I have scant memories of my beginning, time out of mind. Mind, you see, is shaped by culture, and before culture there is nothing. My earliest memory, that of sitting about a fire and listening to a tale I would later know as that of Orion and the Pleiades. Then there were Eight. From there I drifted, always the hot climes where none would suspect, there are so many inexplicable deaths that one or a dozen will raise no questions. And when the questions are raised I move on.
You are what you eat, and Protean I was, becoming each of the races I hunted, a month and I might change my shape enough to pass for half-blooded, 2 months and the people would think that I had been thereabouts born and bred.
I learned to fly ahead of the plagues; I was not cheating death, merely hastening it; those young pale virgins, their quality of innocence, this is what sustained me. I was Mercy itself, for the pestilences that followed me were never as kind, and every one of their lives prolonged my own, and I lived first hundreds, then thousands of years. And when I was particularly moved by some tender prey I might visit her a few nights, allow her the slow lingering sleeping sickness or aching consumption, before resurrecting her with a few drops of my own. What privilege to be able to choose your children!
Where only I dined, the pale morning death like the petals of a flower laid out upon the clay, the faintest smile upon their lips; if life is suffering then let their deaths be made sweet; always I have been the considerate guest; and the anguished keening carried to me on the morning breeze foretold the plagues to follow.
Travelling routes that took me from: Ur, Bagdad, Cairo, Tangiers, Athens, Rome, Venice, Carthage; a tour of centuries, a hundred other cities where there lies now only sand and sea, then later with ships, and steam ships and then aeroplanes and the American South, Savannah to New Orleans, time and again running into my little proteges, our tastes now the same, with families and roosts of their own, twirling ringlet curls: “And how do you like this gift?…”,
I have wondered at the fear our race have provoked in you, the Sumerians and their Pazuzu, the Greeks with their Gorgons, your priests with their crosses, yet the cattle don’t fear the farmer, nor is the shepherd feared by his flock. And while my race has been feared because of a few degenerate examples I have never been one.
First of all manners. What manner of beast laps up the blood of his victims? Only the most depraved, I have always stood upon ritual, table manners, while I’ve needed no fork and knife, and have shortened a great many lives I have given others the chance of immortality. In my estimation this balances out.
Which brings us to the cup. So much talk of progress, first the automobile, then the aeroplane, now it’s all rocket-ships and cell-phones. Mankind, once so noble and filled with aspirations and dreams has become a degenerate race, the world in general infected with a curious depravity, and where with Gilgamesh I could have filled it a hundred times with Poetry, Innocence, Grace and Kindness now I could travel the world and never fill it once. This immortality, well, it’s been a good run, but while reddit offers a ready and willing diet of virgins such is the quality that I would prefer to go hungry. Recall that you are what you eat and never would I deign to become one of those fiends, those withered and gibbering horrors that hang in derelict mansions, or those underground lairs they claw beneath tombs and graveyards, devoided of all language, custom and manners, that have outlived time itself, insatiable, insensible imbeciles, ears filled with crickets and blind eye sockets with star jelly, and yet still, still refusing to die…
Remember the fastidious Count of St. Germain, with his “Who would suspect ME, a vegetarian”?; I ran into him again in New Orleans, not even a hundred years ago, the American diet had taken it’s toll and if he were still alive today I have no doubt he’d be in Congress or Secretary of Health and Human Services.
There is naught left in this world that would quench my thirst, and when the time comes I will wait patiently on the balcony for the morning sun. But pardon my digressions.
For sale: 1 ritual libation cup. Pewter.
I’d prefer to meet at night as the sun irritates my skin, “Solar Urticaria” my physician tells me (and that I need to eat more vegetables)…