Letters I

From Dark August Night to Aodfhin, Knight of Summer -

My Kintsugi,

I detest writing. As a matter of professional care, I do my very best to leave as little physical evidence of my existence as I can manage. Few personal effects matter to me, and those things that do are eternal in the ink upon my skin. Perhaps it is because I came late to reading, or because I had so little to say for so long… it always feels… strange to write my thoughts. As you seem to take such joy in it, and I in stealing off with your journal to graffiti the pages from time to time, I thought it only fair to return to opportunity.

Shall I tell you of the beginning? Of one who was kind… and died for it? I think too many of the tales of my kind are sad. Humans are not meant to live forever. Perhaps it is that which burns the soul out them when they become the living dead… as years stretch and the warmth of that lost life fades. As they stretch so far beyond the origins of their making, their hearts are lost, rendered to ash by time and darkness. Perhaps we don’t start out as monsters. But humans aren’t meant to live forever, and eternity can be a cruel horror.

I think I was a mistake. Or rather, there is something about me that must have been fundamentally broken to begin with. I had not one scrap of human memory. To me, I awoke and simply was as I am - a hunter of the living… and the dead. I don’t carry the same kind of angst and longing others do, but neither have I the memories of love and home to forge me. Or… didn’t. Those took time. A painfully large amount of it. It made me a peerless warrior, however. Purpose alone drive me. The mandate of the House my only real framework. So, I trained. And trained. And trained.

When I awoke… that very first time… it seemed no one knew there was something wrong with me. About me. They didn’t watch as they should have, I think, and looking back now, someone probably should have simply put me down. I’m glad they didn’t, but it would have been advisable. I had no understanding of people, or what I was. And someone should have been watching. They didn’t. And an innocent died for it.

I remember his face. The sound of bones cracking and blood hitting the ground. I was fast even then. Far too fast for him. He had been kind.

If I dreamed… I think I would dream of him, the shepherd who’s only mistake was speaking to a strange girl on a dark winter’s night too close to the castle he was warned to avoid.

He is the only human upon whom I ever fed. Even now… nearly a thousand years later… the smell of human blood makes me sick. Silly problem for a vampire, but there you have it.

And as Siobhan used to say as a toast, ‘Here’s the the Nights, whom the Heavens made mad… for our battles are all merry and our stories are all sad.’