I've been having the same dream for centuries; light. The entire world is surrounded in light and I can feel my body floating up and away in that light; weightless and unhindered by the Beast and the darkness of my soul. It is a good dream and often I look forward to it after the nightmares and premonitions which haunt the majority of my drifting hours. I cannot really call what we do sleeping so much as drifting between worlds; we are aware and our awareness reaches out across time and space to planes that those younger than us cannot imagine. There are times in my drifting that I am young and mortal again. My husband, Markus, at my side and the darkness of the world forgotten as I live the life that I felt I should have had. No. The life I have now is the life I should have had; the life that I made for myself and I have come to accept, at last, that my life as a mortal ended and I became something and someone else. It was after that first realization that the light began to burn the brightest; it had merely been a tiny spot in the darkness prior to that.
Each night since then, in my head, he has come to me; Sandman. I thought at first that he might be a figment of my imagination. We are meant to sleep and in our sleep we are meant to rest our minds and bodies that we might carry on and avoid insanity. I have seem kindred go insane; it's brutal and their deaths are rarely quick. The destruction that they leave behind is frightening and in its wake a sort of dark void fills the night letting all sorts of other undesirable creatures in. I digress. I thought him a figment manifested of my own growing insanity; this was not the case. I have thoughts, so many thoughts, but Sandman was more than a manifestation of them. He knew things about the world that while I was aware of them, I could not have known the great details that he did. I was not present when Jesus walked the Middle East; I was in Africa at the time, but Sandman knew things about him that others have since verified for me.
What then should I believe that Sandman is? A fae, which is what he claims to be? A very knowledgeable figment of my overworked and overactive imagination; overwork, perhaps. I could take him at face value. I should, given what he has shown me. Markus; he is a painful memory but one I have clung to so long that I am not certain I can release it quite yet. My instinct tells me that releasing it will lead me to something greater and brighter; that light will shine through my soul and I will know a peace I have not known ever. My heart tells me that Markus is not to be released or forgotten; not laid aside or cast down like some common man I had laid with. He was my husband and I loved him for our brief time together with a passion I thought would sear our very souls and rend our flesh. I thought I knew passion but then I met Styphathal.
I was embarrassed; degraded. And in that embarrassment and degradation I forgot myself and who I had been as a mortal. Caerdwyn used me for his most base desires and because I did not give in to him, because I fought and I refused to cave to what I considered dark desires he heaped his abuse upon me. Dark desires. I can hear myself laugh lightly at that thought now; I have always desired dark things. It was one of the many things that Markus loved about me. I was a childe and in that childhood I rebelled against my parent and denied myself the passion and desires that I had harbored so long in my mortal life. What would the darkness have been like had I given in to them? Would Caerdwyn and I have ruled the night together as equals rather than master and slave? Sandman once showed me such an outcome; I yearned for it. Regret is a powerful emotion and we are deep pools capable of such.
It is far too late for such regrets. Caerdwyn is gone, though his soul and memories live on within me. I cannot change the past but look to the future. I cannot go forward without admitting who and what I was in the past. I was a spoiled, insolent child who could not be tamed by my sire and when I broke my cage, I killed him like the ungrateful wretch that I was. It does no good to regret that now; I cannot change it. All of the men in my life have shaped and molded me to their desires; perhaps that can be said so of Vincent more so than all the others combined. I would be his good child and I would grow in his shadow to cast one of my own until my mind yearned for freedom from his mundane, ordered sort of world. I craved the destruction and chaos of my sire; perhaps that was why I turned to his brethren. I remembered Eros and I had seen Styphathal vaguely over the years after Grand Mother was disposed of so hastily.
I found in Styphathal a sort of freedom; I protested his visits while secretly awaiting them. Why, after all, would I go to him as tailor time and time again knowing that he was sewing weak stitches in to my clothes with a purpose? Because I desired what he could give me; those fleeting moments when I was free to be myself again; not molded or pressed in to a cookie cutter shape. Ashur told me once, when I was a young vampire at his knee, that sometimes birds were meant to be free and not in gilded cages. He'd helped me set a mockingbird that Vincent had given me free that day and I had known…lightness in my heart. I think it must have been the same for me; I was in a cage and desperate to get out. I rebelled. I have always rebelled. Vincent was angry but I found freedom. Freedom is an illusion; bitter and cold.
Each realization has made the light in my dream brighter and each time I float closer and closer to something important; it is just beyond my grasp but I am so close now I can almost feel it brush my fingertips as I reach. Sandman cackles lightly against my ear and I feel his hands caress against my flesh, brushing down my back and side. 'You're almost ready for it, almost ready…just a bit more...' Sometimes, he seems so sad as we view my life together and sometimes I watch him chortle with almost a demonic glee. There are times in my memory that I am grateful for the strength that Sandman lends me and times I wish that he would simply go and leave me the peace and warmth of that light. I like staring in to that light. I enjoy imagining what might be just behind it; heaven, perhaps? God who gave up on us so long ago?
It is a pity to be so old; I know of God as a story. He is mythical to me in the same way that Jesus is mythical to mortals. Ashur believed; he told me so. I recall his visits to Vincent quite clearly before Augustus murdered him. Did he though? I've heard rumors and sometimes…the way Augustus looks at me I almost think I am looking at my old teacher. It is a pity to be old; to have hope poke and prod at you from every turn. Illusions and ghosts of illusions; memories of the past. Sometimes you believe that you have seen a friend or family member pass by you on the street only to turn back and realize you can't remember what your friends and family members looked like. I suppose it would make some depressed and brooding; perhaps that is why Styphathal takes so many drugs and projects such an air of happiness. He needs to; it balances his and makes him forget. Sometimes it's easier to forget rather than to remember.
I wandered again. The light, yes, I was talking about the light and Sandman in it. It was the light that made me rescue Nero; it was the light which drove me to try to save his pack. How odd that I who had murdered so many, who had killed single Garou when I'd had the opportunity, would then turn to save an entire cairn of the damned beasts. Worse still, as I came to know him, as I saw Nero as more than my mission to make good in life, I actually began to like him and feel for him. His suffering became my suffering and his friendship over these last centuries has been more precious than all of the memories of my family. How quickly that family fades in to the background of my mind; I should feel ashamed but I can finally honestly admit that I do not. They were my family; I loved them, but they are long dead and I am alive still. The light grows brighter still.
Mother. I sometimes confuse Mother with Aphrodite; they are not the same person. Aphrodite was Mother to Eros and Styphathal, Caerdwyn and their brothers and sisters; grandmother to me I suppose, in her way. I remember her disdain clearly. It is to Aphrodite that I owe me destruction in the faith of the Gods; the realization that they might be us. She had another name for me before I chose 'Elisabeth' to be mine in my new world. Aphrodite called me 'Psyche'. One then might, if they knew the circumstances, find irony in the fact that her son, Styphathal, was called 'Cupid'. I pointed this out to Vincent once but he did not find it very funny. It has always been Vincent's thought that Styphathal was an extremely bad influence on me and one that I should avoid at all costs. I suppose it's true what they say; girls like bad boys. My bad boy has eyes that are as blue as the ocean beneath the sunlight; I tell myself so.
Family; I built a family. Styphathal, Vincent…Eros…Nero and his Pack, little Lyrra. It is a sin to embrace a child among our people but there are those who do so. There was a time when we would have destroyed them en masse and never spoken of it again. I believe the light led me to her as well; for when I saw Lyrra, I could not destroy her. I took her in, I washed and fed her. I named her as though she were my own child and for the next few hundred years we were happy together in our odd familial configuration. They are right; those who say that children vampires are given to insanity. Lyrra slowly goes insane trapped within that child's body while her mind grows ever more adult. Vincent has had the keeping of her for many centuries now and though they cannot be in body, in mind they are married and one. It is an agreeable settlement for the two of them and Vincent has at last turned his eyes from me, his 'little one'.
Each piece, each tiny puzzle, one step closer to something but…what? My soul is calling out to something. I am inwardly giddy and screaming out for something important, but I do not know what it is. As I stare in to the light, as I wonder what is beyond it, I feel peace. It is nice to feel a bit of peace now and again. "I'm sorry, Sandman…I cannot go yet, there is so much left to be done." My eyes are turned to my companion who only smiles brilliantly and strokes my hair as though I am a child again. 'I did not think you would.' Because that is not the point of showing me the light, no, or perhaps it is the point; to follow the light and fall in to darkness by leaving my path or to stay in the darkness and become the light. I have become hope to so many; is it misplaced? Perhaps…I do not know yet, the story has not ended.