 Goodevening..Let me introduce myself I am called Pendragon. You are presently in the domain, city of Prince Falon. It has
been in her family for centuries. Please come in...
Let me see...Where to start. How about here...
Bela Lugosi's Dead and so am I. But what's left of Bela is rotting in a pine
coffin somewhere, while I have the opportunity to sit here on the balcony,
enjoying my drink and look at you. Correct me if I'm being presumptuous,
but I suspect that I have the better end of the deal.
I can tell by looking at your face that you do not comprehend. Of course
not--These are cynical, rational times, and you're not going to believe
that I'm a dead man just because I say so. A century ago it would have been
different the last time I had this little talk with someone--but this is the
age of facts. And the facts are that corpses don't move, don't walk, and
don't talk. I'm terribly sorry, my dear, but I have a surprise for you: This
corpse does in fact do all those things.
So sit down. Please, I insist that you make yourself comfortable. Pour yourself
something to drink, preferably from the bottle on the left--the stuff on the
right is well?.we shall say it is an acquired taste. It's going to be a long evening, and you're going
to need a stiff drink or two, I suspect. After all, in the next few hours
I'm going to explain to you in excruciating detail why everything you think
you know about life and death is wrong. In other words, you don't know a damn
thing about the way the world really works, and I'm going to open your eyes.
But I'm afraid dear your not going to like what you see.
Before we go any farther, allow me to tell you that you're getting an unprecedented
opportunity here. My kind doesn't talk about itself to your kind--not now and.
, for the most part, not ever. We've spent five centuries weaving a stage curtain
that we called the Masquerade to hide the real show from you, but in the end it
comes down to one simple fact: We vampires don't want you mortals knowing
we're out there. It's for the same reason the wolf doesn't want the sheep
knowing he's around. It makes our work so much easier. And so for example,
though we do indeed posses the sharpened canines with which dime store novels
and the cinema have branded us, you mortals will not see them unless we choose to reveal them.
like so.
We call ourselves Kindred. Vampire is a word humans invented. They
needed a name for their fears in the night.
You're looking pale, my dear. That will never do if we're going t be seen
later--allow me to take care of looking pale for both of us. Still, I must admit
I'm disappointed that you seem so disturbed by the notion of my being a vampire.
Take a moment and compose yourself, if you can. Truth be told, I'm afraid
that's the least of the shocks awaiting you tonight. Please, don't waste
time trying to come up with a rational, scientific explanation, because there
isn't one. It's just what I am. What many, many of us are--too many, by some
accounts.
Damnation, are you truly that much of a fool? Sit back down. I said SIT.
Now watch, HUSH, stop screaming. No one will come to rescue you, and no one
will call the police--not in this part. Discreet or non-existing neighbors are
a blessing to one in my condition. It's positively Victorian the way they
ignore anything not directly in front of them.
So, at last you have your proof. Now do you believe me? Yes, it is blood
in the other decanter; served cold like that, of course, the stuff loses much of its
taste. You can try it if you like, but I don't recommend it, no. You're not
set up to enjoy such things, at least not as presently configured.
Don't get ahead of yourself guessing my intentions, my dear. If I were
going to act according to your beloved cliches, you would be dead right now. I am a
predator, after all, and you and you entire species are my pray.
I suppose we should begin with the basics of the whole thing. I am in fact
a vampire, brought into this state of existence in the Year of Our Lord .
Yes, I do drink human blood. Without the nourishment it provides, I will wither away;
with it, I will live forever. Yes, forever. Unless destroyed----and destroying
one of the Damned is no mean feat, I can assure you--we vampires are every
bit as immortal as the legends say. Only the sun, and the emotions it engenders,
remain forever foreign to us; we Kindred can drink in the nights of countless ages,
can remain unchanging while all that we know crumbles to dust around us and
is replaced by another stage-set that in turn crumbles to dust, and so on....
Ah?. once again, I loose the way. Blood, yes, blood. I can get by on the blood of animals--
most of us can, except the true elders of our kind--but such a diet is
unpleasant. Unpalatable. No, we all want to feed on the best vintages, otherwise
one goes around all the time with a dull ache in one's gut that just never goes
away. It gets worse the hungrier one gets, I might add; a vampire who goes too long without
feeding is liable to demonstrate a regrettable lack of self-control.
There are other telltale physiological signs of my condition. My heart
does not beat; the strength of my will alone suffices to for the blood
through my body. My internal organs, by all accounts, have long since
atrophied into vestigial husks, but that won't matter to a coroner, as
once I am truly killed I will rapidly decompose into dust. In the meantime.
however, such trills as breathing do not trouble me, extremes of temperature
and the like. My skin is cold, unless I take the effort to warm it. Doing so
takes effort, though, and the expenditure of precious blood. Regular food
is an abomination unto most of my kind. Something we can and usually do go
without.
In layman's terms, then, I am no longer human. For all intents and purposes I am
simply a blood-drinking, ambulatory cadaver, indistinguishable from any body
in a morgue unless I am moving about. I save the niceties like warming my flesh and
remembering to blink for company, such as yourself.
Ah, we return to the drinking of blood, the defining act, as it were, of
my state. Yes, I am afraid it is a necessity, though one can leave one's pray alive. All
that requires is a little self-control and a touch of effort to close the
wound--and no, we don't all drink, from the neck, You can cross another cliche' of
your list. The problem with leaving one's pray alive, however, is that unless one has
certain...protections, she remembers. Such breaches of the Masquerade are not looked on kindly
by the vampire powers that be. Oftentimes, it makes more sense simply to kill.
The crux of the matter, really is that drinking blood not only allows me to perpetuate
my existence, but also provides a sensation unlike anything else this world
has to offer. What is it like? My dear, words cannot describe it. Imagine
drinking the finest champagne and the sensation of the most sensual lovemaking
you've ever experienced, Overlay that with the rush the opium fiend feels
as he takes that first breathe on the pipe, and you begin to have some sense, some tiny, infinitesimal
sense of what it feels like to drink the blood of a kine---excuse me, a living human being.
Your modern-day addicts will lie, steal, cheat and kill for their little tickets to Heaven.
Mine is better, and it makes me immortal besides. Can you imagine the deeds I might commit to feed
that hunger? Don't bother speaking possibilities; the truth is worse than
you can imagine, and I am considered to me a gentleman of my kind. Other
consider me to be....well I won't speak of such in the presence of a lady..
Now imagine, if you will some
of my relatives, the ones who aren't so nice as I.
They can---and do---commit acts that even I don't wish to consider.
And here you are, poor little mortal, learning how fragile your whole existence is.
Are you starting to be afraid yet? You should be.
In most cases, one reserves one's first drink of blood on the night one becomes a vampire---one of the
"Kindred," as we like to call ourselves. The process is called "The Embrace,"
and has two distinct and rather difficult phases. The first is simple: The
vampire who wishes to create progeny drinks every last drop he can form his intended "childe."
This is no different from normal feeding, save that one doesn't have to worry
about erasing the memory or disposing of the corpse afterward, and that one gets
a very full meal indeed, The difference comes afterward.
Once the last bit of blood has pulsed its way out, the "parent" vampire--
the technical term is "sire," not that you care yet---then returns some of
his ill--gotten gains. He bites his lip or wrist, or whatever, and allows some
of his blood to pass his victim's lips. Assuming that the mortal does not
actively and successfully resist the process---few do believe me--and assuming
that the sire has not delayed too long in granting this gift, then the blood trickles
down the victim's throat and revives her, albeit as a vampire.
It sounds simple does it not? The truth is, as truth is always wont to be
more complicated. My own Embrace would seem to be the epitome of the horrors
you see on the silver screen or read about in novels, the gloss your age has put on my kind,
and even so I shudder in retrospect at the memory. Between the adrenaline rush of
the moment of the fear of death and the fight, to the pleasure of the
feeding---yes, it is quite pleasurable for mortals,
to the point of addiction for some --I was quite content to drift away.
And then, as I lay there watching that shimmering door open before me, as
my soul took its first faltering
steps toward Heaven, he calmly slit his lip and pored the vitriol of
eternal life down my throat. You can mock me for not
rejecting what he offered, but even in the face of Grace, life is sweet.
His blood seared
as it trickled past my lips and down my throat, and I found myself fighting
again wanting to live. The
pain the blood brought was proof that I was alive. And, when it became
clear that I would not be
acceding, the shining door vanished with a feeling of ineffable sadness,
leaving me with my sire and a murderous hunger. Fortunately, my sire was
kind enough to see me through the change; he held a kine in another
room like a shrike stocking its larder. While I felt my body dying
cell by cell, he lay senseless, waiting for my hunger.
Ah, yes, the hunger of creation. That little bit of blood that one's sire
uses to bestow the Embrace isn't much---a few drops with more mystical that
nutritional significance. They certainly don't provide enough sustenance
to satisfy the hunger of a newborn
vampire. So the newborn childe had better pray her sire has laid in a few
bottles or, better yet a few
bodies for the moment, so that there's something to feed on right after the
change. I've witnessed the horror of newly Embraced Kindred giving in to that uncontrollable
hunger and ripping to shreds whoever was nearest in their madness. When that
first thirst is upon you, you will do whatever you must to feed, and you will kill your lover,
your child, your parent or your priest to sate that thirst, and you will be glad to do so--for
as long as the frenzy lasts.
There, my dear is the rub. Because no matter how long you're in that state
of frenzy, no matter what triggered it--fear or hunger or pain or rage--no
matter how long you give in to the animal inside you, you can't control what
you do and you always come down. And that's when you must deal with the consequences of what you did
when that animal wearing your skin was in control. And the first frenzy in never the last. One
would think it gets easier to deal with that loss of control as one grows more experienced.
One who thought that would be quite wrong.
A vampire animalistic side is called the Beast in what is, I suspect, and attempt to demonize it
by dissociation. Alas, merely giving the monstrous urge a different name is not enough to tame it.
In the end the Beast always wins, I'm told. If one survives long enough as a
vampire, one is forced by ones nature to do some obscene things. And eventually,
one gets acclimated to committing those atrocities and moves on to new ones, and whatever
was human in that vampire dies. When the last bit of humanity in a vampire dies--and
once you watch enough friend s, loved ones and descendants pass into the dust of ages, it
does die, rest assured--then the Beast takes over once and for all. The vampire becomes an animal.
If you ever reach that stage, the odds are you won't even notice when you get
put down like a mad dog.
If your will is strong, and you've got a decent sense of self, you can hold out for decades. Centuries, even--
I have spoken to Kindred who are over two millennia old. But you are never, ever free of the fear that the
Beast will one night triumph, and that fear is what the Beast will use to bring you to bay.
Of course, the best way to fight the Beast is to keep oneself in fighting trim, and that means
eating regularly. Then again, eating regularly usually means that sooner or
later, you start killing kine---mortals pardon me again---and the more kine
you kill, the easier the killing gets. So the Beast wins that way, as well.
Even if you don't mean to, even if the process begins with an accident, sooner or later you get inured to the
sight of a brand-new corpse that you are responsible for, lying dead at your feet. After the tenth,
hundredth, thousandth or whatever corpse, it stops being a person and becomes an object,
a vessel. A footnote in your history of the ages, and you, at that moment,
crease to be remotely human.
But there is more to blood than just food, a lot more. There's power to so
much so that some vampires call it vitae'---"of life." Blood above and beyond what
is needed to survive can be put to a variety of uses. The legendary vampiric
strength or speed? A product of the proper application of blood. Invulnerability to mortal woes?
Another draught from the same will. I've had pistols emptied into my belly and not
showed down a whit. Blood powers many of the "magical" talents ascribed to us as well:
you've witnessed one. And of course, I can flush blood to my skin so as to appear, well,
almost human.
There is a price to be paid, of course. The more blood I spend on such parlor tricks, the
more quickly I exhaust what is in my belly. The more quickly I empty my gut the
sooner I need to feed---and hunt---once again.
You would prefer me to cease the charade of warmth, then? I am in
your debt.
It is so refreshing to meet a young person who is willing to look
past appearances,
don't you think? Hmmm? My dear, were you twenty times your current
age you'd be
a child to me. "Young" is a relative term.
Tsk. I'm feeling a bit hungry. Would you care to escort me out to the VampManor?
The other option is that I leave you here as a prisoner, and I'd prefer not to do that . No doubt
you'd try to get inventive and escape, and I'd lose some antiques as you smashed things in the process.
You, my dear, are replaceable. My possessions are not. It's that simple. That and Falon would be most upset. She is attached to her beautiful things she has collected over the centuries.
Come my dear you still have much to learn and see....
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Click on the road to your destiny and fallow Pendragon into his world of
darkness. For you have so much more to learn and see child.
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