Blood burns from heart to bone,
Sand to count days of past;
Dark souls in the Light dethrones,
Hope found in the hourglass.
-Tome of Remembrance
Prologue
The placid moon threw light across the man’s long flowing robes casting shadows of snakes biting the night.
The man walked silently but with a carelessness that seemed unconcerned that the revelers in the simple home ahead may spot him. Firelight from a stone hearth inside the home brightened the room through the leaded glass window but cast shadows upon the merriment within. A young woman in white flitting through the night, round and round she goes, gazing deeply into the eyes of her handsome new husband. Their hands joined together, arms around the generous curves and muscles honed from years in the field. But there was an honesty to them, not one that was unaware of their physical beauty but one that found innocence reflected in each other’s eyes and contentment in their touch. Each turn around they went their images flicking across the windowpane like a child’s luminary toy that cast images on the wall. But with each passing beat shadow fell upon the couple, first obscuring his face, then hers, like they didn’t exist anymore for that brief moment of time, more shadow than light.
The loud clapping of several hands assaulted the man’s ears as they urged the happy couple on, round and round they went, lost in their bliss. The man stalked closer to the door, from all of the noise outside they couldn’t hear his approach.
But what if they did—he wouldn’t allow it—he was God. Fear the almighty wrath of the creator who creates these playthings for his own amusement. They were his, they lived and died at his hand, they lived to serve him not please each other. The hypocrisy of it all, the banality, this simply would not do.
Banality, the man liked how that word sounded, it rolled nicely off the tongue. He would have to use it in his next masterpiece, he thought.
Now the laughter and applause broke to a fevered crescendo, the bride in white arching her back, hips pressed tightly against her man, while he spun her round and round; curls of deep dark hair falling out of a silky white bow, cascading across her face, gossamer ringlets flitting in the light, his muscles bulging through the silky white fabric but holding his treasure with no more strain than lifting a butterfly upon his finger.
This simply would not do. Banality. Happiness and pleasure in each other; boring, he thought. There is only one pleasure and that is his own, these shadows flitting across the window pane, they were nothing more than that, he and only he was real, only his desires needed attending too, her hips would only press to him.
The throbbing in the man began to ache-it was time. Lifting his staff, the dark ebony wood in sharp contrast to pale skin, he paused, the blood stone a breath away from the worn wood door.
Performance anxiety? Of course not, he thought.
But for that moment, he glanced once again to the window catching a fleeting glimpse of the bride lighter than a feather in her lover’s arms. An ache. An echo sounded through the hollow part deep inside.
Pain ripped through his ear as sharpened fangs dug deep into his lobe even as he felt the blood slowly sliding down his neck.
She likes to play rough tonight.
Hands that were not hands slid and slithered across his chest, darkness wrapping dark tendrils across each part of his frame. A coarse tongue started from his neck and greedily lapped up every remnant of blood. Soft lips brushed his ear and sent a shiver down his spine.
“You are God and I am yours,” she whispered.
He brought the blood stone hard against the sounds of merriment inside rapping once, twice, again. Hush like a tomb descended upon the simple home. The door slowly creaked opened; a young man stood silhouetted in the doorframe a lopsided grin froze upon his face as recognition dawned. The sharpened blade slid through his chest like a hot knife through butter. All inside froze as one as if a single breath would break the spell and they would wake from this nightmare that penetrated their dream. The young man toppled over. The lopsided grin falling as the light in his eyes went out. Breaking the spell, as one the men reached for their swords and the handsome husband pushed his bride in white behind him.
“They are nothing but shadow,” the man breathed. “Who knew shadows could scream so loud.”