A/N: Well here we are... In Dark Shines! This is the story about Mello's life- the one he had in my other two stories Bring Me To Life and City of Delusion. So yup, it covers Mello's mortal life in Russia, his two hundred sixty years as an immortal vampire, and the when he meets Near in 1871. The chapters with Near are BMTL and the first ten chapters of CoD in Mello's point of view. There's no need to read those two stories first at all, but for those that did it will the a nice little addition to the other stories.

Actually, it's not going to be little at all. I predict that it will be 53 chapters, the first 30 covering the 260 years before he met Near, and the last 23 covering BMTL and the first 10 chapters of CoD.

In short, it's going to be the most epic thing I've ever written. Plus, it's my second fic named after a Muse song! So the titles of the chapters will come from the lyrics of Dark Shines.(HAPPY 31ST BIRTHDAY CHRIS WOLSTENHOLME! 3)

Enjoy.

Dark Shines

Chapter 1: Passing By

Well my darling, this is it. This is the confessional of my life, just as you asked. Yes, I know you never outright asked, but you were quite curious about me as a mortal. Oh yes you were, don't deny it. You were dazzled by me, how could you not be?

Ah, but I am skipping much ahead. My darling, you represented the most recent part of my life, and there was so much before you. Don't be mistaken, you were the greatest thing that ever happened to me, but a lot of drama happened in my nineteen mortal years and two hundred sixty immortal. That will take a lot of time to tell, but I am sure that is fine with you.

So let's start at the very beginning, shall we? And the start starts in the year 1592, in the bustling town of Kargopol.

Kargopol was a magnificent place, the crown jewel of Russian towns in my opinion. During my time it was a large trade center and an important outpost in the new outlying districts of the country. Kargopol also had great architecture, the most renowned of which was the Nativity of Christ, a cathedral built thirty years before my birth in 1562.

In the winter everything was calmed by the thick layer of sparkling snow that blanketed the town. It was common to go skating on the frozen Onega River which Kargopol was on both sides of.

But enough about that, let's get into the good stuff- my life. December 13th, 1592 was a frigid day as very during winter at Kargopol, and everyone suspected from the start that my mother wasn't going to live to watch her baby son Mihael grow up.

Elizaveta and Damyen Keehl weren't exactly the Kargopol equivalent of the Medici family. They had a small but comely house on the outskirts of the town, one of the poorer sections. It was in that little house that I was born in, and it was that little house that my mother died in. My mother was weak, and the midwife and my older sister Lenushka tried their hardest to keep her alive, but my mother just didn't have the strength.

Her weakness took over her mind. Elizaveta was entirely devoted to God, even her name was. It meant, 'God is my oath', and she had strived to uphold the meaning up her name constantly. I was told that during her months of pregnancy she spent all her time in the Nativity of Christ, praying for my health and future prosperity.

Amongst her screams of agony and her macabre prayers, Elizaveta named me Mihael. My father Damyen was rather perturbed by this decision, because the name was Hebrew and we were Orthodox. It meant, 'likeness to God'.

In the end, it was God who claimed Elizaveta. Soon after my birth, she proclaimed that the Virgin Mary had come to her. Next it was St. Damianos, and then the Doubting Thomas. Her saints came on and on, telling her to sell our things and travel Russia spreading God's Work.

Eventually those visitations Elizaveta had left her a dribbling madwoman. One day, when I was only just months old, she simply up and died. I was taken from her lap in the rocking chair she had been sitting in.

Then it was just Lenushka, my father Damyen, and me. We got on well enough, considering our already poor state. Lenushka, who was already twelve when I was born, took over what my mother had done when she was well, cooking and cleaning, and caring for me. The jobs of a woman of those times, in other words. She didn't have to mend clothes though; because tailoring was my father's trade and he could just take care of it.

My father was the best tailor of all Russia, save for the pompous professionals in Moscow. We were still poor though, people who came to Kargopol weren't exactly rich as the Czar, and they didn't mind if the hem of their pants was too long, or if a tear developed in the seam of their shirt. In short, my father was great at what he did, but we lacked business.

And so we stayed poor. As a young child, I never realized we were poor. I was too young to tell the difference between common and extravagant food, and I hadn't seen much of anything of extravagance to compare the lives of the Keehls to. So I was happy poor, and in turn that made Lenushka and Damyen happy.

Sometimes they weren't happy, though. My father didn't have a wife, and he respected and loved her too much to take another. We prayed for Elizaveta every Sunday during the Divine Liturgy, and visited her modest grave once a month and on her birthday and nameday. My sister no longer had a mother, so she had no one to teach her to be a proper lady, which is all my sister ever wanted out of life. And they saw Elizaveta in me, which made it harder for them. I had inherited her treasured blond hair, as opposed to Lenushka who had the dark hair of my father. When I was very still, asleep or in the deep thought that only children could conceive, they saw Elizaveta.

On November 17th, 1595, when I was less then a month shy of three years old, we were in church. It was the feast day of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, so naturally my family's prayers were filled with thoughts of Elizaveta. That day I was thinking quite hard about the mother I never knew, but it was a simple sort of thinking because I was still very young.

In my mind, I pictured my mother a princess like St. Elizabeth was. She was very beautiful, with flowing blond hair and the brightest and purest blue eyes I could imagine. Just as the Small Entrance started, I became impossibly still for a boy my age. My sister and father regarded this stillness as deep prayer, which in a way it was.

It was also my mother's spirit entering my body. As the congregation began to hypnotically recite the Creed in a Russian monotone, I fainted. I dropped instantly into the isle, whence my sister Lenushka thought I was just being devious and sought to pick me back up again. Instead I started to have convulsions, my body writhing so furiously that my sister couldn't control me. People turned their attention from the priest to me. They were poor people who sat in pews near the back, people who knew my family.

Even when the screaming started, the richer members of the congregation and the priest, who was sour in his devotion stayed rapt and fixated upon the Liturgy. I was screaming in a mature woman's voice. My mother Elizaveta's voice.

"He'll crucify my enemies! He'll crucify my enemies!" over and over I relentlessly screamed this in my mother's voice. Even when my father Damyen took me in his arms and brought us out of the cathedral I still persisted. My father was ashamed of having been embarrassed in front of the congregations, but he was afraid for me too.

As he carried me through the frigid streets, I stopped screaming, and my mother's voice left me, but I began to chant prayers I hadn't known as a three year old. They were prayers my mother had favored.

All the while Lenushka trotted before us, having to hike up her good Sunday skirts to keep up. She crooned and tried to comfort me to no avail.

When we returned home, Lenushka put me to bed. It was her bed too; we slept together in the early years. My father got a fire going. I was too afraid to sleep. At three, I wasn't much of a talker, a concern that Damyen and Lenushka shared, and the word, 'possessed' as in by a ghost or something, wasn't in my vocabulary. I had no idea what had happened to me, only that it was frightening and somehow involved my mother.

Revisiting the memory now, I realize that the experience was an out of body one. I remember that I was floating at the top of the cathedral, where the air was thin and cold. I remember looking down at myself and thinking simple words like, why, how, and what. I didn't have the vocabulary at the time to do anything by speculate dimly.

Damyen and Lenushka had more complicated thoughts. When they thought I was sleeping, they talked in the sitting room, adjacent to our small bedroom, speaking in quite sounding Russian. Was it witchcraft? Was it the devil? Was I sick in the head, afflicted with some sort of after affect of Elizaveta's malady?

Then my father dropped his voice to a low whisper, one which I could not hear. Then there was a sound of protest from Lenushka, and then a moment of silence. Then I heard grunting from my father, and squeals of pain from my sister. My three year old mind could not come up with an explanation for what they were doing.

Later in life, when I was much older and knew much more about the world, my sister confessed to me what my father was doing to her.

"Моя дочь, мы не регистр грядущих нападает на сына нетрудно, ваши брат Mihael, поэтому Я буду вы." That is what my father, the tailor Damyen Keehl, told my sister Lenushka, who at the time was at the ripe age of fifteen. My daughter, if you fail to stop any future attacks on my son, your brother Mihael, this is what I will do to you. He raped her.

When Lenushka told me of this, I laughed it off. Our father has been so kind to us, I told her. Why should he follow through with threats like that, or even make them in the first place?

Lenushka explained to me that she and our had always been close, and since she had become a woman Damyen had gone mad with desire, and used the attacks I had from our mother as an excuse to relive himself of those pent up desires of all the years without a wife.

But I am skipping ahead. She did not tell me that until I was fifteen, and her twenty seven. Forgive me, my darling, if I sometimes skip around. One memory may remind me of another, and I may end up just rambling on. I will try to keep on track as much as possible though, I promise you that much.

The next day things were silent as we broke our fast. Silent enough to make me ask in my stumbling, ungrammatical Russian what was wrong.

My sister Lenushka only smiled at me sadly, in an enigmatic way. She made me want to question further, but I did not know what to ask. My father Damyen didn't look up from his dried meat.

And so that was how my young life went. The next attack from the spirit of my mother Elizaveta happened forty days later, a symbolic amount of time in Christianity. My father had brought me into town with him to get tailoring supplies as a threat. I had saved the coin Damyen had given me for my fourth birthday, and had bought a pirozhky with it.

Little did I know pirozhky had been Elizaveta's favorite dessert. When my father Damyen saw me munching on it happily, he recoiled and almost slapped it out of my hand. That was the moment Elizaveta took over, and this time I spoke through the voice she had just before death, irritable and snapping.

"Oh come off it, Damyen. Can't you let a woman indulge in herself once and a while? After all the work I do for you!" At that point I stuffed the rest of the pirozhky in my mouth, chewing in a self-important manner.

Nothing other then that happened. I didn't scream or have convulsions, but perhaps that was because Elizaveta had entered more easily then last time. Regardless of what the incident meant, my father rushed me home. Later that night, I suppose he raped my sister Lenushka.

Of course I knew nothing of this until that time Lenushka confessed what our father was doing to her, but Damyen Keehl must have been very afraid of Elizaveta's entering me. After all, the first two times she came it was bitterly. Oh yes, he must have been very afraid to do such things to my dear sister Lenushka.

When I was still young though, I didn't have those concerns. I worried about simple, childish things like, when was the next time papa would bring me to town? And still not even that mattered and I was happy with my life. On days in the winter when the sun was shining, Lenushka would take me out to play in the snow, and nothing else mattered.

I've always loved snow very much. Pity it doesn't snow down here in New Orleans… But anyway, I believe it's the whitest substance in Earth, and it's prettier in no place but Russia. There is simply snow everywhere, and if you go to the outskirts of town and face town and face away from it, the snow is like a vast and endless ocean. You can see the sun (pardon me; you can't now because you're a vampire… How silly of me.) reflect off each little flake, and everything is bright and happy.

In the snow with Lenushka, bundled up tight with many layers of clothing, there was nothing in the world but us two and the snow. We played frenzied games of chase, which mostly ended up in fits of giggles. At four, the amount of snow on the ground was not much shorter then myself, so I often tripped and fell flat on my face.

In the snow, I forgot Elizaveta. In the snow, I'm fairly sure Lenushka forgot Damyen. Even though we were cold and wet, we were immensely happy. Damyen never went out in the snow with Lenushka and I. He always seemed to be busy doing tailoring work at those times. So it, it was Lenushka's and mine getaway from life. We were very close siblings, despite our gender and age difference.

Let my talk about my family a little bit more before I go on. None of the Keehls had ever been educated. We were working people, with tailoring the family trade. The Keehls had always been tailors, anyone and Kargopol could tell you that. Education wasn't important to the Keehls, for us we only needed to know how to sign our own names.

This is why, darling, that in the day and night I loaded you with studies. Now when I meet an uneducated person, I feel the most powerful sadness for them. Education opens the doors to great thoughts, I believe.

Because of that, I also believe that our lack of education is what kept my family poor, besides lack of business. I could not tell you what would been different for us if Elizaveta or Damyen could had read, but still, education was the one thing missing from our life.

As a young child though, that did not matter to me. My family had the Faith of the Lord, tradition, love, and bread on the table. A young boy like me, who knew nothing of the grandeur of the rest of the world, could ask for nothing more then what we already had.

And so what if Elizaveta possessed me more frequently as time passed on, and those possessions grew more violent? What did they matter if they changed nothing in our life but giving us a little scare, and giving Lenushka cause to be afraid of Damyen?

So what?

A/N: Like it? Hate it? Review and I'll know.

I apologize for the shortness of this chapter... This was more like an intro then anything. I also apologize for the amount of OCs, but for this to work Mello has to have a family. In order to make it up to you guys, I'll try to make them as real as possivle so they don't see like OCs. Plus, as the story progresses they'll be less of them, so all you have to do is keep reading to get rid of them!

By the way, I want you guys to tell me about the summary... Because I'm not really sure if I like it or not.