Vampyre Bride ✔️

XXXV⎮Forbidden Fruits Part I

She was incomparable, his little queen. Perched in the shadows aloft, he watched her tirelessly. The column of her neck was finest alabaster, made starker by the defiant curls that eschewed the confines of her golden diadem. Yet she possessed not the face of Hellenistic beauty—for it conformed not to the aesthetic ideals that might have launched a navy to Troy—but was instead the sui generis grace of a goddess, perhaps even the winged goddess, Isis, herself.

Kassiel alighted from the shoulder of Horus, whose keen stone gaze was lowered over his young wards, thence to walk among the scurrying servants, the bejeweled nobles, and the gluttonous priests. To them he paid no heed—nor they to him, for he walked in their world and not they in his—it was only the queen who intrigued him. For millennia he had beheld the earth with dysphoric eyes, watching as one eon slipped invariably into another. Thus had it been from the time when the oceans were naught but scoria and the mountains raged with fire. From time to time, as was his wont, he had soared down from his empyrean seat in the northern sky but only, he prided himself, to look a little closer and to wonder at these strange creatures and their peculiar habits. Perhaps, he thought with dread, he had been too long among them, as his brother had warned him so long ago, for by and by he found that his heart, if such he possessed, had been unexpectedly and unthinkably moved to beat a mortal and seductive tempo. An earthly affliction with grave and everlasting consequences. Nevertheless, here he stood at her side once more, tempted again to step closer and touch her. All he allowed himself, however, was only to look at what he must never have.

Her nose favored the length and crook of a fine young eagle—which was apt in light of her noble Ptolemaic progenitors—and he recognized in its profile a shrewdness that transcended her youth. To the gaze of a plebeian it might not have inspired esteem or renown, but to him, it was in nowise a diminution of her beauty; on the contrary, he regarded it highly. The eyes too were not that of an earthbound creature. They were sunlit gold and imbued with a falcon-like keenness that was wholly without need of the kohl and malachite that adorned her lids. In the petal-like curvature of her mouth, no one could find fault, for it was generous and alluring, her voice rich with feminine authority. In fine, there was nothing of docility nor of conformity in either Cleopatra's accents or her strange beauty and as such he never tired of watching, nor indeed listening to, her.

In truth, he'd forsaken all else and all others to watch her with a nascent and forbidden love that he took pains to hide from the Great Eye of Heaven—Ra as He was known here. So to the shadows Kassiel cleaved and over her old and wizened body he would someday weep in secret, for what was her life but a ripple on the Nile that would vanish in a mortal instant. And mortals, such as she was, whose passions rivaled even the sun, were never long destined to scatter their light like stars upon those vast and winding waters. Her star would be snuffed far sooner, he feared, by which time she, like her father's fresh corpse, would be spread atop cold stone like a salted cod. What remained of the pharaoh now lay still atop the embalmers' slab deep within his tomb, invested in linen tresses, his painted sarcophagus gaping and hollow-bellied. His daughter, now the basileia, had only this morning pressed her deep ochre lips to his waxen brow for the last time. The lamentations and orisons—even those feigned tears defrayed with drachmas—had not yet dried up from the streets.

Cleopatra, the seventh of her name, was sure her father would be well pleased with his funereal valediction and could no doubt hear the mourners even from the Hall of Osiris. The young queen had earlier whispered her thoughts to the four winds without the smallest notion that her unseen guardian had plucked them from the north wind and was, even now, standing beside her.

Unbeknownst to her, the seraph watched as she sipped her wine in the banquet hall, the funereal feast, for tonight at least, drawing to a close. Only the cheese and honeyed figs and dates had yet to be served. Cleopatra, in turn, studied her young husband—eight years her junior— where he sat between the dour commander Achillas and the rodent-faced regent, Potheinos. Her brother. Her consort. Her thorn.