The Master's Fledgling

Author's Welcome

"I should have stuck to the shadows", she lamented softly, while trapped inside her cold, padded coffin. A coffin she had been laid to rest in, dressed in her Sunday best, and covered in dirt in St. Mary's cemetery only a few hours before. A rich mahogany coffin, with a baby blue satin interior, that her mother had remarked "was her favorite color as a child," and had "brought out the dazzling specks of gold in her sage green eyes". It was meant to shelter her body from her earthen grave- which happened to be one of the two things a newly turned creature like her needed for survival. 

For a moment, the irony of her situation almost felt funny–but then the hunger kicked in, literally squeezing her intestines with painful emptiness until she screamed and panted for breath. A short moment of reprieve would give her hope that the worst was over, and then the pain would return fresh, shattering her fragile body into millions of sharp pieces from the sheer magnitude of it.

She felt so hollow already, merely the shell of the girl she had been what must have been only the day before. She couldn't quite trust all that she recognized as truth anymore. Reality had been as simple as night and day, black and white. It had not been apart of her nature to reflect on the small sliver of grey in between. If she had taken the time to really see the wolves masquerading as sheep, then maybe she would have discovered the Veil before it was too late. But she never believed in monsters, nor those fairytale worlds with creatures of both myth and legend that were said to visit the human realms at night, hunting their human prey. As a child, she never needed her mother's consolation for a nightmare, nor her father's searching of the monster in her closet or under her bed. 

And now, if she truly survived being buried six feet under, she would become a monster herself.

She'd never see the light of the sun rising at dawn, to track it's progress across the horizon through the day, or watch it transform the sky all the golden orange colors of fall during sunset. If she was lucky, she might be able to feel it's energy lingering in the air during the soft twilight, when the Veil between mortals and monsters was lifted, and they could emerge from their hiding.

The only light she'd ever see, for as long as she existed, would be that of the moon– in all of her cold, distant silvery glory. She was her slave now, wholly stripped of the very thing that made her a part of the human realm. Trapped inside her dark, oxygen-less box, she reflected that she had barely begun living, barely had time to accomplish anything meaningful with her life–but she felt the loss greatly, as if she had a great destiny to fulfill and she was stripped of the power to pursue it. Her soul was already gone, she figured. These silly things, like getting married, having children, traveling the world, growing old...they shouldn't matter to her. Yesterday, she was no more closer to accomplishing those things as she was now. In fact, she'd always be this distance from her goal. She'd forever remain a twenty-five year old freak. She was a freak as a human, a disease making her allergic to sunlight. As a monster, she'd have fangs and immortality perhaps, but not much else had changed. 

If I had just walked away... If I had just turned a blind eye... 

The "what if's" were threatening to destroy her before the poison coursing through her blood-stream did. He had drained so much, emptied her out and used her carotid artery in her neck like a straw, with no remorse in his black, vacant eyes. It did not disturb him for a moment that the woman he was draining would surely die from so much blood-loss. It was his intent to destroy her. How many times had he done this before? She wondered. He had covered his tracks well, splitting her neck across with a blade to make it look like a human murder. She had sensed his presence at her funeral, even with her eyes closed and her body strung tight with rigamortis. The bastard had the audacity to even comfort her distraught parents when they wept their daughter's loss.