XII-I stood in the gathering dark before the breaking world

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    Before I begin, let me first tell you of how poor a vampire I utterly was

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    Before I begin, let me first tell you of how poor a vampire I utterly was. I took to absolutely nothing. My instincts I fought forthright at every turn. I fumbled what could only be the greatest fumble in the history of all vampires to learn what I might be. I couldn't begin to understand what I was. I was only with the profound inability to allow it, to allow the warmth of human blood to make florid my pallor skin so that I might not be this grotesque and perfect vision of conscious death.

The saying is "all or nothing", but for me it was nothing only, and damn the rest, quite literally.

    —1814–

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1814–

I had been a young vampire for a year now, and nothing became easier. Every evening rise I was descriptively and positively dead to the world. I awoke with an unbearable heaviness, like a boulder weighing upon my chest, my body suffering completely before my mind even gave it a name.

    I remember being with such anger that I woke, wishing like a coward that it would all end as I slept, that some great clammy hand of death would come and, alas, claim what it absolutely must have.

    But then, too, along with this immeasurable depression, I awoke with such thirst. It was a vital need that pounded within me, this insistent aching that would reach the whole of my profound consciousness. I hardly had patience to ignore as I lay there alone with it, so that I quickly sought the opening to my coffin, revealing myself to the still room.

    Such harsh stillness I cannot so well explain. I had never known it until then. It was a deafening, weighty thing beside me, such that the very air felt deathly still.

I was unsure of Heaven, the placement of it, only knew the idea of it. But I was infinitely sure there was a Hell. I was living it. I lived in it fully in this quiet.

    And along with that unnerving quiet, was there, too, this total darkness, as if very light retreated from that place.

    Oh, that I could be but a tiny light.

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