Chapter 1: Origins 

        I always knew that demons existed. Catholic teachings and the darkness of the plague had only confirmed such. Good and evil have persisted in endless war for centuries. Magic, devils, soul-binding contracts, and the supernatural. None are as hidden from humanity as they should be and for as long as I’ve known about their existence, I’ve fought against them, this was the case for as long as I lived. All is to say, I would have never believed you if my past self was told that I would become all of which I used to fight against.

        Everyone these days is aware of the legend of the vampire. Dracula, Nosferatu, Carmilla, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dark Shadows, My Baby Sitter is a Vampire, Interview with a Vampire, Twilight (which I could never bring myself to enjoy, and not, contrary to popular belief, because my name was blatantly stolen and bastardized for the sake of some moody love interest). Vampires today are a well-known, well-loved concept. It seems that every person on planet earth knows the legend and every teenage girl has, at least once, thought about wanting an edgy vampire boyfriend. It seems as though our deepest secrets–how one of us is created, our vital weaknesses, even how we govern ourselves–has been leaked in some way through the media to the ready eyes and ears of the public. Thankfully, many more twisted versions of the truth of our kind have been released than the verities that could expose us. Although I do believe the best part of our recent fame is how uncontrollably much the media fawns over us. If it were any less than a nauseating amount, people might actually begin to think we exist. For better or worse, we have become but the beloved fictional characters of mortals. In this day and age, I can be accused of being a vampire without the fear of an angry mob with wooden stakes and pitchforks being the thing to follow. Quite a strange time to be alive, indeed. However, the one thing that everyone seems to miss is the question of how it all started. Vampires didn’t simply just show up out of the blue, did they? There must be a reason for their existence; there must be one who put the whole ordeal into motion. That is the question I will answer for you today, dear mortal, for at this point I have become so violently and overwhelmingly bored in my immortality that I truly have nothing better to do than publish all my secrets and shortcomings to the world without a shred of doubt that not a single part of this content will be taken with any shred of seriousness.

        Vampires, unlike any other dark creature or demon-like species, are a relatively new occurrence. Of course, there have been legends of undead and creatures that come from hell ever since people have died and hell existed, but vampires, true vampires as they exist today, have only been around since late antiquity. I suppose it isn’t exceedingly surprising, after all, when you think of vampires, I’m sure you think of a brooding man in the 1800s, and much less so a night stalker of the ancient world. I like to think of us as the modern adaptation of a demon: not all too dissimilar in existence or function, but more so aesthetics and details. All that is to say that the first vampire originated in Constantinople in 542 CE, an unrivaled, glorious year for the eastern Roman Empire and when the Justinian Plague reached its heart. 

        I myself was born in 516 CE in the same city that brought my death. My family had a long history of my quite wealthy ancestors from Athens. I was the first of my family to be born outside of Athens, the first to sever generations and generations worth of history. My family had been around all throughout ancient Greece and well before that but in the 6th century, my father wished for that to change. With the rise in popularity of Constantinople and its Christian population, it became the newest fixation of my father. Betraying centuries of Hellenism, he converted to Christianity and set sail northeast to the capital of the Roman Empire with his new, pregnant wife, to further his position in the empire’s military. My relatively short life as a mortal was, for the most part, a comfortable one. My family was quite wealthy from owning a large network of merchant ships as well as fairly notable from a long line of military service, so we were easily able to afford a large plot of land in the new city with a large estate fit for a family much bigger than ours. I was well educated, well, respected, and well trained to become a soldier in my own right. I was set up to have the ideal life of a man in the Roman Empire. I lived every day with the glory of my family name on my shoulders separating me from the commonfolk like an angel’s halo. Wherever I walked, people bowed and cowered in my wake, or, at least that’s how I imagined things in my youth.

        Only a few years after I was born, my mother found herself with another child. Unfortunately, they both died when she was giving birth, taking any previous hope I had of a real sibling with them. I’m sure I would be much more torn up about it if I was any older but as it stands, I hardly knew more about her than her name and therefore haven’t brought myself to show even an ounce of sadness about the ordeal. My father, of course, wasted no time in remarrying a wealthy widow with two children of her own not much older than I. I never paid much attention to my step-siblings. I thought of them as competition, not family–a worse, imposter version of myself that paraded about as though it was in any way related to me. I had one older brother which I hated for casting me in his shadow and replacing my rightful spot as head of the family, and one younger brother, who I blatantly ignored as no one important enough to give even the time of day. 

        To put it plainly, family never meant very much to me. All my family was to me was its name, the immunity and power that came with the title. It had nothing to do with the people that called themselves my relatives. That is, until Prim was born. I was twenty years old when my step-mother gave birth to the first girl of our family, and the first of my living siblings I shared blood with, even if it was only partially. She was the one person in my family that I really, truly cared about. She seemed so sweet and innocent to me, a small, fragile flower amidst a family of men much older and stronger than she. That was why I gave her the nickname Primula, or Primrose. She reminded me so much of the garden of dainty, beautiful flowers in my step-mother’s garden. Oh how I would be proven wrong in the years to come. Although now she’s the greatest pain in my ass, back then she was just a little girl that I couldn’t help but want to protect from any part of the world even the remotest bit unpleasant. Unfortunately for me, that would become increasingly difficult when the Plague of Justinian spread to our home in Constantinople and ravaged the empire. 

        The serenity and glory that had permeated every moment of my life previous was warded off by hordes of rats and the everpresent smell of death throughout the streets. Paradise was slowly corroding, beginning with far off news of plague on the coast and a lack of grain production. Not long after, corpses littered the streets and demons haunted the darkness until life had rotted away to become simply a shadow of what it used to be, leaving us to fall into what seemed to be hell itself. The Four Horsemen had come to visit town and all the empire seemed to be capable of was succumbing to their wrath. Even the emperor himself fell to the disease for a short while. The plague was upon us. My father and younger brother fell ill while out by the coast checking up on the delayed shipments of grain from the fleet our family owned. They died within the year. No longer did our family name protect us. For all the wealth and power and respect of the world couldn’t save us from rotting like the beggars by the coast. Slave or noble, when the plague took its course and we became nothing but blackened, empty vessels of a soul long forgotten, we were all simply dumped wherever there was room. Our haloes, silk, and gold no longer did anything to keep our corpses from falling among those that littered the streets, unable to find a proper burial, souls endlessly wandering without the proper respect, hardly able to find peace in a mass grave. I could feel their spirits every time I left the house–which soon became a very rare occurrence–looming in abandoned alleyways, endlessly pacing in the darkness, unable to find peace, unable to rest, tortured for all of eternity by an unending sickness and out for revenge against any who survived while they were left to decay. 

        I never used to be one for superstition. At the time, I was twenty-six and resentful of yet another addition to my ‘family’: my older brother’s wife, a young woman named Juliana that acted as a bridge between our family and another with wealth just as great as us. She was an odd woman and quite strangely rooted in superstitions and magic practices ancient even at the time. She rarely spoke to me about such interests, most likely in fear that I would condemn her for it, but I often overheard her speaking about her beliefs to her small group of friends when she thought I wasn’t listening. I thought little of these secretive ramblings. At the time, I wrote them off as the silly delusions of a childless woman. As the plague continued to lay waste to Constantinople, however, the shreds of her stories I managed to overhear became increasingly more and more believable. Death and disease hung in the air like a thick fog that invaded your lungs any time you dared step outside your house, flooding your airways and constricting your throat, replacing any room there once was for oxygen with the thick, virulent smog of pestilence. In the dark hours of the night, when the only sounds in the town were distant weeping and the solemn footsteps of the workers conscripted by the emperor dragging corpses from the streets, Juliana’s ghost stories seemed immeasurably more believable. 

        For months on end, I locked myself in my study, hiding from the virus that was threatening to invade my home, having already gained victory over two of my family members. The darkness brought the sickness, the devil brought the disease, and soon pestilence would creep through the crack under my door, too, infesting every pore of my being until I became but one with the shadows. Every night I thought I could hear it, the steady pacings of death outside my door and the looming silhouette of the reaper come to collect yet another victim. I seldom spoke to anyone but the then six-year-old Primrose and occasionally Juliana, whose quiet rantings I could hear every so often through the thin wall that separated our room from my study in the latest hours of the night, although never very clearly. Brief snippets of one-sided conversations of deals with the devil and a cure that had to be somewhere in her books were all I caught. To my paranoid, sleep-deprived mind, they simply blended in with the background noise of my own–very loud–thoughts and were taken as nothing out of the ordinary at the time. It was early December when the bubble of delusions and seclusion I had surrounded myself with finally popped. The darkness was upon Prim. She hadn’t even made it a decade in this world and already the claws of the devil were in her, threatening to pull her down back into the depths in which he came. 

        The long period of paranoid serenity that I had condemned myself to was shattered to pieces in the face of a cruel, unbearable reality. Tears that I previously didn’t believe myself to be capable of in this sheer magnitude poured freely from my eyes and screams of pure anguish that I couldn’t be sure were truly audible or once more products of my delusion tore from my throat, leaving it raw and bloody. The one thing I couldn’t lose, the one thing I had sworn to protect at all costs, my beautiful, precious Prim, was in the jaws of death. With blackened fingertips and coughing fits of blood, she was sure to be not long for this world. Although the details of this year remain foggy in my memory, a scene that has forever remained as clear as broken glass in my mind ever since its occurrence is what any sane person would call the breaking point of a madman. I had Prim in my arms, fingers digging into her flesh as hard as I could without hurting her, desperate to maintain an iron grip on her as if I could prevent her impending death simply by not allowing her to leave my arms. Her head was cradled as gently against my chest as I could manage while blood marred the white fabric of my tunic from a recent fit. Her eyes remained closed. Her expression could’ve been mistaken for peaceful if not for the soft crease of her brow and deathly pale skin. I fell to my knees before Juliana, who looked down at me from her seat on her bed with wide eyes that I couldn’t quite see clearly through the blur of tears in my vision. 

        Words felt like acid in my throat, burning my insides until I finally choked them out as a horse, desperate plead. I confessed what I had heard about her talk of demons and magic and my overwhelming, suffocating desperation to not lose my sister, to not have the thing most dear to me succumb to the dark fog that had overtaken the empire. If the devil managed to drag her down to hell, then I would be quick to follow, I confessed. I begged, for any closeness we might have had, for any mercy in her soul or any kindness in her heart, for any sort of boon she would be willing to grant me. I groveled like a slave, unable to control my tears. Any hint of pride I held before this moment was swallowed and ignored for the time being in favor of the gamble that she might help me. I don’t know how long I begged or how many times I emphasized that I would do quite literally anything in exchange for her aid, no matter how large the favor or what shred of help she was willing to give. I was aware that I was asking for the impossible. Although people have recovered from the plague before, none had made it to such a late stage as Prim was and survived, and none had been able to truly cure it as I was now asking. Despite all my begging, I knew–even in my most desperate moment–that there was almost a 0% chance that she would get even a fraction better. I was literally asking for a miracle from who I could only hope was some sort of practitioner of the dark arts. 

        Eventually, once she recovered from the shock that I’m sure the sudden scene she bore witness to at her knees was to her, she agreed to help, although she ensured there would be quite a heavy price to pay. The words felt like a practiced script at this point as I once more repeated how revoltingly willing I was to cure Prim. I would go to hell and back time and time again if it ensured her survival and I could bring myself to do nothing but drill that into Juliana’s head again and again just to be sure she understood. I would have my soul torn to shreds before my eyes and have to live with the pain for the rest of eternity before I let anything bad happen to her. I had no idea I would follow through with almost that exact promise. 

        I was led down through the estate, urged to be careful not to be seen by a paranoid Juliana. She showed me to a place that, even in my twenty six years of living there, I had never once seen. It was a door just down the hall from my father’s old study and partially concealed behind a curtain that was drawn back from the window directly next to it. Once I saw the door, its existence was painfully obvious, although perhaps equally perplexing. I couldn’t fathom how I had walked past it all this time and never once thought there was anything other than a continuation of the wall because there was simply no reason for that not to be the case. The door shouldn’t lead anywhere. It wasn’t visible from outside the house so it must just lead to a wall, and if not that, then outside. However, that wasn’t even close to the case. Instead, the rusty hinges creaked open to reveal a long, winding staircase lit by nothing but very distant candlelight only barely visible halfway down the stairs. The sight once we finally got to the room wasn’t any less suspicious. Unlit candles circled a large symbol in the center of the stone floor that was carved maybe an inch deep. Books were piled in messy heaps without shelves and loose papers not given even the dignity of a cover littered the place. Discarded candles joined the piles and pools of old wax created little pots that held the new ones in place. Other various symbols and runes were traced with chalk on the walls, ones that I couldn’t even begin to comprehend at the time but now know are each dedicated to an individual or family of demons or other creature of malice. It was lit only by a single flickering torch on the wall, the dim light not nearly enough to make up for the shadows that danced along the walls, mocking my weakness, laughing at me, delighting in my misery. 

        My step-brother’s wife was a demon worshipper. How convenient. The room smelled of must, incense, and old, dusty books. The same haze prevalent in the streets seemed to be present here as well, although not in the exact way. It was lighter here, and although death hung over the room, it was somehow different, like the air had been cleaned, refined so that only the cause remained. The cloud of rot that was before so suffocating had been cleared, leaving only the root of the death remaining, the pure evil that caused it all without anything to obscure it. It was a sharp, cold feeling that sent goosebumps down my spine. It was the cleanest air I had experienced since the beginning of the plague and yet every shred of sense in my head urged me to turn back. Unfortunately, there wasn’t very much sense to make that urge loud enough for me to listen. Juliana began to speak as she rifled through her myriad of books. Her low voice echoed off the stone, soft enough to almost seem comforting and strained enough to send a bolt of doubt piercing through my skull. 

        “There is one thing I can do, however here me when I say that there will be consequences, consequences that I don’t think you are willing to-”
        “I’ll do anything.” My interruption was met with a venomous glare. It was then when I realized that even the softest brown eyes could manage to hold insurmountable volumes of spite.
        “Not for you. For her.” The eerie silence of the room following her words was almost worse than her glare. My heart stopped when the witch’s dark eyes turned to Prim. 

        “What…” I could feel the air rattle through my chest every time I took a breath. “What is the nature of these consequences?”

        “I’ve attempted to cure this disease before to no true success. Healing has never quite been my strength. What has been is transformation. Metamorphosis in exchange for an abandonment of humanity, power for soul. And do not mistake my words as exaggeration, I speak as true as this plague’s lethality. But I can hardly bring myself to believe you would give up this girl’s soul so carelessly after all the effort you’ve put yourself through thus far to ensure it remains intact.”

        “Explain to me exactly how this… transformation works.” I sank down the cold stone wall to sit with Prim in my lap. I suddenly felt like a boy, asking his teacher for clarification on something he didn’t understand in the lesson.

        “I call my patron, he takes a soul in exchange for a piece of him and his power taking up residence in the empty space. There are drawbacks of a demon replacing a soul. You become dependent on blood and flesh to maintain any semblance of your previous humanity and entirely dependent on the constant usage of your gift in order to stave off other consequences of that such. In exchange, you gain immunity from disease, old age, and most paths of death. Essentially, you die and in your place, shadows infest your soul, brought back to life by magic, and use your memories and personality to spread further across humanity. A soul for power, as I said. Someone must die and be forced back again so that she might live.”

        “Stripped of humanity…” My head fell into my hands, my clammy fingers doing little to soothe the ache behind my skull. Prim was coughing again, eyes clenched shut as if a lack of vision would ward away the reaper. 

        “She must die to live.” My eyes stung with the resurgence of salt water. A single tear landed on Prim’s cheek, joining the flood of her own.

        “I don’t recall saying it had to be her…” Juliana had perched herself atop a precarious stack of books when I raised my gaze back to her and had begun to light candles from a large basket behind her. After each flick of her finger and light of the wick, she sent them floating to the points where corner met circle on the edge of the carved symbol on the floor. Her expression was detached and yet, I couldn’t help but note a nearly imperceptible change in her eyes, a relaxation of her posture, a softening of her previous spite. Perhaps pity had finally warmed her cold, reclusive heart.

        “Can you… Can I…?” My words failed as Juliana stifled a giggle. Thankfully, she took no time in completing my sentence. 

        “Well, I suppose if you are so desperate. It would only be courteous of me to lend my aid to a poor soul in need.” She was before me in less time than it took for me to blink, cold, thin fingers lifting my chin up to meet her near pitch eyes that held the smile that her lips didn’t quite. “Despite how little we exchange words, we are still family, are we not? In a way…”

        “Please…” My mouth moved before my mind could catch up with it, as if casting a safety net knowing that otherwise I might say something to compromise such a fleeting chance. No, we were not family. The only family I had was the girl dying in my arms. Not the family my father married into and even less so the women that married into that. And yet I seemed trapped by those eyes, enchanted by her voice and frozen by her spell, utterly helpless and waiting for her to save me.

        “The shadow and the power can be split from one another; they aren’t as tightly bound as shadow to person. The shadow must take over the spot of the soul but magic isn’t exactly guaranteed. As long as my patron is satisfied with a soul, it hardly matters who provided it and who gains the benefits. Of course, it hasn’t actually been done before, no one has been helpless enough to attempt it, so I cannot fully relay the effects. In theory, you, who gave your soul, would take on all the consequences of the shadow, with no magic to save you. You would remain undead and immortal, a demon yourself, an eternal shadow of the girl. Nevertheless, she will live.” Juliana knelt down in front of me and brushed aside my tears, allowing her fingers to linger on my cheek for just a second longer than I would’ve otherwise preferred. Yet her words were promising. My fingers easily curled around her wrist, my movement slow as I attempted to regain my right mind, and gently pried her hand away from me, keeping her hand trapped between mine.

        “Take it. My soul belongs to you. Anything. Please…” My eyes searched hers for any shred of confirmation, only to be met with a small smile that finally reached her lips. 

        “Do not worry, it really only hurts for a moment.”

        She lied. The entire ordeal has remained a blur in my mind since the moment I gained my senses again but the one thing that prevailed throughout the entirety of the fog was the unrelenting, overwhelming agony of it all. My memories were lost in a flood of crimson. At first, it felt like a deliberate, languid ripping, making up for what it lacked in speed in anguish. The time blurred as my memories and the pain seeped into every crevice of my being, beginning in the center of my stomach. I grew increasingly aware of my soul as the ritual stretched on. It was as if it was hardening into a mass of iron, unsure in its shape but deliberate in its presence. I could feel the light it gave in every atom, setting each of my cells ablaze with a hot, electric spark that I only realized the existence of once it was gone. At first, the pain was minimal; a slight tingle in my fingertips, a numbness in my hand, a cold ache in my arm. It was as if my body was being taken over by ice, frozen from the outside, slowly making its way to my heart and soul. My heart felt like stone in my chest, an unmoving lump of coal, unbeaten and unfeeling, more useless than if the space it took up was empty. The weight of it ached, making me wish that Juliana had simply removed it to save me the constant reminder of a heart too blind to the world to be comfortable. My lungs felt as though they were collapsing in on themselves, constricted by roots of ice that buried themselves into my flesh, sharp and nauseating. I was left gasping for breath on the flagstones.

         The air that managed to make its way into my lungs was cold and dry, rattling in my throat and providing not even the slightest sense of relief. It was a great deal of effort to remember to breathe. It still is now. Emptiness is far more comfortable than the dryness hollowing out my lungs and the conscious decision made to keep up appearances has since become quite easily forgotten for the quiet relaxation of death. Death. Getting your soul stripped from you must be one of the worst ways to die. Once the coldness reached my stomach, I began to fight the pull. My consciousness had been stripped, all I could see, hear, feel, was the tiny scrap of humanity I had left, the light in my soul that had become increasingly isolated in a flood of frost bitten skin and hollow, icy organs. It was a lighthouse at the edge of a midnight storm and if only I could reach it, hold onto it, then I would free myself from this eternal desolation of my soul. Every time I managed to pull it back, even slightly, from the grip of the witch, I was filled with something else, a shadow cast by the light and brought to life inside me. It acted as a wall between me and my soul, filling the space it used to take up just to ensure that there was nowhere for me to pull it back to. Not quite an invader, but not quite myself either. It was at home in my body, a familiar hunger, a familiar animosity, but unfamiliar in the entirety of it, the pure, concentrated amount of it that suffocated what was left of my original temperament, starving it of spirit in exchange for an amplification of previously quiet, carnal desires. I thought only of keeping that part of me away. Every devastated attempt was made in vain. My grip slipped, thrown off course by the force of the wind and the waves. That singular slip capsized my ship in the storm, plunging me into the depths of the ocean, cast in wretchedness and forced to drown in the abyss of my sins, destined to only see the warm strains of the sun filtered through the murky, desolate waters that I’ve been sinking in ever since my death. 

        The sense of relief that followed was brief, the eye of the storm before my situation could get even further out of hand than it already had. The fight was over. I had lost but at the very least, it was over. It was a cold, bitter end. If my body was a temple, it had been ransacked; the tapestries burned, the statues defaced, and the altars reduced to rubble, leaving only the tall stone walls, cold and vacant, stripped of any shred of a god they once hosted within their confines. I was left numb, without even the satisfaction of saving my sister to spark any sort of real emotion in my petrified heart besides a distant, dull notion that I should be happy about this. I had supposedly achieved everything I wanted. She was alive. She was without consequence. I had an eternity as her shadow to look after her. And yet I couldn’t bring myself to feel much about it. What I did feel, as I laid there with nothing but the empty stone ceiling in sight, was a growing hunger gnawing at my insides. It didn’t take long for it to come to the forefront of my mind, to eradicate all other thoughts in its easy conquest of my mind. The empty space in my being was easily filled with it. The first consequence of being a vampire, the first and most well known sin: a thirst for blood; a hunger for death. Like the earlier pain, I was easily blinded by it. I could taste the metal of my own blood on my tongue before I felt the slight, sharp pain of my own razor-sharp fangs piercing the inside of my cheek. The bad habit I had previously of doing such when I was hungry was far more unpleasant when I didn’t yet understand how to control my fangs. 

        My body felt as though it was covered in bruises and I didn’t possess a sliver of the motivation it took to stand. Exhausted from the eternity-long ritual, sleep was the first thing on my mind. However, as always seemed to happen in the first couple centuries of my afterlife, my instincts were stronger than my will. I stumbled up the stairs in what was nearly a drunken haze, leaning solely on the wall for support. The sole thing in my mind was the hunt for a warm body, anything I could possibly sink my teeth into. Anything other than Juliana or Prim, who both seemed invisible in my insatiable bloodlust. My first victim was my stepmother, whose room was in the same hall that possessed the room of ritual. She was lying in her bed, brow furrowed and a shimmer of sweat on her forehead from a nightmare. From that point on, I will always remember her as such: blind to the world and bothered only by the triviality of her dream. Her blood ruined the sheets that had been previously so perfect and such a common point of obsession in her neatness. I think she had stopped making them when Father had died. The moon cast a pool of light on the floor. It really was a breathtaking night, although I often lament over my lack of a last sunrise to look back on, not accompanied by the annoyance of being set on fire. Her screams woke my brother. His blood was all the sweeter, this time paired with the joy of a battle won. No longer would he be the source of attention, no longer the first son, no longer the more accomplished. From that point on, I was the sole carrier of my family name, alone aside Prim but still now escorted by the glory previously stolen from me wherever I went. 

        The world cleared once the two bodies, empty now of blood, hit the floor. It was as though I was putting on glasses after spending my whole life without them; as though everything was now so much more obvious, more apparent. I had no idea how I could’ve missed everything I saw now, how I lived before without the inhuman awareness of my immortal life. Once the noise of your own heart and soul is removed, it’s astounding what you can hear, what you can see, what you can notice. The distant song of a bird nearly a mile away, the minute details of every leaf on every tree, and the seductive, mouth-watering smell of blood that at first was so strong for every person, no matter how far from me they were. Unfortunately, as my mind became overwhelmed with new experiences then, my memory seems to fail me now. I remember only vaguely the realization of how unwelcome I was in the world. Burned by the sun, unable to enter homes without invitation, seared by the crucifix, allergic to garlic, appalled by the taste of mortal food, and unable to do anything but lie awake, tossing and turning, in a bed unfit for a corpse. Even my reflection was unwelcome in mirrors, although thankfully they’ve stopped being made with silver long ago so at the very least, that issue has been solved. The only thing that I’ve been delighted and amused by since my death has been my sudden ability to transmute into a bat of all things. It’s been one of my favorite little perks of vampirism, although it is quite unfortunate that only a select few vampires seem to possess such an ability. Quite an interesting discovery as well. It happened around the turn of the 600th century, when I found myself being pushed from a very great height, although for the death of me I can’t seem to remember why, and suddenly I found myself in flight around halfway down.

        It took me a great deal of time to master any one of my gifts. For the first couple decades, and even centuries, I was entirely blinded by my instincts, unable to act as anything but a wild animal, only intent on two things: finding blood and protecting Prim. It took me a shamefully long time to have such a steady hand on my hunger as I do now. In that time, we traveled quite a lot. I was terribly sloppy in my hunting in my early days, which frequently caused us to flee whatever city we were then occupying. I don’t think there’s a single country on earth that we didn’t stay in for at least a few years. After leaving Rome, Prim and I hiked through the middle of Asia and through the frozen Bering Strait where we spent a good amount of time in Alaska. We were caught in the midst of the first crusade in Jerusalem in 1095 in our return, and the Black Plague of 1346 in London, lived in Romania under Vlad the Impaler, was the cause of the lost colony of Roanoke in the late 1500s and circled back so west that it became east so that Prim could create mass amounts of upheaval in the midst of the French Revolution and somehow convince me to take a hike southward through Africa after complaining about my affinity for the cold. It seemed as though bad luck plagued us wherever our little adventures took us. At the very least, it made our travels interesting and my hunts easier to cover. My favorite places to visit, the countries we occupied the longest would easily include Greece, Romania, Italy, and Russia. I much preferred the north. It was quiet, largely undisturbed, and seemed to align with the poetic drama I had forsaken myself to in my early centuries. Alaska was also one of my more frequent visits from far before it was established as part of the United States as it is now. Crossing the Bering Strait that connected Alaska to Russia in the depths of winter was, and still is, one of my favorite journeys to take with Prim. 

        Speaking of Prim, she grew up quite quickly. While I was frozen in time, she raced ahead. She stayed up to date on whatever customs were current of the time: the social politics, the fashions of each place and era, always flitting from thing to thing to thing while I was left behind. She aged normally until around her early twenties, when her age seemed to slow, although I’m not certain if it ever fully stopped, as mine had since it was around that time when she began to make frequent use of her newly discovered ability to shape-shift. Her favorite time periods are always the current while mine seem to stay fixed at least a century or two in the past. 

        Eventually, I began to gather quite a name for myself. Romaios replaced my previous last name once I left Rome, where I had resided for nearly a century after leaving Constantinople, and seemed to follow me wherever I went. This was halfway because the newer vampires I had accidentally created had begun to spread the word of their creator and I couldn’t be bothered to speak to them enough to tell them anything different, and halfway because I haven’t the foggiest idea what my name was before that. My first name, however, remained the same. Evaristus is a name that has been whispered with fear and reverence by my legions of spawn for well over a millennium. Or so Prim tells me. I myself have never taken any great interest in the politics, or even the plain existence of other vampires. The first, second to only myself, was created around fifteen years after my initial transformation when I was caught by a guard in Rome just before sunrise and was forced to flee before a fight caused me to stay out past curfew, leaving the woman I had bitten only partially drained and me with a matching bite mark she had very nicely returned while trying to escape. She met me again but a week later, undead.

        Since then I have been careful to not spread such a disease to many more, although the select few I have killed that didn’t quite remain dead weren’t nearly as careful. I am unaware just how many of us there are. Not much more than a couple thousand, Prim tells me, although the means of how she obtained that information in the first place, I have been too wary to ask. Out of the few that I have met, most recognized me, apparently by the scars I obtained from the ritual (two large gashes: one stretching from the center of my collarbone down through my abdomen, and another that crosses it just under my chest), and a golden ring with my initials pressed into it that has been a habit of mine to wear for the past thousand years. It’s mostly because of the ring that I’ve gone out of my way to keep the same initials over all variations of my names. The most recent also pointed out the tattoo I obtained in 1984 of a primrose on the inside of my right wrist that I had gotten in New York City with Prim, who similarly got a bat just below her collarbone on the same side.

         Apparently word of any sort of my defining characteristics has a way of spreading like wildfire amongst the undead. Prim tells me I’m famous. Every other vampire I’ve met reveres me as someone of note and great importance. I’ve had some come to kill me, having some outlandish idea about taking the crown I supposedly hold and being revered with all the glory that I am. Others that I’ve met cower in fear, as if I’m some sort of god amongst mice, the wisest and most powerful, the father of all. Either way, I was given far more respect than I’m worth. The abundance of vampire-kind is a mistake, nothing more. There is no greater purpose, no undead army coming to destroy the world and drag humanity to the depths of the underworld, no great vampire king overseeing his army from afar. That’s the reason I don’t engage in the messy politics of my kind. I simply cannot bring myself to be bothered. 

        So, I suppose that brings one to wonder what such a great vampire is doing now, in the second decade of the second millennium, after a grand total of 1,506 years walked this earth. Well, much to my great dismay but likely great importance to fit into modern society, I changed my name to Edward Roberts on return to America in 1935. I made my way in and out of several well-known universities across New England and southern Canada in the 20th and 21st centuries, both as a student and a teacher. My affinity for learning and teaching only seemed to grow with the number of my degrees. At this point, I had fully adapted to modern society and was learning to appreciate it as Prim did and participate as any mortal would. I was able to appreciate how much the world had to offer and how much of it I was able to witness over my centuries of postmortem. Even so, it was a distant appreciation, a dull notion that I was both luckier and unluckier than most. I was able to observe everything that mortals could not. Throughout that, however, was a more pervasive notion: that of a nauseating, fatiguing, all-consuming boredom. I had seen everything. Done everything. My love for the world had become estranged and distant. All that was left to do was give at least a fraction of the wisdom I had gained to the next generation, teaching at a university in perhaps the worst place for a vampire to abide but so far Prim’s most beloved place on earth: Los Angeles, California.