached bone. They spoke of the death that followed him, gruesome death, horrible death, splendid and glorious death when heard by the right ears. After a short while, the mortals went silent. The stink of dying blood hung like a curse in the moist soil. Then, the sound. Clear as a scream, sweeter than a laugh, and as sad as Nicolas playing his treasured violin. Perhaps this was Death’s song come to serenade me into Hell, I thought. All at once I felt like I was being lifting higher and higher by a pair of mighty and invisible hands. Great globs of earth fell away from me like boulders tumbling down a mountainside after a quake. I was helpless to stop this madness. My body was being pulled out of the ground, this I knew, but by who – or what? I saw overheard the gleam of the dark sky and the thrilling drift of clouds covering the curious eyes of the glittering stars. Never before had the heavens looked so exquisitely divine. I felt something crimson and soft, something wonderful and luxurious like velvet touch my face. Air filled my lungs. I issued a sort of mix between a moan and a groan at the lavish pleasure of the taste on my tongue. I was out of the earth now, floating by no will of my own towards the most magnificent creature I had ever seen. His hair was white and as wild as a fisherman’s tale, yet even as it whipped around his impossibly smooth face, it maintained a certain dignity, a grace never found in mortals, no matter how hard they seek it. Incandescent eyes fixed on mine and enthralled me. I knew immediately that I was in love; hopeless, glorious love. His arms, wrapped in a elegant crimson velvet coat were open wide and somehow beckoning me to him. I was powerless over my own body, I could offer no resistance even if I wanted to, and I was unsure if I wanted to. There was something preternaturally beautiful about this vampire, and yes, I knew that that was what he was, not as despairingly beautiful as Armand, but devastatingly handsome in his own unique way. His alabaster fingers pulled me in, and all I could do was shiver. At last, I felt this clever fiend wrap his arms around me and hold me tighter than any other creature, mortal or immortal had ever done. I felt his heart well; his body ripple like waves against me as we were sealed to each other. I was dizzy with delight as he crushed the air out of me with great ease. With the last of my breath I wheezed out, “Marius . . .” He answered: “Yes, my precious child, my darling wounded one. I have been looking and looking for you, and at last, I have found you.” Then I felt his dagger like fangs sink into my skin, and everything went as black as the great abyss.
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 16:00:27 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015