In The Woods Somewhere- Hozier

Bad Luck- BB King

I was led down into the depths of Volterra by a stranger, a young woman of Asian origin with silky dark hair and a guarded expression. She came not long after Jane left, with a soft rap at the door and a monosyllabic greeting. Her eyes glimmered a daring red that reflected the imposing dawn.

I followed her through the church through a door that appeared a closet but led down a dark hallway. This soon opened into a much larger room, with towering ceilings and dark marble floors.

There were no windows here, nothing to expose any secrets that were so carefully guarded. But there was an elegant desk at the end of the room, and seated at it was a pretty young woman with tanned olive skin and a beating heart that almost echoed in the cavernous chamber.

She stood immediately when she spotted us, though that took until we were nearly in front of her. It must have seemed to her weak eyes that we appeared from the darkness, but she didn't seem to be surprised or startled. I supposed this was a common occurrence to her, and she greeted us with a warm smile.

"Welcome," she said cheerfully.

I couldn't hide my frown. She shouldn't be here, in this dark room, hidden from the sunlight and from her own people. I knew that she knew exactly what occurred. That's why she was here, after all. She was sure to have witnessed scores of people somehow led to the depths of this enclave, never to return.

She knew the horrors and chose it nonetheless. And I knew she was doubtful to attain what she thought she wanted. The Volturi had for centuries been employing humans to further their agenda in the human world with the promise of eternal life, and I had never known them to grant that wish.

This vibrant, alive girl, barely acquainted with the world, and she would be gone before she knew it. I stared at my feet, finding that looking at her was more painful than I could manage. I was already bearing a great burden, carrying it in the hollow of my chest and forcing my spine to stay straight against its oppressive weight. I couldn't take on any more. This girl had chosen her fate, and that was the end of that.

Some things had changed, even in this world that so clung to ancient powers. Metal doors glided open and we stepped onto an elevator, one that played the lulling sounds of Britney Spears Muzak as we descended further into the pits of hell.

We emerged into another hallway, this one I was entirely familiar with. Straight down it led to where I needed to be. The throne room where Aro and Caius held court, where I could plead my case before them and hope for a decent mood.

I could feel the nerves building, trembling in my body. I only had to maintain the same truths I told Felix, the same story I repeated to Jane. None of it was lies, everything Eleazar could easily back up.

I hated my gift. It was useless, dangerous. It painted a target on my back and put everyone I knew at risk, and it wasn't even enough to protect anyone I loved, much less myself. My mind being a place of privacy wouldn't keep me from having my arms ripped off by Felix, from being held down as my family was targeted on the other side of the world, far beyond where I could ever even hope to reach them.

After all, I couldn't even keep Edward and Alice safe from a newborn tracker.

My fear was set aside, hope squashed, when my companion made a sharp turn down another hallways, leading me away from my goal. My salvation, my damnation, whatever my fate was, going further and further away.

After another turn down another hallways, I knew where she was leading me. I was overly familiar with this part of the compound, and again, nothing much had changed. The walk was narrow, on each side were doors leading to rooms and suites where members of the Guard stayed. The further we went, the more transient these spaces were, but we didn't have to go too far to get to our destination.

The woman stopped and opened the door without ceremony or pause, her hand remaining on the ornate metal knob. She looked at me blankly, expectantly. Waiting for me to follow her unvoiced order to enter.

My feet wouldn't move. I was pinned to my spot in the dark corridor, terrified of the reality of what this could mean. But nonetheless, I shuffled forward and, with a few words from the woman that sounded muffled and distant, I was shut in and alone.

I didn't move from the doorway. It was all I could do to not fall to my knees, because I was somehow back to where it had all started.

This had been my room when I was in the Guard. It was dark, kept cool from the stone walls and lack of light. I knew the morning had come, could faintly hear the world above bustling about with their human demands, but in here it was the pitchest blacks of the deadest of nights.

Nothing seemed to have changed. It could have long since faded, but I smelled nothing in here, couldn't tell that anyone had been in here since I had left. There was my canapé, now musty and old, with ornate wooden legs that were hand carved, framed on either side by mismatched ambulantes that almost buckled under the weight of books stacked, one on top of the other in a precariously balanced tower.

On the other side of the room were two armoires, the door still slightly ajar the way I left it after I stuffed a few dresses into my bag while Carlisle rifled through our other belongings, trying to sort through the most important pieces that we could take with us.

I closed my eyes and manifested the moment. We were both full and flushed with fresh blood from our hunt, energized by our shared revelation of freedom.

We returned through the city gates hand-in-hand. My velvet dress was scandalously short for the era and my hair was undone and spilled wildly down my back, but it was the middle of the night anyways. Carlisle was only in a waistcoat and breeches, his hair curling along his lace collar, his fingers clenching mine.

We moved through the city in silence, slipping through the shadows and ignoring the eyes that were always watching. We had spent the day in privacy, sunning ourselves and sharing dreams for the future, a vision we both agreed would not take place here. Carlisle had never meant to stay for as long as he did, and meeting him had opened my eyes to the possibilities of the world. Complacency was not a good look on me, and exhaustion had worn on Carlisle.

Carlisle technically had his own rooms, given to him the moment Aro decided he was such a novelty that he simply had to be kept around. But he only kept some clothing in there, preferring to spend the time we were corralled indoors in my rooms. They were poorly furnished with shabby furniture, but there were plenty of books and art covered the walls.

We used to spend our days, lounging around, trading stories of childhood and humanity, reading every book we could get our hands on no matter the subject. That night was different. There were no lighthearted jokes traded, no gentle ribbing between us.

We worked as we had travelled- in an uneasy silence. We wordlessly settled on bringing a singular trunk, one small vessel for over two centuries combined of existence. I pulled the most versatile, sparse clothes I could from the armoire, just things that could tide us over until we restarted, as neither of us had much in tangible funds. And even if I had been willing, Carlisle would never abide stealing, even if it was just hose and a dress.

I couldn't bear Carlisle's job. He carefully selected books from our expansive collection. There were things that held sentimental value as well- his father's wooden cross, my da Vinci portrait, the first edition of Don Quixote and the handwritten copy of the second volume that I had begged from de Cervantes.

I knew later, when we unpacked in Portugal on the night before boarding a ship to the New World, what Carlisle had left behind. And it was as I saw before me now.

There was the statue from Michelangelo. He had gifted it to me, but even then it seemed almost a betrayal of my friend, especially after he saved my life. It was an early carving of David, not nearly as large but just as flawless. In fact, I considered it to be even more so. The original had been carved from imperfect marble and was then a victim of disproportion, with his twisted figure and slender torso. This piece was perfect, beautiful, a more youthful expression on David's face, a more careless attitude in the way he carried his slingshot over his left shoulder.

On the wall behind the canapé hung a collection of portraits I had once cherished from Artemisia Gentileschi and her daughter Palmira. Women artists were few and far between, but I had already been changed by the time she gained infamy and I was not free to travel to see her. I sent her a good deal of money to support her, though it never saved her. It was the least I could do, after the trauma of her life, to save her most brilliant works with the intention of giving them back to the world in a time where she would be appreciated, not as a spectacle or a victim, but as a brilliant artist.

It was such a time, I figured, but these paintings still hung, gathering dust in a dark, cool dungeon, with no one to admire them but myself and whomever had come snooping through in the past three hundred years. Artemisia was at least remembered, some of her works surviving in museums. Palmira had been lost to time, and the tragedy of her depiction of Helen, beautiful Helen, standing on the walls of Troy and watching the carnage of the war below, became all the more palpable. At least Helen was remembered. Helen's memory lived on. Who was Palmira, with no one who remembered her left to remind the world she matter?

I had heard the footsteps but didn't turn when he walked through the door with a tentative, measured knock on the door.

"I've been sent to inform you that Aro has been detained with other matters. He sends his apologies for the delay, and hopes you'll be comfortable in your old quarters. Given the circumstances, we can't allow you to leave the building until Aro had collected, er, been given your testimony."

Felix's words were not his own, recapitulated from orders he would never dare argue.

I remained standing, staring at the painting directly in front of me. It was the last installment of a triptych, and much darker than its companions. It told the story of Judith, young and desperate and prostrate before God, victorious and glorious and hoisting the head of Holophernes with blood dripping down her knife. The one I focused on was the final, untold piece of the story. Judith, alone in an empty room with a single candle casting sorrowful shadows on the wall. Judith was old, her hair greyed and lines carved deeply over her brow. In one hand, she clutched a small round object- to this day I wasn't sure what it was. In her other hand, was a skull.

"If I've heard correctly," I said slowly, my words suddenly heavy and hard, "I'm not to leave this room until Aro decides to see me."

I still hadn't moved and thus couldn't gauge Felix's expression, and his tone gave nothing away. " You know how things get here. And the world is so much bigger and more complicated these days. There are countless affairs to manage, crises to address, justice to administer," he justified defensively.

I did know how things got here. I knew that nothing was so pressing that Aro couldn't be pulled away for a short time. The very basis of my being here was shaky at best when Aro could have extracted the memories of Alec, Jane, Felix, and Demetri to have a full, encapsulating picture of a situation that now felt so far away that I wasn't even sure what I was doing here anymore.

"Would you care for a game of chess to pass the time?" Felix offered. I glanced over my shoulder at the hulking figure in the doorway, his hair cropped short and his posture stiff and straight. He was the picture of a good soldier in mind and body, and I knew, for sure, that I was alone here.

"Okay," I capitulated, against my better judgement. I had the pitting yearn for isolation, to wallow in loneliness that I knew I couldn't feed.

Felix flashed away for a moment, darting down the hall and along the main corridor to his own suite. I had never been in them, but I knew them to be far more expansive than my own, with several rooms and accoutrements he was sure to have collected over the centuries. Not to mention, Felix was a well-known conqueror in the bedroom of vampires and humans alike, though the later never left alive.

When he returned, it was with a board under one arm and a velvet bag of chess pieces in hand.

Carefully, I collected some of the books from one of the ambulantes and moved it forward. Felix placed the board and began setting up the pieces while I patted the dust from the canapé before he sat.

The human trait of needing to sit, to appear comfortable in order to socialize was one that Felix was indulging me in as he perched beside me, the intricately carved wood groaning but maintaining under his weight. He grinned at me sheepishly, shedding some modicum of his seriousness as he moved a white pawn forward.

I countered with my own pawn, and the game began.

"Have you ever read Hume?" I asked quietly. There were sure to be ears listening in. There was no such thing as being truly alone in the Guard's quarters, especially not in such a preciously favorable location. I was almost surprised that my belongings weren't cleared out to make way for some other surely important figure that had come along.

"The philosopher? I've heard of him, but you know I've never been much of a reader. I do like comics, though. A very fun invention of the past century."

I rolled my eyes and took his rook, unable to quite laugh at his attempt to lighten the mood. There was something in me that prevented a smile, even to be polite.

"Moral intuitionism, as Hume taught, is the idea that our natural inclinations are sufficient to guide us ethically," I started.

"By us, you mean humans, though."

"That was the context by which Hume wrote, but are we really so different?"

Felix scoffed. "Of course."

"Really, though. Don't we have the same basic drives and desires? We were human once, after all."

"Humans are not so near to us," he stubbornly maintained.

"Fine, fine," I capitulated, pondering the board. There was no point in dwelling so long on a topic I wouldn't win, at least right now. "For the sake of the argument, the hypothetical, let's pretend Hume was writing about vampires."

Felix nodded, his lips pursed as he toyed with the white marble cross that crowned his bishop.

"What if the individual was left alone to adjudicate moral decisions, in the vein of moral intuitionism?"

"That would be absurd. There would be chaos, like in the time before. Can you imagine someone like," Felix's typically booming voice was reduced to but a whisper, "Jane was allowed to look inward for moral direction?"

I pondered his question for only a moment while he made his move for another pawn. "I'd argue that that's kind of a reductive way of framing what moral intuitionism is. That we feel certain emotional impulses when we made decisions, and that these impulses are to be trusted, because they're just as important as logic or reason or anything else."

"Go with your gut?"

"Essentially," I agreed. "As Hume put it, morality is whatever gives us 'the pleasing sentiment of appearing approbation' and immortality the contrary."

"That seems like a slippery slope," Felix said. I was happy to have him playing along, letting me plant seeds in his thoughts, even if I wasn't being exactly subtle in this pursuit. It was a dangerous game to be playing, with Aro sure to extract the details of this conversation exactly as they happened.

"In the context of our laws, what if I'm someone who's not lawful? Even then, there are still objective truths. Exposing our kind is wrong, however you slice it. I don't care who you are, how saintly you could be and your adherence to every other rule, but if you expose us, it's unacceptable."

Of course this would be his view of moral absolutes. Not murder, but exposure.

The one law I had broken.

"I disagree," I said quietly.

Felix's head snapped up, his thick brows pulling together with fear in his eyes. "Isabella…" he said cautiously, his hand frozen in suspense over his king.

"It's not that I don't believe it's wrong," I continued calmly, though I felt anything but. "Exposure is too dangerous to fathom. We have no idea what the consequences would be, but whatever it is, we certainly can't risk it. I just mean that, even if I believe it's wrong, I feel that it's wrong, I can't prove it. Not objectively, at least."

Felix shook his head, but didn't seem resolute in his disagreement, more reacting instinctively to the challenge.

"Think about it. Take our values, the ones we, especially you, have protected for centuries. If the Volturi are the epicenter of morality, if the Volturi is morality, then all of its dictums have to be moral, don't they?"

"That's not what we fight for, though. I believe in what we fight for so much that I've devoted my existence to it. I would never leave. But this concept of morality is something contemporary that you're applying to an ancient and complicated system."

"Morality is contemporary?" I asked, but Felix was on a roll. I wondered how long it had been since he truly thought for himself.

"Plus, maybe the Volturi created morality, continues to create morality. What was the world before the Volturi instituted our laws? Dark, violent. Humans oppressed, which I know you find distasteful."

"Hold on," I interjected again. Our game was forgotten before us, most pieces discarded with only my king, a bishop, and two pawns, and Felix's king and queen in a surprisingly even show of strategy. "Whether the Volturi creates morality doesn't really make much of a difference in this argument, does it?"

Felix frowned, but the rest of his body was still while I tapped my foot and anxiously bit at my bottom lip. He was not practiced nor reliant upon human traits. "Yes it does. If the Volturi creates morality, then the Volturi is synonymous with morality. That's the very basis of the justice system we operate within, that we enforce. The Volturi created morality, put it in place, and then we, the Guard, almost as if a separate entity or force, carries out those commandments. Or, rather, all of vampirekind, not just the Guard. The Volturi can give us commands that are moral, or that have nothing to do with morality, or-"

"Is that important, though," I said, now my turn to interrupt. I was feeling alive, a buzzing of excitement in my fingers. This room was home to decades of memories of doing this, just sparring with a different partner. It's how Carlisle and I formed the system of ethics we created our family around, and how we formed a bond in the first place. It was, momentarily, slightly less painful than what I had been enduring. "The details are irrelevant because whatever the Volturi contains must be, at minimum, not immoral. But really, of course, that threshold is way too low. Everything it contains should be moral."

Felix's brows twitched again at my criticism, but I cared less and less about the danger. I could almost hear something, someone, encouraging me along.

"This can't be controversial, Felix. You're going to tell me that every last part of the Volturi is defensible on normative moral grounds? The foundation, the destruction, the brutality of the early years-"

"I'm not going to pretend to understand everything," Felix said. "We weren't there, and can't understand the complicated political environment, the conditions and pressures that led to the Volturi. There are things that exceed our comprehension, things that challenge-"

"It's a lovely idea, but that's not just blind faith then, it's lethally nearsighted. Because either certain commands are fundamentally immoral, in which case the Volturi is immoral, in which case we have ourselves a bit of an issue, don't we? Or, on the other hand, maybe such commands are not intended to last forever, are supposed to evolve, but then morality doesn't age very well- which is a particularly prescient issue for our kind. Pick your poison, because either way, doesn't that given us a collection of artificial, terrifyingly meaningless boundaries?"

"No," Felix said strongly, clearly, his mouth turned down and his forehead crinkled with the intensity of someone attempting to untangle complex mental knots. "because, again, you're just applying incongruous standards. Like, what if vampires simply weren't ready until the Romanians were overthrown? Aro, Marcus, and Caius couldn't just impose crazy laws on the vicious and uncivilized all at once, laws they wouldn't understand and didn't make sense according to cultural and historical standards. In that case, their way of transmitting morals is pretty genius. Gradual, steady, increasingly ethical."

I nodded, victory impending. Felix had named Aro and Caius directly, instead of the circuitous Volturi.

"That's an appealing option to you? Is it better to follow a system that reveals itself in revolutions that shock society's historical and cultural standards but apparently cannot convince its own people to adhere to that moral system? Because otherwise, there would be no need for enforcement. There would be no immortal children, no armies, not exposure." There would be no death of humans, no murder, no violence, I continued mentally, still restrained enough to not alienate him, or else make the entire conversation into a joke. "In my mind, we're better off just calling the whole thing like it really is."

Felix studied me, not warily but curiously. He was open, his mind willing to accept what he wasn't even aware of. "Which is?"

I chewed on my bottom lip, the danger rising again. This was heresy, if there was such a thing. And to do it in Volterra, in the depths of the Guard, to a senior member of the Guard who would soon reveal all, however unwittingly, to Aro, was the most dangerous aspect of it all.

"Our system is immoral," I said softly. I was unable to meet his eye, instead quickly looking around for something else to stare out. My gaze settled back on the triptych, but this time instead on the other side of it. The piece that portrayed Judith, laying before the heavens, her body on the ground and her face and hands turned towards the heavens. Tears poured down her cheeks, anguish enshrined on her body as she begged for forgiveness and strength. In the story, she was asking God to make her a good liar so she could befriend and seduce Holophernes. The moment she was close to him and he was vulnerable, she would slit his throat and take his head and, ultimately, save her people. But before that, she was just a scared woman giving herself over to the highest power she knew.

"You've given me a lot to think about," Felix said stiffly.

"I bet you haven't thought this much in centuries, huh?" I teased, trying to draw out his familiar lightheartedness. And it seemed like I was successful, because he treated me to a grin.

"Just three hundred years," he joked, and I rolled my eyes in turn.

"It seems like I won, huh?" I said, nodding towards the board.

"You wish!" Felix exclaimed, "I still have my queen!"

"Bring it on, big guy," I said, folding my fingers and staring at him expectantly. It was just a fraction of a second, but I saw his eyes dart towards the door and back before he nodded and moved his lone pawn, repositioning it to block in one of my own.

I had more pieces, but it seemed like Felix played the game often. He was more familiar with professional strategy, and his queen quickly disposed of one of my pawns and, after some chasing, took my bishop, leaving my king exposed and open for a check mate.

The game was over.