Total pages in book: 87
Estimated words: 82480 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 412(@200wpm)___ 330(@250wpm)___ 275(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82480 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 412(@200wpm)___ 330(@250wpm)___ 275(@300wpm)
Those are the real details of me.
As a keeper of diaries, I wrote down the events of my life in a compulsive fashion, even though I rarely reread them and was well aware the Chosen in the Temple of the Sequestered Scribes were doing a far better job at the recording. Looking back on it, I wonder whether I’d sensed my destiny all along and that was why I took to ink and page. In marking my present, it’s possible I was trying to take some control over the future that I could feel coming for me, the brief sunshine that was followed by so many years of dark suffering looming just under the surface of my conscious mind.
But if that was the case, how stupid. Penmanship, no matter how fine, has never been as persuasive as prayer. And prayer is no guarantee of happiness or salvation, either.
Given my grieving, you might ask if I would have chosen a different path, if I’d have denied or avoided my destiny if I could have. It would be more courageous, more admirable, to clothe myself in the armor of “absolutely not.” But that’s just an easy virtue signal—as well as a claim no one can refute because nobody else is in my head, in my heart.
The honest truth is more nuanced, more complex. In the moment my path collided with my female’s, before everything started, yes, I probably would have taken another route: If the second before we met, I would have known what I had to face, I’d have balked.
There. I admit it.
That’s just the survival instinct at work, though. Nothing more than a reflex to avoid pain that fires in a nanosecond and is untempered by higher purpose and reasoning.
It is a truth, but not the truth.
One night after I first met my female, I knew over Campbell’s tomato soup and Wonder Bread toast that I would never leave her. And even after she told me to go… and then after she died in my arms… I never left her. I’ve taken my beloved everywhere with me, hoping that through my eyes she could see the beautiful thing we made together and know our daughter is safe.
I’m a male who keeps his promises.
In my female’s last moments, when she knew she wasn’t going to survive, she asked me to watch over our daughter. She made me swear that I would guard our young. I would have done that anyway, but as it was the one and only way I was able to honor my mate, that vow became my connection to her and my reason for living.
I stopped writing anything down about my life after that night. But there were other recordings, photographs now, no longer my words, that documented my time. I amassed a collection of hundreds of pictures of our young, and I framed them so that those moments I could not be by our daughter’s side in person were preserved forever for my heart. From a distance, from the oculus of a camera lens held by another, I witnessed her maturation. Raised as an orphan, she was never alone, my loyal butler doing the daylight shift and I, myself, on the nighttime watch. Wherever she was, in the orphanage or out on her own in the world, we were never far from her.
She could not know the truth of who her father was, however. Half-breeds are rare, and although being a human is not safe, existing as a vampire is downright dangerous. Further, I always had the hope that her mahmen’s genes would prevail and she would never go through the transition.
That was another prayer not answered.
As our daughter’s time for the change approached, after years of mere worrying, I became terrified. To see any vampire through their first feeding is perilous. To get a female with mixed blood through it? There was only one male she could take from and have her best chance at surviving.
Only one purebred vampire left on the planet.
Except it was like turning her over to an undertaker. Who kept his business going with black daggers and throwing stars.
It was at this critical juncture in her life that death came for me in the form of a car bomb, leaving our daughter not just undefended, but on the precipice of a life-altering, mortally dangerous change she didn’t even know was on her horizon.
So of course, I had to find a way to come back.
When my time to enter the Fade came, I struck a bargain with the Scribe Virgin, the mahmen of the species, and I returned to the earth in a different form for a different life… with the same purpose.
And so it has been, for these most recent years, me peering through new eyes at the beautiful proof that I had known love.