The stones of Volterra do not remember. They are deaf to the centuries they've witnessed, their cracks smoothed by time's indifferent hands. I, however, am a prisoner of memory, a prisoner to myself, a prisoner to stand witness to the bonds swirling around me from every mortal and immortal alike. The weight of it clings to my bones like lichen, green and persistent, even as the world outside of these walls spins forward, heedless of my stillness.
Morning light slants through the high, narrow windows, a pale imitation of the sun I once knew. It paints the council chamber in shades of ash and bone. Aro insists on these meetings at dawn, not because daylight holds any power over us, but because he enjoys the theater of it—the way the light gilds his theatrics, turning his gestures into shadow puppetry. It would have been amusing, perhaps to an audience that was in a far better mood, but Aro was cursed with the immortal plight of having Caius and myself as his morning audience.
"Marcus," Aro sighed, sweeping into the room. His voice is honeyed, edged with the faintest scrape of a blade against stone. "You're brooding again. It's so very… mortal of you."
I do not look up. The grain of the oak table holds more fascination than his performative concern. It always would. "And you're predictable, Aro." Beside him, Caius snorted, a small smirk playing on his lips. As long as someone was happy with these events, I guess I could live with that.
They take their seats as I continue looking down, happy to keep as much verbal distance between the three of us as possible.
"It would have done Heidi a lot better to bring this lot earlier, so we could properly get to business." Caius was irritated, fingers twitching against the arm of his throne in frustration. Aro simply hummed in acknowledgement.
The gardens are my refuge, though they are not mine, nor are they even Thena's. Even here, among the cypress trees and roses preserved in eternal bloom, I feel the ghost of her. Didyme's laughter lingers in the rustle of leaves, her smile etched into the petals of the white camellias she planted. The gardeners avoid me; they think I don't notice their trembling hands as they prune the hedges into submission.
"You're wasting your time," Aro chided once, catching me here at dusk. "There's so much more you could be doing, other than sulking here."
I would just look down at the Earth, muddied from watering but still somehow absolutely beautiful. Millennia ago, my life too had been absolutely beautiful, as muddied as I may be. I wished that the Earth could somehow bare some of my memories for me, absorb the grief from within my bones and lessen the load by a fraction. But the earth is not cursed to remember. Not the way that I am.
Thena would often chastise Aro, tell him that he's being overbearing and should leave me alone for the time being. Ever since the departure of Didyme, I had grown incredibly close with Thena, her taking on a doting older sister role towards me. She became fiercely protective of me.
A sparrow lands on the stone bench beside me, its heart a frantic drumbeat. I could crush it without thought, yet it tilts its head, black eyes unblinking. For a moment, I envy its simplicity—its life measured in seasons, not centuries. This sparrow will never know heartbreak, grief, depression. This sparrow will live out its' short existence within a wonder and obliviousness of the world that I'll never understand. Then it flies away from me, and I am left with the hollow echo of wings.
The mortal girl in the piazza is selling lilies. Their scent is cloying, saccharine, but I pause anyway. She cannot be more than sixteen, her cheeks flushed with the artifice of life. Her hair is in pigtails, and I find myself growing almost attached to the view of innocence. She's adorable. When she meets my gaze, her pulse stutters. Fear, yes, but something else—curiosity. A foolish thing, to find beauty in the dark.
"Un fiore, signore?" she asks, holding out a stem.
Her voice is a thread, fragile yet bright. I take the lily, my fingers brushing hers. A flicker of warmth, a heartbeat, and then nothing. She shivers, though the sun is high.
"Grazie," I murmur. For a moment, I allow myself to assess her bonds. She is in love with the boy who works at the bakery across the street from her flower stand. He likes her back, but he's unsure, worried almost. She intends to follow him to the ends of the Earth to make him love her back. She dreams of happiness and grandeur. I spend a moment absorbing their bond, basking in the fresh pink and white spiraling colours that linked the two juveniles together. How sad the two of them might be, one day.
I leave a gold coin on her cart. It will mean nothing to her, in the end.
Night falls, and with it, the pretenses of day. I retreat to the library, where the scent of parchment and dust is a balm. The books here are Aro's trophies, first editions bound in leather and hubris. I trace a finger along their spines, feeling the weight of words that changed nothing.
"You linger in the past," Didyme whispered once, millennia ago, her breath ghosting against my neck as she pressed a poem into my hands—a mortal's ode to a dying star. "But the past is a language no one speaks anymore."
She was wrong. Didyme had been so, so wrong, in the end. I speak it fluently, in the silence between heartbeats. I would now always speak the language of the past, always recall back to her. It would always fall back to Didyme. That very language was the language that still linked her back to this mortal plane.
Aro visits the most during the nights, but I am not in the mood to talk. I am never in the mood to talk, why would I be? We sit in silence together, absorbing the scent of the library, basking in the silence together. Occasionally, he reaches out to brush a hand against mine, a small intrusion on my thoughts, and I would allow him to see. He seems discontented with what he's hearing, but cannot come up with anything reassuring to say, so instead he will sit vigil by me in the way that a cat stand guard for their sick human.
When he leaves, I extinguish the candles one by one. Darkness suits me better.
In the quiet, I open the drawer of my desk. Beneath maps of forgotten wars and treaties written in dead tongues lies the poem Didyme gave me. The ink has faded, but the words remain etched into the paper:
"We are all broken constellations,
searching for our missing pieces
in the wrong skies."
Happiness and grandeur. Maybe that's what we should all be seeking in the end. My happiness and grandeur had been cut so short, taken away from me so soon. I wasn't sure what to search for anymore after experiencing that within my existence. There was nothing else beyond that, as far as I was concerned. Curtains.
The sparrow returns at dawn. This time, I do not envy it.
A hand clamps down on my shoulder, fingers digging into the wool of my coat with familiar, unyielding force.
"You're thinking too hard again," Thena says, her voice a blade sheathed in smoke. She steps beside me, her black velvet cloak stark against the silvered landscape. Caius's mate, the Volturi's unflinching sentinel, the goddess of war. And unfortunately, or fortunately depending on the day, my keeper.
"I wasn't thinking at all," I lie.
She snorts, a sound more cat than woman. "Liar. You've got that look—like you're trying to dissolve into the mist. Again."
I turn my face away. The city glows faintly in the valley below, a hive of fleeting hearts. "Why do you bother, Thena? You know I'll only disappoint you in the end."
She seizes my chin, forcing me to meet her gaze. Her eyes are the color of tarnished rubies, sharp enough to flay souls. "Disappoint me? You're not some mortal child, Marcus. You're a king. Act like one."
"A king of what?" The words slip out, brittle and broken. "Rotting stone? Ghosts? Or is it the blood we spill that crowns us now?"
Her grip tightens, then relents. A flicker of something ancient crosses her face—not pity, never pity. Recognition. She releases me and strides ahead, boots crushing the brittle undergrowth. "Hunt with me," she commands, not glancing back. "The stench of your melancholy is becoming exhausting to bare."
I follow, because I always follow.
We find them near the ruins of an old chapel: two lovers, foolish enough to wander beyond the city's glow. Their hearts drum a duet, their breath mingling in the cold air. The girl laughs, her head thrown back, throat exposed. The boy's fingers tangle in her hair, blind to the darkness pooling around them.
Thena leans close to my ear, her voice a venomous purr. "The girl. She's yours."
I stiffen. "I don't want her."
"You don't want anything. That's the problem. But you'll take her anyway. Because thirst is the only thing that doesn't lie to us."
The boy sees us first. His scream is cut short as Thena moves—a blur, a sigh, a crack—and then he is a crumpled marionette at her feet. As quickly as Thena killed the boy, I followed through and killed the girl. No soul should have to witness what she almost had, so young.
Instead of sprinting back towards Volterra, we decided to walk, absorbing the silence together. This was just often the way I spent time with people now.
"Didyme wouldn't recognize you."
The name splits me open, a wound that never scabs. Didyme. My soul's own shadow, her laughter now ash in my throat. Thena knows this. She wields this. I look at her incredulously, biting back the pain in my chest. Why?
"You cling to her ghost like it's a religion. But even gods die, Marcus. Especially gods."
I close my eyes, tilting my head up towards the sky. "Then let me die too. Put me out of my misery."
Her hand strikes my cheek, cold and stinging. "No." The word is a vow, ironclad. "You don't get to leave. Not while I'm here."
"Why?" My question is a rasp, a beggar's plea. Surely, she had to understand that this would be my only necessary end. Everyone should have understood that by now. But they never admitted it, simply clinging onto me, as grim as I had become.
She stills. For a moment, the warrior falters, and I see the ghost of the woman who holds Caius's heart—not with gentleness, but with a ferocity that matches his own. Thena was fierce, particularly so being Caius' mate, but she didn't want to listen to me prattle on about my own death, and it was unfair to make her listen to that regardless.
"Because," she says quietly, "eternity is a desert. And I refuse to cross it alone."
I snorted, something almost close to amusement. "Taking after Aro's theatrics?"
Thena shook her head disapprovingly. "Of course not, but I'd much rather still have all of my companions with me when I finally leave this Earth. Eternity has been exhausting, you know."
I wished that Thena's hopeful views on existence could somehow be right. The length of my own existence paled in comparison to hers—a creature older than time itself. She does not remember the womb of humanity, the fragile heat of a mortal heartbeat, or the taste of air untainted by centuries. Thena's first breath was not a beginning but an awakening—a rupture in the silence of a world still stitching itself together. When she opened her eyes, it was to a sky unburdened by stars, a horizon raw and formless, as though the cosmos had not yet decided what it wanted to be. Her name was the only word etched into her marrow, whispered by a voice that might have been her own, or the earth's, or something older still. Athenadora. Not a gift, but a command.
For eons, she had wandered the skeletal and broken landscapes of a planet still learning its' shape, as she learned about her own life as a vampire through her own trial and error. Thena had had no guidance in her newborn life, not in the way that most immortals had. I hadn't had guidance either, but I had been lucky, managing to find Aro within a few years and finally acquiring myself a companion. I hadn't been alone for very long in the grand scheme of things. Survival became a language that she mastered expertly, all without a teacher. Thena had dueled many of the earliest vampires, never allowing herself to back down from a fight as she felt like she had no option but to fight to endure. For Athenadora, it had taken millennia before she found a single soul that she managed to trust—Caius.
"You'll thank me one day." Thena mutters, breaking me out of my thoughts. Her tone lacks conviction.
I almost smile. "Will I?"
Thena shrugs her shoulders. "I just think that there has to be more for you Marcus."
I could have laughed at her, but decided to spare her the embarrassment. "You'll find yourself feeling very disappointed if you try to hold onto that notion, Thena. What purpose is there in outliving the stars themselves for me now?"
Her eyes glimmer, and a flash of what almost looks like fury flickers through them. "Purpose? You think purpose is simply gifted by the universe? It's clawed out of the dark, just like everything else is. You've led armies, and now grief leads you. You're a statue that was once my brother."
I shook my head. I felt shame burn within me at her words. "You're so far above us, Thena. What binds you to this theater, if not only just Caius?"
She smiled, bitter yet somehow still bright. "I only stay to remind the dark that it does not truly own us."
I shook my head as a memory surfaces. Thena, year 80 B.C. standing on a hilltop during another hunting trip, one quite similar to this. We'd spent a lot of time hunting like this, over the growing time we'd spent together. "We are the teeth of eternity, Marcus." She had told me as we walked homed. "Bite, or be devoured."
"You've always known exactly what you are, even before you truly did." The admission tasted like rust as it left my lips.
"And you?" She stepped closer to me.
The wind shifts, carrying the distant cry of a nightingale. I close my eyes, and for a moment I am not with Thena, but instead I am in a field of sunflowers, Didyme's laughter weaving through the golden petals as she dances underneath the sun. It had been one of my many grand gestures for her, to simply carve out sections of the countryside and implant thousands of gorgeous flowers, just for her. Didyme had wanted to live simply to spite the gorgeous stars above her peaceful, happy head, sparkling in the sunlight as she ran.
"I don't know how to be anything else." I whisper.
Thena's laugh was a spark in the dark. "Then pretend. Until the pretending becomes a second skin. Safety. You'll learn to revel in the mask."
The mask. I wasn't sure if I could ever revel in something like that. In pretending that I wasn't indeed this shattered, mangled thing. I wanted people to understand that I could quite literally describe the way that the sky bends and breaks before it's about to fall on you. I wanted them to understand my grief. I was bitter.
We reach the tall walls of the castle, our fortress in Volterra, and Thena jumps up the wall with perfected ease. I hesitated for a moment, and then followed her just as gracefully. Not for empires, or oaths, or the hollow crown.
But for the girl in the sunflowers.