Alone in the Dark

The nights were cold sometimes.

Not many people stopped to think about it, but when they did, they would probably have said that such ethereal, frozen creatures as those with vampiric blood in them generally were must not be equally affected with cold as warm-blooded beings like humans were.

Little did they know that it was actually the other way around.

At least with him.

It was very cold. Wrapping his cloak around himself hardly helped much, because the wind that blew was harsh enough to creep in through it and chill him all the way to the bone.

It was dark, too; it generally was quite dark in this part of the world, this time of the year, and at this hour. The moon was not in the sky; the only things that broke the blackness were the dimly twinkling stars. Them, and the glimmering lights of the windows that plotted the edge of a town in the distance.

It was nothing special for a town, really. Just yet another place where mixed blood wasn't welcome. In that, it differed little from all the other towns he had visited before.

A low-pitched, garbled noise from the vicinity of his chest drew his attention for a moment. It turned into something of a cough, and then a whine. The hand was being loud in its sleep again.

That was another one of those things which would probably have been difficult to guess: that a parasitic face in someone's palm not only slept, but also sleep-talked.

He turned his eyes back towards the distant lights of the settlement.

On the other side of those tiny window panes, people were likely sitting around their tables, enjoying the supper before turning in for the night. He imagined that they would sleep well – more or less, anyway – in their beds, some together, some by themselves, and they would waken to the new day in the morning and go about their business, calling out greetings to the familiar faces of their neighbours and friends and shouting curses to their enemies or to those they just generally disliked. Come evening, they would sit down by those same tables, eat another supper, and go to bed again.

It was a very straightforward and uneventful way of existing. And so very simple.

What was the strangest part about that was that for someone who wasn't born into it, such a way of life was actually so hard to achieve that it seemed to border on impossible.

You could do it, however. If you just matched the standards. One of the first was having faces you could call familiar.

He did have faces he could call familiar – but those faces, once left behind, were forever lost to him. Some died. Others, well… died, too. As a matter of fact, almost all of them died. A few persisted longer than the others, but in the end, they all went the same way.

It never ceased to amaze him that so many humans seemed to find immortality an enviable thing. They didn't seem to realise that what it really meant was a long succession of memories of people and events long gone, and every day something being added to the list of things that would fade away while he prevailed. Attachments were difficult to form when you knew they would be brief, rocky, and inevitably end with loss. And the only ones who might have been able to withstand the passing of time…

The lights from the windows were slowly winking out, one by one. The occupants of the houses must going to bed. Tomorrow they would rise again and tend to things that moved no one's world but their own. So very simple. So very small.

So very, very far away.

Wasn't there a saying according to which life was made of all things simple and small? But if you had neither, what did you have, then?

Humans spent their lives pursuing uncomplicated, unimportant everyday things that no one would remember once they were gone, but which they took to with the seriousness of one who is moving the world. The Nobility occupied their days by quenching their thirst for blood and wallowing in their superior self-importance, so that even though they dabbled with matters that really had neither sense nor purpose in the end, they did so under the delusion that the reality was the complete opposite. What was common to both was that although the things they did rarely made much of a difference, they lived them in full.

The lifestyle of the Nobility was not really inviting for someone who could see the pointlessness and destructiveness of it. He had been tempted a couple of times, before he had seen the pettiness and the utter loneliness of their supposedly glorious existence. Slaughter, lust, playing god… in the end crumbling out of inability to see your own flaws. That was what the most of them were like. They lived for thousands and thousands of years, and they seemed to glean very little from it.

Humans, on the other hand, were like shooting stars or flickering sparks. They shone brightly and were gone almost sooner than you had realised that they were there. But the differed from the Nobility in that they were warm.

Warm to their own kin.

Just like the Nobility only had any kind of a regard for those who shared their likeness.

In a war, you had to choose your side. There was no in-between, and nothing that reminded one side of the other was looked upon with understanding. Those who saw beyond the black-and-white setting were few and far between, and they usually suffered greatly for it. Odd that it was not the stark contrast but the shades of grey that hurt most to see.

He should know. He had seen more than one fate like that.

Some couldn't choose a side. Some could, but were denied. He should know that, too.

The hand muttered something in its sleep again.

Although he had the makings of it, he was not one of the Nobility. He knew what he was, but he was denied. Always apart. Always alone. Always denied.

But not by others, was he?

He'd seen prejudice overcome, minds changed, hearts finding room in themselves for things they had previously abhorred. It was neither the humans nor the Nobility who had put him where he was, left with nothing else than inevitable endings and a string of memories that grew heavier by the day.

It was on nights like this that the faces from his past rose to his mind, clear and sharp, and voices grown silent long ago spoke loud and clear again.

It was not them, either, that drove him on and on, never allowing him to rest, or stay in one place for very long. In fact, many of the voices were asking why he never stilled, never allowed himself to stop and take a look around. Countless faces had been engraved to his memory, but it was still a little startling to realise how many of them wanted to know why the only thing he saw waiting in the future was yet another ending.

Only two of the windows now held a light; behind all the others, the people had gone to sleep. They had turned off the lights, closed their eyes to the mundane world, and now dreamt small dreams of petty things.

Who was he to judge them, though? Who was he to blame them, even when they drove him out of their cities and towns with bullets and arrows, for reasons that didn't stand the daylight much better than a vampire did? Who was he, crouching at the foot of a tree, alone in the dark, wrapped in his cloak, leaning on his sword, which was encrusted in the blood of ages past, and wallowing in his self-inflicted misery — who was he to call them petty?

One of the two, small rectangular lights flickered into darkness. He stared at the last one, eyes starting to slide out of focus.

No matter how you looked at it, nothing lasted forever. Sooner or later, all things would come to an end. The Nobility imagined that everything they did was ever-lasting and eternal, while humans had the gift of after each ending, always being able to begin anew. But where he was, everything that went by was gone forever, and nothing came forward to replace it.

And sooner or later, the light of the one, last remaining window would go out as well. Not really wanting to witness that, he huddled deeper into his collar and closed his eyes.

Some time during the early morning hours, the wind finally stilled. The stars faded slowly out of sight as the sky turned first a deep purple, then slate grey, and finally a bright, pale blue. The town had already begun to wake before the man huddling under the only tree in the plain stirred. He stood up, brushed himself off, mounted his horse, and rode away, without another look back…

… never knowing that the light in the one last window had kept burning steadily all through the night.