Naramsin: Interlude
It is said of the vampire that he is an evil, hollow shell, a soulless revenant who roams the earth, his sole purpose being to drain the blood of the living in order to continue his own undead existence.
And it is said of the human that he too is an evil, hollow shell, a soulful madman who infests the earth, his sole purpose being to inflict pain and suffering upon his fellows in order to continue his own earthly existence.
Both sayers would be right, and both would be wrong; for between the spectrums of the extremes lie many, many shades of interwoven color. Such nuances are gleaned and best understood through the long, diligent observation of both species. Indeed, from such observation it can be discerned that, although separated by the spheres of life (such as it is defined) and death (also, such as it is defined), vampires and humans are merely opposite sides of the same Janus-face. Each can be ruled by passion as well as intellect, by love as well as hate, by greed as well as charity, and by good as well as evil. But emotions are not the exclusive province of either men or kindred, nor are they exclusive to the two combined; for even the beasts of the land, sea, and sky share the honorable instincts, and, most tellingly, rarely share the baser ones.
Those baser instincts are, ironically, left to the us and the humans, the so-called creatures of reason, the same creatures who worship both life and construction, and death and destruction, simultaneously, without acknowledgment of any contradiction inherent in such opposition. Instead, there is a symmetry, a terrible, terrible, symmetry, that is aided and abetted by reason, the acceptance of which allows both those of our kind as well as the humans to hold the opposite dualities of good and evil as one unified whole in our collective mind’s eye.
The sublime human writer Dante wrote of the Devil, frozen in a lake of solid ice, his three faces chewing remorselessly upon the traitors of humankind, in black imitation of the Christian Trinity, a juxtaposed opposition to the light that dwelled above. And in his depiction, Dante thought of humankind: of human suffering, of human betrayal, of human redemption.
But what of us?
We also suffer, we also betray, we also redeem. We are in the world, yet apart from it. We shape history; yet of us, history has no record. No Greek or Italian poets sing our odes, or tell our epics. Our legacy is whispers, and legends, and myths.
And that is as it should be. As it must be.
For it was decided, long ago, that this was how our existence would be. As the numbers of the race of man grew, we knew that their sheer increase would be sufficient, if properly aroused, to eventually exterminate all of our kind. We saw the extinctions that man wrought upon nature, saw the risen beast assert himself over the planet again and again, only to be struck down again and again by the cycles of folly and destruction that are the history of his species and, indeed, of this world; and we determined that we would not be beholden to the cycles generated by his folly and lust.
But with each cycle of destruction comes always a rebirth; and so, the humans persevere and rise again, ceaselessly, relentlessly, as they have for millenia. Observing their struggles from behind the shadowy veil of brilliant days and endless nights, we the vampires live, locked in the frozen lake of our own destiny, chewing remorselessly upon the minions of men, century after century, age after age.
Myths. Legends. Whispers.
As it takes vast numbers of antelope and lesser creatures to support the lions of the savannah, as it takes vast numbers of seal and fish to support the sharks of the sea, as it takes vast numbers of fowl and game to support the soaring eagles of the sky, so it is that the humans, through their ever-expanding number, support us. Man is the apex predator of his world; yet he is the prey of ours.
It is an uneasy symbiosis, but a necessary one. We have been careful, must be careful, not to succumb completely to the madness of blood and soul that is the remorseless desire of our deepest inner beings. The struggles between good and evil mark not only human existences, but our existence also. We too ride the wheel of Fate through the endless years, sometimes on the top of the wheel, sometimes on the bottom, but always in motion, and always, the cycle continuing, the wheel turning.
You have wondered about my beginnings, of who I was once, and who I am now. And I have related a tale of a distant time, in a distant place, of comrades-in-arms who fought together, who died together, and were reborn in blood, inextricably bound together for all eternity. That world, where long ago we gave our bodies and our souls willingly to the mad Devourer, is long past, crumbled underfoot, and swept away like ashes from a dead fire. Continents and civilizations have risen and fallen since that fateful night, and spectral armies have waged wars of high sorcery behind the veil of days. Through calamities of which the current time has no conceptions, we of the Pact have survived, continued, and nourished the ways of our kin. But we too have suffered our losses.
Though distinct and individual we are, we of the Pact share one common mind, one common soul, one common purpose; for as it is in the interest of the humans to preserve and cultivate their cows and their lambs and their chickens for slaughter, so has it been in our interest to assure the perpetuation of the humans. Therefore we partake in history, and live among them, to aid in their survival; and by doing so, secure ours. Where we are in time at any given moment is what determines our intervention or withdrawal from the events of man.
There is, as a result, a radiant beauty, a crystalline balance in the relationship between our race and the race of man, a beauty that is not diminished by the acts that we perform upon them, nor by the acts they perform upon us. Indeed, it is those acts that harmonize the balance and perfect the beauty between our species.
And I know for certain that the Devil chews us all.
Yet I believe that when the species are compared, we, the damned, are in many ways the least damned; for while we are, in the end, propelled primarily by our instincts and our needs for human sustenance, the humans are almost singularly propelled by relentless avarice and inveterate antipathy, base emotions that are only rarely redeemed by honor and love, and which darkly lead down the path to true damnation.
But enough. I do not seek to excuse my kind, nor the humans, for what we each must, by the very substance of our natures, do. The world is what it is. We have all been handed our destinies, to do with as we will. Many a vampire has cracked under the terrible weight of his eternal suffering; many a human has cracked under the terrible knowledge of his own mortality. Both are weak. Both are doomed.
I accept my fate without complaint, for it is the fate I chose on a frozen night an eternity ago. Across the long, remorseless millenia, I have fought tirelessly to preserve myself, unflinchingly enduring both immediate physical dangers and the long, twilight battles of the soul, the eternal war against succumbing to the madness of the blood. I have seen with my own eyes the descent of the noble into the savage, the murderous impulse and delight in slaughter overwhelming the reason that has allowed us to endure.
Like Odysseus, I have heard that siren call, felt the joy, the indescribable consuming joy that rises from the wanton spilling of the hot blood, killing upon killing building into a frenzied orgy of bloodlust, killing not solely for the sustenance, but for the pure pleasure of killing.
I suppose it is ultimately the sense of power one feels from being able to so quickly and easily snuff out a life that leads to the glorification of the madness by some of my kind; and the same sense of power similarly intoxicates the humans. Without the slightest trepidation do I confess without shame or excuse that, in my own life, countless have been the times that I have killed solely for enjoyment. Or revenge. Or a thousand other reasons. Or sometimes for no reason at all.
But again: What of it? Am I worse than Caligula, or Attilla, or Tepes? Worse than Stalin, or Hitler, or Pol Pot? I have never created a gulag, nor fenced a concentration camp, nor sown a killing field as the humans have done. I did not nail the Christ to the cross, nor kill the Mahatma. I did not drop atomic bombs upon the innocents. The sheer scale and variety of their murderous ways dwarfs the imagination. Which species has the true madness of the blood?
Yet …
There lurk horrors, vast and primeval, drawn by death and blood. Horrors only dimly perceived, outlined like distant ships on a foggy sea, heard but not seen, hidden in the shadowy mist, until that final moment when the ship looms up out of the fog, bow descending to destroy, no time to flee.
And as man continues his cumulative destruction of his kind in ways ever more pitiless and indefensible, as the souls of his scorched dead fly screaming from this life and hurtle into the black Void, there are Things that glut upon those crying souls…nameless, eternal, evil Things that grow larger and fuller and ever more powerful as they feed upon the endless carcasses that spill across the veil at the hand of man.
Things that move slowly, relentlessly, to the portals of this world as they wax in power and purpose. Things that design to slip across these thresholds, gigantic appetites whetted by souls, seeking now the casings in addition to the seeds. Things that sentry forth, summoned by sorcerers and succored by madmen. Things that twitch and drool at the feast of blood served red and hot on this world for time immemorial, Things that claw and clutch and devour the shrieking souls as they fly by.
Yes, it is true that some souls escape, and fly to the Godhead of their destinies.
And it is also true that some souls return, to learn again, in the twin hopes of enlightenment and redemption.
But it is also true that some souls are destroyed, their energy absorbed, their existence utterly erased from the books of the dead for all eternity, as though they had never been.
I know this to be true.
For I am a destroyer of souls.
And blood is my wine.
And soul is my bread…
