Falling Dusk
1. The Mind of Nahuel
Nahuel stood at the brink of the forest, staring at the dimly lit cottage. He had arrived just a few hours earlier, with only one purpose in mind. The girl. The one he had seen over a year ago, the only one of his kind to not be his half sibling. Renesmee, she was called. A beautiful name, he had to admit, for an equally beautiful creature.
Nahuel leaned nonchalantly against the lean oak tree, feeling every fissure, knot and more of the trunk through his coarsely textured shirt. There was no true name for his kind, unique as they were. Half immortal and devastatingly beautiful, he and his sisters had been created from the cunning of their father's seduction, who himself was a full vampire, and considered what he did as a sort of experiment, as twisted as that did sound.
"A new superior race of vampires," he had explained to Nahuel when he had been young, about two vampiric years of age. "One that will triumph over the old immortals, and put the Volturi in their place. Under myself."
Nahuel had never shared this dream of his father's, in neither the present nor when he had been a mere fledgling. He hardly ever saw him, and he had no wish to. In fact, their last meeting had been ten years ago, which wasn't all that much when you were a hundred and fifty years old. When he was young...
Nahuel crossed his arms, reminiscing in the not altogether fond recollections. He would not call himself particularly vain, but his aunt, Huilen, was continually reminding him that his was 'The face of an angel', which was a statement hard to ignore. He was half human, after all.
Ah, Huilen. She was the only reason he had chose not to accompany his father, Joham, in his travels. He felt he owed her, simply for making him a better person than his father; showing him how to love and feel compassion. Occasionally he would feel guilty, when he thought of how he had damned his aunt to an eternity of living on the lifeblood of others.
But that thought was always followed with one of serenity, the certainty that he had brought joy into her existence, the joy of having someone to care for.
She had confided in him that he was the only being who had ever brought her happiness. Well, apart from her sister, Pire. Pire, the woman who had given birth to him, his true mother. Not that he didn't love Huilen, of course he did. It was just that he would have liked to have known his birth mother, found out about her. If she shared any of his traits, his ways of thinking. Huilen had once told him that his sense of humour came from her, though his was sometimes more difficult to coax out.
She had also had described Pire's unique laughter to Nahuel, one of the many things she had missed about her sister.
"Her voice was not unlike the trill of a bell, and the sweet peals of her joy resounded throughout the jungle. She always stayed positive, through any situation," Huilen's exact words had been, but that last sentence never failed to disturb Nahuel.
And that, in itself, was his biggest sorrow. The knowledge that he was the one who had ended Pire's life, ripping through her frail human flesh; practical murder through and through.
Sometimes, if he strained his memory to its sharp limit, he could call up a brief image, seem through hazy newborn eyes. A woman's pale strained face, black hair coated with blood and tears; but smiling nonetheless. A single word mouthed, before her head sank down out of sight. My Nahuel.
For now he knew the face belonged to Pire, she who had loved him even when he had broke her bones and tore her midriff apart. She had been only a mere spawn vessel to Joham, Pire and the other human mothers of his three non venomous daughters.
Nahuel had carried this burden throughout his century-and-a-half, believing himself to be a monster, an abomination of the highest order.