The Quickening
The darkness deepens right before dawn. For an immortal this time is known as the Quickening, because the sunrise, an hour or so away, is like a tentacle of heat across the ground, circling your every step, ushering you into a nook of safety someplace shaded from it. It is as if your heart beats those last moments of nighttime, reminding you of what it is like to be mortal, letting you taste your hidden mortality, like the bitterness of stale coffee.
I have known a few who have not been able to resist the longing we harbor, and yes, we all do harbor it somewhere inside of us, to feel the sunlight on our skin just one more time. They are the lunatics of our society, who have grown mad from age upon age of change and who have not been able to handle their new role, the special part we play.
They step onto rock and soil and watch the sun as it reclaims the sky, the glory of a king as it chases black into blue, blanketing stars, making the waking world feel safe, guarded, protected from nightly creatures such as us. The heat claims their skin, burns it, chars it, and then they are ashes scattered on the rock and soil as though that is where they were meant to rest in the first place.
There is no rest. I stopped believing in it a long time ago. A vampire dreaming is a rarity, though I have met a handful who did so vividly enough to wake in the middle of the day. They said it was the loneliest moment and that the dreams were a haunting, disturbing, though they might be of long lost memories of family picnics and smiles from a girl now dead and gone. Especially when of long lost memories.
I do not suffer the curse, but the sleep of the un-dead is not sleep; it is merely a different state of being. We do not need sleep. And rest for humans is even more impossible as their brain never once stops churning thoughts through their heads. At least for us there is none of that. We close our eyes and blackness reigns. But we do not rest. We hear the mice stirring in the walls, we hear the worm turning over the earth, we hear the sparrow flapping its wings. I wish sometimes for peace. I wish it hard enough to seek out the sun, but I find myself treasuring existence much to fiercely, and so must consign myself to hunting for it elsewhere.
I have yet to find it, and I have been searching for it for nearly two centuries. I look back and I find myself in wonder at how the years and days and hours bleed into one another until all that is left is a pattern, which you can trace with one finger.
You ask yourself, had I not made this choice here, where would life have taken me?
I ask myself, had I not told her yes, what would have become of me?
I have known a few who have not been able to resist the longing we harbor, and yes, we all do harbor it somewhere inside of us, to feel the sunlight on our skin just one more time. They are the lunatics of our society, who have grown mad from age upon age of change and who have not been able to handle their new role, the special part we play.
They step onto rock and soil and watch the sun as it reclaims the sky, the glory of a king as it chases black into blue, blanketing stars, making the waking world feel safe, guarded, protected from nightly creatures such as us. The heat claims their skin, burns it, chars it, and then they are ashes scattered on the rock and soil as though that is where they were meant to rest in the first place.
There is no rest. I stopped believing in it a long time ago. A vampire dreaming is a rarity, though I have met a handful who did so vividly enough to wake in the middle of the day. They said it was the loneliest moment and that the dreams were a haunting, disturbing, though they might be of long lost memories of family picnics and smiles from a girl now dead and gone. Especially when of long lost memories.
I do not suffer the curse, but the sleep of the un-dead is not sleep; it is merely a different state of being. We do not need sleep. And rest for humans is even more impossible as their brain never once stops churning thoughts through their heads. At least for us there is none of that. We close our eyes and blackness reigns. But we do not rest. We hear the mice stirring in the walls, we hear the worm turning over the earth, we hear the sparrow flapping its wings. I wish sometimes for peace. I wish it hard enough to seek out the sun, but I find myself treasuring existence much to fiercely, and so must consign myself to hunting for it elsewhere.
I have yet to find it, and I have been searching for it for nearly two centuries. I look back and I find myself in wonder at how the years and days and hours bleed into one another until all that is left is a pattern, which you can trace with one finger.
You ask yourself, had I not made this choice here, where would life have taken me?
I ask myself, had I not told her yes, what would have become of me?