I, Zmeu

I, Zmeu

(fiction derived from a recent dream; possibly the first part of a longer story that I may finish someday, but complete for now)

Many nights I feel in my blood that I still hunt by command of my master Ktholha, the arch- strigoi who took me when I was boy and made me into the kind of incubus-vampire that he called zmeu, but this cannot be true anymore because Ktholha is a pile of charred bones and white ash in a black metal box under the heavy butcher block in my kitchen. He is dead because after I completed my adolescence—a painful age of soaking hot fever and unrelieved thirst for one of my kind—my powers had become so great that he blanched at the sight of me and tried to get rid of me, tried to flee from me. I tracked him through the warrens of the old city center and through the layers of the necropolis beneath it wanting nothing else but to regain and retain the love of my once-doting master and creator. But he would have me no more, and in a rage of rejection I projected my hatred into his body and he burned to cinders in just a few moments. What scores of would-be vampire-killers had failed to do—and had died trying to do—I had achieved with almost no effort. I wasn't even hungry afterward. I did not even break a sweat. After a thousand years of seducing and raping human boys into ever more stronger and more exotic monsters, Ktholha had made a beast far more powerful than he had ever been in all his ravening centuries. Fuck you, old man, I sometimes say to his box of ashes when I cook my meals. But still I sometimes feel that it is he that I serve.

I decided last summer to redeem at least a little bit the evil of my kind's feeding lust by doing a grand favor for the humans of the city and the provinces beyond. I would destroy the vile imperator and his courtiers and end their predatory kleptocracy. Imperator Jai, who looks like a teenage androgyne, is actually a hundred-year-old strigoi of the blood-bathing kind created by Ktholha one night back then when my master took the boy prince to his bed for simple human sex but ended up draining him of his blood and then feeding it back into his body. Later this transformed prince and his friends killed Jai's father the old imperator, and took over the throne. Since that time, many hundreds of youths—sold to the castle by their poor parents—have died hanging head-down over Jai's fuligin-stone bathtub, their hot blood draining over his naked body and soaking into his thirsty skin.

I have created very few of my own progeny—always under the cloud of worry that my dead master would not approve of my own generative power and its results. On those nights when I need blood, I take as little as possible and often let my victims live. In my fully mortal form, I can usually sate my body's needs through normal human food and normal human sex. I am an excellent cook and can take care of myself for the former, and I rely on the city's rentboys for the latter. But occasionally, when my lust is too great, I kill and transform one of them. Occasionally I meet up by happenstance with one of my many brothers—other sons of Ktholha—and we fuck and feed each other in both our mortal and spectral forms. But my brothers are not reliable allies. I need sons who will feel the same loyalty to me that I do—did—to my own master. I head into the deep forest beneath the base of the castle to find some.

It is highest summer and the season of the ritual known as "enphasma," so called by the followers of the Rite of Adonis-Kah. The boys of this cult, once passed through adolescence and at the edge of manhood, go to live for a period of weeks in the forest where they commune with the natural world there and talk to their god. Little do they know that Adonis-Kah is a fraud, a maimed monster who has been imprisoned in the castle for centuries. Even the depraved Jai ignores this shell of a god. When these boys complete their time in the forest, they return to the city and present their penises to their priest for ritual circumcision and are thereafter considered men of Adonis-Kah.