{/\/\yth}
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The personal memoirs of...
please return if found
...
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of life, I walk undead, in the truest sense of the world. With senses and lust ablaze with immortal and irrevocable conviction born of the knowledge that I do, in fact, have forever. Despite what others may say the knowledge that it will never end only inspires my unquenchable passion for life and the infinite smallness of everything in it. Its like a maddening roar in the back of my mind like a child with a new toy, except that my toy is nearly boundless power, opportunity, and advantage. True that there is a price, a darkness that has infected my soul at the root, like a tickle at the back of you throat that you can quite reach, one who’s presence grows in my mind and coils around my soul, constricting the goodness until there is only room for the blackness and the insatiable desire to drain a life and wipe it from this world. Its a small price to pay… for me. At first I had trouble… some call it guilt but that guilt soon became a memory as I found new and creative ways to deal with the affliction part of my sometimes less then affectionate condition. In my travels I came to realize there was no shortage of those who deserved to die… those who’s death made the world a better place, of at least a less annoying one. It was only a matter of time before I found people that seemed even eager to die. I was deaths little helper for those who couldn’t live and didn’t know how to die. Assassination was a well suited line of work, in the beginning, when I had nothing but my newfound abilities. It was… difficult to say the least. I wanted to go on a rampage of exploration and testing of my new skills but this was nearly my doom as ordinary people can become a threat in large organized numbers and numbers is what you encounter when you draw attention with feats that baffle their limited experience and understanding. It’s a bit like being surrounded by the handicapped, at all times, everywhere… I’ve learned to be patient. Patience does not come easily when the disparity is so great a chasm. But their lameness can be a comfort… From my research I’ve found that many of my abilities I owe to the one who created me, her skills became my skills with only a few being lost in the process… and I was fortunate to be chosen by one so advanced in her studies and gifts. Many of the things she had learnt were lost forever for she killed those she learnt from and stole any recording, written or otherwise, of their knowledge. Amazing knowledge lost in time like a grain of sand dropped in the desert. I’ve found the skill of temperature to be most useful. For many decades I didn’t understand the implications, until I came across a man with a theory about exciting particles at the atomic level using my specific will alone to cause heat or even fire, or the reverse calming volatile atoms to chill and with enough effort even freeze matter. Much of what I can do can be described only as magic or at least metaphysical as it defies explanation, even by myself. A child is not taught to swallow or sleep it simply does, and so it is with me only with sometimes significantly more devastating results… an example of which is the loss of my middle finger on my left hand, the only part of my body to never recover perfectly from an injury. Perhaps because it was self inflicted… but that’s another story. Sometimes temporary boredom causes me to be masochistic, sometimes even self destructive, but these are few and far between. With the infinite beauty of life its difficult to lose passion in its treasures. My ability to entertain myself is only eclipsed by my ravenous desire to indulge in the newness that seems to constantly catch me off guard. Just when I begin to fear that I in fact done all and seen all a new age has risen around me, of art, of war, of science, of romance, the cycle of change is as never ending as I am. Apparently just to keep things interesting there is a never ending precession of those stupid enough to attempt to take that which cannot be taken. My life. If I ever lost my joy for preying upon those unfit to live the steady stream of vampire “hunters” would still provide a nearly boundless source of entertainment and best of all, food. They hound me, track me, write about me, and in the end they all die. If not by my hand then by that of time itself, their lives a blink of a eye wasted on the pursuit of something they cannot possibly comprehend. Perhaps those who pursue me do so out of jealousy, an envy that drives them to destroy that which they cannot have but think they need. A madness. Do they even realize that when you become as I am you end and something new is born. Something only loosely based on the original, like a secret that has passed through so much time and so many people that it is nearly unrecognizable. Others like me, the few that I have met… are… so different. As though hundreds even thousands of years of continual existence has caused us to evolve into separate creatures, each with their own unique abilities and even appearances. I have met a few that are barely recognizable as humans, their shapes perhaps contorted by their past or perhaps they have lost their humanity entirely. I have found the wisdom in the hoarding of secrets… as the one who created me killed her teachers she ensured that only she possessed the knowledge and that it could never be used against her by another of our kind. You must have an advantage or you must run, and keep running. After the first thousand years it has become clear to me that I am the exception within the exception. Most do not survive past a few decades, they do not survive the initial madness. Killed by the human mobs they have stupidly or unwittingly exposed their natures to, or by other older vampires they have foolishly angered. Humans kill what they do not understand… especially if its gorging itself on their neighbors in the dead of the night. Wealth has never been a problem… the fat and rich usually become so through the sweat and blood of the less fortunate they employ, I simply recycle that blood once more… I just do it in a more direct and forceful way. I now have a system in which I transfer their holdings to my own in a discreet and efficient way “in the event of their unfortunate demise.” Drug culture all the way back to the ancient Chinese and their opium has always been convenient. I simply partake of the revelry of the culture and work my way up the food chain. Up to the cartels and mafias and organized crime then all the way up the producers and wait for a large exchange, pillage all then disappear for a few hundred years, when I “awake” my holdings have doubled in low interest investments or bonds earning 15%. Drugs and poisons have an interesting effect on me as my body tends to metabolize at a furious rate but my more then equally heightened senses cause me to experience their effect as a tidal wave. Poisons on the other hand are broken down so quickly they have no physical symptoms but cause excruciating pain that no human would survive. An excellent way to die a long and tortuous death is to attempt to poison a vampire… My physical self seems to exist on another pane of time, accelerated and slightly separate. Everything seems to grow quickly, nails and particularly hair are usually long as it seems I would need to constantly attend to them to keep them in check. A very small price to pay for the nearly instant regeneration of wounds and insusceptibility to disease and various afflictions that plague mankind. |
-{CONTINUED}-
"a subversive and endlessly unfulfilled chaotic fall through the black hole at the bottom of life..." But the pain. No one can prepare you for the pain. With senses like mine each mosquito bite will cause you to want to tear off the affected appendage, each burn will rack your soul with pain, and each wound will cause a nearly unstoppable rage. Fortunately if you can survive and learn to control yourself, with time you become nearly invulnerable to damage. Force the mosquitoes to burst into flame, suffocate the fire from across the room, and a weapon wielded by a human will never be fast enough to nick your skin. Like any massively traumatic event in a life a living person will either rise and overcome or succumb and be destroyed by the experience. Turning from what you were into what you become as one of us is no different. Most are enveloped by the rage, the madness, unable to cope, to deal with the ripping and reshaping of all they know. But for those who triumph there awaits a new existence, one undreamt of. What magic was, technology is becoming. I find it amusing that things that were once abilities of the soul and mind, magical and metaphysical in nature are now being reproduced through machines and technology. It causes me to wonder weather in time a virus will be created that reproduces the effects of vampirism, or worse yet if human beings begin to engineer themselves with never ending life and superior faculties. Such a perversion of the human genome and natures balance would surely be swept from the earth in a burst of mother natures blinding wrath. I sometimes wonder if I bend to life or weather life is drawn to me, if something other then my condition makes me special, special enough to deserve the attention of the universe. Great events and people seem to be drawn to me. Of each age I have endured and thrived in I have managed to place myself, usually unwittingly at the epicenter of important events, and continually encounter those that I have met in the past. Are our fates so intertwined that we are irrevocably bound to one another the way I am bound to this mortal plane? In some ways so real and so unreal, existence in some ways unbearably heavy and in others I am transparent, moving like a shadow as time slips by like wind through my hair. I speak to god often. He answers me in events rather then words, and I often thank him. In truth I do nothing that does not occur in nature, predator and prey, with minimal malice out of a need for survival and balance. I sometimes wonder if an angel would be so different from me, or whether I am close to a divine state. More unkillable than undead, and certainly more extremely long lived than dead. I have become a master of staging my own death. It is an inherent necessity as people begin to mutter about your extremely good looks despite your age… It is the only way for those of our kind to attempt a publicly noticeable position, or relatively lasting presence in a place. It’s a simple thing really, when a human sees a sword plunge through your body, for example, they assume you are quite dead. In Sri Lanka I met a man who knew far beyond his meager human years, from him I learned quite a few useful tricks not the least of which is changing my form in small ways through intense body control guided through meditation. Its made me quite attractive and is very useful for reinventing myself or starting over. I wouldn’t remember what I originally looked like if my body didn’t have a tendency to return to its original shape over time. Then again I sometimes don’t remember who I originally was anymore so I suppose the point is moot. Truth be told I can never forget who I was, its as though my memories of life from before my rebirth are clearer, sharper, stronger… like that life was reality and this one is a dream. Lasting relationships are a figment of my memory. Everyone dies except for a few of the old ones like me, our fates intermingled in a circling river of life. I don’t enjoy their company but I do find solace and comfort in their existence. We meet on occasion and endure each others presence just long enough to quiet the feeling that no one can possibly understand what we are experiencing. I don’t even bother with the newly turned or even the young, they are not even worth teaching as the vast majority fail. I’m not bored enough to gamble my effort on such poor odds. I also seem to have a strange instinctual connection with wild creatures, nothing as cliché as a conversation with a dog, we just seem to understand one another’s motives and intent. For better or worse. I can and do eat on occasion but more often then not its not worth the “process” so I simply drink to excess. No amount of human food or animal meat will slack the perverse hunger that I experience. When I have waited too long I grow ghostly white as my body leeches sustenance from my skin, muscle, and bones. My physique shrivels as my muscles slowly dissolve, my skin grows thin and dry, and my bones become frail, prone to break… this has only happened once and will never again, but that is another story. Fortunately the reverse is also true, when well satisfied minimal exercise will build increasing amounts of muscle, bones thicken and my skin fortifies and darkens slightly with a faint golden glow. When I gorge myself on human life, say five to ten lost souls in a day, my body surges with power, my senses dwarf the best technology has to offer, and I have more and more control over my environment. Unfortunately this excess also causes me to uncontrollably crave more and more until I can think of nothing else, like a drug that causes one to forget self preservation in pursuit of blinding desire. Not to be forgotten are the visible side effects… ones which can easily give away my nature and end this long and glorious life. Humans seem to feel my presence in this state, I could walk by a house and all the inhabitants will either be griped with inexplicable fear or be enraged and run out to attack me. As though some deep instinct or memory had been triggered. Not that I would be difficult to spot with my eyes brimming in a burning pupilless sea of blood red, smoking slightly, my muscles swollen – barely able to contain the energy within them, my clothes singed black and slowly burning from the heat of my body, and the strange aura of darkness… its as though light is drawn to me… not as a bee to a flower but more as water down a drain… the feeling of you hand growing lighter as the sand rushes through your fingers… that feeling as you stand too close to the edge of a vast cliff, magnetized by your own doom. The Churches and Old Religions of the world know of our existence. After campaigns lasting nearly a thousand years and costing them a great many devout souls and “hunters” they have mostly given up their physical pursuit and now simply try to slander us with false tales of successful hunters and the villainy that is our immoral and immortal existence. Many of my abilities are negated by the unstoppable “progress” of industrialization, machination, and technological innovation. People can now see far beyond their vision with binoculars and web cams, they can lift far more then their meager bodies with hydraulics and pneumatics, they can move things without touching them with remote control robots, and kill a man from a mile away with sniper rifles and grenade launchers. Lost are the old mystical arts, and lost irrevocable because they are replaced. Cast aside by a faster computer with more processors that can not only forecast markets and simulate physical stress on a car that doesn’t exist yet, but also attempt to tell your fortune with an astrology “program”. Laughable. All of it. A time will come when the machines rust, the computers crash and the grenades and missiles fail to save man from whatever corner they eventually paint themselves into. They will be forced to return to that which they do not have, that which they cannot touch and cannot see. That boundless force that can only be manipulated with the soul and strength of will. From which something can be made from nothing, unlike the current mode of senseless consumption which can only end in a lack of everything. Why do they think that if something cannot be proven by science that it does not exist? That simply proves that the phenomena does not exist in SCIENCE, reality however cares little for science. Reality will continue to exist long after science is gone as will all those wonderfully unaccountable things that slip through the fingers of those obsessed what can be measured in a formula or computer. Science merely a tool, it helps us have a reference for dealing with reality and things in it. Time is a figment of human concept to help us navigate. The internet has proven to be a great ally and a constant threat. With information traveling in a nearly perfect, instant, and infinite void to anyone with a hundred dollar computer and $5.99 a month its become more and more difficult to keep my personal information and history private. Fortunately stealing another’s identity has in some ways become easier, and once I learnt the new black art, hacking, very little is out of reach. The ability to change records and launder money, falsify information and even find victims. I know the image of a vampire hunched over a computer in a dark room lit with the pale wash of a computer screen is hardly romantic but the information and power it affords me pays for many a new château in the south of France or say a villa on the island of Ibiza? As for evading government agencies the modern computer is better then the fastest horse or ship ever was. Of course it never hurts to bribe the right people or form strategic relationships with those in power, oh if they only knew… what their greed had bought them. It is the life of the criminal in “decent” society. True its perhaps the glamorous pirate among the boring Elite but what better then to choose and to choose all, to move freely among social groups, countries, religions, professions, and ideologies. A dragon in sheep’s clothing with the sheep unaware why they are drawn to you, their curiosity your playground. You begin to feel responsible for them, their frailty and impotence making them seem unable to survive without your intervention. You become their father, culling not the weak but the weak hearted, the cruel, and the unjust. Your mind rests easy knowing you are contributing by draining only those who drain those around them. - P. J. Ochabski |