I am starting a new and darker piece. Warning: This is nothing that I had ever attempted before. It will sound weird, but hopefully in a flowing kind of way that I seem to think I'm still struggling to perfect. Much critique and opinions are appreciated.

It was blood. His blood was everywhere. He whipped round as he was falling and the whole world was slow, slow with his falling and his dying and his taking his life with him, away from all of us. As he whipped, his red blood sprayed-a graceful, gruesome image, magical, ethereal, imperial, and I looked into his eyes, and he saw me, and his mouth opened, and the pain of losing him losing him losing him was on my face already. I held out my hands to him in that moment.

I went to him and I held him in my arms on the ground, his killer having slunk away, and I wailed into his blond hair, into his curls that I have loved since he was a child, that I have breathed in bed asleep and touched in fields of grain. And I wept, wept more bitterly than I have wept for my own children thousands of years ago, oblivious to the hands that were touching me, telling me, Leechtin he is still alive, let us take him into the house where we might save him. But I knew then that he was gone.

He took everything good about me with him that is all there is, and I whispered "Escha," into his hair, in the red packed dirt, in the air that had tasted his blood.

My Escha. I'm sorry. If I had known then that you would die like this would I have done any of it the same?

***

"Ariel," I said, to my servant, to my shadow who has followed me through all these years. "Ariel, I cannot live if he is dead."

And the one who tells me that Laurent is dead, whispers, "It is hard to live."

It is hard to live.

+++
1st Act - Ancient Sinai, smoky rooms and white faces.

I laid looking up at the starry sky, and it was such a particular color, this inky blue, someone had spilled dark dark ink on a serrated metal surface, small twinkles of null oblivion shining on me, pinpricking my skin and world. My eyes drifted, lying in the four inches of water, dizzy, fingers floating, black black hair the same color as the water. I could die here, I could. It was too hot, it was suffocatingly hot. The air filled my lungs like thick brine, lips open.

I was vaguely aware that my attacker was standing above me, and that he was going to steal my horse, and that he loved me loved me loved me, and despised me. It is possible more than possible to do both. Everywhere in the world they do it.

"There is a darkness in you," he whispered to me, in a language that was a dialect of my own and it sounded serpentine, "that will destroy you". I couldn't move to stop him but I had to get out of the heat. And any reason, any reason that had made me want to go to Cairo no longer mattered.

If I had known then what it meant, what our intimacy had meant, no matter how difficult, I would have struggled out of the water and clung to him, made him love me more than hate me, would have begged to go with him.

I knew him for no more than ten minutes, his attention unbidden and the result of no seduction beyond being of a particular age and a particular personal carriage. I would have kissed his hands and kissed his face and kissed his mouth and made him stay with me.

I believe he expected me to die in the heat within a couple of days. A fool, a victim of passion, he did not leave me to die but gave me what he believed to be a chance, a chance of which he knew very well I had no idea how to take advantage. But I was old, and full of my own passion, and he did not steal my horse.

It is funny the things that one remembers after the fact. I remember the name of my dead son, Gene, but not the name of my dead husband. I remember my maker's hands, because that is what he was, but not his voice. I know that he was old, or that he suffered, because of where he wandered in hot hot Egypt. A caterpillar again in a world where I had long ago become a butterfly, a youth again, I needed the cold. I would have suffocated on my own breath and baked from the inside out.

I had been walking my horse, sitting high, sitting straight, determined for something. I think I wanted to go to Cairo for revenge because I think someone killed my family and that I knew them, but that is all I remember. Maybe I knew for years after that, but I have forgotten it now. There are too many years piled on top of the knowledge, but the passion itself remains. I remember the passion that I felt, and that it was boiling inside of me, and it was a desire for blood that I had, and it was knocked me from behind. He attacked me from behind. He dragged me down from my horse and pulled on my hair to keep me still while he intimately and lovingly took away my life.

I struggled against him until he had finished biting into me and then I held onto him as if I needed him, and it was my embrace that he loved, and he kissed me. I do not remember drinking his blood. I do not remember dying. I have watched a lot of people die, so I have some idea of what it must have been like, but I think I didn't remember it moments after it happened, and the memory has not come to me.

So I held onto him. I realized that he had killed me, lying in the water, because nothing in my life before that mattered after it. I was a child again, not his child, but of the night in which I was enrobed, and of the water in which I lay, and of the blood which I could taste in the back of my throat. He did not touch me at all before he left, and I believe that I have never seen him again. If he lives still I do not know it, and if he knows that I live, we are apart. I do not care to know him.

We never really knew each other at all.

***

I wandered. I have relived it so many times. It was dry and hot and all that I knew. I grew up in one of the hottest places in the world, and suddenly, without knowing that such things could happen, I was walking dead and running from my homeland. It was unclear in my head what I had become. I had no way of knowing.

Near the beginning there was water, and I bathed many times, fascinated. The heat of the day would become the warm enfolding night and my limbs were fresh. Nearsighted vision had been replaced, graying hair had become long and fluid and black again. My skin was smooth, a soft white color, a pale pink when I clenched my fists, digging my nails into my flexible yet unbreakable skin. My nails were hard, long as they had been at my death, but much more resistant to breaks, and sharp because of their resilience. Sharp is how I felt.

In life I had been somewhat prone to napping in the midday heat, using the excuse of old age for my slowing down. I had been comfortable. Family I had had, an heir, a good position in society, money. I lost it all somehow near the end of the life I left behind, but I could stop caring about that. It was a single-minded flight to the north, to the delta and then across the sea, up through Italy.

For the first thousand years of my life it was flight, and travel, and never being in one place for long. I traveled beyond what I dreamed might exist when I was alive, and my heart was very quiet, very abiding.

But it found me in India.

***

India 5000 years ago was not as one might imagine it. I suppose that imagining it in itself would be difficult. I also suppose that my own idea of what it was is dependent upon where I went myself, but a lot of India for me, actually, is Nery's room, or Yaksha, as he is known now.

He was-is-a maverick character. Smooth, witty, and wild enough to go on living the way he always has been.

I was walking in the bazaar on a Saturday afternoon. There were no bazaars in India, you might say, if you know anything about what is now ancient India, but there was no "Saturday" then either, and I was in a bazaar. I was looking for hot oil, for my hair, and suddenly he was there, his white face staring me down in a sea of dark skinned flesh and blood of living people, two feet away. My hand froze in midair between my side and the bottle I had been looking for.

He spoke to me in the local dialect, which I didn't understand at all, as I had just arrived.

"Tell me about your life," I saw his lips say in my language, the one I still knew the best, the language of my own race of people, who do not exist anymore.

In those days, 1000 years old was not old for an immortal, though it is now. I did not know then that it was the standard to kill the younger ones, but it makes sense to me. It was more dangerous then, for the older ones to be crowded. Cities and technology are able to support much more of us now. Covens did not exist then. It was necessarily an individual existence.

"I will tell you about my life," I said, and his black eyes twinkled at me, reaching out a long white arm for me to take.

It was dangerous. It was a gamble, but I had managed to live that long without being afraid of anything, so I was not afraid.

We walked in the warm evening together, intimately, his fingers entwined in mine. It was not closeness between us, but understanding.

He told me I was beautiful. I smiled with pouty lips.

"Your lips are so red," he said, and again it was not closeness, but understanding, that made him touch me, touching my mouth.

I was not afraid, but I was careful. All vampires are murderers. In those days we killed each other with as little feeling as we killed the living, and I knew he could do it.

If you were familiar with Yaksha, you would know that in those days he had 2000 years on me. I could smell that. He was 3000 years old and he smelled like the humid, overpopulated city in which he lived. Which, is to say, almost human, because it was a such a human place.

Yaksha and I were not lovers, but I wonder what "lovers" is. We were not in love, but we had that understanding, and that intimacy, and I slept in his bed. I never drank Yaksha's blood. He might have taken mine, but I never took his, and it was not offered.

I told him about my life, and he told me about his. Unlike me, Yaksha remembered being human very clearly, and just as clearly remembered every moment of what he called "rapture" and I call "dying". He did not consider himself to be dead, though he acknowledged himself changed. He had not stopped, but continued.

"Maybe you think you are dead because you were running from your life," he said.

Maybe that is the truth.