"It was only gratitude. We got along well, and through a miscalculation, the sun burned my flesh because I didn't arrive in time. He offered me his blood; I refused once, twice. I knew what it meant. But the pain was so sharp that my youth wouldn't allow me to heal. Then I accepted. Big, big mistake. Because not only was the relief; nor his centuries in the world, a mass of information and emotions, loss and thousands of nights across the globe; it wasn't even that. It was a creature which could still feel; layers and layers of complexity through his dark, thick, honey-like blood. I felt that I, a fledging, would disintegrate in that immensity. Something that not even my own maker had managed to do to me. He stopped in time, I stopped in time; my body healed instantly, but the pain of centuries dragged in my mouth. I found myself surrounded by his magnolias, that perfume that seemed to cling to his skin. I saw how it entangled me, how it invaded everything in an impossible golden hue. And I wept. I saw myself weeping. For myself, for him, for the hundreds of thousands of lives he took to survive; the terror, the guilt, the passage of time. But I didn't weep blood. I wept gold, the same gold that flowed from the petals surrounding me in that vision. If this being was so intense, so immense, I grieved not for feeling it, but for understanding what it meant to have his presence. Then everything went black, and with a sigh - that came from my heart, or from the pulse that no longer lived, I thought only one utterly, incoherent thing: "Poor Molloy."
(Alvear's Long Night - Chapter VI - Southern Nights - Fragment)














