I had never disagreed with any of the residents of the manor, nor the guests we had ever had visit or pass through. In all the centuries that I have lived in this manor, Tenkil a Ristiri Cireli, House of Black Silence, I have dealt in silence, and I have dealt in death. I have catered peace, and mended situations of tension, but in the end, it is always the same. Death follows my being, my very existence cursed. My brethren and I are a feigned existence of life and cherished moments. Lies, delusions, nothing is real but the crimson trail that streaks in our path. Love, hope, dreams, these are all but a façade. Death is my only mistress, and death is all that I deal. I am the tool She uses in her onslaught of Their kind. Human life is precious, infinitely fragile, because we make it so. When They cease to make their lives significant, then it once more returns to insignificance. Significance only comes about because They refuse to believe They are insignificant. Only then are They more, and only then are we called in, when life is most precious. We are the messengers of Mistress Death, and we send the telegram of last coming. Human life is pathetic in its every glory, and that is why we are held revered and most feared, because life for us has never begun. Lady Death is our cradle, and She holds us dear, and She takes Their fates from Their hands and puts them into ours. We are gods to Them, because we have the power to both create and destroy life.
My name, it is feared most of all, because I am the oldest of my Mistress Death’s spirits. I take the most fates into my hands, and I steal away more hopes and dreams than I care to recollect. My name is branded into the memories and histories of men for all time. I am Satoma Lithel Liander Kosuke.
It was precisely the year seventy-two B.C.E. when I came to this estate with my master, one thousand and seven hundred and ninety-eight years after my first lover had died. I was exactly a millennium olde. My master had first taken me under his wing as his fledgling in the year ten seventy-two B.C.E. in the confederation of the Etruscan capital of Velzna, before the cultural development had begun to move at a faster rate. I was of an earlier Celtic division of people known as the Keltoi to the Greeks, meaning I was just another invader. My pagan people were seen as the enemy for our mass migration efforts to settle in new lands. Eventually, most of my people made territory in the British Isles. I was to go back to my birth place after I had seen Etruria. It was part of my tutorage. As I have said, I had met my master, Amarian le Delouvé Lithel, as he was known in more modern times, in the capital of Velzna, and I had been enraptured with him.
Back then, as I recollect such periods of civilization without the restrictions of the Christian god, love was love, and men could take men as women could take women. And, therefore, he was also enraptured by me, and we were to become lovers later. I was eighteen when we had first crossed paths, twenty-two when we confessed our desires for each other. It was not until my twenty-third year did I realize exactly who, and what, he was. Where before he was charming and mysterious, he was later seductive and completely mine, and I was his. I lost my life to him, ensnared in his trap as he was caught in by my web. I lost my hopes and dreams to him, and was reawakened to a world of darker ambitions and instincts. I developed a craving and lust for a sinful sustenance. I began to live from the blood of animated flesh, animated with warmth and a soul, unlike my own. I had become a vampyre.
I had been born both times in what was known as the Dark Age. Such a title amuses me, for what it is worth. It is the period in which the fewest vampyres were bred, yet it was also the deadliest for both races. We, as the night stalkers, were nearly annihilated. Roughly a century later, I lost Amarian to this era; lost and confused, even as I was a new fledgling (though by then I was strong and olde enough to move along on my own however difficult it might have been), I went back to my homeland finally, long after my kin had thought me dead. I was the last of my blood, and I am all that remains today, tainted as I am with this curse of a feigned existence in the service of Lady Death.
I wandered the lands of Angleland, through Sussex and Wessex, Kent and Essex, all along the coasts and the other sectors of that time. It was not until three hundred B.C.E. did I again meet Amarian, and having nowhere to go, I allowed him to lead me away from my aimless paths, despite my previous sense of betrayal. I loved him after all, this ageless immortal sculpture of immaculate beauty and perfection, poisoned in every miniscule way possible, yet luscious and irrepressible. He took me to shelter, giving me a place to stay, to call my own, to coddle and care for me in a way I had never been sustained before. It was as though our separated state had provoked in him the revelation of what life truly meant, that we were put here merely to indulge ourselves in every emotion capable of our beings. Lady Death, he would whisper to me in the dark hours of the morning after our love making, would want us to live a fruitful life, even if it meant taking those of others less deserving, which I had been known to find repulsive.
In eight hundred and nine A.C.E., I again lost Amarian, who mysteriously disappeared and I was lead to believe he was killed by a hunter, which had begun their first ranks of training in that century. The last words Amarian spoke to me were these,
“I love you, Satoma, but you will love another, and I shall pass into memory.”
I had not at first understood what he meant, yet somewhere in my heart I both knew it to be some unspoken truth and yet I wanted to deny it completely and utterly. Twenty-one years later I met the boy in birth that he had prophesized I would love, and thirty-nine years to the day of my master’s words, eighteen years of the boy’s life had passed and I again met him in person, and he became mine, utterly and completely as the truth I had wanted to shove away. We were drawn to each other as moths to a flame of attraction, and I undoubtedly ensnared him like the helpless butterfly I saw him as, weak and dependent, yet holding within great potential and beauty. His name was Zykeshta, and he became my fledgling like I had become Amarian’s, and I passed to him the last of my blood and the last of my master’s and his master’s before him, for we were all the last of our people, and in Zykeshta, I had made a new breed of vampyre, and I loved him dearly, more so than even my tutor and caretaker over the millennia. Yet he too left me, taken by an illness unknown to any in this world but those who have it. There are three bloodlines of vampire kind ever known to have existed with it, and I know nothing of the other two. I was the carrier of the third, and I infected the blood of my beloved. Since then, I have lived alone in this estate, picking up a few stragglers in time on the few trips I take to acquaintance myself with the changing world. We live a solemn and solitary life, quiet and serene in the mountains of today’s Britain, a small band of lost vampires who do not belong in the world outside. Until now, when the blood moon rises, and we are forced, by tradition and ritual, to hold a truce between our kind and the human race, and I must suppress my dislike for company to uphold the expectations of me, as master and host of the Blood Moon Masquerade, Trist Ahn Nefaritus.
Kosuke Satoma
(Insertion of next scene: Gabriel's and Elric's arrival)
(An exchange between Marius and Satoma later in the storyline: BOOK II)
“If you'll please excuse me, Master Xavier, as much as I would love to indulge in your company further, and believe me when I say I do, I have prior engagements to attend to, as well as a promise I intend to keep.”
The warm dark halls of the comfortable estate, inviting now as the guests file in for the upcoming masquerade, harbors a prowling hunter, one whose mind is filled with troubling memories and conflicting turmoil, a chain of thoughts that are not nearly faded enough tormenting the alien dreams that visit it. I am filled with a coldness that is all too familiar to me, one that neither leaves nor diminishes, but rather it grows always stronger until I came into the presence of a select few. And when I am not in their company, these days pass slowly, and I begin to remember things that make me bitter, and the coldness creeping within grow stronger, so that I am filled with ice when I came upon those I would have near me. And yet, at times, it is those few who will cause the coldness to begin, to permeate throughout me, simply because I have known them, and I have recollections of them. Memory to me is a cursed thing, and everything belonging to it is therefore damned as well, like myself.
A vampire is a hunter, but one that is different from a human. Humans are stalkers, following one step behind, trying to pinpoint the exact location that they would strike at, in hopes that their predictions pertaining to the hunted on their lists are correct. A vampire, however, is not a stalker, despite the metaphors human kind has labeled them with. No, a vampire is an animal, and therefore relies not on reflexes, but instincts, prowls but does not stalk, knows rather than predicts. A vampire is a killer, not a locating device raised and used to bring theoretical justice onto an unnatural nature. A vampire is an animal. Animals receive no such justice.
Curiosity begins to eat at me as to where the man I am searching for can be found. I had promised Marius, and I will not break that promise. Not for Marius, of all people. God knows how I have treated Marius of late. I bite back anger at myself even now as I rake a hand through my shoulder length red hair. No, not Marius. The young vampire might not understand the position this creature was in, the need to dominate and act as alpha, the need to have a pack and care for that pack. Vampires are solitary creatures by nature, living alone in their existences, once and forever, for eternity. And that is the essence of a vampire pack if ever one were formed. Yet they are fiercely loyal, as I had come to remember them.
Marius, whom I had vowed to take out to the little village on the east side of the mountain slope, is in my mind now, as vividly in the present as he was in the past, and I recollect how I had met the young vampire I am sworn to love, and how I promise to take my own life for the hate I breed in myself. Love to me is not as simple as loving a single person for all eternity and giving myself entirely. It is my love that I curse with, and my affection that I damn for. I hate myself, for all that I have done to the other vampire whom I think of now. I am not like Marius or the others, and in this, I am dooming them all.
A pack of red wolves has been prowling the estate now for several nights, but the guests have not been warned, neither do the residents know save myself. In fact, it was only when I had emerged from my slumber the first night the moon was tinted with blood that they arrived. They prowled the courtyards and gardens and various grounds under my name even as I prowl the corridors. They hunted as I hunt, but they kill as I could not.
I envy these wolves in some respect. The pack is adequately numbered, ranging from a number between five to seven, perhaps eight, and each seem to remind me of someone I live with now, and that this does strike my curiosity and superstition, I have come to shrug it off as a conclusion that I have simply made this connection up in my own mind based on my own sickened morality. But I envy the closeness these wolves share in contrast to their vampire counterparts.
There resides in this pack, I observed through recollection of my first sightings of them, an alpha wolf, as all packs usually have, a strong male lean of muscle, not quite as large as one might expect of a leader, but there is a certain vicious gleam in its great eyes, one that proclaims his rightful place to rule over his pack mates, a kind of wisdom that comes naturally from reason and instinctual intellect. He is second only in size, however. In all other respects he is dominating, yet reclusive behavior and what seems to me to be humility is also in his nature, as the red wolf is prone to sit alone, and usually at a lower elevation, I noted one night out the small window that vents my attic quarters.
The next wolf is quite unique in its physical appearance, and like wise in its personality. It is the smallest of the pack, a runt in its earlier pup-hood, and it is adorned with a gleaming silver pelt, no doubt in preparation for the winter that is to arrive within the week. And though this she-wolf is no doubt the youngest, already it possesses qualities of a beta wolf, possibly even an alpha if it lived long enough. This one I named after Satoshi, my dear young human apprentice, who will be delighted to hear he has his own wolf, I am sure of it.
A third and fourth wolf has also come to my attention, and it is these wolves I think most about now as I pad into a quiet library on the second floor. I want to find Marius, the young, naïve vampire brought to mind by one of the wolves, but I sense he will have to wait, and despite my need to see my younger companion, wait I will. It is only fair, after all, after I have made Marius and Gabriel wait on me for so long, so that they had to find other means to entertain themselves. Marius, whom I had vowed to take out to the little village on the east side of the mountain slope.
Silently, I slip serenely into a winged arm chair and close my eyes in the dark. Sluggish thoughts come to me here as I wait for Marius to finish with whomever he is with, for I also receive the feeling he is with someone, an aura I know but can not place. It discomforts me in some way I do not know, neither why nor how. Thus I allow images of two wolves to swim through my mind, a young male wolf reminiscent of Marius, who is usually naïve, needs guidance, and often is snapped at by the alpha, but who also possesses a determination that allows him the dominance to kill as he needed to. This wolf is also very protective of his pack, and I envy him more than any of the others of the troupe. To have such reckless abandon was never afforded by myself. The other is a red beta wolf with smooth patches of black at the tips of its ears and its paws, whom often takes the place and advantages of the alpha whenever possible. This wolf also takes its irritation out on the young wolf, but without reasons or cause, and no sooner had it let a threatening growl emanate from its throat with flattened ears and chased briefly after the young wolf did it playfully and affectionately curl up to the smaller one, licking its ear with a most friendly tenderness.
I envy this pack of beasts, their closeness, their innocence of the laws of man's morality. I hate that they are unbound by thought or emotion or the convictions of human nature. They are only animals, with an instinct to kill and survive, as I am, yet they are only shadows on the minds of men who care only for political justice. Yes, indeed, they are coming for me. I envy the pack that lives so peacefully when I can not bring myself to express my own nature to those I take notice of. They are a true pack, to live and die for one another, and love without consequence of bitter resentment or judgment.
It is true, that I have lived a great deal of time, and though it might have been found strange among my peers that I did not have a pack of my own for as old as I am or belong to that of a master, I do not think it as so. I merely think that I have not found anyone I am willing to protect since my previous lover had died. But it is still in my nature to be the one who cares for all and acts as alpha, and I do not know if Marius will ever understand that. But I can not change that. I do not think I can change my ways, even for Marius, to conform to the customs of modern society and their monogamous ways, to take only one partner, because I know I will never be able to love just one person for all eternity. I will never be able to protect just one pack mate. I will feel incomplete without several in my charge, and thus I have cast aside the idea of taking any mates, for Marius.
Even I can not forsake my nature for love. I wonder if that I were able to, that I would become more conformed to the modern world, I will be less. Would Marius be able to love a vampire that was less of me, yet was still me? I can not tell, and I do not want to think so. No, the idea itself sends cold into my bones.
I have loved two people in this life, my sire Amarian, and my first and only fledgling, Zykeshta. I do not know the origins of Amarian, for I had never thought to ask. Zykeshta had been an English boy of eighteen, like myself, though I am also Japanese in blood. And I had not been so unfortunate as to lose my life at eighteen. No, I had been twenty-three years of age, and it has served me well. Zykeshta had been small and weak, and my love for the boy would not allow him to live or die as such, and thus I had made of Zykeshta a damned man before he was a real man, to live with immortal strength, though in the end, it had been what killed him. My selfishness had killed him.
Since then, I have lived a solitary life, with only one other to keep me sane, to bring me through my own demise, and that man had done his purposes. Until Marius came along. For a period of time, I was losing his mind, Even now, a shadow crosses my face as I think of it. That which I had so lovingly taken care of and meticulously carried out had no longer pleased me like it had, rather in a cynical way I had taken to enjoying it in a polluted and filthy way, and I was losing my mind in accordance to this. My companion at the time had helped to push me to the edge just enough to reel me sharply back in, to make me see what was happening, to keep me sane for just a little while longer. I had, for once in my life, needed someone, in a way I thought I never should have needed. Vampires, naturally, live single existences, and rarely come together in permanent packs, nor do they depend on each other but for the first few centuries of life when a fledgling is still dieing and they require assistance with the process of dealing with new sensations and thoughts. Eternity could cause a newly turned vampire to go mad and simply forget themselves, thus, many died and did not make for good breeding.
But then Marius came along, and I no longer needed to rely on my companion to keep me sane. Marius, in a small yet significant way, had filled the emptiness left in me by Zykeshta's death just enough to make me come to my senses and become who I had once been before. I had found someone to care for again, to nurture after I had been left alone by so many of those I had associated with. And even now, several of them are here in the manor with me now, as I doze in the dark and I cringe within at the idea of having to face them every night after I prepare dinner and lay it out before them. I had learned to once again support another as I had Zykeshta. I had also learned the art of distance once more, for which I grew uneasy with. My presence among others was not in my pleasure, but my complete isolation was not an intention when Marius and the other select few suffered for it. My nature causes rifts to form, and restlessness and irritation threatens the moods of my companions. Already, several of the vampires who had come to live with me so long ago have left with nothing but an air of themselves remaining within their rooms. Slowly, as the guests filled the rooms and halls for a ritualistic party, the residents and companions of myself are leaving to escape my stony resoluteness. Perhaps I had let them in too much, and pushing them back out again, they have learned to ignore my struggles to put aside my walls of defense. Marius, however devoted to me he is, does not understand this, and it pains me, for Marius struggles with it as well.
In my ancient culture, when I had traveled the Essex and Wessex and Sussex territories of Angleland, and the remaining others, and had visited Verna in what was now Italy, and had lived among the natives in modern day Japan, it had not been a crime to have love for more than one, and it had been, in fact, quite common, for men were not quite so men as they were animals still, and so, nature suggested that polygamous relations be handled, if with caution, as everyday affairs, and thus, I had learned that it was not wrong to love more than one, though I myself had never lain with another before my sire came. Though living in single worlds, occasionally as it were, vampires would form packs, usually with sires taking fledglings and joining to create a small tribe of blood related kin, so that a sire ruled over his pack like an alpha wolf, and his pack members consisted of his own blood fledgling and their fledgling after them. In a way, I have done the same thing, though more complicated. I do not share blood ties with any of the vampires I consider to be dear to me, and though other vampires live with myself, only Marius is among my chosen. I dominate the house as an alpha would, and Marius iss under my leadership and guidance. The only other who iss led under my guiding hand and protection is neither blood nor vampire at all, but rather a stray human I have taken in as an apprentice, strange as it is for me as a vampire to mingle and dabble in the affairs of humans.
It had been one of the characteristics of Zykeshta I had found so interesting and beloved, that the boy was neither completely human nor completely vampire. He shared the physical state of myself, but a love of human nature rather than this cold hearted existence I had offered him. Thus, I had suddenly found it in myself to rear Satoshi, the seventeen year old youth who lives in the east wing among the night stalkers, and not among his own kind, to which he is unused to but fairly curious about. Yes, love did strange things, didn't it?
I slump in my chair, swimming in memories of how Marius had come to love me, how the young man had come into my charge, to give me his love, and ultimately become my demise. Oh damned and cursed thing such as love, to hell with it, I think.
Even now I can remember the events leading up to it, and though I press it from my mind, I shiver from the pleasure I had felt in the blood shed of those days that now churn my stomach; I can not dissipate the recollection. The sun was just past noon at about one in the afternoon, the moon striding along side it, and the air was dry and void of life. The village is a picturesque of abandonment in my mind.
A shutter creaked in the distance, the wind flapping its chipped painted surface against the side paneling of a house just as badly in need of repair. The moon above glowered down at him as if to place blame for the atrocities and cruelty his kind could commit. Yes, he thought, my kind can be so cruel.
A warped and twisted smile slithered across his lips, the sensual corners lifting into a devilish sneer as he looked out into the streets of the abandoned village, blood in the air and death casting a shadow over everything in sight. A vampire had come through here, one fully intent on annihilating the village. Satoma raked a hand through his hair. A younger vampire, most likely, one that could only stand the morning hours and was away before the afternoon rays took their toll. One lone figure stood in the crevice of a littered street as the sun sunk lower towards the horizon, debris and filth strewn everywhere in the mad rush of citizens to escape their inevitable doom, sent by an infallible messenger of Mistress Death.
The man's shadow cast out behind him as the cynical sneer spread further across his expression of lewd pleasure in the sight before him, thin lips allowing obscenely protruding fangs to appear from behind them. His eyes darted about the force-made burial site, its inhabitants laid out far from being buried. A genius, he thought, the vampire that had done this, pure and luscious pain. No soul stirred save the damned man's, no beating heart was to be heard but his own lethargic and arrhythmic pulse, slowed by the decay of his previous life and the extinction of human emotion.
He reveled in the slaughter that was so blatantly apparent in the village avenues, nothing but dust moving about and the stale breeze that shifted the tattered and torn flaps of a canvas awning that seemed to have been fallen through, and indeed someone had, he mused to himself. To his immediate right, standing in the central market square of the town, there was what could have been a vegetable or fruit stand, a dull colored canvas awning supported by four wooden and sturdy posts overhanging cracked baskets and shattered clay pots. Primitive tools that were still useful. The strip of material overhead had no center, rather it lay bottomed out, and two of the wooden posts had broken with the brute force he could imagine the man before him was thrust on. One had simply disintegrated, but the other had snapped in half, one splintered end protruding grotesquely from the bowels of this middle aged, partially naked male. A look of horror and pain was fixated in his expression, his eyes glassy and his mouth thrown open in a permanently silent scream, yet there was something else, and he shivered within to recognize it. Something that resembled profane pleasure and approbation.
“Doth it please thee, mine love?”
Satoma closed his eyes as a smooth hand reached out to graze his shoulder. But the red headed vampire flinched away just before the sensation could reach him, unwilling to accept the gesture of affection, and he let his brilliant silver blue eyes flare open once more to allow his gaze to swing around to stare intently at the darker vampire that accompanied him, whose skin was like moonlight, and his hair was like coagulated blood, a congealed dark red, almost black.
Almost immediately he regretted doing so, for peering back at him were black orbs of warm depth that glanced down into his thoughts, as though reading his every collaboration with amusement and deep understanding, a tenderness in his gaze that Satoma did not want to be present there for the likes of himself. No, better to have mirror like eyes that revealed everything yet nothing, and hid away no dark secret such as this man's ardent desires for him. It was an arduous allegation to accept, knowing that his companion already knew the scene of death enticed his nature, and he did not want to give in to the idea that this man already knew what was happening, yet he could not lie. The scent of blood arose in him a fire, a fervent wanting of pain like that which had been inflicted on these villagers by the strange and unknown vampire that had passed through.
Satoma turned back to the village square without answering his companion, observing with curiosity the orderly arrangement of bodies and the forms of torture that had been prepared and used. None were left alive, save perhaps the select few deemed worthy enough as fledglings, taken as hostages to become of the damned blood in short time. Leave no mercy behind for men, yet do not leave witnessing women and children. And thus, Satoma noted in his observation of the streets that women and children were all lined on the sides nearer the buildings, their heads towards the painted surfaces or worn and cracked stone walls, their faces turned to the east. He thought this odd initially, and could not reason with himself why such an arrangement would have been made, but it was with the men he was more interested.
The man beside he and his companion was merely an example. No male older than the age of eight, he guessed, was spared the indignity of being stripped below the waist, and all wore the same horrified and pained expression, with a gleam of passion in their cold dead depths. Again he shivered at the thought of what they had gone through, and in some remote part of his mind, he wanted the same fate, to be stripped of all that he was, beaten, raped, and left to die. There was sign of struggle near where the pair stood, yet further down there were collections of weapons, as though the vampire had done his work slowly enough to give them time to attempt hunting him, and then let them flee from him as he hunted them in return. The end of the street opposite them proved to be a surrendering grounds, weapons abandoned as realization dawned on the men that the creature slaughtering their women and children could not be stopped. Most had begun to run judging by the patterns weapons were dropped and thrown about. Some had merely given up their struggle for life, as proven by the fact that their lower extremities were more mutilated than recognizable, shredded in the zealous desecration that strange vampire had committed.
This time, Satoma's dark haired companion attempted to touch his cheek, and this time, he did not resist, but looked into his partner's eyes at the brushing fingertips across his high sculpted cheek bones, and he realized that what he had been saying to himself was a lie, that what he wanted was untrue. He did not want the pain and suffering, he needed. And he took the fingertips that graced his pale skin into his own hands, holding them before him, kissing each one tenderly, starting with the thumb, and working from the little finger, so that all that remained was the index, and this he took into his mouth and let slip over his tongue, his eyes a fiery inferno as they gazed into the dark pools of the death messenger before him.
He pricked the tip of his companion's finger, watching the stoic and unmoving expression of interest remain unwavered, and he felt the hot angry rush of blood flow over his tongue, slow and steady as he gently kneaded the thin sturdy digit between his lips. A slow eternity of seconds later, he watched as his companion replaced his hand with his own lips, leaning in to scoop the base of Satoma's head into his hold and capture him there in the middle of the street, surrounded by death and perverted consecrations, as if in connivance of what lay about them as they kissed tenderly.
Satoma's breath quickened and thinned out, a low moan threatening to make itself heard as he closed his eyes, allowing himself to be completely embraced, waiting for what he hoped was inevitable, knowing that his companion was not ignorant of his impure desires for pain. And then they pulled apart, much to his disappointment, and he nearly cried out in protest, but a finger was held to his lips, and in his struggles for the arousal that burned within, he again made to take it into his lips again, but it was abruptly pulled away and he glared at his partner for doing it to him, his actions a torturous teasing.
“Not yet my love. Yours needs will be filled, but first mine need to be met, and I need to see more.”
And thus, with some resentment, Satoma resigned to allow himself to be led, no longer to guide himself in such a state as he was in, gently pulled along by the hand as a child is. But he did not mind. His mind was too preoccupied with his arousal to remain at a difference. It had quickly left his mind, and now he turned back to observing the town and its murdered people, his enticement heightening as he studied the blood and deprecation, detached from time.
I start awake as I hear a scuffling out in the hall, and sitting quietly to listen tensely, ease only when I hear two guests fooling around in the hall as though they are drunk. A little early in the day I think, but then again, if they are pretended lovers for as long as the masquerade is being attended, then by all means. But outside my library door, when I am in no mood to be reminded of such frivolous activity as I am not permitted to obtain or exhibit? And just as I think this, I hear the pair staggering down the hall, stifling laughter and tumbling into each other. Most definitely drunk, I muse.
I sit once more in black silence, the windows draped out of precaution for vampiric guests, and I am left to my own contemplations, to which I have no desire to return, yet can not find it in myself to turn away or return to the haunting dreams of my past. I once more begin to think of Marius and his whereabouts as I glare at a painting across the room, the colors merely muted to my overly sensitive eyes. I sit so miserably slumped in my chair, uncharacteristic for myself, as though depressed, my legs unfolded and spread apart, my fingers tight on the edge of the armrests. My hair is already in disarray as it slithers up the back support and I slide down, and I have not the will to even rake my fingers through it as is habitual of my character.
Instead I simply sit here alone, lost in brooding thought, irritated by the fact that I do not know who Marius is with, though I can now tell they are in fact one floor below me. Still the unfamiliar aura perplexes and eludes me, and I grow even more dissatisfied by this present location in body and mind. Yet slowly, I once again succumb to memory and past, and this is followed by sleep once more, as much as I try resisting it, and it comes over me so strongly that I am instantly and immediately thrown back in time to those cursed days before I had stumbled upon Marius. Oh, how agonizing the mind can be when it means to torture its charge of person, that it should recollect everything unwanted and make it a battle to find the thoughts that are needed for relief.
(Return to the past where Satoma comes to find Marius)
