THE VAMPIRE VITTORIA | THE ACCOUNT OF AN IMMORTAL PAST

IV-Hope is a thing with feathers

    For a time during my natural age, I daresay I felt my spirit could get no lower. But this night had marked the beginnings of yet my greatest fall. The night when I wept a great fount of mortal tears.

And although I came to know the darkest dwellings of my mind, I, too, came to know my fiery spirit. I had discovered it flaming inside of me in a sudden. But what measure of horrors did it take for it to be so.

    Were it not for that smoldering flame that was mixed equally with an aching pain to see once again those eyes lay upon me very gently, I know not how I would have endured all of my eternal nights. 

    Life for me had changed drastically and totally. I no longer knew life of The Grand Tour where I had come to learn, finally, the world beyond a page. In sadness, I no longer knew that particular sound of the castrati singing in the bright air of the earth, nor the fresh faces of an intelligent mind exploring, as I was confined, finally and miserably, to the small measures of a room.

Thus, although I was free, I was not free. I fled one horrible fate only to be dealt another. What I came to hopelessly realize was that loneliness was tragically all I would ever come to know. And so a powerful sorrow fell upon me, one that felt at once endless and deathless.

    Peter was a kindly man that was connected to James to some degree, and as such, had provided me with a room in an attic, in which I was meant to be very quiet. But to be very quiet, as I have mentioned, I had such remarkable talent.

   I lived with the dust and darkness there, breathing in that particular smell. I was allotted a single candle to be used strictly by day, and I was to never open the small, narrow window so that I might draw in the light and the pleasant fanning air, or draw in the lovely hymns sung by the monastery, soft and echoing and unspeakably beautiful.