Chapter 79 - The Last Mammoth Hunter part 5

"Imagine the pain," I said to the man duct taped to the chair in my apartment. "You wake with no memories. You don't know where you are. You don't even know who you are. Your body is smashed beyond all recognition. You are crippled. Monstrous. But then a miracle occurs. You are healed. One by one, your memories return, and they are good memories, memories of love and pleasure. You are excited, overjoyed. You see a path that leads back home, back to the loved ones waiting there for you, their arms open in welcome.

"And then you realize, like the fictional character Rip Van Winkle, that the world has passed you by while you slept.

"I did not return to my valley. I never have. Not in the flesh. I return to it in my memory. I return to it again and again, even now, thirty millennia later. I watch them from afar, much like I did so long ago, when I was first transformed into a vampire. I watch from afar as my beautiful wives and my quiet, enduring husband grow old and die. I wish I had gone to them then, cold and white and evil as I am, but I did not—I could not—return to their side. I had become a monster, and I did not trust myself to resist the lure of their warm, nourishing blood. I retreated to a cave like a monster in a fairy tale and watched them from a distance, undying, ageless, and now I remembered it all. Lying there in the tundra, my memories tortured me.

"I remembered how time took my lovers from me, one by one, how I flew down to the village and collected their remains. By then, the people of the river called me Thest-Un-Mann, which meant "the ghost who is a man" and I brought their bodies, one by one, to the cave to keep me company. I buried them there, and with me they remained, for decades, for hundreds of years, I do not know how long I resided there, but they were my only companions through that long epoch of self-imposed exile. I was the ultimate hermit. God of the recluses. I only left my mountain when disaster threatened my people.

"I remembered the ages that passed, as my children and my children's children grew up and then succumbed to time. I remembered how the world grew cold and my people forsook our valley, how the glaciers spilled over the northern mountains until all that remained was ice, and when I could bear my solitude no longer, I went down to that ice and cast myself into a deep and lightless crevasse.

"There was no going home, I realized. Everything I knew was dust. The ones I'd loved the most were ancient bones in a distant and long abandoned cavern.

"I mourned them afresh, lying in that distant tundral steppe. I cried for them all through the night. The pain accompanied me even into the daylight hours that followed, as I slept in the shallow fissure in the dry creek bed. I dreamed of Eyya and Brulde and Nyala, and woke with my vile black tears crusted upon my cheeks.

"I took the young Mammoth Hunter named Hammon that night.

"I found the survivors many miles away, having abandoned their camp. They were fleeing home. They were jogging south through the starlight when I caught up to them.

"I took Hammon from their ranks without a sound and dressed myself in his clothes after draining his body of blood.

"Ashamed of my gluttony, I decided to spare the boy and the wizened old man. I had come, at last, to think as my true self, with all my mind intact.

"Yes, I would let the boy and the old man live. I was not like the monster who had made me into a vampire.

"With no home to return to, and no glacier to throw myself in, I started walking south, parallel to the two surviving Mammoth Hunters. I was not stalking them. South merely seemed as good a direction as any other, and their distant presence was comforting to me."