Chapter 225 - Finis

"But you lived," Fatima said softly.

"Yes, I lived. I survived," Apollonius replied. "The pyroclastic flow ripped me from my maker's grasp. I was thrown into a wall and buried in ash and stone.

"The pain… was indescribable. I felt the living blood boil inside me, felt it turn to steam and expand. For a moment I thought I would burst from the inside out, like a beetle tossed onto an open fire, but even as the living blood boiled, it worked to preserve itself, to preserve me, its host.

"My maker had made me a powerful strigoi, and the Strix hardened my flesh instantly, made an impenetrable shell of my body. I became a man of living stone, unmovable, my mouth frozen in a tortured scream.

"I do not know how long I lay buried there. Days. Weeks. Months. The pain had driven me mad, and in my madness, time had no meaning for me. Time no longer existed. I was trapped inside my hardened body. Trapped inside my own mind. I dreamed that I had died and gone to hell, and the demons who tormented me were Laevinus, Domitianus, Junius, Soranus-- all the vile mortals who had beleaguered me in life.

"Gradually, by degrees, the earth cooled around me. The living blood within me returned to its normal liquid state. It spread out through the vesicles of the stony shell it had made of my body, and it began to repair me.

"Cell by agonizing cell, it remade me.

"I was still blind, still unable to move, but I returned to sanity. I remembered what had happened, and wondered that I still lived. It seemed an impossible thing, to be alive.

"Tormented by hunger and pain, I lay immobile in the ash of Pompeii and waited for the Strix to finish making me whole.

"All the while, the only thing I could think of was Julia. Rising from my grave of stone and ash and finding Julia. If I had survived the river of fire, I reasoned, then she must have survived it, too. I imagined I felt her near to me, just inches away. I imagined she was frozen, like I was, trapped in a body turned to stone, and waiting for the living blood to restore her. Sometimes it seemed her spirit pressed upon my thoughts. It was maddening. I was an insect trapped in amber, but still conscious, still thinking.

"Then, light!

"My maker had found me, was exhuming me one handful of dust at a time. I saw his face, his moving lips. His flesh was hard and glossy, fractured in all the places where it flexed, at the corners of the eyelids and mouth, the neck and shoulders and abdomen. Wherever he moved, his flesh crackled and the living blood oozed out to seal the webbing of fissures.

"I couldn't hear what he was saying, my ears were full of earth, but I could read his lips. 'Just a little longer, son,' he said.

"Like a midwife, he birthed me from the earth. It was like being reborn. I found that I could move, slowly, with great pain, and I sat up with his help.

"My flesh fractured at every movement, but I rose. I saw that it was dusk. The sun sat in the west, a heart on a bloody pile of entrails. To the north, Vesuvius still smoked, but the main part of her fury had been spent. I was lying in the middle of a vast gray plain. I was lying in the heart of Pompeii, but the city was gone, buried under 25 meters of tephra. Here and there, the blackened spire of a tree jutted out of the ground, but that was all that remained of her. Her temples and townhouses, shops and offices and theatres, they were all gone. The coliseum where I'd watched Russus, my boyhood hero, fight and die, the great encircling wall, even the harbor… all gone, erased from the face of the world.

"'Julia,' I croaked.

"'I have not found her yet, but she is close,' my maker said.

"I had lain in the earth long enough for the haze of ash to settle out of the air, though smoke still rose from the ground in places where fires burned somewhere underneath. It reminded me of a hot springs.

"'Can you move?' my master asked. 'Can you help me dig for her?'

"I said that I could, and though it was very painful, I helped him to search for her.

"We unearthed her early the next morning.

"Like us, the living blood had hardened her flesh, tried to protect itself from the heat of the pyroclastic flow by transforming her into a protective shell, but she was not nearly as strongly made as we were, and the Strix, vaporized by the intense heat, had burst from her breast.

"We knew immediately that she had perished. There was naught inside her stony flesh but ash.

"Gon carefully exhumed her as I cried. He scraped the dirt and ash from her form with his fingertips, his movements delicate, reverential. He glanced at me repeatedly as he worked. I think he was afraid that I would blame him. I had made her into a vampire, but he was the one who had insisted we save the servants, and so he believed that he was at fault.

"But I did not blame him. It wasn't he who killed my lover. I didn't even blame myself.

"It was Vesuvius who killed Julia. It was nature, and what good is it to blame a force of nature, to cry at the flood, to shake your fist at the storm?

"We took her carefully to Surrentum, carrying her petrified form between us. When we arrived in town, we discovered that several months had passed while we lay entombed beneath the ash. Our servants had given us up as dead and dispersed. We were abandoned. Alone.

"We hid her body in a cave near the sea until we could acquire a new home for ourselves. Gon bought a villa in Sicily, and then he sailed back to Surrentum to fetch my Julia's remains.

"We wrapped her in fine linens, and transported her to Sicily. There, in a vault beneath our new home, we stored her fragile remains.

"I went down to see her once, when we placed her in a beautiful sarcophagus. We placed her in her tomb of gold, like an Egyptian queen, and I kissed her once upon the cheek, but that was all that I could bear.

"When we finally parted ways, when I tired of Sicily and left to see the world, he promised to keep her for me. And he has, ever since, for he loved her, I think, just as much as I."

"So why send her to you now, knowing how much it would hurt you?" Fatima asked.

Apollonius rose, his face turned up to the stars. "There can be only one explanation. He is planning to kill himself. He must have discovered some way to accomplish it, found some way to destroy an Eternal."

"What do you plan to do?" Fatima asked.

Apollonius looked at her, his face grim. "I have to go to Belgium. Try to turn him from this madness. He is my maker. My… father. I cannot just stand idly by and let him end himself."

Fatima nodded. "Of course, my love. You have to try, at least."

Apollonius went inside and made his plans to leave. As he sat tapping at his computer, sending his maker an email, Fatima bid her son carry Julia's remains to the vault.

"Be very careful with her, Sunduk," she said, stroking the girl's stony cheek. "This woman was much loved."

END