—Present Date—

I cannot tell you how it was. I can tell you solely and solemnly how I remember it. I will explain to you everything that I am, and, too, everything that I tragically am not. And I will tell you this all in fantastic detail, as only a vampire can.

Yes, I am the vampire Vittoria de Luca Bonenfant, but I am nothing at all. You mustn't get completely lost to this. Nothing is so wondrous about me, save that I have endured.

With you I leave my confessions, as in those wretched wooden rooms. Do with it as you like. Tell it to your one, or to many, or burn it with my rosary, which I surely have blasphemed.

But allow me here to begin softly, for I am presently of the mind and do not know how long that can last, this softness of a gentle spirit, which I am not. Bethink you.

    But I am lonely to know the world again, as I want to be alone in my quiet, to be buried beneath the damp and heavy earth, free from my grief. And, too, I want my courageous faith again, for some will in my soul to go on.

So, I find myself back at my beginning, after two centuries of what can only be described as a beautiful spectacle. My existence. My immortality. My miserable and forlorn being.

And after all this time, this place has become just a place. Its once golden walls are now crumbling beneath the leaf-patterned wallpaper, and the brilliance of the crystal chandeliers are now gone.

    My home, which is now desolate and overrun, was once such a wonderment to me, but it eludes me now how the old visions had sustained me. I struggle at this moment to see them, as I've struggled at so many things in my madness.

    That I remember it at all astounds me. Even if it should be that I remember all things with clarity; all things with perfect recall, such that I wish to die.

    Pitiful, you.
 
    But even as I strain to explain this, to keep my scattered thoughts in a line,
I'll tell you that it's giving to me—some foreign peace to my dispirited, chapfallen mind.

    In this room it is very quiet. The only sound is of this pen that I hold as I press it down. Gone are the feathers of geese and swan. And of my vellum, they are all but dust, brittle heaps within the drawer.

    I should think they were meant for some sweeping love story or poetry, or perhaps a bit of heartfelt scale from an unfinished overture.

But, oh, how romance of this kind eluded me during my age. I have never possessed the mind for such things. What had become pressing to me only had been The Word of God. All other passions faded in some horrific hellfire plummet against my heart.

How long ago the mortal soul in me was lost, I do not know. How long ago since I said, "Take me," with such hatred in my eyes. "Take me now from this cruelty!" But non, He would not.

    I can still feel it, the hatred in my eyes that time will not soften. It will follow me into the cold hollows of my grave for all that had been left unanswered.

Why should there be questions without answers, I ask Him. But He does not answer and I laugh.

I laugh because I know He has left me, my God, my Savior, my Abandoner, turned His crystalline gaze from my ruin. But with nervous hands and nervous breath did I pray to Him still, my breast cracked asunder as I strained to hear Him.

   But lo, that I heard the cold laughter of the Morning Star, and was blinded by the Son of Dawn, who I left long ago, along with all the rest that I said, "Come find me, blade, and run me through! Sweet blade, I am done!"

But like a child to a mother's arms, I haste back.

    I hate Him.

    I hate Him.

    I love Him still.

Alas, always, I have been some quiet, brooding thing. But I am quiet only by habit, save when I am angry, and to be thoroughly angry I have well learned in spite of my gentle self.

    But let me be here only what I must, which is to be utterly truthful. How long since I have been gentle? How long since I have been kind? How long since I have said, "Come lay within my arms, sweet bird, precious heart," and spoken pleasant things? What year is it? What month? What day? Time is such the fickle thing, but I would have to say that it has been a very, very long time ago. A time when I was wrapped at bright faces in quiet rapture, faces that took the place of all that misery.

    My James, my Henry, their clementine hearts long gone from me now, that I hate the world again.

    Now, I daresay, no earthly living thing binds me to gracious mortal empathy, that mortal beating heart in its miserable rhythm. I have not eyes for their mourning visage, nor ears for their desperate cries. No heart for them. No heart. No heart that He may never forgive.

    But I move along too quickly. I must take all this in order, because of these pains, I have so many. And I will write it all completely down for you. Turn my mind towards those lowly places.

But where do I begin? From my making? From those devil eyes which watched me all the while? Non. I will start with my childhood.

    Naturally.

To map my way back is unsavory, but it was then that I had such passion, then that I could still feel so keenly my heart breaking, and it had been the heartbreak felt for centuries.

But it was here in my childhood home that I shared with my adopted mother that I became all but a crashing heart.

    I was born in 1788, on the cusp of the French Revolution. Nestled deep in the Parisian countryside of Loire Valley, beneath the arching oak trees, will you find the home that housed the beginnings of my misery. Where I learned to love, and, too, to hate all things with such passion. Where I first said the words, "I will not go with you, Devil," and the Devil, who became the serpent of my rosary, and like a strange stigmata, bit my praying palm, pressed my fingerstips to his pallid lids, as though he felt a pull at his heart like so many strings.

I loath him and do unto him cruel things. I like to do it. Because it is I, alas, who had become the Devil in the end; a savage Devil with sweet, ruddy tears at the rending of mortal flesh.

What a proper mystery I am to even my many selves.

    But I should well tell you that I was a child unlike any child. Always, there had been something troublesome with my mind. Always, there had been strange sounds in my hearing, small movements beyond my eyes. I look, but there is nothing. Always, there is nothing.

And, too, I was with this haunted quality that perhaps I was awaiting something beyond the real, such that my mother—let us call her that—would say to me, "Vous êtes trop étrange." You are too strange, too quiet.

I cannot explain to you this thing. It's best said that I felt as though I knew something that others did not, that I was mayhap awaiting some mysterious secret to be revealed.

But from this alone, from the very beginning, I felt perfectly separate from the rest of the world.

But within my home, the tall and narrow windows, the high arching hallways, the golden-gilt curlicues, the light shown fair with a special radiance that cascaded marvelously through. Light that I would capture in different moderations of color upon my small canvases.

Those canvas are all but burned now. Burned away with the ignorant and blissful sleep of two decades. But I will not talk of that. I must explain to you only the rest.

Now. If not, never.

The year was 1808. I was twenty. At that time a proper woman. I was so young by modern standards, yet my knowledge was profound. From a child, I knew the truths beyond all mortal dreams, knew of the frightful secrets that reside in shadowy corners.

Why that in the coming and going of fleeting glances within the rough taverns, one might see in the dark a figure that lay still and slumped against a chair. And why beyond the dimming of a single candle light, one might see through the strain of winking eyes that something might have held them, and fed from them. And that no sooner when they called out, that sound would have been snuffed from them, and those around would have taken no more notice as the ghostly figure was gone.

My mother had explained to me these things, these terrible truths that no mortal child should ever come to know. That this primordial shadow would be that of a vampire.

    And it was on this day that she told me I was destined to this world. That, in fact, I had been destined to it from birth. My ties, she told me, were bound to Phedré Dechannes, the leader of the largest known vampire clan. I was to be his consort, and in return, be gifted eternal youth and immortal life.

So tiresome the sound of it, like some stupid, blackened fairytale. I should tell you that we fought, my mother and I. The sole and only time I had raised my voice to her.

What hideous and useless trouble, all that.

    And, so, pondering over what terrible powers held sway of my fate, I've had such unfathomable obsession. Those were my first moments when I felt deeply that God had left me. That in this, I would find myself thoroughly damned. That in my profound conviction, we were all damned.

Mon Dieu, how the fires burned us.

♱