the stranger.

she was born in the year 1726, into a family made comfortable by the trade of medicinal goods. merchants and interpreters passed through her father's orbit carrying printed books and foreign words, their lessons intended for her brothers. she learned by listening outside doors or stealing pages left unattended, stitching fragments together until they became whole. she grew to recognize the characters marked upon crates and medicine jars, to name each root, leaf, and powdered remedy that passed through her father’s storehouse. married young to a man chosen for the usefulness of his family, she was widowed and returned to her father’s care before she had properly learned what it was to be a wife.

she was twenty two when she left home again. this time in her brother's clothes, traveling with a trading party under his name. upon reaching the intended port she abandoned her father's associates, survived on her brother's stolen allowance until she bribed passage on a merchant vessel. whether the captain believed her to be the runaway clerk she claimed mattered little - after the exchange of silver and a quiet boarding, he found his stowaway indeed kept a neat hand, could name the herbs and count without error. liar or no she was useful, and so use was made. through him, the world opened before her. as did so many of its cruelties.

you have forgotten that woman. what use is remembering? you who were born of her death, who share no family nor name as a reminder. your making was an act of salvation you have never reconciled with, an exchange of one form of dependence for another. those first decades as a vampyr were characterized by a deep self-loathing. hunger was resisted until it became agony, guidance rejected wherever it was offered. you withdrew, you withered. feeding became an act of mourning, for the frightened reminded you too easily of yourself: once a fragile being, reduced in another’s hands. some of them, you spared. most, you wished you had. and this life your maker had deemed an act of love. you didn't understand arjun then, not as you do now. in the end, misery became tedious. your grief was traded for restlessness, and restlessness gave way to appetite. you began to travel, first as an escape, then as a novelty. the centuries found you beneath many roofs and many names, disappearing from each place without warning only to return lifetimes later, made anew. before you realized there was none, you sought meaning. you studied wherever instruction could be purchased and, when colleges opened their doors, pursued art, language, philosophy, early sciences. you spent years singing in smoke filled clubs, hunted the men who followed you home for sport. but as all the others, each new place or pastime wore thin, eventually exposing that same brutal emptiness. try as you might to thrash against it, it always pushed you back to safe harbors. you no longer regret what you are, only that the choice was never yours. that distinction governs all that remains between maker and made. three hundred years later, and arjun alone stands as your oldest grievance and most enduring devotion, both your architect and unmaking. now, you revel in what you once despised. the years have made you greedy for whatever sensation you can find, made you playful with your affections and careless with consequence. your boredom has a tendency to leave broken things in its wake, and your attention is fickle, at times cruel. after so long in your own skin, even tenderness becomes just another means of holding something still.