Legacies || Hermitcraft

Chapter VIII - The Vampire

If you wait long enough, you'll get used to anything. Even a monster, on the other side of the door, starts to feel normal. Fear dies down, life moves on, and with each passing generation, history itself becomes nothing but an old story. When nobody is left to remind us of the dangers that lie just beyond the wall, nobody is left to fend them off either.

Until they come back.

All Mumbo could remember was the blood. Everyone around him covered in blood, his own blood dripping down his neck, and a bloody hand being forced against his mouth only seconds before he was overwhelmed by sudden pain and rendered unconscious. It had taken several days for him to realise that he wasn't alive anymore, but hadn't yet been claimed by death. He was trapped alone in a strange state of subconsciousness, knowing that he was still alive, but not in the way he used to be.

He'd been dragged to his feet the moment he could open his eyes, taken away from the ashy ruins of his home by those who had burnt it to the ground. Under the cover of night they'd left him deep inside of the forest, to the parts so far and hidden that not even the moonlight pierced the canopy. Mumbo had been too weak to protest, as if any life and energy had been drained from him. And, even if he didn't know it at the time, that was exactly what had happened to him.

But it was far from the only thing that had happened to him. It didn't take Mumbo long to realise that he'd changed, turned into something inhuman without his knowledge or consent. His heartbeat had been replaced by nothing but silence, all thoughts in his head corrupted by an unfamiliar hunger, one he'd never experienced before but soon yearned to satisfy. Yet all he could do was lie where he'd been left, as the hours passed by and his inanition drove him to the brink of madness.

When the night came again, the attackers returned, and things had only gotten worse from there onwards. They'd at least spared him an explanation, even if Mumbo wished what they'd told him wasn't true. They were vampires, undead creatures that feasted on the living and had the power to convert other humanoids into one of their own. And, according to their leader, they'd chosen to convert Mumbo.

Many things had confused and scared Mumbo that day, but the one that he couldn't stop thinking about even now was why they'd chosen to keep him. What had these monsters seen in him, a vulnerable 17 year old who hadn't even gotten the chance to leave school yet, that made them think to take him as one of their own? To not give him the simple and easy fate of death, but instead to trap him between life and death for the rest of his days until the latter finally came to claim him.

The others had considered him lucky, saying that as a human-born vampire, he had certain advantages to his state of undeath that 'true vampires' didn't. He wasn't cursed with immortality, the sun would hurt him but not turn him to ash, and food could still give him sustenance as opposed to surviving purely on blood.

That was another particularly terrifying aspect to vampirism, the blood drinking. Mumbo had managed to delay it for the first week or two, until normal food could no longer satisfy his hunger and he was forced to feed. He still couldn't bring himself to attack humans like the others did, but slowly got used to feeding on animals, even if it still disgusted him. However, the others became increasingly impatient with his refusal to join them on hunts, and eventually decided that perhaps Mumbo wasn't worth keeping after all.

"We need to talk, human."

The vampires refused to use his name, instead opting to refer to him as 'human'. It was ironically cruel, a reminder that he was anything but human nowadays, yet Mumbo had come to learn that he was lucky to receive their acknowledgement in the first place. Although in this particular instance, Mumbo would have preferred to stay out of sight and out of mind.