Recalled to Life

III

        Remarkably, directly after the initiation, I retired back into my room and slept. Wishing only in that moment to rest and not to dwell on the recent past events, I cleared my head and laid myself down upon my bed. The sheets felt less soft somehow, and the room less luxurious. It was amazing how quickly humans -or even a freshly turned vampyre, for that matter- could adapt and change. This thought comforted me somehow, to know that I was a completely normal creature, and in that sense sane. It made me transfer the reasoning to other things- my new life, what I was, what had just happened. It was all completely sane and normal, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to be afraid of. Everything was completely and utterly fine.

        I went to sleep believing that reasoning, and have kept on believing to this day. Only the true horrors that were revealed to me later on in the years to come would have me shuddering like a child, doubting what I now held dear and close to my heart.

        But that is another story entirely, or at least one for a later time.

        I slept for days, perhaps for even a week, and while the binge of blood would normally have one of the Kindred completely energized for the duration that I felt I needed rest, for me it had the opposite at that point in my life. Like humans with drug binges, once the initial effect wears off it leaves the user fatigued and helpless. My senses were overloaded and I merely needed time to adjust to all of the change- what didn't register with me, however, was how long that would take.

        The winter was abnormally cold that year, and lasted for longer than it should have. Whether it was the truth or my mind playing it out longer in my imagination I knew not; perhaps it was simply because it was my first true lesson of time in the UnLife.

             That we are eternal.

        Winters were always a dreary time that tested patience and the extent of one's abilities. Scraping up enough food to get by, snowed in the house but shoveling a path in order to get to the animals, sometimes bringing the smaller ones to the warmth of the fire inside; a chicken, a piglet, winter was a universe all its own. It offered solitude and warm conversation and stories, but at the same time, starvation and disease. Always at spring's thaw an entire house was dug out of the snow, only to realize that the entire family inside was dead, or a child was missing, or a math had died giving birth and the babe had suffered the same fate, unable to get help because of the debilitating snow.

     Now, though, there was none of that. I would not die of disease or starvation, the only threat to me was a lack of humans and animals, and even then, a lack for an extended period of time. A mere winter without blood would not kill me.

        Slowly, the snows of winter and then the morning frosts began to fade and melt. The days passed uneventful and blended into one another in a timeless cycle; I knew that I could not get any older, and worried less about my appearance than normal, and even less about whatever reputation I was supposed to uphold there. Still, that did not in any way say that I was depressed and therefore repulsively unkept. I was now accepting, albeit a tiny bit indifferent, to the situation as a whole. I knew what I was and had a defined path in life now, and the structure and order brought me about to my senses again even as I slept. During those unending hours I began to grow used to certain things: the cries of the mortals, their screams of pain, the scent of their blood. Always the scent of their blood, but not only the scent, it was the new feelings that came with it, too. Before it carried with it a smattering of guilt, the soul, or the family of the mortal's blood. Now it only reminded me of the euphoria of the initiation, the power I felt there.

           I was slowly beginning to change.

        The time I spent sleeping passed slowly, but not unpleasantly. I was only dimly aware of the new change I felt within me, the change of mind and of heart, and I wondered if Tzan and the others knew that the initiation would have this effect on me.