Sins of the flesh

The dawn had not yet broken, though its herald appeared along the worlds rim, warming the night with hues of honey orange, bleaching the sky of the inky black restraint of night. The world was emerging from its nightly slumber, preparing for another day as it had since immemorial. But for one of the children of Adam and Eve it was the final dawn that he would ever see. For one of their number would die this day, to be reborn into a world of shadow and darkness, a world contrary to all he thought he knew. The man was youthful, the age where the impetuousness of the teenage years are mellowed, bringing a playful quality to his eyes as he surveyed the landscape around him. He loved this time of the morning, it was just before any rational person would consider being awake. The lazy rousing of the world to the realization that, despite the faeries reigning the hours of the devil, it was now time for them to face yet another day. But not just yet, for the moment at least, silence was the all powerful prevailing force upon his senses.

 

            Traffic lights flashed from red to amber and green with no regard to their empty roads, the gentle click of their logics humming the only indication that something other them him was here, awaiting the crowds to come. Yet despite the nervous excitement he felt at the sight before him, despite the urge to go and lay in the middle of the junction that he had just crossed simply while he could; there was another presence in his yawning world, a presence that felt anything but the idle fancies of the man he pervaded. His form clotted in creeping blood, dark sharp cuts leered out from beneath his tattered clothes. He had been in a fight quite literally for his life, this was no drunken brawl turned nasty as their anger, exaggerated by alcohol, got the better of them. His ancient heart, used to beating only a few times a day, now hammered away in its hardened cadaver, life burned in his veins so sweet and pure, he could almost imagine himself to be human again. In the elation of the assault, all other things had melted away, all his fears and paranoia surrendering to leave him a beast of instinct, reacting to the blows of the others, as they struck with no other intention then the kill. That was the way it had to be for his kind, for to maim, even dangerously, would still leave his mighty gifts of the blood at his disposal, and that was a risk that they could ill afford. But risk was the theme of the night, it was what drove him even now on dawn’s ragged edge, it was the gravest risk for all of them. To try and kill an elder at all, but in the dying moments of the night, they risked sharing a final death with whom they sought to stop. He couldn't allow that to happen, he had to endure this day and confirm that which he suspected and what he saw in his slumber.

He moved across the black slate roof, his movement swift and unnatural. He travelled on all fours keeping low and close to moistened tiles, along its still shaded edge to the far end of building. Below him he could see the snaking valleys, hills be spotted with waking farms. It was too early to try find somewhere in which to hide, despite all other considerations, despite his great age and matured lineage they could still kill him in the Earth below, the sun risked their lives as well; besides he felt the old hunger serpentine and coiled, quicken in him from the middle of his thoughts. The scent of the man as he walked without care brought in him the craving that once was without ending. That keenest of instincts so long fed and pacified, was to him arisen anew unquenched and dominant.

He watched the man as he past with the fascination, taking all the subtle twists of his form and those tiny details of body language, which are normally lost on most. They were not lost on him, his eyes now nothing more but fierce points of black against the rising dark, studied their prey with all the guile and institutive knowledge of any of nature’s hunters. A mythic chimera possessive of an inhuman, intimation form; the creature moved to the roofs lowest edge, where the shadows were thickest, sniffing the air a final time and without fear or hesitation, Jonah dropped from the roof top and fell to the earth below, skulking under the shadow of the long standing Oaks, softly he tread into the consecrated ground below. He did not believe in the God of St Peter and feared not the blessing upon his holy shrines, but in and amongst the knotted ivy, that choked the life from the surrounding trees, he could well imagine their fabled rising on the day of judgement.