Chapter 123 - Exodus of the Neirie, 23,000 Years Ago part 1

Twilight resolved slowly into night as my vampire child and I watched the Neirie from afar. The band of escaped slaves had traveled all day through intermittent showers, a group of some fifty-odd, work-hardened souls. They had marched relentlessly, even through the lashing rain, pausing only to care for their wounded, the sick and the old.

The clouds had lifted shortly after we arose, hurried on by a westering wind, and it was as if a heavy gray blanket had been swept away from the sky. A multitude of glittering stars winked down at us, a milky river of them, flowing from horizon to horizon.

I was just as exhausted as the Neirie below. My body ached where I had been pierced again and again by the arrows of the Oombai. The living blood had healed me, of course. Healed me without a trace of the injuries I had sustained, but even vampire flesh remembers its wounding, and in remembering, throbbed tiresomely in the night's moist air.

The sight of the Neirie exodus raised my spirits, however. If not for me, these people would not have had the opportunity to win their freedom. I had killed the leaders of the tribe that had subjugated them, decimated its army, allowing the Neirie to rise up, to free themselves from tyranny. The pride I felt in their liberty lifted some of my weariness from my shoulders.

If you are there, father, I hope that you are pleased with your son, I thought, glancing toward the heavens.

I once believed the stars were the campfires of my forefathers, that the night sky was a dark inverted plain that hung suspended over the world. I know now that the stars are really distant suns, much like the sun that warms this busy world. They appear tiny, like flecks of diamond strewn across black satin, but only because of their distance. Still, sometimes I think about my people's myths, and there is a part of me that takes comfort in those old fantasies.

The stars dimmed and brightened like the distant fires of the Neirie camp. If I squinted, I could just make the wayfarers out, moving among their crude shelters, huddling around their glimmering fires for warmth. The refugees we followed had camped for the night in the middle of a glade. How they had managed to find enough dry wood to make their fires, I could not say.

I recalled the pitiful living conditions they were forced to endure in the village of the Ground Scratchers. Worked until they fainted from exhaustion, whipped at the slightest hint of disobedience. Raped. Reviled. Butchered for sacrifice, and sometimes just for sport. Their Oombai masters had kept them in pens like they were animals. Disposed of them without even a modicum of human compassion just as soon as they were too old or worn out to be useful anymore. I was glad they'd escaped, and I intended to escort them to the lands from which they'd been stolen.

Those wicked, greedy Oombai!

Ilio had spotted pillars of smoke rising from their settlement earlier.

"Good! I hope the Neirie razed that cursed village," I replied. "I hope they burned it to the ground!"

I didn't expect to encounter a people so cruel when we came down from the mountains. Ilio still lived then, a mortal child on the cusp of becoming a man. I'd wanted him to have a natural human life, to know a woman's love, to have a family, and so we went to the village of the Ground Scratchers hoping to find him a wife. But the Oombai stole my mortal child from me, made a mockery of all my hopes, and in my wrath, I visited complete and total destruction on them.

"Can you hear them singing, Father?"

Ilio squatted in the high grass at my side, a short, stocky lad with round cheeks and long dark hair woven into braids. He would forever be a halfling, made immortal just at the cusp of manhood, neither fully a man, nor completely a child.

I cocked an eyebrow at him, thinking, How many times have I chastised you for calling me father?

It was not that I disliked his familiarity. I loved him as I had loved all of my children, but I feared he had grown too dependent on me. What if something happened to me?

I did not know how utterly immune to death I was. Not then.

But if the boy was anything, he was persistent. He was much more stubborn than I, anyway! I did not have the energy to argue with him about it.

Besides, I reminded myself, you yourself call him "son" in your thoughts. You have no right to reprimand him.

Ilio watched the distant campfires, his eyes glinting in the moonlight. It pained my soul to see him so changed. His form whitened, removed from time. An eternal boy-child. He had only been a vampire a handful of days, and there was still a hint of mortal softness to his flesh, but I knew even that would soon be gone, and then he would be like me—a creature of living stone, cast adrift on the listless watercourse of eternity.

It was all my fault. I should have let him die.

It would have been a mercy. A few moments of pain, fear, then release from his mortal shell, his spirit rising to take its place in the ghost world, or whatever afterlife his people believed in. But I was unwilling to part with him. I had grown to love the boy too much.

"I wish we could go and visit the Neirie," he said. "I would like to see them up close. Join them in their singing."

"It is a joyous music," I agreed. "They celebrate their freedom, but you know it is not safe for you to venture very close to mortal men. Your thirst for their blood would surely get the best of you. Perhaps, when you learn to control your hunger a little better, we might venture among the living. For now, you'll simply have to be satisfied with observing them from afar."

"I understand, Father," he said, dropping his eyes in respect. "Still," he said, peeking up at me with a smile, "I think it would be interesting."