Nostalgia plagues me of late. While I lie in solitude memories slowly work their way up from the depths of my mind; memories most ancient, memories of life.
I was anemic while I lived. My disease left me with alabaster skin. I had dark hair and changeling eyes, one a clear calm blue, the other a pale gray green. And I was thin, so thin and weak. My parents and siblings despised me for my strangeness.
When I was young, I was given to wandering through the nights. My disease left me weak, and so I could not work, play or do many of the things my peers often enjoyed. And so I wandered, slowly I made my way from field to forest to lake in the wilds beyond my home.
It was false dawn, the forest dripping with the remnants of the previous day's rain. And for the first time in my nightly wanderings, I was not alone.
There was a man, a beautiful man, sitting upon my thinking rock. His face hard and cold, his beauty tainted by bloody lips and slender white fangs. To anyone else he would have been someone to fear. But I was not afraid.
He leapt down and approached me and still I was not afraid. I could only marvel at this specter before me, this tall figure of black, red and white, holding an ebony rose.
We stood in silence for some time, I, too awed by his presence to speak, and he, contemplating the black flower in his hands. As the sun tipped over the horizon he raised his gaze to mine. His eyes were black, bottomless pits that I couldn't help but want to get lost in. He bent down, placed the rose in my hands and kissed my neck gently, beneath my jaw. I was paralyzed, though not by fear, and I could not move until he disappeared. Then slowly, as if being unfrozen, my fingers moved to clench the stem of the flower and my other hand moved to rub away his kiss. I gasped sharply as a thorn dug into my palm. I brought my other hand to the wound to tear out the offender but stopped, dropped the rose and stared at my hands.
They did not seem my own, both covered in the blood I could not spare, and I stood there unable to break away my gaze.
Nights later I would realize what scared me most about the encounter. Not the appearance of a strange man, nor the giving of the flower, but only how right it felt to have blood on my palms. It was then that I began to fear the nameless man.
It was my first meeting with Silver, my blood father, though obviously not my last. It would be years until I saw him again. But he had marked me in blood with that rose and through it, marked m as one of his own. I had been only nine at our first encounter and already he was older than the oldest in our village. But I did not know that, as I did not know what he was. I told no one about him, and perhaps that was my downfall. But it does no good to stir upon things one can not change and so I settle my self into a chair and fall asleep.
Like my entire race, I will not dream tonight.