Betrothed To Death

Chapter 13

The skull embossed door to the Room of Time creaked open. I pulled my robe around me tighter to keep out the chill and moved inside, closing the door behind me. I made my way to the back of the room, stopping at the table that held my life glass. Next to mine were two others. The sight of them frightened me a bit. It wasn't the fact that they were black with the skull and rose adornments that mine had nor that they had Ilirra and Dimitri's names engraved on the plaques already, no, what frightened me the most was that the top of the glass was filled with 1/4th gold sand and the rest was the strange blood red sand, showing that they would grow at a normal rate for the first part of their lives but after a time they would stop. They wouldn't age, forever frozen in time until they decided that they no longer wanted to live. i stared at the glasses in horror. I don't know why it surprised me, on some level I must have expected this, must have known it, but seeing it just made it so much more real for me.

I fell to my knees before the table, gaping at the Life Glasses. I wanted to smash them, save my children from this kind of life, but as my fingers wrapped around Dimitri's glass I found I couldn't do it. It was a selfish thing to want them to stay with me but it was a want nonetheless. I set Dimitri's glass gently back on the table and used the sleeve of my gown to wipe the tears from my face. This was not what I had come here for. I stood and moved towards the back of the room, standing before the Mirror of Souls. I called out, giving it my desire and waited. I watched as the glass shimmered like a pool of water someone had dropped a rock into. The ripples slowly stopped, showing the image of a man with a broad face, long black hair and a neatly trimmed beard, Orcus' father. He looked at me, his black eyes studying my face, then he smiled. I was a bit taken aback by it. Orcus seemed to favor his mother in many ways from her eyebrows to her nose to the set of her cheekbones but he still looked a great deal like his father, the same mouth, the same jaw and forehead, but the eyes were what got me. And it was so strange to see that same eyes I had stared into time and again glitter with happiness, the corners crinkling as he smiled.

"Hello," he said and his voice was much like Orcus' but with a bit of a deeper pitch and rougher. "You are Astoria." I nodded, still a bit surprised. He was so warm and friends, so unlike Orcus.

"Did you want to ask me something?" He asked.

"I did," I said. "It's about Orcus."

"Ah yes," he said. "My son can be very difficult at times."

"Well, it's just," I paused, not really knowing how to put what I wanted to say. I didn't want to offend his father but, "is he capable of loving someone, in a romantic sense?" Orcus' father scratched his chin thoughtfully.

"Well, I'm sure he can, though I had never really seen him in any kind of relationship when he was younger," he said.

"It's just... he said he could never love me. He even got me a lover because I was lonely," I said. "And I stopped thinking about it because, well, I guess I just accepted it but now..." I felt tears gather in my eyes and my throat grow tight. "Well I just had twins and I don't want them to grow up in a world where Mommy and Daddy don't love each other and Daddy's cold and distant and..." I stopped; trying to fight back a sob that had found its way into my chest. He looked at me sympathetically.

"Did he tell you why?" he asked. I shook my head and took a shuddering breath.

"Umona said it was because of what happened to his mother after you died," I explained. A look of understanding came over his face and he sighed heavily.

"Orcus always was what you would call a 'Mama's Boy'," he began. "But he never knew that his mother had problems before I died. She was always a bit unstable."

I stared at him shocked. No one had ever told me that!

"But Umona never-"

"Umona didn't know," he said. "No one did but me and the doctor. When she was a child she lived in the human world. This was thousands of years ago you understand and back then it was not uncommon for vampire clans to live amongst humans. Generally the two left each other alone. There were human donors who offered themselves to the vampires in return for money, power, sexual favors, but in general the two races lived apart. Then a group of rouge vampires began slaughtering humans mercilessly. The vampire council quickly disposed of them but the damage had been done. The humans saw all vampires as blood thirsty killing machines and sought to wipe them out.