Aurora

Before Twighlight: POV Marcus

Life. Some say it is the phase all people go through before going to Heaven, an eternal resting place of perfection. Others look at it as though it's a cruel, terrible thing and try to end their's very soon. Me personally, I think its incredibly boring. I mean, its so predictable. The sun comes up, around the sky as our small planet makes its celestial rotation, then back down into the sky turning day, to night. What about sleep? Oh yeah. I don't sleep. We cant. We being vampires of course. Aro, Caius, and I. Aro found Caius and I a while back, around 900 BC. That's when the three of us decided to go to Italy and form the Volturi to protect the identity of our kind.

But before then, Caius and I had been human brothers. We were born in Sparta, Greece 952 BC. We had grown up with the dream of fighting for the Spartan army and pleasing the gods who had gifted us with everything we had. Of course I was a much different person back then. Much more emotional about our cause. I also had a wife and 5 children, 4 of which were shipped off to army training right away. Our first son, Perseus, lived with my wife while I trained to fight in the ranks of the Spartan force.

I was 26 when my brother and I found out that our first battle was to come as a raid of a small town off the Athenian border. As we approached the town and proceeded with the raid, my brother and I came to be into a nice looking house. As we entered, a sharp hiss rang through the house. Unperturbed by the noise, we ran foolhardily into the main room. What was there surprised us. There was a man and a woman, the man standing in front of the woman in a protective stance, unarmed. This surprised us, we had been expecting a fight, but now there was only a slaughtering. As my brother and I charged in, swords out, the man swung out with his arm so fast that it was inhuman. Both our swords exploded out of our hands, and my arm seared with pain. As I fell to the ground, Caius lunged for the man with his knife, only to be thrown back impossibly fast. As we lay on the ground stunned, the man seemed ready to lunge on top of us. And that's when the woman spoke. " Spare them, Alex. They were only doing what they were ordered to." Her voice was soothing, and it seemed to work on the man, as his pupils seemed to return to normal size…

And that's when I realized that he had red eyes. Blood red. And when he spoke, I knew that we had come upon something far more dangerous than we had thought. " I do not see what you see in them, Elicia, but I will not kill them. But I most certainly will not spare them. The children long for the extinction of us, and we need greater numbers to survive."

As I was about to ask the man some of my many questions, Why do you have red eyes? Why are you so fast? What kind of children would pose a threat to someone as powerful as you? And why is the girl with you? But before I had the chance, he leaped on top of me and shoved his teeth into my neck. I felt as he shifted his weight from me and lunged at Caius, but that was the last thing I felt before the burning. I felt as though my entire body was being set on fire from the inside out. I heard only the pounding of my heart growing slower and slower yet. Finally, after what seemed like a couple thousand years, my heart stopped. I opened my eyes, expecting the judgment table and hoping that I would be chosen to go to the Elysium fields. The sight I saw was a little less impressive, though. I was still in the house. The couple had gone, and my brother was sitting on the couch that the woman had been before the nightmarish pain. Seeing me up, he motioned for me to come with him. That night we hunted. We hunted our previous brothers in arms without a second thought, being newborns and not thinking about our decisions. That night I fed upon 3 of my best friends, and didn't give it a second thought till about a year later, when I found my humanity again. The year it took me to find it was the worst year of my entire being. But when I awoke from my age of monstrosity, I saw that everything had become so clear. For 80 years we had roamed Europe in its entirety and had decided Asia might hold better luck. So we roamed there for about a hundred years, until we met them. The children that the vampire long ago had said something about. I will never forget that night that haunts Caius every moment of his life. We were walking from a village that we had just fed upon, and the people there were starting to get hopeless. Of course there was no Volturi back then so vampires didn't necessarily have to keep there existence a secret. Which kind of led to a problem. Human blood becomes pretty disgusting when there isn't hope in the human mind. I don't know why, something about hopelessness that cuts off certain enzymes in the blood stream. Like heartbreak I guess.

Anyway, we had just come back from a village that had started to get hopeless about there situation, when we noticed that something was following us. Remember that we hadn't encountered another vampire since the one that infected us, so we weren't exactly trying to listen for something hunting us.

Caius was the first to hear it. He all of a sudden whirled around and snarled into the blackness of the forest. I immediately followed his example, and that's when it came out of the shadow of the trees around 30 yards away. It surprised us that it was human, but when we sniffed the air, it's scent was so repugnant, that Caius and I both winced. While we stared at it, it stared at us, our eyes a fearsome red, it's an almost disturbing black. I was the first to interrupt the silence by accidentally stepping on a fallen stick. The snap was difficult for me to hear, even with my extreme hearing, but the figure standing in the trees flinched at it as though I had cracked a whip. When it flinched, a shudder seemed to run through its body, and it looked up at the full moon and howled. But as if howling wasn't weird enough, when it howled, a transformation took place, and the figure was replaced by a huge black and grey wolf. And when I say huge, I mean mammoth sized. When it had transformed, the trees within it's immediate vicinity were without a doubt, destroyed. But I didn't have a lot of time to ponder the answers to the amount of questions I was thinking up, because the Wolf had then decided to charge. And to my utter disbelief, so did Caius. They clashed in the clearing that was not 10 yards in front of me as the wolf tore at Caius, and Caius ripped at the wolf. Caius was fighting as if he had nothing to lose, and knowing his skin was hard as rock, I didn't disagree with his fighting style. Except when his arm came off. Yeah, it really happened. It was twitching and everything. As I looked back at the fight in horror, I saw that Caius was as surprised as I was. And also just as horrified. The wolf then took this chance to take off Caius's hand. Caius grew desperate then, swing with his behanded arm and kicking out with his legs at the beast, but it didn't seem to be taking much toll on it. The massive wolf took the blows and dodged some, waiting for Caius to grow tired. As Caius took his next swing, the wolf head butted him to the ground as he slammed into the brush, his severed hand seemed to twitch towards the arm it had been cut off of. Seeing this, Caius reached out with his arm…

And the hand jumped to him, connecting to his arm. And as the wolf tilted his head back and howled over his victim, Caius grabbed the wolf's fore leg, and pulled. You could hear the leg pop out of its socket for only a second before the wolf cried out in agony, screaming into the black night. Cauis took this chance to curl his legs in to his chest and kick as hard as he could into the wolf's stomach, sending the wolf about 10 yards into the air. Caius immediately turned and connected his other arm onto the stub that had previously been. He then turned to the wolf which had just fallen down onto the dirt with an enormous crack. The wolf then, its spine snapped because of the massive weight that had fallen on it when it fell, changed back into human form, and died.