Douglas Clegg [The Vampyricon The Queen of Wolves (epub)

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Others, that the mask was stolen from the temple walls of a conquered god.The mask brought immortality to its first wearer, who then became a god.It has since leeched immortality or mortality from whoever wore it.Nezahual called it the mask of the Ketsali, and claimed ownership.I think he loved the mask more than he loved Pythia.”“You loved her.”I nodded.“Perhaps this love was forced upon me when she brought me into vampyrism.She was avaricious.Lustful.Lazy.Sneaky.Bloodthirsty.How do you love a betrayer? A seducer? A creature who brought her own father to misery? She could not see gold, but she had to steal it.She could not find a beautiful youth, but she must seduce him.That love is like a firestorm.In the centuries that have passed, all love seems.”I could not finish the thought.I felt the old pain at my heart.I had three loves in my early life, and I could not think of any of them without experiencing regret and sorrow.“Yes.I loved her, and others.”“I think most people would not believe a vampyre capable of love,” Natalia said as she reached to the middle of the table to pluck a handful of grapes from a wooden plate.“Some vampyres cannot love,” I said.“There is a love between us, even so.The stream is a kind of love—it flows as if telepathically between all vampyres.We feel the sorrows of those we cannot even see.We understand those who have committed atrocity.We forgive the vampyre his flaws, because to feel what the other feels is to understand completely.That is a kind of love.But I suspect love doesn’t interest you tonight.Or does it?”“What about your children? You had two with Enora.”“Lyan, my daughter.Taran, my son,” I said.I did not like to think of them anymore.It had taken me centuries to want to recall their young faces.“Surely you had not given up on them? Even their mother—I can’t believe you had given up on her.”“A vampyre? Care about mortal children?” I grinned.“You are not like the others here.I know that.You loved Enora once.She was the mother of these two children.Did you truly give up that love?”“Despite all she had done? I had watched her eat the heart of her youngest brother, his blood along her lips and chin.She was more the monster than I.How could I love her then? When she destroyed vampyres and burned many of the forest women—could I love her, despite this? When she.did all that she could, using bog sorcery and the old magick that the Myrrydanai taught her.No, I could not feel that pure love again for her that I had felt when our world had still been a place of innocence and purity.”“But she was a prisoner of Medhya herself—a hostage to the White Robe priests.”“Yes.A hostage.I could be blamed for her transformation, for it was my death at Pythia’s hands and my resurrection from the Sacred Kiss that brought about her descent into darkness.When I professed my love for her, and we took our passion into a chapel, beneath the gaze of the stone virgin, did either of us truly understand how love could turn to daggers in a heartbeat? We conceived our twins that night, and I was sent to war soon after.What war taught me was mortal waste and the inability of humankind to value what is within its grasp, and instead to value what others hold.Wars are for wolves and scavengers.“So I grew to hate the world.While Pythia drank my blood in a tower of Hedammu, my beloved Alienora received news of my death, and then rumors of my damnation.Yes, the Myrrydanai priests began to dominate her.Yes, she turned to bog sorcery to learn my fate, and to try and bring power into her soul that she might—perhaps—save me.The taste of the magick of the forest turned her to a darker magick, to the bogs where the hounds of Medhya whispered to her of ancient sorceries, of plagues to be born, of dreams brought as a Disk into the world.It was her decision to spill the blood of our children to call up shadows from the bog.It was her decision to murder her family that she might become baroness after her father’s death.She sought power, and showed her true nature—a nature that is hidden when we’re young and untested.”“You drink blood,” Natalia said.“You have sipped from my throat for many nights.You have murdered many men.Don’t pretend you’re not a monster.Perhaps you are more monster than a vampyre like Daniel, who is honest in his bloodthirst.”I nodded.“I am no hero of mortals, I know this.What seems brutal is instinct to me.What seems bloodthirsty is merely.survival.”“You could hate Enora for her crimes,” Natalia said.“You could love Pythia, despite hers.And your friend Ewen.He, too, murdered [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Pokrewne