I'm going to try to fix the next scene this week and post it. No guarantees. My life is so chaotic right now it's hard to find time to breath. If I don't fix it this week than I will just go ahead and post the rest of the story next weekend.
"The first draft of anything is shit."
― Ernest Hemingway
Damien lay perfectly still on the soft down comforter of his bed, a flawlessly preserved body in an elaborate mausoleum. The black lacquer of the enormous four posters stood out starkly against the prevailing snowy white. The contrast nearly smacked you in the face the moment you topped the stairs and Damien liked it that way. There were a few other black accents in frames on the wall and the end tables, but it did little to mute the effect.
Anyone walking in on him right now would be sure he was dead or a movie prop. He did not breath, he had no heartbeat, and he had no wish to pretend to be anything more than what he was at the moment.
He considered the last instants with Annabel. He could still smell the sweet perfume of her arousal, could still feel the heat from her core against his hungry cock. Jesus! She was his, and then everything went to hell. The cold that crept over him reminded him of that bastard in another time that felt the need to end his existence for no particular reason. The world turned to the consistency of goo and something coursed through him, an invasive invisible force stealing the ability to move, icing his insides as it moved through him. It wasn't the dark skinned priest from another culture long dead, but her...his siren. Apparently the ability to control other emotions, ergo the ability to control him, was gained naturally...at least in her case.
"Fuck!" He said the word out loud, enjoying the feel of it on his tongue. He always loved the curse words of any culture he latched onto. Technically he'd panicked which was different for him; though 'panic' wasn't exactly the right word. There was no racing heart or fast pace breath or cloudy thought process in which he did something thoughtlessly stupid. It was more of an overwhelming sense of self-preservation leading him to believe that giving into her at that moment was the best option.
It was time to give this chase up which killed him just a little bit. Curiosity, desire and the things denied were the very basis of sustenance for him. She could actually kill him though, which put a damper on the appetite.
Actually that last bit was only technically true. She was still missing one thing.
His eyes opened and flicked to the closet door. It was almost another room unto itself like the bathroom it sat next to. He rarely went in it though. It wasn't for clothes. A trick of the mind and he had any clothes he wanted. Shoes were moot as well. If he needed something more he had another world entirely to store shit in. But there were...things. As far as he knew he was the only one of his kind that had a certain propensity towards being a packrat. When you don't really belong in the world you roam around in it's not a very good idea to make a permanent residence there.
He did though. The leftovers of every life he'd lived, every lair he'd kept here, were set neatly in that closet. There were scrolls and books, odds and ends, and hundreds of small black vials labeled in a language no one in this world knew anymore. And, almost every item there was a relic from a civilization that no longer existed; destroyed in such a way that one would think it was done on purpose if you delved into the similarities between them. Nothing was left behind save what he had taken.
It was not locked, as far as anyone knew, but he wasn't stupid enough to lock it with conventional means. The door wouldn't open for anyone that didn't ask nicely courtesy of the wood he'd brought with him from Egypt. A tree whose name he'd known well before it and its kin were paved over by advancing civilizations. It was a beautiful violet hued timber that now had a smooth as silk feel from the millennia he'd carried it with him. It protected his little cache wherever he went.
There was one more thing in there; a blade of the same strange black glass as all those little vials he had. He'd taken it from someone with the same strange dark eyes as the girl he'd been obsessed with the last 4 days sometime after those eyes had closed forever. Someone who could do the same little trick she pulled back there that gave her more of an edge on him than anything else had in a really long time. If she got a hold of a blade like that she would know how to finish him too.
She was more powerful than the priest he'd once tangled with. That coldness that crept through him the first time was more a shock to the system. This time it crippled him. If she hadn't been overcome with something he would never have gotten a word out. He might still be sitting there.
And now that was over.
He sat up. The next moment he stood before the closet door, moving through his own world which sat in an interesting juxtaposition to this one. If people could see what he saw it would like cosmic rats had chewed little holes in reality here and there. His kind referred to them as
planebreaks
.
He ran a finger over the carving on the violet plain; Egyptian hieroglyphics and a carving of his likeness. This was the only remnant of his first life, and the tree the wood once belonged to was the first name he'd ever learned from the scrolls that had rested in the great library of Alexandria eons ago. The words on the door were the Egyptian translation of that scroll.
Whispering the old name, the door opened for him. He'd had it modified so there were dozens of drawers in cedar, another name he knew, lining each of the four walls and a table in the center. The table, draped in deep blue silk embroidered with the same runic symbols that tattooed his very essence, held the largest of the objects he'd collected during his extensive lifespan. In the center sat the blade.
He neared the black glass with caution. Its appearance belied its strength. This glass would not shatter and it was nameless. EVERYTHING that existed had a name in a tongue older than the universe; the name that brought it into this world. The language had no sound since sound came with the universe, but it was there and he could speak it however someone on the receiving end of that knowledge might want to take that. The unique language of his own kind gave him an advantage, but it wasn't beyond the ability of humans. In a more primitive time the knowledge was theirs as well or Damien would not know it now. This material, however, was not created. It existed before creation and continued to exist now. If one looked at it long enough they would notice a slight distortion around it, as if it bent reality just a little. Other than that there was nothing particularly interesting about it. Most wouldn't even look long enough to notice the bizarre warped space that hovered less than a centimeter from its surface. Sharpened as it was now, it only meant a nasty cut to most living creatures.
But the creatures he referred to as hunters, because once they did hunt his kind, were not most living creatures. They're ability to control the emotions of others gave them the ability to control those like him, and that blade had a knack for destroying things under the users control. So much so that an unfortunate recipient of a death blow from a hunter holding a blade like that not only died, but ceased to exist entirely.
Damien often wondered who the hell his predecessors had pissed off badly enough to warrant that much vengeance. Or maybe it was just a really tenacious human. They could be a bitch sometimes.
In his hands the power might be nearly unlimited. The names he knew gave him the power to control the things he named, but human names were harder to come by. He could go wipe out the existence of a grove of trees or something which would be weird. Still, who knew what that grove of trees might have done? Who knew what he would change?
He found he was able to manipulate the material using fire from his world, and that's how he came by his little trade. What destroyed also captured and protected things that, by the standards of this world, were only ideas. Shit still made him uneasy though.
He turned around, closed the door, and went back to the bed to sit, mentally shooing away the odd emptiness that crept up on him now. What was he? Curiosity, passion, danger, desire...but not this. He knew the edges of it. He'd collected loneliness before. It shouldn't be a problem, but there it was. Part of him wondered if this was the beginning of the end. Maybe he was breaking down and would one day soon fade into nothing...back to where he started.
It was a thought and that was that. He shrugged and moved through the house thinking of hot showers and new distractions and ways to relieve an itch he could not scratch.
***
On the screen behind Annabel Chris Pine's character took a hell of a beating from a group of assholes dressed in crimson uniforms, but her mind was elsewhere. She recalled a passionate one night stand that ended in nothing when her would be lover lost interest a few moments after she did.
