A Work-in-Progress by Elysian Alder | Editor-in-Chief
The author would like to provide a few content warnings for any potential readers. The following passage of text contains: death & mentions of death, blood, and violence.
What was perhaps most surprising to him was how long it was taking to die this time. It was nothing like before, when he was fourteen years old and his pitiable, ailment-riddled body finally gave out in the dark peace of slumber. The circumstances being what they’d been, his memories of it were shrouded in a hazy fog, fragments of awareness amid the frantic efforts to revive him. Galino, decisive even in adolescence, forced air back into his lungs while Raksha sent jolts of electricity surging into his chest. Beside the bed, his mother sat in shambles, her grip firm on another’s hand, her body shaken by repressed sobs. Later, he learned that his father had excused himself posthaste to fetch the physician—a pinch-faced, balding man who consistently delivered grim prognoses and stern counsel, all of which Briar managed to dismiss with alarming ease, a talent entirely at odds with his worsening condition. In his father’s absence then, the hand his mother crushed within her own belonged to the estate cook who chastised him the next morning, claiming that she’d never cast so many prayers into the aether before that day, when she’d begged the forces that be to return his body and soul to those who loved him, only for him to revive with even less gratitude than he had possessed before. Who would have known, he’d said then, that the forces that be were an adolescent curmudgeon with rudimentary emergency medicine skills and an elementally-charged familiar?
On that dying day over ten years ago, he recalled no blood, nor did he remember pain, and days later, with the same characteristically dry, morbid amusement that didn’t find favor with Galino, either, he remarked that it had almost been a disappointment.
Everything was different this time. There was nothing peaceful about this agonizing crawl towards death, and there was no solace to be found beneath the shroud of night he had always cherished. There were no resolute friends, no furry-footed familiars; there was no one sobbing beside him, and there was no breath being wasted on desperate, directionless prayers. His bedroom—with its towering bookshelves lining the walls, each shelf burdened with volumes that had witnessed countless late-night musings and moments of epiphany; with its clutter of manuscripts and cacophony of leaflets and sheet music strewn about in early morning frustration; with its ridiculously grand, imposing canopy bed, the dark, wooden frame of which was accentuated by four marble posts, each hand-carved with an artisan’s precision; with the grab bars fastened into the walls here and there, a cane or two placed within arm’s reach, cushions, emergency service bells, the endless list of proactive precautions that he’d argued against when his father had suggested them, but conceded when his mother did; with the resplendent window stretching from wooden floor to high ceiling, bathing the oft-used reading nook nestled below it in the light of the moons and the stars—was replaced by the dreary, deadened boulevard leading to Moray Manor. The only light was the occasional flicker of moonslight through the skeletal canopy of dead oak trees, but it was cold and unfamiliar, struggling to permeate the gnarled, barren tree limbs—not at all like the soft glow of it cast freely through the panes of his window. Instead of oil paintings, charcoal sketches, marble and bronze busts, and the beginnings of his beloved antiques collection, his surroundings were decorated in scarlet and soot. His blood—and the blood of those who had been assailed by the other creatures that had been terrorizing the boulevard for weeks—splashed across the hard ground and the decaying trunks of the oaks around him, painting the crumbling stones of the low walls lining the path as it flowed from the open wounds on his neck, on his chest.
His awareness was still fragmented—and with his head being slammed into the ground, the walls, the trees, how could it not be? But the adrenaline and delight coursing through his body as he endured the onslaught of pain kept him more grounded than before. The only sounds he could hear were the distant groans of recently reanimated beings meandering through the copses of trees, his own choking, gurgling, gasping breaths, and a sound he found to be curious—albeit deeply tragic—once he deduced what it was.
In between erratic snarls and inhuman grumbles, with their fangs sinking into his flesh, the vampire feeding from him… was sobbing.
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