I took one step forward onto the transparent walkway that lit up in a gold light when the weight of my foot was on it and did so with each following step. It must have been about ten steps onto the path when I heard the voice of my daughter echoing in this galaxy themed place I was traversing, and that is when I realized that I had no earthly guess as to how I was now presently here in the first place. Her voice was coming from a glass path directly parallel above me, near the planet, so I ran, and the path spiraled up to where I could hear her closer. The path ended abruptly but very close to the spinning, colorful and gaseous rings of the planet, they were meant for me to jump on them, so without question, I did. When I jumped into the rings, I was then engulfed in a thick blue vapor, so cold and dense, I almost suffocated in the mist. After spinning around in the cloud for a good eternity, I found myself landing face first onto a platform made of golden bricks before a flight of stairs of the same building material, leading up to the top of a black pyramid in the middle of a red and black nebula sprinkled with specks of stars. I climbed up the stairs, and each step made a different musical note when I would step on. When I got to the top, that is when I had seen the unbelievable sight, and the first time I would ever meet “them”.
There, at the top of the pyramid, underneath the brick shade of the opening, there was a creature that reached the height of my collar, very gaunt and a reptilian grey skin stretched tightly over its skeletal frame. It possessed not a trace of hair save for the few white sporadic wisps on its head, and its large almond black pools for eyes bored into the very essence of my soul. It raised its right hand to my shoulder, and almost automatically, as if I already knew to do it, my left had met its had in a gentle palm-to-palm touch of coming in peace. I then bowed down to the grey creature, quite unafraid, but taken aback in amazement at how something I believe to be mythical was so lucidly in my line of vision. Telepathically, in a deep bass tone, a male voice entered my mind an conveyed a message, the creature never once opened his lips, but I made out his every word with absolute attention.
“King of the Moon Scion,”
“Not a King, only a prince yet,” I spoke back in English to him. He blinked his giant moist black eyes at me and scratched his chin with four grey skinny fingers.
“Yes, you are the one. On Planet Earth, your people are endangered. Your kind are the only ones who can ally us to fight the Leviathan, the one named Basilisk. You must unite your race for the good of your Planet, you are the only one who can face the Beast. A great turmoil is coming, please heed our warning, great Vampire King. Rise and fight don’t allow the destruction of Eyreon to repeat itself on Earth, or every lifeform will cease to exist,”
“I’m sorry, I am fearful that you have me mistaken for another person,” I told the grey creature looking at me with clear, perceived irritation at my skepticism. He tugged at his golden scarf on his neck.
“King Enttu, take heed. From the cosmos, from the moon Goddess, from Sekhmet, from mother nature, from the lifeforms, from your family, and keep a close eye on your enemies as they near in on you without you even knowing it, unless you come back to your true element,”
In the blink of an eye, I was almost being dragged down the stairs be a vaporish spirit that looped itself around my arm, and its upper body floated in the air like a genie. The spirit was a male, and he possessed very long black hair that could have reached his feet if he had any, like the color of my father’s, but his eyes were nothing but two spaces of blinding white light.
“Who are you kind spirit?” I asked him.
“You uninformed fool, you should be ashamed,”
“It was just a question, I am as lost as you are,”
“Only you’re lost. I am Alucard,”
“The vampire Alucard?!”
The spirit of Alucard didn’t reply to me. When we reached the golden brick platform, where red and black winds of nebulas swirled all around us, Alucard let go of my arm, and I saw my daughter happily awaiting me there. I ran to her and took her in my arms, clutching her against my chest.
“My love, what in tarnation’s business do you have here?”
She giggled innocently.
“Daddy, I’m so glad my friends liked you!”
My vision and memory to the events that followed became a dark blur, the only thing I remembered was awakening past the evening in our sleeping chamber, next to my naked wife, and I buried my face in her hair, pressing my front against her back, and holding her tightly with relief. I never mentioned the dream to her, although I tried my hardest to meditate and consult with the Goddess, who had never appeared to me much until my brush-in into the afterlife realm. For the next two years, I ignored and tucked the dream into my subconscious and in that time, I traveled for a bit around the world, taking my wife and daughter with me.
We visited America in the wee age of the Progressive Era, and stayed in a hotel in New York City, and then we visited the Southern part of America in New Orleans. It was a leisurely and beneficial time for my wife to branch out her knowledge with the resources available here, and for her to stock up on all the material and supplies she needed. We also visited strange lands and islands I had never dreamed of going to before, the Philippines, Thailand, Hawaii before it had become integrated into the United States of America, and we saw what a volcano looked like in person. Due to our gift of levitation we got treacherously close to the opening of the caldera in Mauna Loa in the main island of Hawaii and hovered a daring proximity over bubbling, glowing red magma brewing beneath, and then I took my wife and daughter to enjoy the luau and Polynesian hula dancers, at very late nighttime of course. I hunted small local animals and we pretended to eat human food in front of the locals, discreetly spitting it out onto a napkin when no one noticed, though I did appreciate the taste of pineapple, even if it provided no ounce of nutritional value. I brought back some koa wood souvenirs and leis for Mother back in Romania.
We made one last stop in Egypt to visit the Great Pyramids of Khufu and the Sphynx along the Nile, and it was in a nearby merchant’s town where we visited and witnessed the Temple of Sekhmet for ourselves. It was a splendid temple of extravagant architecture in the form a gold ziggurat much like the stone pyramid temple of Selene in our city. Legend in textbooks from our studies suggested that Selene and Sekhmet had been sisters and the first mothers of our species before we had divided into the covens we were today, but I took everything with speculation and skepticism, especially because of the strange reoccurring dreams I was having. The ziggurat contained two sarcophaguses within that supposedly housed the mummified corpses of an ancient vampire warrior named Malakae, that I met a whole century later, and his sister Mawu, a high priestess that baptized newborns in the Nile and made flowers and papyrus reeds bloom with her breath. The coffins were placed upright against either side of an entrance to a main chamber where white candles and opium infused incense burned eternally, and many articles of jewelry, raw and polished precious gemstones and solid gold bars were placed at the foot of a statue of a woman with ears and lower body of a cat, the Goddess Sekhmet. I had told my daughter to not dare take or alter the arrangement of anything inside the temple. The entire time, I felt eyes of an unseen entity were upon us, and my fangs drew out inadvertently in response of a possible combat. We left the temple quietly a couple hours before daybreak and traveled home by ferry and then by self-flight once the ferry made it to Istanbul.
We returned to Romania in the early spring of 1894. Upon our return, my sister and Tyro had told us that they had wed in secret and that they planned to leave the country. I knew that Vibekka was growing fed up with our warrior-like lifestyle in Meytros, and she had always longed to escape and make a name for herself, even if that meant renouncing royalty. She was a young, frustrated woman about three years younger than me, very attractive with hair that cascaded in platinum curls, and she had baby blue eyes. By any man’s standards, she was desirable, however, my sister
was also very tomboyish, and wanted to fight in battles the way my father and I did. Father strictly forbade women from battle, and not because of any sexist reasoning, but because he knew that women were anatomically weaker and more susceptible to violation on the field from the enemy, as well as women were the preservers and birth ground of our coven. They didn’t need to be subjected to the atrocities we saw as men, so consequently, all homes in our village were built to and decorated with richness, jewels, textiles, and the finest metals and spices from around the world, so wives and daughters lived in temples.
Mother knew about my sister and tried to talk some reasoning into her, but just shook her head. Ultimately, my sister moved far away from us, and it made her one of the very few survivors of the ominous incidents that were brewing and unfolding right beneath our noses. We had been simply too off guard in enjoying the more exquisite side of immortality.
The dreams with the grey creatures were beginning to resurface, and one night, I had even caught one looking straight down on me at the edge of my bed and stood there without making any audible gestures. A heavy sleep washed over me and I drifted back off to sleep. For the life of me, I could not wake up for the next few hours that followed. When I finally did awake, I found my wife standing next to my bedside, and she sat down beside me, and laid a gentle kiss on me, her small cold hand on my face.
“You have been out for a week. You need to feed,”
She leaned over me and pressed her neck to my lips, and I felt myself becoming more alert, as I took another deep breath to inhale the scent. I sunk my teeth into her pulsating flesh, and felt the blood soothingly flow down my throat, to all my vital organs. My veins began to pulse a little more intensely and my breathing heightened. I wanted more of her, like a primal lust for life.
“Drink to your heart’s content, my love,” she said, and I knew the feeling was as pleasurable for her as it was for me.
She possessed the premium taste and fluidity of blood from a healthy human being with no illnesses or ailments. The taste was a metallic saltiness with a slightly sweet aftertaste lingering on the palate. She withdrew herself and stood in front of me in her delicate pose she always did balancing her small weight one of her legs only. I left two fresh, red fang marks on her neck, and they bled slowly. She was stunning in her black satin kimono dress I had purchased for her in Phuket, even though it was the dress she conducted a lot of her work in. The way her tendrils of raven hair fell so perfectly down her shoulders, awakened something in me. I arose from my bed, and grabbed her by her waist, pulling her body against mine.
“Is that a dagger in your slacks, or are you just delighted to see me?” she teasingly cooed in my ear.
I kissed my wife and she was as equally receptive in passion, throwing her arms around my neck and playing with my strands of platinum hair. She hiked up her skirt to reveal bare thighs and lace undergarments, and then with her superhuman strength, she jumped up and wrapped her legs around me, grinding herself against my apparent arousal lined out through the fabric of my trousers. I laid her down gently onto the bed, and we undressed each other to nothing. We made love for what seemed like eternity, and it never changed as to how amazing she felt to me, the soft skin, breasts that fit in my hands, the inner walls of her body gripping my manhood, and the biting. It was so much easier to have sex with her as a vampire, without fearing that my intense rhythmic movements into her body would kill her. I thrust into her hard, and she responded pulling my hair, digging her fangs into my neck and feeding from my blood. The feeling of pure ecstasy derived from the pain and brush with death was incomparable, although mundane sex and the warmth of a human was still very pleasurable. Her body would become deceptively warm after she drank from me. This was our exchange, I would please her sexually, and she would give me the pleasure in return when she would get drunk and sank her teeth into my neck, and then I would do the same to her. My blood was in hers, and hers in mine. Intensity I felt while sinking my body deep inside of her overwhelmed me, and I ended up spilling my seed within her, and I stayed here, making sure she was implanted with my essence.
After we were done we cleaned up and changed into fresh clothes, always something black for me, and something of exquisite velvet or satin and ruffles for her. We went to the courtyard of the castle and bathed under the light of the rising moon over the mountains, and a bat flew above us overhead, and circled around us several times before it stopped and transformed into my daughter, in her rose taffeta dress, adorned with ruffles, bows, and hearts, that my wife picked out for her.
“Daddy, you’re awake! I had a dream that I was in a chariot of steel. And then, that next, you were in it too, and the chariot could fly over the world, and we saw the sun, and it didn’t burn!”
The innocence nonchalance of my child was always a soothing balm to my consistent somber mood. Despite the rather damned way of life she was born into, she was no different from any other child, and found seriousness in nothing, and often made light and constant question of adult topics that should have been taken solemnly.
“Well, it was indeed a dream because sunlight would surely burn us to a pile of ashes,” I said to her, gently patting the top of her head.
“The little people told me your real name is Theli, and that this isn’t our home. I’ve been to our real home, it’s a vile, vile world in ruins and infested with crawling creatures and darkness, and vampires aren’t from here,”
I looked at her sideways, always entertained by the tales of her lively imagination.
“Vanya, that is preposterous. I was born here, and you were born here as well, ask your mother,”
Nayeru rolled her eyes and nodded in agreement, “Oh yes, you nearly ripped me in half when I pushed you out.”
“Out of where mommy? I thought babies were brought to the Temple of Selene by the Goddess herself. So where do babies come from?”
I hadn’t anticipated our conversation heading in that direction and I felt myself tense up when she had asked, it wasn’t a topic I was about to discuss with a six-year-old. She looked up at me and then with her innocent, shiny eyes and puffy cheeks, she turned to look at her mom, and then we were both staring at my wife.
Nayeru raised her eyebrow at me and scoffed, “Well don’t look at me, I’m not answering that,”
“Well, you see my dear, you kind of dug yourself into your own grave there,” I said as I smiled nervously.
“Enttu, I’m going to be digging you a grave if you don’t shut it,” she replied with a tinge of anger in her voice, that I always found to be endearing when I tested her temper.
“Good, I can’t wait,” I winked at her.
She rolled her eyes and cursed me under her breath. I always loved this temperamental side of her, one minute she was affectionate and receptive to my romance, and the next, she was aggressive and very headstrong. I loved that despite what the rest of humanity told her she couldn’t do, she was defiant and wild, with unyielding intelligence, and classful independence. She had the couth of royalty, but underneath she was a tigress, and she knew she was unstoppable, even when the world bloodied and soiled her name, her sheer determination never tarnished her spirit, and that is what made her so beautiful. Many of the closed minds of the 19th century would have put her to death, but I was raised to never tame a wildflower. I was raised by my father to always respect women, for they are the ones who give us the gift of life and endure the excruciating pain in exchange.
I let her bloom, and she gave me a garden of prosperity and the fruit of what true joy was. She was always my equal, and I treated her as such and provided for her, as she equally did for me. Though she could start or end a fight, she gracefully tended to the castle, to raising our daughter, and to advancing daily in scientific discovery. The combination of graceful femininity and challenging attitude was a lethal combination that hooked like a stake through my heart. I hopelessly, apparent and unabashedly loved and was in l
ove with her. My days spent with her were beautiful and remained forever entombed in my memory.
The day I lost her forever was the day I had felt the true curse and frigid loneliness of immortality, and I was only a phantom of my former self trapped in the carcass of a vampire. My will to persevere, my lust for life, my compassion in human error had been dissolved by the ebbing poison of my depression, my vendetta-laced anger, and avenging her death, my daughter’s disappearance, and the genocide of almost every Selenian in my beloved coven.
It was an eventless day in late September 1894, when the screams of my daughter echoed throughout the city, which prompted myself and my team of guards to go running after the sound. Not even in the span of a minute, I found my little girl safe and sound in the outskirts south of the city limits but standing before the body of one of our townspeople with a stake of wood through his heart, completely bled out and decomposition setting into the greyish-blue skin. He was face down, with the dagger protruding with the pointed end coming out from the front of his chest; he was attacked from behind. I flipped his body over, and when I saw his face, my heart sank to my stomach, and I almost vomited blood. Maggots took no time to begin to spawn and feast on his carrion.
“Tiberiu Kristian,” I said solemnly, as one of the men that joined me wrote it down in a journal. “Race, dhampir. Age 130 years, husband of Raluca Kristian, and father of their two children, Andrei and Florentina. He was a blacksmith when not in combat, and one of my most noble soldiers in my army when I avenged the death of Nicolae. His wife is a merchant of textile and forged steel weapons her husband designed and created. Their two children attend the school within our palace. This is disheartening, and I cannot fathom who would do this or why their motives of murder are,” I said, the ground I knelt on absorbing my words of my head bowed down.
The Dhampir Dimension Page 19
