There is rarely a time I find myself asking questions. Maybe, long ago I would have asked. I would have been curious.
But as the centuries pass, you lose that. You stop questioning because you already know the answer. Curiosity amongst our kind is rare. That is why we do not understand you humans – who are curious about everything. You want to know what is already there before you. To us, it has always been like this.
Perhaps that is why we kill you – not only because we want to feed, but because we do not like what we cannot understand. And there lies the irony of it, I suppose.
But I? Why do I like it so much more? Why do I relish the sight of them in various stages of dying, the poetry in their decay that poets and artists have tried to capture for so long? There is no answer, or rather – I have never had to defend it. I do not feel the need. We all must feed, and so much better for it if it is a thing of pleasure. A certainty to all of us. It is actually rather beautiful, just like the artists describe. I have always liked the sight of skin turning grey, of eyes losing their spark. A waking dream.
It is true that we play with our food, because that is all that you are to us. A little immature perhaps, and not quite in etiquette, but that is how it is.
We enjoy your suffering. It does not matter if you deserve it or not. I have never questioned this reasoning.
Emotions have always burned me the most. I have an artists soul, after all. But never have another meant so much to me as that girl. She had no name, and yet she marked me forever, without knowing it then.
But the waking dream continued – with her. And it was different. I tried to be...different. But something went wrong, and I...failed. I couldn't keep her color alive, couldn't keep her heart with me.
She went away and something else did too. Much more of me gone. And my gift helped me, just as it cursed me as well. I was never alone again – the memories of others more like fables that never seemed real. It helped me when I could know what everyone else was thinking. I was a king once again, and that other life was a poor imitation of me, what I really was.
I knew how to rule, knew how to make them remember me.
Years passed and I did not think of her. Sick with fever forever, my poems recited out loud but never on a stage and the words were hollow, but whole world is a stage, as the bard once wrote. Entire villages of our kind gone, and I danced around their broken bodies. We became respected, more revered – a god once more.
Women weeping in my arms, me consoling them before I broke their necks. A beautiful order of things.
A waking dream, a new beautiful dream that seemed to continue forever.
I was not awake when she came. When I saw her again, I did not really see her. It was only when I touched her that I knew.
And the questions that I had never asked began to plague me.
I was happy, so happy to see her again. I wanted her then and there – with me always. But the first question came to me "Would she like that, without any explanation?"
I had never thought about someone else's needs before. It bothered me that I had to think like that, to have her. But then I knew that she would be uncooperative if I did not consider these things. And I wanted her to smile. Wanted her to sit next to my throne where I could see her, just like before.
But as the months passed, I grew impatient. I tried to make her remember what she should already know, what I glimpsed under the surface.
But she was difficult, uncertain. For so long. And so sweet, so tortured. In that life and in this one as well. She had already swallowed the pomegranate seeds, eaten all the fruits of the underworld – and yet I kept her at bay.
When I found out what she did to herself, I did not laugh. I did not mock her. Instead it reminded me of myself, and that was unthinkable.
"What will happen when she finds out that you are a monster?"
I looked at her bones, and realized how frail they were. Felt them through her flesh, warm in my arms. She was a warrior in her time, and still was – but my grip could break her. Inside and out, so easily. She had scars on her wrists and I found myself staring at them often, wondering. There is no use grieving the living, but sometimes there is.
In this waking dream of mine was a thorn – and the thorn was she. She was making a small tear, leading me to a place where I knew pain like she did. Addicting, just like her.
"Will she ever smile, like you hoped?"
Her smiles were real, but never like I had imagnined. I saw them differently, knew that they were a falsehood. That inside, something always bled. Would never heal if she stayed.
I just wanted her at first – she needed to be mine. A new pet, someone I could play with.
But she is the only one who has ever really known me.
Human emotions are hard to get rid of, once you feel them. They fester inside you and explode. And now she is going to die.
She made her choice.
And the Volturi never takes pity on their kind. But it is not pity I feel, but dread.
She is suffering, and so am I. I did not expect this to be torture for me as well as for her. But it is.
"Stop please stop! she screams, and I look away.
I know what she is seeing, feeling. I can feel it as keenly as her. I am gripping the sides of my chair, unable to look away as she fades away before my eyes. Not her life, maybe.
But her sanity. Her soul.
Can you live through her death one more time?
Does her soul weigh more than the many thousand ones that came before her?
What does yours weigh?