THE VAMPIRE VITTORIA | THE ACCOUNT OF AN IMMORTAL PAST

I-In the beginning, there is a seed

—Present Date—

I cannot tell you how it was. I can tell you solely and solemnly how I remember it. I will explain to you everything that I am, and, too, everything that I tragically am not. And I will tell you this all in fantastic detail, as only a vampire can.

Yes, I am the vampire Vittoria de Luca Bonenfant, but I am nothing at all. You mustn't get completely lost to this. Nothing is so wondrous about me, save that I have endured.

With you I leave my confessions, as in those wretched wooden rooms. Do with it as you like. Tell it to your one, or to many, or burn it with my rosary, which I surely have blasphemed.

But allow me here to begin softly, for I am presently of the mind and do not know how long that can last, this softness of a gentle spirit, which I am not. Bethink you.

    But I am lonely to know the world again, as I want to be alone in my quiet, to be buried beneath the damp and heavy earth, free from my grief. And, too, I want my courageous faith again, for some will in my soul to go on.

So, I find myself back at my beginning, after two centuries of what can only be described as a beautiful spectacle. My existence. My immortality. My miserable and forlorn being.

And after all this time, this place has become just a place. Its once golden walls are now crumbling beneath the leaf-patterned wallpaper, and the brilliance of the crystal chandeliers are now gone.

    My home, which is now desolate and overrun, was once such a wonderment to me, but it eludes me now how the old visions had sustained me. I struggle at this moment to see them, as I've struggled at so many things in my madness.

    That I remember it at all astounds me. Even if it should be that I remember all things with clarity; all things with perfect recall, such that I wish to die.

    Pitiful, you.
 
    But even as I strain to explain this, to keep my scattered thoughts in a line,
I'll tell you that it's giving to me—some foreign peace to my dispirited, chapfallen mind.

    In this room it is very quiet. The only sound is of this pen that I hold as I press it down. Gone are the feathers of geese and swan. And of my vellum, they are all but dust, brittle heaps within the drawer.

    I should think they were meant for some sweeping love story or poetry, or perhaps a bit of heartfelt scale from an unfinished overture.

But, oh, how romance of this kind eluded me during my age. I have never possessed the mind for such things. What had become pressing to me only had been The Word of God. All other passions faded in some horrific hellfire plummet against my heart.