Vlads letter to Natashenka

Dearest Natashenka
I write this in Rome, far from my ancestral seat, far from my adopted home. Here I rest, sated by my beloved as she hunts on my behalf, luring men to their doom upon my table. Men only, for she is a jealous creature. She believes I have sent you away for love of her, and that is the truth. It is not, however, the entire truth.
I put you aside from fear. I fear your jealousy of her. I fear the fate of all I have dragged down into my doom. All things alter, as she knows as well as any. She fights against this change, foolishly, and her struggles may but speed it. I have learned, to my sorrow, that nothing I can do endures. She will be lost to me, and it is my damnation to choose if I lose her swiftly or by inches and decades, but inevitably she will slip my grasp.
How can she think she will remain, when all is flux and chaos? In Paris, in the icy North, in the heated East, the watchers of the sky are amazed, chapfallen, at the prodigy in Cassiopeia these recent years past. The holy aether, untouched and immutable, is now shown to be fickle as the love of man. A new star flares, unseen and uncharted no bearded vagabond, like the shaggy star of 1456 which shone on my first, brief reign, but a fixed light! As if the angels of the spheres had untimely coupled, birthing a celestial bastard. If even the stately constant tread of stars is vulnerable to change, how can any earthly thing be fixed?
I study the heavens. I study the words of ancients. I study the signs I see, and those I taste in the flesh of those around me. I know the time draws near.
Soon I will sleep, and it is good that I will sleep. Too much strength is overpowering for us. My beloved weeps, she wipes her crimson tears with golden tresses, but I am not sad. Those around me fear the great slumber, shy away from the nightmares and visions, but not I. They see a prison, another torment, another cage forged by God for their worthless souls. They are blind.
I see opportunity. I see a road before me, a new world to explore and conquer. The elders tell me in chastened tones about the madness of their resting visions, but I saw, beyond their fears—the loss of self, the loss of sense, the loss of memory—tools of surpassing potential, if only the hand that grasps them is strong. I shall sleep but not rest. I gird myself for battle, not of the body, but of the mind. As I lie in torpor I shall duel my weaker selves, I shall kill any memory that makes me less than I ought to be, less than I need to be, less than the greatest of my kind.
Before my slumber war, however, a task remains. Like any good scholar, I must put my books in order. I have contacted a interesting gentleman from London, he shall assist me. The temptation is there to change events—all things change, do they not? Is this not my credo? Yet I refrain. I will not sand away one bleat of self-pity, I will not soften any stark cruelty or brassy foolishness.
This is my cause, my hope.
Ever Vladimir