‹ Prequel: Lead and Gold
Vernacular
Time
There is too much time in this place.
I have stopped measuring time in any realistic sense of the process. Seconds, minutes, hours, days; I pause for what feels like heartbeats, only to realize settlements have risen and fallen around me. I force myself to endure and endless moment, warring with all of my thoughts, only to find I have moved inches from where I was.
There is too much time in this place.
To call us immortal seems absurd; that requires that we place ourselves into a time frame; immortality is a measure of time. We are not immortal; we are lost in time, all of us. Some of us haven't realized it yet, of course; the euphoria of that first Kiss, that first hunt, blinds us to what we truly have become a part of. We are not a collective race of similar beings; we are individual's by choice, sometimes finding solace in the fact that we find another that resembles us. We erect our covens and our clans, our manors and our dens, but it is, and always will be, temporary. We were meant to wander; we wander to extend our very existence. We wander from street to street, valley to valley, room to room, feeding and feeding and feeding. We are not meant to remain dormant and stationary. They call those like me rogues, as if I should be expected to reside in a household. It is heresy punishable by death for me to wander, as we were meant to. They think me odd for the way I speak; I am a rogue with class, with style, with standing. This is why I wander; because to bind myself to a home, immortality would become even more unbearable; seconds in which I watch those around me reel in thousands of corpses, years in which I watch an elegant lady move from one side of the room to the next, searching for some trinket or another.
Home requires that there be time; when to roam the halls, when to make pleasant speech, when to stay indoors.
And there is simply too much time.
-Aluraune
I have stopped measuring time in any realistic sense of the process. Seconds, minutes, hours, days; I pause for what feels like heartbeats, only to realize settlements have risen and fallen around me. I force myself to endure and endless moment, warring with all of my thoughts, only to find I have moved inches from where I was.
There is too much time in this place.
To call us immortal seems absurd; that requires that we place ourselves into a time frame; immortality is a measure of time. We are not immortal; we are lost in time, all of us. Some of us haven't realized it yet, of course; the euphoria of that first Kiss, that first hunt, blinds us to what we truly have become a part of. We are not a collective race of similar beings; we are individual's by choice, sometimes finding solace in the fact that we find another that resembles us. We erect our covens and our clans, our manors and our dens, but it is, and always will be, temporary. We were meant to wander; we wander to extend our very existence. We wander from street to street, valley to valley, room to room, feeding and feeding and feeding. We are not meant to remain dormant and stationary. They call those like me rogues, as if I should be expected to reside in a household. It is heresy punishable by death for me to wander, as we were meant to. They think me odd for the way I speak; I am a rogue with class, with style, with standing. This is why I wander; because to bind myself to a home, immortality would become even more unbearable; seconds in which I watch those around me reel in thousands of corpses, years in which I watch an elegant lady move from one side of the room to the next, searching for some trinket or another.
Home requires that there be time; when to roam the halls, when to make pleasant speech, when to stay indoors.
And there is simply too much time.
-Aluraune