Chapter 36 - The Charnel Pit part 2

What else can I tell you of my maker?

I know you must be dreadfully curious about the being who made me what I am, but of my vampiric sire I'm afraid there is little more to tell.

I never called him master. I assure you of that. My loathing for him remains pure to this day. Thirty millennia has not been time enough to adulterate the purity of my hatred for him and three hundred millennia will not be enough!

Though he was the father of my living death, I never learned his name. I call him the Demon, the Foul One, the Beast, the Leech. I'm sure he had a proper name. He was a mortal once, just like me and every other of my kind. He had a mother and a father who named him as my father named me, but he never spoke his name to me, or if he did it was in the tongue of his people and I did not know the meaning of the words.

Though he made me an immortal, he was also the murderer of my true father, the genesis of my mortal life, and so the word "father" will never cross my lips when I speak of him.

He was cruel and brutal. He existed only to satisfy his own appetites, and not just for blood but for cruelty and domination as well. He made me what I am by force, took me as a man might take a woman, and put his black seed inside me. The very thought of him makes me tremble with hatred. However, as I know you are curious, I will tell you what more of him I can.

As I explained earlier, we vampires are as varied in strength and appearance as any other natural creature. Some of us are soft and pink and warm, barely more vampire than human. Short-lived and weak, the fate of these half-mades is a tragic one. These must suffer the curse of the blood hunger without the recompense of our full powers and longevity. Like the little Foul One I dispatched with my knife, whom my maker called Uel, these half-mades are more than human, with speed and strength superior to mortal men, but they are not like their more powerful vampire brethren, the cold white beings the Strix more fully transformed. They are vulnerable to injury, sometimes even to mortal diseases. They can be killed with a blow or a stake to the heart. Some, poor things, can even be injured by the sunlight! Like mortal men, their lives have a natural span, and at the end of that span they weaken and die. At the other end of the scale, you have the true immortals, whom we sometimes call Eternals. They are cold and hard and white, demi-gods of immeasurable strength, as immune to time as they are to mortal disease-- all but invulnerable to harm. The rest fall somewhere between those two extremes. I do not know why the Living Blood has such a varied effect upon the mortals it transforms, but there it is. The vampiric transformation, like all else in life, is something of a lottery.

My maker was one of those immortals who fell in between those two extremes. Your average, run-of-the-mill bloodsucker, he was neither soft and weak nor an omnipotent demi-god. Though he seemed terrible and all-powerful to me at the time, I would estimate that he was about half as strong, physically, as I am now. He was not hard and white like me but somewhere in between man and marble. Still human looking for the most part, but pale, and with the requisite fangs and iridescent eyes. He did not seem to possess any of the strange gifts that some of our kind are granted by the Blood. I do not believe he could read minds or move objects by the force of his will. He certainly couldn't see the future or he would have steered well away from me!

To my reckoning as a living man, my maker's strength was irresistible. I could do nothing to defy his will. I was helpless to defend myself from his brutality. He could have killed me at any moment, rent me limb from limb as easily as you might pull the wings from a fly. Sometimes I think it might have been a kinder fate if he had done that… but life, as I have said before, is not fair. He seemed a monster to me then, a demonic being of vast and overwhelming strength, but compared to me now he was a minor fiend. In the eons that have followed, I have destroyed countless such creatures out of hand.

Though he was strong and fierce, he was not intelligent. Cunning, yes, as any predator is cunning, but he thought little of consequences and he was completely devoid of the finer sensibilities: love, honor, friendship, mercy.

I have occasionally wondered what brutal tribe he was born to, and how he had come to be what he was, but I never found out. Not for certain. In his dress and mannerisms he seemed much like the Foul Ones my people sometimes made war with, but he could have hailed from any number of primitive peoples. Nor do I know what undead monster made him a vampire—my immortal grand-sire, you might say-- or how old he was when he attempted to press me into slavery. He might have been an ancient by the time our two paths crossed, but if so he had gained woefully little wisdom in that time. His decision to give me the Living Blood was a misstep he would not survive to regret.

Yes, I killed him. Of course I did.

He had little knowledge of the particulars of the vampiric transformation ... that some are made weak and mortal like his servant Uel, whom I had dispatched with a knife to the heart, while a rare few are transmuted for some unknown reason into demigods.

Uel was weak and easily subjugated, and so he reasoned that I would be as well.

He was doomed the moment he decided to make me an immortal.

Now let me tell you how I killed him.