The Veil

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This is the second message I got from him, and I hope the first of many about his life. I feel that he was offended by the short and concise way I described his escape from the Underworld, as it’s what he wrote about. As before, this is what he wrote, verbatim.

*****

It was a hard wake up. Being crushed by the ocean on a daily basis is something you get accustomed to after years in the same situation, as with everything in life. The hardest part of it all is not being able to fight it. You don’t have control over your own muscles, your bones are no support at all if they are fragmented in thousands of little pieces. And then, the pain. The constant pain you feel when your body starts recovering from all the accumulated damage it has taken, despite the fact that the thing causing it is not there anymore. It hurts like hell. It took two months in a god forsaken cave to regain most of my movement. I say most, because there are some parts that take longer to recover. For me, it was the kneecaps. Even though my accelerated metabolism and Caine’s blood running through my veins helped a lot, it takes a long time for you to be completely OK.

I still have this fear of water. I don’t like swimming, although I do it if I absolutely must. But it was during this time that I met her. Nocturna had this chiseled jawline that looked like a work of art. I was mesmerized by her arrogance, she was no way like any other woman I had met before. Her haughtiness, her disdain for all living things, her “I could destroy you all if I want to” attitude made me pay attention to her. And pay attention I did, as I saw a glimpse of myself in her eyes. I didn’t recognize the land I was stepping into, it all felt too surreal. Her appearance only made it more surreal. And in this surrealism I saw beauty. The beauty of art that somehow you can’t describe. It felt magical.

As I approached her for the first time, I felt something that I had not felt for no one before, not even Elena. I felt I found an equal. She was ruthless and despised all the world, as if she was accustomed to step on everyone just to get to the top. I loved that immediately, as I am the same. And we started having this irresistible passion that made my heart beat, a feat not very common in my brethren. Being with her made me feel like I had the world at my feet, and she was my queen and my muse. I decided to use my talents to get riches, and riches did I get. I got a plot of land and built my own castle there for this king to offer his queen a kingdom to rule. But then it happened, she started feeling like I felt for her and her ambition died. She started acting like any other mortal woman, mesmerized by my power and my own ambition. And I despised her. All the power she showed was gone, all her disdain disappeared. All that was left was this pool of gooey, sticky, fearful love. And knowing what love tends to cause in women, I left her.

Out of spite, I found the meanest, baddest-looking witch and courted her. And her, not giving a rat’s ass for anyone, decided to go with it, especially since it meant for her to feel above Nocturna, which she wasn’t. But it worked better than expected, Nocturna was out of my life and I was free again to follow my heart to glory and power. I did lots of bad things while I learned how to generate a vessel on the other side, killed a lot of people to gain more knowledge and power. But the most important piece of information came, of all sources, from Nocturna herself.

On our first night together, as passion grew and things started to go carnal, I wanted to bite her and feel her warm blood flowing in my mouth, but she stopped me cold. She told me that her kind didn’t have blood on its own and that there was a breed of Vampire whose blood could damage them, but this was all a legend and no one had even tried it. This piece of information was enough for me to go into overdrive, looking for the information on which clan had this curious power. And searching I found a really old library rat, a Nosferatu with a lot of books recovered from different sources. One of those talked about a special gift from Caine for his most beloved daughter. The elder of the Toreador clan saw this gift as a blessing for herself, but it was shared amongst her breed. I knew I had to test it, but since Nocturna left this plane, I didn’t have how to.