D sticks to his father's philosophy and thinks of where to go.
The Long Way Home
He sits on a boulder in the middle of a field that stretches for miles and miles. The moonlight, the source barely a crescent, is enough to make the sweeping visage lonely but not beautiful. D is not in the Frontier anymore, and yet he hasn't hit the larger, busier cities that cluster nearer to the Capital, either. Here the landscapes are vast and uninhabited, far from the wilderness that draws settlers and the cities that trap the rest of humanity into little pockets of half-formed civilization, trying to pretend they are no longer savages scrabbling in the dirt.
There are no vampires here. There's no one to pray upon, and anyway, for miles and miles there is no shelter to be found from the sun. Not that many of the Nobility are to be found elsewhere, these days most often D comes through one town, and then another, and finds no one who has heard of or seen their local "ruler" for ten years, a hundred years. Some towns swear there has never been a Noble to rule them, even the eldest do not remember a menacing shadow coming down from their castle.
Maybe he had killed them back then and simply forgotten, or perhaps the vampires simply tired of existence, retreated into slumber, staked themselves or wandered off.
The castles are abandoned, and when he walks through them the defenses do not even deactivate; they are dead and their masters vanished. He finds crypts, sometimes, but inside the Nobility has slept undisturbed for decades, fine dust on moldering cloths and hair.
D does not kill these slumbering old lords. He feels guilty either way, when he stakes them inevitably he sees his father in their study at home, writing in his journal, smiling at him in such a harmless way, although his fangs peek out through his thin lips.
When he does not he sees the girls he couldn't save, the boys who turned to killers overnight and have to be disposed of. He is not sure where his allegiance should really lie, and somehow the sad, abandoned air of these great Nobles wins him over in the end.
There are few vampires in the world, and with few vampires come fewer jobs. He does not eat much, but these days there is not enough money for lodging, either. It is not so bad, except the sun which he does not like. Some days he is lucky to find one of the abandoned castles in the vicinity and sleeps inside, close to the entrance, unwilling to find a bedroom. Sometimes he is unlucky and sleeps wherever he happens to feel like stopping. The landscape no longer changes as he travels, a year ago D was likely spending the night in the middle of a field much like this one. Even the climate doesn't change thanks to the 12 climate controllers. It has been years since he traveled from the Frontier, but he has not yet reached civilization. The world is vast, but it seems to have grown since he first ventured down to the closely knit Frontier colonies.
He came up mostly due to lack of jobs, thinking vaguely about going to the Capital to find hidden crypts within the dark catacombs beneath. That concept's very much dead by now, D thinks he might reach the Capital in maybe another five years, and the idea of hunting vampires who have slept for centuries is no longer interesting.
Now, mostly, he is trying to find his way home.
One would imagine that a vampire, or even half of one, would be able using some animal magnetism to know the direction in which his lair lies. D's lair, granted, is a legend abandoned when he first left it a few thousand years ago, and back then it was already quite depleted. He hadn't really thought of it as a "lair", or even home. Mostly it remained to him a vague memory of childhood, family, comfort.
Still, the fact that he cannot find it is rather… disheartening.
Oh, he remembered it quite well. Or at least he thought he did, all these long years. A thought would bring it all back, his father's library, his siblings, his bedroom, the dining hall with those candles his father would set everywhere. The pine trees that peeked through the windows, the hills in the distance. A grand old stained glass window that would simulate the sunrise.
And yet, for all that, he has only recently realized that he cannot remember where exactly all of this was.
D does not search, really. He is a Vampire Hunter, and what vampires are there to hunt in his old home? He is sure that were anyone to find it and realize what it was, they would turn around and walk right back to where they came from.
It is only that these days, the lack of any other places to go is making itself known.
And, D admits to himself sometimes, he is a little curious as to whatever did happen to that old place. He remembers his siblings, but only just. He could tattle off their names in sequence but the faces are smudges, scribbles. His mother is a figure outlined in light against the stained glass window. His father, the clearest of the lot, is a voice and a hand and a smile, nothing more. His precious memory has dwindled to a single spark.
So he travels through the desolate places no vampire ventures into. He heads east, but for no particular reason. He can no longer remember which way he traveled in that long-ago journey that took him from his childhood home and into the world.
Transient beings are we. His father said once. It is one of the few things he said that D remembers. He thinks of it long and hard as he grows, and is forever coming to a different conclusion.
These days, as the vampires disappear and D finds himself slowly dwarfed and finally erased off a landscape where his footprints will never be found, heading to a place no one knows of, leaving places too numerous to recall, he thinks his father had predicted this slow end to the age of the Nobility and all their half-breed remainders.
Somehow he knows, with certainty, that he will never find the way back now.
Maybe he isn't meant to.
END