nothing else but my heart's desire [COLLECTION] | FINISHED

A vampire burial - ORIGINAL PROSE

Vampires. The spawn of the devil. Demons in disguise. Monsters hidden in plain sight. Predators on the hunt, lurking in dark corners, concealed by the night as they wait and watch for their next unsuspecting victim. These are the popular narratives of my kind, these stories now lost to history as truth slowly shifts from real lived experiences to mystery, legend, just another scary story to keep children from straying too far.

I wasn't always this way, this fate was not mine by choice, but thrust upon me as punishment from perceived slights and sins I had not known had been committed. I had always hoped, in those first few years of undead life, to be slain, for another to finally bring my torment to an end. Now? I am met with only joy, as I have seen the rise and fall of empires and countries, change bringing forth progress and new beginnings. It has become a new beginning for me too, but let's go back to my own humble start in life, when I fell in love with someone who only sought to use me from their own ends, and why I were punished with this fate to walk the earth for all time, alone, tired and without any home to call my own.

Vanessa. That was once my name, long ago, but I had realised, after so many centuries alone, lost, unsure of myself, that such things had long ago lost their meaning. Thus, I had found myself reinventing my self, my image and how I wished to be perceived by others. No longer would I be tied to the girl I had been, the person long since dead and buried, long since scattered to the wind. Christa, that is the name I had chosen for myself, only in recent history, but it has been the name which has stuck, which has become as natural to utter in my presence as breathing.

I grew up in a small village at the base of a castle, where nobility ruled the land, where some of the young female villagers worked as maids, cleaners and other domestic servants. Most of the men worked hard as labourers in the nearby coal mines or as entrepreneurs in small shops in the heart of the village, selling goods or services for a small price, while a select few had been lucky enough to be given employment in the castle as cooks, waiters and other such members of staff. It was a good life, for the most part, and I couldn't have asked for more; being an only child, my family relied heavily on my income as a maid in order to pay the bills, so I had little else to think of as I worked. My mind felt as though it were consumed by anxious, obsessive thoughts, as I worried for my mother and father, how they were, what would become of them if I lost my position at court, as low as I was in the pecking order in the castle. Perhaps it was all these thoughts of worry which caused me to catch the attention of one such nobleman, the son of the Duke who inhabited those castle walls.

The Duke and his family were an odd bunch. Perhaps it should have been obvious to me then that they were vampires, as much as the townsfolk had gossiped and spread rumour after rumour about the nefarious goings-on in the castle, from the disappearances amongst the staff, to the mysterious rooms no staff were permitted to enter, to the muffled cries from above as we slept in the servants' quarters below. It frightened me so, but like so many who chose to stay, rather than take their chances elsewhere, particularly for the men as labour was hard, difficult, with long hours and little pay, I had little choice but to continue as if it were all perfectly normal, shutting out the alarm bells ringing in my head, all day, every day. It was this which would eventually be my undoing, but I had thought myself to be safe. Why, you may ask? Well, you see, the Duke's son was an incredibly jealous man, and had thought all the female staff in the castle to be his to do with as he wished; thus, many of the victims of this sadistic man would mostly end up being men he had thought it was his sworn duty to dispose of, before the female staff had the thought to turn, to run from the castle and all its blood-soaked secrets, with these men in tow. Of course, the time being what it was, when women had not the freedoms of choice and options to decide what to do with their futures as they do nowadays, in this modern era I had grown to love and appreciate so much in its own ways, such thoughts would not have crossed the minds of the women who worked there. Like myself, they, as well as the men who worked their alongside us, only considered what they could do for their families, who lived in poverty while the Duke and his family, as well as all the noble, wealthy families of the land, even to the King himself, lived as though they would never be without their gold, their castles for protection and their centuries' old hoard of wealth.