I never understood how one could see through eyes so bright, through the remarkable sheen that reflected such as glass.
Two glowing orbs brilliant with impossible color that seemingly looked on to unravel every hidden secret upon this plane.

    It was with these eyes that Phedré looked at me; eyes that where blue in color so especially. A wintery flame that blazed with an expression of boundless wisdom as they looked infinitely through me.

And there were times that I thought I might parish in this limpid and pellucid light. That if he looked unto me, my pitiful weakness should be revealed suddenly by the mere piercings of his eyes.

    But the radiance of his eyes was the radiance of all vampire eyes, because it would be with these same foreign eyes that I saw the world truly for the first time.

Phedré explained to me a great many things this night. He spoke to me on how I would yearn, almost painfully, for all things around, and how I would only bear part with them to seek rest within my tomb.

    When I laid eyes upon the frightful thing, he told me that I should not vex at the sight of it. That I would be merely fashioned as though sweetly sleeping and find it easily, that I would be very much dead to the waking world.

And I prayed.

    He lead me, throwing smiling, knowing glances and gesturing to every remarkable truth, the sights too bold and excellent, the smells too controlling.

The air was crisp. I felt the dead of winter's cold breath upon me, but I wouldn't know it to be standing in the midst of it. I felt the coldness, understand. Though, it did not reach me beneath the flesh when otherwise I would be shivering violently to be there in my cloak alone.

    And though my hair was caught up in the give and take of breath, there was the absence of that little cloud upon my breath, so that I had some horrific panic within me.

I closed my eyes.

    It was then that I had such distinct awareness that I was simply a vessel of breath and bone to walk the world alive!

I learned that my body was impervious to all that might kill me by way of functions, to all natural sickness. That my body no longer produced revoltion of any sort, altogether.

    And though it was that the night weighed heavy upon me, I could not remain so blind to its splendor. My new vampire senses gave to me more richly than any passion I had when human. I smelled every aroma and scent of the earth as I've never smelled it. I saw the master's lifelike works of art that shown with a new brilliance through the windows of the ancient houses. Color so vivid that I could taste them upon my tongue. The images so clear to me that it was as though the horses were living things that seemed to breath. I heard the galloping of their hooves upon the earth, felt the moving wind upon my face.

And, too, I found I was beneath a musical sky, a sky so completely full of tiny miracles. I saw the floating and gleaming stars more clearly than I had ever seen them, more beautiful than I could bear, bright and magnificent. It was a sea of glittering too sweet to my eyes, that I wept for them, these tiny faces of heaven, twinkling and twinkling and saying nothing at all.

    How oft I looked upon them, their quietness offering no knowledge or comfort by wisdoms collected over their countless outstretch of years. How oft I mourned silently beneath them, and yet I could not curse them, gentle as they were.

But again and again, my senses were assaulted by the flood of thick aroma as lavishly fashioned gentlemen and ladies spilled from the opera houses, theaters, and carriages, passing with the alluring fragrance of their flowing blood.

    We slipped through the night unseen with an instinctive vampiric grace, and all the while Phedré said, "Take this one! Take that!" They would walk in perfectly small counts, their laughter ringing too loud in my ears, and I'd simply turn away.

    Though, again and again, I envisioned myself latched onto their unsuspecting flesh. This unclean passion sickened me. I would not, not for all the dismal impulse of myself, give in to such yearnings. And how I suffered for it, suffered the longing and emptiness within my veins, so that when I happened upon a man or woman alone beneath the weak gleaming of a lantern, it came at me in a wild rush.

I hardly knew where Phedré was behind me, hardly knew of anything beyond that lingering scent.

I fought the craving all the way to their homes where they would locked themselves, having felt a presence watching them, that heavy weight upon their back so that they threw quick glances over their shoulder, turning to me a singular, vivid eye.

    It seemed too long ago that I was like them, oblivious to the creatures that shared our world, hidden within the black shadows of time.

The world is full of things we've yet to understand. Even now we are still learning, learning the secrets within the depths of our oceans, the untouched corners of our galaxy. Yet among all these mysteries they may discover, none could be let to discover us, and how lonesome and desolate it is.

    I was nostalgic for my younger years at that moment, living with my adopted mother at her estate, far from the French wars. How I longed for that time. To feel the simplicity of those walls again. To paint the canvases of the shinning and vexless world I then understood.

    But there I were, a proper statue, still as I was transfixed upon a woman at her garret window. The moonlight spilled gently through, tender light soft upon her smooth expression as she sat quietly with her book.

    I should tell you how utterly changed the visions of mortals were to me. They were ever more captivating most remarkably, such that every time my eyes fell upon them, I was struck afresh.

With a nightingale gaze, I beheld this woman, all the more supple and fair and flushed. Her sighing breath from her rose colored lips that were so red and moist, they seemed a pulsing heart themselves, such that it heated my very tongue.

    But then came his musical voice soft upon the night air. "It is a curse to fight this need. The more you fight it, the more you become what you really are."

"You'll not make me," I said to him. "You are finished with all that."

"How will you fight your instinct? You will only suffer gravely," he said as he neared me, easy steps unheard against the road. It was as though he meant to touch me again, to put his hands in my hair and make of it a silk sash as he did in that room before the fire.

I held a palm to him, my arm moving with a subtle rustling of fabric fascinating to my hearing. "I loath a great many things of this life, and I suffer them all already."

He gave to me one of his little grins. "It is a choice, Vittoria. Suffering is optional. I daresay you enjoy it."

I was wroth to hear these words. "You know nothing of me. I detest that you think you do!"

    But calmly he said, "I know that now within your empty flesh you are aching to have it filled."

    To which I said nothing at all.

    He looked to the woman through the small window and sighed. "There has been precious little that has astonished me in my many years," he mused, "but no greater thing will astonish me as your restless tenderness towards humanity. I'd say I wasn't so stuck on it as you are now."

So coldly did I look at him, such that any human remnants of my face felt gone away. "I should say not. I daresay that you instantly became what you are now."

"And why not? There is no reason to linger upon a fantasy that is this goodness you see in them."

I think I gasped. "What fantasy! How can you deny such a thing as goodness?"

    "I do not deny that there is goodness. A person can have goodness, of course, but with it lies within them the unquestionable ability to be without goodness. So what is goodness, really, when it is so fleeting? And to go to and fro from good to evil is a common thing for mortals. Why cherish any of it? As a whole it really does not matter. Being mortal does not proclaim any type of meaning. It proclaims only the frailty of moral law by which they live. They have no remarkable truth. So, to take their life is no damnable thing, if you think us damned."

    I was shaking my head. "How horrible is his wisdom. These are men and woman whom can create, love, ponder, yearn for knowledge in life!"

"Oh, but we do it better!"

"You speak as though we are divine but we are little better than the devil, you and I. If an angel can fall from heaven into hell, so, too, can we!"

   A shadow crossed his terrible white face. "I know nothing of the devil. I have never heard a whisper nor seen a vision. Have you?"

    His tone was mocking as he looked at me, and a subtle yet most obvious movement of the corners of his mouth was there vestige of a sarcastic grin.

    I scoffed. "And what of God? These mortals were created by Him. Same as you during the natural time of your life. He alone can make these judgements."

"Oh, yes, God! Where is the significance in that?"

"Blasphemy! You haven't then slightest concept under God what you say!"

    He laughed. "I love your piety. Your spirit and passion in the name of good! You take contrary positions in all our discussions and I adore you so for it, but alas listen. We are all of us made by someone. And we've been given immortality by someone. There really is no difference in the who. Power is power. The only difference is that one power merely created a weaker being in that they can parish in too many ways, be weakened by too many things, and in their feeble attempt to understand their corner of the world, they take in too little knowledge of it all!

"We alone have the strength to learn all we wish. We alone have the time! We alone can hold the earth within our hand and count the grains, count the looming stars, which are infinite! We alone can reach out to discover things that would only take all of existence to learn; why the universe moves about us, why there is creation at all! And in our existence that is to be an eternity, we may ponder these things. So why place them above us? Most of who cannot even come forth with the question! And that was why you were chosen! Because you question everything!"

    I was both horrified and saddened by this way of thinking. It is true that my mind had become more open to the truth, to knowledge and understanding, as I suppose it is for all vampires; that the vampire's knowledge goes to where the future only follows. However, it seemed he had forgotten it all, the awesome responsibility and humility for obtaining all this.

And in spite of myself, I told him, "I admit that after my change it seems all other knowledge had become rudimentary, all common, human sorrows insignificant. That all the things we quested for as a human were primitive. That our existence was something we would piece together for ourselves in some simple fashion to define what we thought of as life."

"Exactly! Yes! Yes!"

"But you forget one thing, my horrible maker."

"Pray tell."

"Evolution. You must also understand that it is the inevitable journey for humans to evolve their way of thinking and their understanding of things. This is what is beautiful, a blooming mind slowly discovering in spite of itself, in spite of the dimmed enlightenment in comparison to us by which they think. Many times over they have overcome. They have surpassed themselves into a new age of scientists and doctors and inventors. And so they will continue. And so they should. This alone is natural and right, not us. For what we know was not earned. What we were given was only at the price of destruction and suffering. By the will of God we should all be destroyed and cast promptly to hell to crawl blindly upon the ground as lowly varmint do."

    He made some offhand gesture and impatient sound, but then he laughed. "You are an immortal creature with a mortal's passion, but you are only too new. You are only still part of them, is all. Within time you will think as I do. I worry not of this. I remember how it was for me when I was quite put out over these things. When I fret over what I had left behind, but then I learned they were inconsequential things, things that did not move you forward, and that is why I have decided on their insignificance. That is why I mean to make our kind known so that I may take what doesn't really belong to them anyhow."

"What is that?" But then I knew what he would say.

    And with a smile that crept his face and brought life quite impossibly to stone, he said, "The world."

♱