The Veil

XII

This would be the last of his own stories that I will share with you here. After this, I will let you all know what I believe important for you all to know, regarding the battle to come. Humanity must be saved and you have no idea how many forces are lining up against us. Every human saved is a possibility for us not to fade into oblivion. For the moment, let him explain himself on his own words why he chose to fight alongside us and try to save humanity instead of destroying it.

*****

Losing a vessel is one of the most awful feelings in the world, specially if the vessel is lost in the fire like the last one. You feel their pain according to how they are dying. I’ve died stabbed, shot, suffocated, crushed, burnt, in several vehicle accidents. There are little parts of your own vulnerabilities that get passed on to your vessels and since fire is one of the main ones for vampires, a vessel dying by fire hurts you a lot. Your energy transports this damage and pain to your otherworldly body and it hurts like hell. When I was expelled because of the death of my vessel and got back to the other side I still felt the burning sensation on my skin. I had to fight the urge to roll and try to put myself out as my actual body was not in flames. The burning sensation was awful, I still get shivers when I think about it.

I decided to get to work and try to find a suitable vessel for my next life, although it would mean to be stuck in the other plane for at least 20 or more years. Well, there was not much more to do. I sent my consciousness into the life stream and saw a couple of possible vessels. I decided to choose the possible child of a noble family, as I wanted to get my own kingdom back on earth. It would work in a vastly different way than I expected, as I would later learn.

When I was back on earth, I was as sneaky and manipulative as I could. I tried my best to earn everyone’s trust and be able to reach my intended goal. I moved the court towards my goal with charm and intimidation when needed. I knew I shouldn’t show my ruthlessness until my goal was reached and I was the ruler of this feud. I had it all planned and by the time I was 20 on earth I was close to my goal. But the advisor of the Feudal lord discovered my plans and informed him. Since I was the son of one of his noblemen, he casted me out. I was back on square one with no nobility papers. I was just another commoner. I decided the best course of action was to try to gain the trust of a different feudal lord, but I needed a different appearance. I thought looking like a sage would be best even though it would take a long time to accomplish this, around 15-20 years.

That was nothing for someone measuring his lifetime in hundreds of years, so it was just a matter of waiting it out. I worked on cementing the appearance so I built a cabin in the forest and started attracting people to give them “supernatural” advice. It’s a good thing that Auspex works while in a vessel, a little aura reading here, a spirit touch there, people started coming to me for advice and removing “curses”. It was really easy to do, considering that most of this work was just tracking the energy of another “special” and hunting them down on the other side. I saw this was fun, and decided to make it my lifestyle for a while.

About five years later my fame was big enough to get the attention of noble people and I saw the effort was paying off. But then, about half a year later, all started to wane and fade. I decided to investigate what might be going on and saw that gypsies had set up a camp less than a kilometer away from me. I was furious, I felt their magic aura and I knew they were taking my lifestyle away from me by either scaring them off or using their own abilities to get them under their influence. This was not going to pass, so I decided it was time for me to bear my banner again to destroy their camp and kill them off.

Considering that this time I was alone, no army of pirates to fight by my side, I decided to sneak into their camp and kill them in their sleep, setting everything on fire after the deed was done. Unfortunately for me, Auspex never showed me (or I was never able to read the patterns of) any supernatural protection. When I got into the camp, they started surrounding me and I was never aware of it until I felt my muscles become rigid. I was trapped and at their mercy. I never got to understand the language of gypsies, but I was scared they would kill me off, as they started shouting all at once “Vampyr! Vampyr! Vampyr!” over and over. Then, I realized I had screwed up, if they knew what I was even inside a vessel they would most likely be more powerful than I thought.