The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

Who Wants To Live Forever?
04:07 Apr 06 2013
Times Read: 368












In the main forum there is a thread asking who would want to be a vampire, the kind that is immortal and not vulnerable to sunlight and such. Here I quote one of the responses to that thread.



‘A dishonest answer, I know human nature all too well and I know the majority here would take it if they have a chance.

The whole "I hate being a vampire/ I don't want to live forever" is the very common "angst broody personality" cliche or at least their attempt to avoid being a fanatic of vampirism. There would be some who does not desire to be immortal but on a site like this, they would likey be the minority.’



Being who I am, I read that post and thought that I had to respond to it. But then I decided that my response would be far too personal to share with the entire site and that I’d rather just share it with my closest friends here. Perhaps the above statement would hold true for the majority, but it certainly would not hold true for me. I am a natural born vampire, to use the most commonly adopted terminology, and as such I have looked down the long path of what immortality can really mean.



To me, immortality would truly be a curse, a trap from which there would be no escape, a torture with no end. This mortal life that I have led thus far has been too hard, too painful, too full of different griefs and sorrows to make immortality look the least bit appealing to me. There have been times in my life that have been so full of sorrow, so saturated with despair that I could scarcely breathe for the weight of grief that it put on my heart. How could I face enduring that forever?



Yes, those pains and griefs gave way after a time, but what if I came across one such loss that was so all encompassing, so completely devastating that I could never recover from it? To then face the reality that I was trapped in such anguish for all of eternity would not only drive me completely mad, it would break all that was left of who I am. And, if I cannot even hold on to who I am, what then is the use of immortality? What is the point of enduring so much suffering if all there is to look forward to is more suffering? I would be the most insane contradiction: a suicidal immortal, a being who longs for an end that, by its very nature, can never come. There could be no greater torture.

Pt. 7/ Into the Night
04:05 Apr 06 2013
Times Read: 369






I left my husband and moved back to California to fight my dad’s attempt to adopt my son out from under me. I won that court battle, but I think that most all of the credit for that victory goes to Daniel for being courageous enough to refuse my dad and give voice to his own wishes. Once the court case was over, my business in California was complete, but I had nowhere else to go, so I stayed with my sister and her family. One day I got a phone call from a woman I didn’t know. She explained that my ex-husband was stalking her and two other women in Kentucky and that she had found my number and called it to see if there was anything I could tell her that might help the women get a restraining order against him. I was happy to help in any way that I could.



In the process of this, I met Lady Amethyst Willow (or Willow for short) as she was one of the women that my ex was stalking. We hit it off right from the beginning, becoming the best of friends and, later, long distance lovers. I think I fell in-love with Willow the very first time I heard her speak. It wasn’t just her sultry voice that attracted me, it was the way that she said things and how effectively she communicated anything she wanted to say. She was smart, smart enough to keep up with me, which I had never experienced in a relationship before. That only attracted me to her even more.



I had never made a habit of telling people about my past as a vampire; quite the opposite, really. I went out of my way to tell no one about it and for all of the reasons that we all hesitate in sharing that side of ourselves with others. They simply would not understand. But there was something about Willow that made me feel that I could trust her with the secret of my past. She had invited me to come to her out in Kentucky so that we could be together but, before I made yet another cross country move to yet another place I’d never been before, I had to know if I could trust her with all of the secrets of who I am. So, on one of the nights that we were having a marathon session of talk on the phone, (the typical length of these calls was anywhere from 1-2 full days and nights), I decided to tell her about my past. I already loved her completely and I had to know if she would still love and want me if she knew the full truth about me and my past. So, I told her that I had spent two years as a master in the vampire subculture. In what I now know was typical fashion for Willow, she wasn’t turned off by my past at all. It actually turned her on!



So, I made the trip to Kentucky and made my home with Willow. She made me happier than I had ever been in my entire life. She loved me more completely than anyone I had ever known and as for me, I worshiped the ground she walked on. I still do. As the years that we spent together passed, there were many, many times that Willow asked me to tell her more about my past as The Baroness. I always avoided that subject out of the guilt that I felt about that part of my life. I know that I neglected to mention it before now but, back when I was 17, a big reason that I left the Community had been due to the religious guilt that my mother put me through over my vampire nature. Based on what I now know about my mother’s own past, I should never have listened to her, but I was still young and impressionable when I was a teenager, and especially where my mother was concerned. But the guilt stayed with me, misguided as it was, for many years. So, between that and the stalking experiences I’d had, I did everything in my power, short of glamouring her, to discourage Willow from asking me about my past. But Willow is nothing if not tenacious and, as frustrating as that can sometimes be, it’s actually one of the things that I love and respect the most about her.



There were a couple of times over the years that I did answer at least some of her questions, but I would not Awaken or teach her. That was where I drew the line. During this time, I maintained contact with my son via phone calls. One night Daniel called me and told me that he was experiencing new things that he had no explanation for and he asked me if there was anything I could do to help him. Based upon the things that he was telling me, it was obvious that Daniel’s vampyric nature had been Awakened inside of him and that, with or without me, he was going to seek out more knowledge. I brooded over this for what felt like a long time as I was unsure of what to do. In time, I decided that if Daniel was going to train it was better for him to be guided by me than by one of any number of people whose intentions towards my son would be less than honorable. At that same time, I decided that I could no longer put off Willow either, so I Awakened her first, answering her questions the best that I could.



That was a couple of years ago and both Willow and Daniel have learned much in that amount of time. Daniel has even had students of his own, but has never closed his mind to learning more. Willow is progressing at a wonderful rate and as for me, I have made peace with my vampyric nature and have been happy to have joined Vampire Rave, which Daniel recommended to me. My journey through the Night is only just beginning.

Pt. 6/ This Long Night
04:03 Apr 06 2013
Times Read: 371






I had lost custody of Daniel, but arrangements were made to place him in the care of my dad and his wife, who at that time, lived in the mid-west. They came to California and picked Daniel up to take him back home with them. Soon enough, I left everything I knew behind me so that I could move to the same area in order to maintain contact with my son. Once the guardianship paperwork was finalized, though, my dad began to make my visitations with my son shorten and then stop altogether. I had no legal recourse, that I knew of, and so I found myself completely alone in a strange place, isolated from everyone and everything I knew. The depths of depression that I sunk into then were of mind boggling proportions. And my loneliness was especially profound.



As a side note, it was also during this time that I discovered that I was bisexual, an inner truth that I struggled against very heavily for a long time, due to the religious pressure of my upbringing and my environment. Although I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, I wound up rushing into a marriage in an attempt to “cure” myself of my attraction to other women. My husband was a tyrant and I ended up leaving him just 5 or 6 months after we were married.



By that time, my dad and his wife moved back to California with Daniel and they began court proceedings to attempt to force an adoption of my son. I immediately went back to California to fight those proceedings. A true testament to Daniel’s courage, he took his own objections about the adoption to the lawyers and anyone else who would listen and told them that he didn’t want to be adopted because he knew that, if he was adopted, he’d ever be allowed to see me again. The bond between Daniel and myself has always been an unbreakable one, and the courts saw that and chose to deny my dad’s petition to adopt Daniel. At the end of the court case, though, my dad and his wife remained Daniel’s guardians and they routinely did things to try to keep Daniel and me apart.



Just when I thought that things could not get any bleaker in my life, an unexpected light shone through. My ex-husband had apparently been stalking three women in Kentucky and, after stumbling across my phone number, they contacted me. I couldn’t have known it at the time, but with that first phone call, my entire life was about to change forever.



To Be Continued…..

Pt. 5/ The Ultimate Sacrifice
04:02 Apr 06 2013
Times Read: 372






So, my enemies from within the Clan structure of the Vampire Community had managed to plant, for lack of a better word, a spy in my home. Now, I will be the first to admit that becoming a mother had mellowed me out a-LOT, but not enough to let that go. I had been known for being fierce during my active time as The Baroness but, when it came to my son and the sanctity of my home, my former fierceness paled in comparison. I made quick work of ridding my home of it’s now *very* unwanted guests and my family and I agreed that staying in that town was no longer an option if we wanted to live any semblance of a normal life. The town was too small for us to disappear there.



I was determined that my past would not touch Daniel, or influence him in any way. He would have the chance to make his own choices in that respect, in time. As far as I was concerned, my job was to nurture and protect him until such time as he could make those decisions for himself. But there was no damned way I was going to let anyone else choose that life for him, and I wouldn’t allow any outside forces to influence him in that direction either. So, we packed up and moved to a much larger city in California and our lives grew quiet again.

Years passed. For reasons that are not relevant to this…”document”, it fell to me to make a choice about where and with whom my son would live as he finished out his childhood. Before I comment any further on that, I have something to say.



I have, and have always possessed, a powerful command of the English language, particularly where vocabulary is concerned. In other words, finding the right thing to say has never presented much of a problem for me. But as I stood in the empty lobby of my lawyer’s office, after learning that I had lost custody of Daniel and that where he went was a decision that I had to make…..Well, both now and then, there are no words to describe what I felt. The knowledge that Daniel was lost to me was so devastating, so overwhelming to my entire being, that my body literally could no longer support me.



As I collapsed to the floor, my head was swimming and I vaguely remember thinking that this is what it must feel like to pass out. But I was not even granted that mercy, the mercy of, even just a small escape into unconsciousness. No, I was conscious for every brutally agonizing moment. The grief that consumed every fiber of my being, the shock that battered my mind…the indescribable depths of despair and loss that I felt in that moment made the loss of Jessie and Ray seem thoroughly insignificant.



I forgot how to speak. I couldn’t breathe. Some unknown, unseen part of my body was dying; slowly and torturously. I think that the only thing that allowed me to survive that moment was the knowledge that Daniel still needed me, even if it was to let him go. There was no comfort to be had, no advice to guide me. My only company was the inescapable, mind-searing...depths of black despair that consumed me and which wracked my body with sobs that exploded outwards throughout my body, starting from deep within my achingly empty womb. There is simply no other way that I can describe what that moment was like for me. Of all of the things that I have been through, of all the decisions that I have had to make, the decision to let my son go was the single hardest thing I have ever had to do.



So, I had to choose. I had three options available to me.



1) I could continue to fight the custody battle, which my lawyer assured me that I would lose. If I chose that path, I would have no say in where Daniel would be sent and it would be a very strong possibility that I would never see Daniel again. That was unacceptable.



2) I could allow Daniel to stay with the couple who had him already, in which case, Daniel would almost certainly be adopted. The couple had always been very nice to me during the custody battle, but my instincts told me that if I chose to let Daniel stay with them, that in very short order all visitation would stop and I would never see my son again.



3) I could send Daniel to my dad and his wife. I would have no guarantees that they would keep their word about allowing me to maintain contact with Daniel, but at least I would know where Daniel was, even if they moved away, and my chances of continued visitation with my son were much greater if I was dealing with my dad than anyone else. Plus, I knew from experience what type of upbringing that Daniel would have with my dad, since I had grown up with him too. As for the rough patches that I went through with my dad, I could only hope that everything I’d heard from my step-sisters was true, namely, that my dad had mellowed out a lot since I had been a kid.



So, I chose the lesser of all evils and had Daniel sent to my dad. That was eight years ago and, looking back with hindsight, I have no doubt that I made the best possible choice for Daniel. I was able to maintain regular contact with my son and, in the last few years I’ve been able to be there for Daniel as he Awakened on his own. It was actually watching the inevitability of Daniel’s Awakening that acted as the catalyst for my own return to the Vampire Community. But that, dear readers, is another story.



To Be Continued…..

Pt. 4/ My Journey Continued
04:00 Apr 06 2013
Times Read: 373






I was still very young when Daniel was born and in many ways, I still viewed the world through the eyes of a youth. Everything was black and white back then, with very few shades of grey. When I thought about my past and my history within the Clan structure of the Vampire Community, all I saw was danger. My enemies had pursued me across the country and back again, stalking me and my family until it seemed I would never be rid of them. And there was Daniel, all wrapped up in my arms, so vulnerable, so helpless and completely dependent upon me to protect him. As I looked down at the newborn child in my arms, I knew that my commitment to disappear from the Community had to be more concrete than ever before. In those early days of Daniel’s life, this seemed much easier to accomplish than I had feared it would be. No ominous shapes darted from shadow to shadow outside of our home and no agents of any vampire master I had ever met made themselves known to me. It seemed that my family and I were in the clear.



Some time later, I don’t remember exactly when, my mother, sister and I had to go to the store and Daniel was with us. I was a very protective mother and I scarcely let Daniel out of my sight. We had no car at the time, so we relied upon taxi cabs to take us anywhere we needed to go. The cab arrived and we all got into the car. The driver was making polite conversation with us, asking us where we were from and what our names were, since he had never seen us in town before. I was extremely reluctant to answer any such questions as I had been trying to stay below the “supernatural radar”, so to speak. But finally, not wanting to be rude, I told him my name and that we were not new to California. As I finished strapping Daniel into his car seat and I settled in for the trip to the store, the driver asked us where in California we had lived before. Again, not wanting to be rude and not seeing any way out of answering him, I told him the city we had lived in prior to moving to Dallas. His entire demeanor instantly changed.



“Oh, I know you, “he exclaimed. He called my Sire by name and declared that I had been one of my Sire’s followers. I instantly tensed up and began assessing my situation in the back of the cab, trying to plan out what I would do to defend us all if the need arose. His voice trailed off into silence as I watched his reflection in the rear view mirror. He looked straight at Daniel, for what felt like a long time. I can’t claim to know what exactly was going through the mind of the driver then, but he took definite notice of my son and it was clear by the look in his eyes that he was thinking hard about something as he stared at my baby. I instinctively wrapped my arm over top of Daniel where he lay in his car seat. I wanted to hide him, but there was nowhere to go as we all sat in the moving cab. Fortunately, the worst thing that happened was that the driver invited me to his house to meet some of his friends later that week. I thanked him for the invitation and told him I wasn’t sure that I could make it, but that I would hold on to his contact information just in case I could attend. Of course, I had no intention of going anywhere near this man or his friends, but I had to ensure that the driver thought he had succeeded in his effort to get me to his house.



That very day, my family and I began making plans to move, since it was obvious that the cab driver not only recognized me by my reputation, but even worse, he knew where we all lived. That meant we had to get out of there as soon as possible, hopefully before the stalking began again. Soon enough, we found a house on the other side of the town and we moved to it as fast as we could. Things grew quiet again and my family and I went on with our lives. My mother watched Daniel every day while I went to college and in the afternoons when I went to work. I forbid anyone outside of family to be trusted with Daniel’s care. We had lived in that house, undisturbed, for a couple of years.



One day my mother met a woman with three children who had nowhere to go and she offered to let them come and stay with us until they got back on their feet. Things were fine, at first. But soon enough the true colors of our houseguests became apparent. One night, the woman asked us to drop her off at the house of one of her friends. Once we got there, she invited us to come in to the house so that we could meet her friends. Inside of the house there was a group of men sitting around a table playing Dungeons and Dragons. The woman called out a man’s name and the owner of the house stood up to come and meet me. It was the cab driver who took such obvious note of my infant son two years before.



I hid my emotions well, making a perfect mask of my face as I took his hand to shake it. I casually asked him how long he had known my house guest, and the cab driver replied that they had known each other for years. I chose to play things as cool as possible, acting completely unaffected by the way things were playing out around me. But inwardly, I was shocked and maybe even a little panicked too, as this situation made it apparent to me that the Clans had found a way to insinuate themselves back into my life, and I hadn’t even realized it until it was too late. My enemies, my stalkers, were not just infringing upon the borders of my property anymore. They had managed to get inside of my home.



To Be Continued…..

Pt. 3/ My Journey Through the Dark
03:58 Apr 06 2013
Times Read: 374






As I said in my last entry, the trip from California to Dallas was a cross country one, long and arduous, since my mother was not in good health and had to make the journey slowly. My two best friends, Jessie and Ray, made the trip with us and I was happy that I would not have to leave them behind me in California. The bond between us was incredibly strong. Ray was like a big brother to me and we had known each other for years at that point. There were times that it was only Ray’s presence that had scared off some of the enemies which came to harass me and my family during the previous two years. He was strong and respected, and rightly so, for he could be fierce in battle.



As hard as it still is to imagine, since I had known her for so much less time than I’d known Ray, my bond with Jessie was even stronger. She was my best friend, like my sister, only closer. My bond with Jessie extended into the realm of the psychic and empathic. We often completed sentences that the other one hadn’t even spoken aloud and there were times that we had even shared our strongest memories with each other through a mental link that, to this day, is hard to understand and is even harder to explain. I saw her memories as though they were my own, and she saw mine, and this experience bonded us together even more closely than before. She and Ray were a couple and I knew, just by watching them together, that she was the love of Ray’s hard life.



On the trip, our car broke down just outside of Deming, NM. Jessie and Ray hitched a ride with a trucker to go into town to get help for the car and my mother, sister and I waited at the car for their return.



They never came back.



I was a devastated mess and my poor family suffered for it. By the sheer force of my Will, I made my mother and sister wait with me on the side of the road for nearly two full weeks before I finally accepted that Jessie and Ray were not coming back. Then I began searching for them. On the way to Dallas, I showed Jessie’s picture and left notes saying where we were going on the bulletin boards of every rest stop, truck stop and tourist shop from Deming, NM all the way to El Paso, TX. There were times that I had only missed them by five minutes. But I never found them and this left me a psychological mess for a long time.



Once my family and I were in Dallas, we still had encounters and experiences with the Vampire Community that sometimes left all of us, including me, rattled. But in order to tell you fully about that, I have to get more detailed about what was going on in my life at that time. Remember in my last entry, when I said that my parents had their own drama and, even though I didn’t want it to do so, that their drama became my drama? Well, it did, and this is how that happened.



When my dad left my mother for another woman, my parents had a joint bank account. My mother was disabled and the only income she had was from Social Security .Because my parents still had a joint bank account, my dad was able to go into the account each month and drain the money from it each time my mother received her direct deposits from the government. Because the divorce wasn’t finalized yet and because the bank account was still technically my dad’s too, he was legally able to do this and get away with it. But the consequences of his actions were harsh on my mother, my sister and me. My dad’s actions made us homeless for a while and this was the state we were in at the time when we had moved back to Dallas for a fresh start.



So, it was that much more unsettling that we were found by agents of my Sire one day when my family and I went to a mall to hang out and cool off from the summer heat (which, in Dallas, can be brutal). We were sitting on a bench in this huge mall when two young men approached us and said that my Sire had sent them to find us and watch over us while we were away. To this day, I have no idea how they found us. We had no permanent residence in Dallas, yet, and we were just a couple of people hanging out in one of the largest malls in the country, in one of the largest cities in the country. Yet, still, they found me. I don’t remember the conversation that we had with them. I only remember my shock that I had been found under such circumstances. As I said, it was unsettling and was a defining moment for me in deciding to leave the Community and find a way to somehow melt into obscurity. But that decision, and it’s main catalyst, didn’t come until later that year.



That Autumn, I got a job and was having a hard time with it, so one of my co-workers invited me to a party she was hosting. I was still in heavy grief over the loss of Jessie and Ray so, while I was at the party, I got very drunk, hoping to escape the pain for a little while. At the end of the night, most everyone had gone home except for me, two couples and a friend of my co-worker’s husband. The guy and I got to talking and drinking together and we wound up having a one night stand, the only time in my life that such a thing has happened. I got up and went to work the following morning and I never saw him again. A month or so later I discovered that I was pregnant and my whole life changed. With everything that I had experienced, I knew that I had to disappear from the Vampire Community and never look back. I had to protect my child from my enemies, no matter the cost.



I was still pregnant when my family and I decided that we were too isolated and without resources while we were in Dallas, so we made the move back to California and settled in a different small town than the one we had lived in before. My son was born that Summer and he became the absolute crux of my universe, my total reason for living, the center of my gravity. I would have gladly lived or died for him, and that is still true to this day. You may know him here as DanielNoctum.



To Be Continued…..

My Awakening Pt. 2
03:56 Apr 06 2013
Times Read: 375






I guess you could say that he was my Sire, since he awakened me. I spent a lot of time with him over the next couple of months and, based on some of the things he told me, I adopted him as my cousin. He introduced me to the vampire subculture in our area and I learned much about how to interact with others of our kind. I learned the proper etiquette and respect to show to others, and *how* to do to so. Learning this was very important, as it helped me to navigate effectively inside of the vampire subculture. Those were probably the best, most important lessons that my Sire taught to me, and they are lessons that have stayed with me to this day, and which continue to serve me well.



But, to be honest about it, he really didn't teach me much beyond those...cultural lessons. After those first, initial lessons on proper mannerisms among the Clans, my Sire taught me the basics, but left me to figure out the rest on my own. As far as my abilities were concerned, I was self-taught as, after a short time, my Sire seemingly dropped off the face of the Earth, leaving me to my own devices.



But that was okay really, because all things supernatural and...magickal (?) seemed to just flow out of me quite naturally. What I learned that I could do, and my ability to use those powers, came to me in a nearly effortless stream of knowledge that poured through me on an instinctual level. I am not boasting, as I think that being humble is a good personality trait to have. I am simply trying my best to show you what my life was like 20 years ago, when I was 15 years old and was active in the Vampire Community.



Needless to say, I advanced through the ranks of the vampire subculture in my area very quickly and soon found that I had students of my own. I was mostly known simply as "The Baroness" by most of the people who operated in my area, and only my personal students knew to associate that title with my Dayside name, meaning the name that I was given at birth.



As with any other kind of group, I had students who were more serious and committed to learning than others, and I did my best to deal with all of them as fairly and competently as was possible for me. Those who weren't as dedicated fell away on their own, for the most part, and so I focused my attentions on those students who were the most eager to learn and grow into their own Nightside abilities.



But there was a down side too. In time, after my Sire had disappeared, I found that, even though I had my friends and supporters in the Vampire Community, I also had my fair share of enemies. These were much more subtle than my supporters, as they stayed in the shadows, both literally and figuratively.



At the time, I lived in a house that had a brick wall, about waist high, which surrounded my property. The wall ended at the driveway in front of the house, so the property stayed open there, but it was fully closed off in the back yard. Beyond the wall in my back yard, there was a very large field which separated my property from the road and the rest of the city. This field became a battle ground of spiritual warfare that raged on, all around me, every night, for nearly two years. I had to stay continually vigilant, HYPER vigilant, even, in order to protect myself, my family and my students, who happened to live with me at the time.



It is a very difficult thing to try to describe, all of these years later and, (frankly) to people that I'm not sure will understand me. But I will try anyway. I feel that *someone* here will understand, and that encourages me to continue on. I'm a very rationally minded person, perhaps part of the cult of science in some ways. But what happened all around me during that time in my life defied logic and made me even more of a believer in the reality of the occult.



As I said, I had my supporters and friends in the vampire community, but I never asked any of them for help. At the time, I didn't know where my enemies were coming from. I only knew that they were there, in the shadows of the bushes around my property at night, or in the field on the other side of my back yard. I was being constantly watched, whether I was at home or away. Just like you can feel it when someone stares into the back of your head for too long, I too could sense it whenever I was being watched or followed. To this day, I don't know why this happened to me. I have my suspicions, namely that I was maybe too open about the Vampire Subculture to those who I wished to take on as students.



You must understand that, 20 years ago, the Community was very different than it is now. Back then, secrecy was ALL and was one of the most important rules to be followed by each individual within the Clan structure. Today, the Community has "come out of the coffin", so to speak, and is much more vocal, much more public than they ever *dreamed* of being in the very early '90's!



By the time that these, for lack of a better term, "imposing lurkers" started coming around, my dad had already moved out of the house and was getting a divorce from my mother. They had their problems and I had mine. I truly was the last and only line of defense for my family and friends at that time and I could not have taken that role more seriously if I had tried.



My parents' drama became my drama, unwanted and unneeded as it was. The point is that my parents wanted to be as far from one another as possible and my mother, fearing for me in many ways, wanted me as far away from the area in which we lived as was possible. She thought I needed saving, but knew that there was only one place I would consider going to, my original home: Dallas. So, my mother, sister and I made the cross-country move back home, and the next stage of my Dark Journey was set into motion.



To Be Continued.....

My Awakening Pt. 1
03:51 Apr 06 2013
Times Read: 376






My Awakening Pt. 1| EDIT | DELETE |







So do I tell you everything, or nothing at all? I'm a writer, so I don't believe in half stories. I'm also honest to a fault, so I don't believe in half truths either. So, I guess that means that I will tell you everything.



It really was a dark and stormy night on October 28th, 1992 in a small town in California's San Joaquin Valley. I was 15 years old and had no idea that on that evening I would be reborn into the world of Night. I was at my high school campus to perform in the choir and work back stage for the costume/make-up department of our school's drama department, of which I was also a part. Did I have a flair for the dramatic? Yes. I was also very down to earth, a skeptic really, despite the fact that I had been raised in a home with very strong Christian values and belief systems.



It was hot and stuffy back stage so I went outside to catch some of the cool, fresh air that came from the storm that raged quietly outside. The rain poured down in torrents where the school halls were uncovered and the dark storm clouds billowed and rolled over head, lit eerily by the street lights until they seemed to glow with a pale orange fire all their own. I tell you all of these things so that you may see how the night itself seemed to lend itself to my Awakening. As I made my way out of the backstage door a young man and his girlfriend nearly ran right into me as they moved to enter the door. He was lean and tall, wearing all black, including his thick trench coat and heavy leather boots. As we passed each other he gave me a knowing smile and then the door closed behind me. I took a step or two but something gave me pause. I had a question form in my mind that I just had to ask him before he disappeared backstage. I turned around to open the door and go back inside when the door swung open in front of me and he stepped out of the door, the two of us nearly colliding for a second time. We excused ourselves and introduced ourselves and got the pleasantries out of the way. I remember saying to him, "I know this is going to sound strange, crazy even, but there is some scientific evidence to support the theory of their existence..." I realized I was rambling, so I just asked my question. "Are you a vampire?" He gave me that knowing smile again and said, "Yes, as a matter of fact, I am. I'm a Vampyr (pronounced vam-peer) actually, and so are you." I had never heard of a vampyr before, and so my litany of questions to him began as I asked him, "What is a Vampyr?"



I know now, 20 years later, that what he described to me was more commonly referred to as a psychic vampire or, as they had long been called in Eastern Europe, Strigoi Vii/Viu, a Living Vampire. But I knew nothing of these things that night, so long ago, and I hung on his every word, which became a new gospel to me. Had he chosen to tell me that the Sun had actually burned out eons ago and that the light we now see had simply taken that long to reach us, I would have believed him; not because I was particularly naive but because there was something in the timbre of his voice, something in the words that he said, that made me feel and sense on a very deep level that absolutely everything that he said was true.



As he answered my question, he began to tell me a story, fantastic and wonderful. I will share it with you now, but please understand that this conversation happened 20 years ago, so my ability to quote him exactly is very limited. But still, I remember what he said, so I will tell it to you here as precisely as is possible for me. "4,000 year ago, there was a family, " he began, "half of them were Druids and half of them were Vikings. The Druids revered nature and all life, but the Vikings were war-mongering and destructive, killing people and the environment around them everywhere they went. So the Druids placed a curse upon their Viking cousins. The curse said that they would always hunger and never be satisfied, thirst and never be quenched. They would have to feed upon the life force of humans and, should they try to resist the Hunger, their bodies would force them to feed upon the people who were closest to them, both physically and emotionally. The curse would follow the blood and would pass from generation to generation, forever, possibly skipping a generation every now and again, but always reemerging. But the curse had other effects that Druids did not foresee. The curse granted the Vikings great strength and speed at need, allowed them to shape shift into certain animals and to drain the life energy from all around them, including the Druids. The race of the Vampyr had been born.



"In answer to this, the Druids cast another curse, this time, upon themselves. Since the power of the Vampyr followed them through the blood, the Druids would take their strength and vitality from the blood of their enemies. Through this casting, the Druids gained all of the powers of the Vampyr, but with costs of their own. They could no longer endure the light of the Sun. They gained immortality, but were cursed to wander the ages alone, watching all that they loved wither and die, time and again. War broke out between the races of the Vampire and the Vampyr that lasted for centuries, until both had driven themselves to the point of extinction, with no clear winner in sight. In time, other supernatural races emerged, like werewolves, and the Vampire and Vampyr were forced to make peace. A clan system was, by nature and necessity, devised, which classified and separated the different supernatural species. Battles for supremacy and power raged on between the Clans, forcing the Vampire and Vampyr to cast aside their remaining disputes and join forces against the other Clans which had arisen. Over all of the Clans, there was a Throne. Only the strongest and most worthy member of the Clans could hold the Throne and, time and again, this Holder of the Throne came from among the races of the Vampire and Vampyr, a system which holds true to this very day. It is in this way that the races of the Clans have become confused in the minds of Men. "



There were many other lessons that he taught me over the next few nights and months, but it was the things that he shared with me from these first two nights which have stayed with me the most vividly over the last two decades. Though I believed everything he told me then, unswervingly, I have learned much on my own since that time. In his story, I still see grains of truth sprinkled throughout, obvious ones for those who know how and where to look for them, but there is much of this story's truth that I also now doubt. Despite that, I am grateful to him for what little he did teach me. I had been Awakened, but my journey through the Night was just beginning.



To Be Continued.....