For the Love of a Vampire

The Rebirth

Chapter one finally up! Hope you enjoy!

February 29, 1864

Berk: During the Civil War

It was dark, it was cold and I was alone.......again. No surprise there, although it would be nice to have even a little bit of company on the one day every four years that actually meant something. It was my birthday, I was sixteen, but did anyone care? No. You would think that in the middle of a war someone would take better care of their children, yet here I was, walking home in the middle of the night with no proper protection. I had taken up a position at the blacksmith shop to help pay for expenses, and this blacksmith tended to work longer than necessary to keep up with the war demands. I can't say I mind it though, it means more pocket money for me......and more time away from my overbearing family. We lived on the outskirts of town, on the other side of the forest that surrounded our massive plot. It wasn't much of a home. To me it was just endless acres only accented by a mansion and countless other large buildings. The only thing I really liked about it was the view, and that only did any good at sunset. I had grown accustom to the long walks home from town every night, but that didn't make them any less unnerving. I paused a moment in my steps, to look up at the silvery moon. There was something about it that gave me a sinking feeling, yet one that also awakened something inside of me. This moon didn't shine like it usually did, no, on any normal day it was dull and lifeless.....just like the world I lived in. But tonight it was the brightest I had ever seen, casting large luminous shadows wherever its rays fell and silhouetting each tree in a perfect gloomy outline. There was life in the streams of moonlight that reached the forest floor, life unlike anything I had seen before. They seemed to emanate a ghostly glow that sent a chill shooting up my spine, and sent the forest around it into a flighted frenzy. It appeared almost as if everything came to life around me, awakening from a deep slumber and rising at the same pace as that feeling inside my chest. A sudden wind whipped at my hair as if playing with it, shaking the bare trees overhead and sending little wisps of snow tumbling through the air around me. My skin felt like fire even though it was freezing cold and the tips of my fingers tingled with a magic unknown to me.......as if I could control the world itself. My body was screaming at me to do something....anything to relieve some part of the tension that built inside me, but I didn't. My senses heightened somehow and I felt a connection to the earth around me, pulling me to let go of myself. I was alone..... and yet I couldn't shake the feeling that something was watching me. This had only happened twice in my life that I can remember. Once in 1856 and once in 1860...............on February 29, my birthday.........and now it was happening for a third time.

I shook my head at my own imagination, continuing my journey home though the elements wished to hinder me. It was a crazy notion...that all this happened only once every four years, that it happened only when I was alone, that it only happened on my birthday. It was an impossible reality, that all of this happened solely because of my existence. It simply couldn't be true.........could it? I refused to believe what was plainly true, and had refused to do so for sixteen long years. My parents always told me I was stubborn and willful, and of course, they were right. I saw it even in my own life in how I so ardently denied this event as pure coincidence over and over again. How I ignored all the strange things that happened to me, the things i'd 'brought' into existence, and all of the urges I had to make the world see peace. Sure, it wasn't that strange to want peace in a time of war, but this want wasn't in the same way and I wasn't even sure if it was the same kind of peace. I felt like it was my job to rid the world of anything that hindered peace or made it incomplete, that mutilated it. I felt like I was that missing piece the world was looking for, and I've only hurt the world by not surrendering to my true self......whatever that was. I could only imagine why it was that I felt this way. Was it because I was the only one alive at present born on the twenty-eight day of the second month? Was it because I was different than all the other people I saw in my lifetime, and knew that I was? Or was it simply a delusion....a dream conjured up in the mind of a boy who just wanted to make a difference in the world...in a world so full of hate? I could not tell, and the void that this blatant lack of information caused haunted me to my core. Was there a reason I was so different...so freakishly small, so oddly weak............so special? I know there must be...but one that also explains the abnormalities in my life constantly escapes me.