Forsaken

The reality of us creatures of the night pale in comparison to the glory given to us from legends and myths conjured up by generations of the human imagination.

We are the damned, and we are cursed to walk the Earth for an eternity, leaving us alone in the end with only our thoughts and memories to provide the little comfort we want.

That is not what I would call glory or power. It’s what I call wretched and pathetic.

My maker, Raymond, left me alone one night and never returned. No matter how many times I called his name, he never showed up behind my back with his usual smirk like he always did. He was all I had in this lonely immortal life, and now all I have is my ego and myself. He gave me the most blunt and important lesson he’d ever given me: in the end, we’re all alone in this life.

I often wonder how he’s doing today, in the modern world. He is an Ancient, and I suppose he’s lying low, like the rest of us. We have to; were we to expose ourselves, we’d betray the entire identity of our kind, and destroy everything our ancestors struggled to conceal from the living.

So I decided to stay true to what I really am.

I pulled away from the girl’s neck, as I tasted the last inches of life leaving her body. I licked her blood off my lips, and wiped the remnants off on my sleeve. Her body joined her partner’s—in the fire that they had built to keep warm on the chilly fall night.

I stared into the orange flames, watching her body burn into nothing but ash. I sighed and held my hand out towards the fire, and I felt the heat lick at my palm, raising the temperature of my hand a few degrees.

It felt nice. I felt human, with warm skin and blood.

I sighed and let my hand fall to my side, before turning and simply walking away from the fire, the sand finding its way into my shoes as I walked along the shoreline, the smell of salt mixing with the smoke coming from the fire that I was leaving.

I used to believe that since I have an eternity to live, I might as well make the most of it. But then I realized no one of my kind are meant to live our lives to the fullest, since a plethora of our ambitions has some sort of means to gain some sort of recognition in a community—and if anyone were to record our names now and someone else find them in a hundred years to find we hadn’t changed in the slightest, our secrets would be out in the open. So we’re left to live in solitude and only dwell within our limits.

I am no exception.