Friend Of The Dead

Tying Up Threads

I've seen many strange sights in my short span of life. I've seen things that weren't obscure in their abnormality, I've seen happiness where sadness festered, and I've seen life, where death resided. And I've seen death, where there was nothing but life. I've seen and met people, both living and dead, both hollow and passionate, both joyful and condemned. These sights I've come across in many different situations, all of them valuable memories stored in my brain. But nothing of what I'd learned, no knowledge I'd obtained, whether from those in real life, or from those in the land of the dead, could have ever, for a single moment, prepared me for what I came upon one lonely, crisp day in the woods.

There are those moments in your life, where everything that should have prepared you for what you came across, suddenly seems completely and utterly, irrelevant.

What do you do in that moment?

When the air has left your lungs, when your heartbeat is no longer within your control, when every sight and smell and sound around you, seems to have dissipated into thin air.

Strangeness, I may have encountered before. Danger, I may have touched. Love---I may have tried.

But etherealness, like his as he stood across from me, his regal form surrounded by the majestic forest, seeming to bend the woods to his will, I had never thought I'd ever come across.

It was hard to take my eyes off of him. I was afraid that if I did, he'd disappear, like an angel from a dream. Words failed me, as did my body, my bones suddenly seemed rubbery, and in my shock to keep standing upright, I stumbled back, grasping rough tree bark with my bare hands to steady myself.

I don't think there are enough words in the English library to justify his beauty. There shouldn't be. If there were such words then it meant that beauty like his has been discovered before, and that feels like such an impossible idea. Because I was sure to my core that nothing like him has ever graced this earth, and if there has been another like him, then he has never come in direct contact with a human being.

He stood tall, his shoulders broad and adorning a wide chest, long legs that stood steady on the grass. The sun brushed through his caramel locks, the curls that let loose over his forehead shaded differently in certain parts. I trailed my eyes down from his forehead, to his straight nose, his full lips, his pale skin, his Adam's apple, his finely tailored suit that draped over his form like velvet. I looked back up to his eyes, staring mesmerized into the green orbs that seemed to have come from the forest itself.

Is he divine? I found myself wondering.

Something so resplendent could not possibly be real. Someone more beautiful than a vampire, a creature created with allure for the sole purpose of attracting helpless victims. Until this very moment, I'd thought that a vampire was the most beautiful being on earth, simply because he was designed that way, simply because it was how his nature was. But vampires had a skeletal and sharp kind of beauty, a dead kind of beauty, like when someone dies young and beautiful and you look at them when they're in the casket, being lowered into the ground; their beauty didn't hold a candle to whoever this person was.

I swallowed thickly, forgetting everything else in the world other than him; this---creature---who'd tried to lure me into his grasp so many times before.

He too watched me in return, hands in his pantsuit-pockets, head cocked to the side curiously.

Whatever I'd expected to see when I followed the voice into the woods, this wasn't it.

I dug my hands into the bark, feeling myself slip down onto the ground, my eyes trained on his eyes, willing him to disappear like I thought he would.

I opened my mouth, to say something, anything, and yet the only sound that managed to escape was a choked grunt.