Chapter 10 - Germany: 30,000 Years Ago part 9

But so that I do not paint too rosy a picture of that primitive era, I should tell you that our lives were hard. Death, by misadventure or disease, dogged our every footstep, clinging to our heels as tenaciously as a shadow. I think that is why we cherished our pleasures so greatly. No candle seems so bright as the one that burns in the blackest night. And it was dark in those days. Dark with death. So much death that it seems a wonder we did not go mad from the sheer hopelessness of our lot.

My mother died when I was just a toddler. Her name was Val-Hal, and my father was madly in love with her. I do not have many memories of her. I was very young when she died, but I do remember her face and her long curling auburn hair, which I inherited from her. I remember her kind green eyes, and the way she always smiled, as if she were secretly amused by the ridiculousness of the universe.

She died when she was struck by a snake while gathering the fiber of the flax plant to wind into string. She was struck on the heel of her foot and suffered a slow and painful death, her leg blackened and swelled to three times its normal size. She died gripping my father by his shirt, screaming through clenched teeth, her eyes crazed and bulging in her agony.

My elder brother Grent was killed by a bear the year before I married, and my brother Vooran died when I was young, too.

So many of my people died in those days, from accident or infection or animal attack. The children fell prey to disease and wild beasts. Winters were especially hard on the elders of the Siede. When a member of our tribe passed on to the spirit realm, we wrapped their mortal flesh in their sleeping furs and carried them to our burial mound, to be interred among our ancestors. We mourned them, bitterly sometimes, as my father mourned my mother, but we knew that death was a part of life. We had a saying: As the sun descends into the earth each day, so too do we.

But not I.

By the caprices of fate, I was placed beyond the reach of death. Even among my vampire brethren I am something of a freak of nature, a true immortal, immune to every common way my long-lived comrades find their ends. Burn me on a pyre and I arise like a phoenix from the cooling ashes. Separate my head from my body and the two parts will conspire to rejoin. Pound a stake into my heart and I will pluck it out like a mortal would pluck a thorn from his finger. I know this for a fact, as both man and immortal have tried to rid the world of me a thousand times over throughout the ages... and time after time, I have shrugged aside death's dark embrace to deliver retribution on my tormentors.

I was old when Babel was new. I was ancient when Mesopotamian accountants pressed the first cuneiform symbols into clay tablets. I have fed on the blood of countless forgotten empires.

I am the oldest living vampire.

Of that I am quite certain.

We vampires have always been a rare breed, a species forever teetering on the brink of extinction. Though I am not the first of our kind, I have wandered the world from stem to stern and found no other immortal who is as old as I am, not in this modern age. All those who came before me have long since quit the stage of this corporal existence, moving on to I know not what, and I myself destroyed the beast who made me what I am. Though there are no doubt a great many vampires far wiser than I, there is not a single undead creature that can boast to be as old.

Yet, I am still a man. I miss my family. Even now, after so many endless ages, I mourn their loss as if it were fresh.

My only wish now is that I could truly die and end this long and wearying existence.

I curse the day the dark fiend who made me what I am snatched me from the bright-lit path of my life.

Now let me tell you how it happened.