#sad vampires

[findthefandom-orbecomethefandom]

Hey google, how do i convince my iwtv friends to listen to the diaries of netovicius the vampire cus it's literally iwtv but if the vamps were in their healing era and the genre was cosy melancholic mystery

[monstersinthecosmos]

physically, i’m here. but mentally i’m staring into a flickering candle flame and contemplating my eternal damnation while lestat throws grapes at me.

[monstersinthecosmos]

The magnificent paintings of the Louvre were not for me intimately connected with the hands that had painted them. They were cut loose and dead like children turned to stone. Like Claudia, severed from her mother, preserved for decades in pearl and hammered gold. Like Madeleine’s dolls. And of course, like Claudia and Madeleine and myself, they could all be reduced to ashes.

Louis de Pointe du Lac, Interview with the Vampire

[monstersinthecosmos]

What mattered was that I was more utterly alone in the world than I had ever been in all my life. That Claudia was gone beyond reprieve. And I had less reason to live than I'd ever had, and less desire.

Louis de Pointe du Lac, Interview with the Vampire

[monstersinthecosmos]

I turned, paying no attention to where I went, wishing the city would swallow me, conscious now of the hunger rising to overtake reason. I was almost loath to put an end to it. I needed to let the lust, the excitement blot out all consciousness, and I thought of the kill over and over and over, walking slowly up this street and down the next, moving inexorably towards it, saying, 'It's a string which is pulling me through the labyrinth. I am not pulling the string. The string is pulling me...'

Louis de Pointe du Lac, Interview with the Vampire

[expewrites]

On a long, cold Simril night

Sharing an excerpt from one of my Bloodweave fics, because I'm kinda obsessed with the idea of Leon and Sebastian teaming up after the events of the game.

*･゜ﾟ･*:.｡..｡.:*･'･*:.｡. .｡.:*･゜ﾟ･*

The squares and promenades of Waterdeep were dotted with bonfires that night, each one ringed by revelers trying to stay warm near the flames, their hands clasped around cups of hot mulled wine the many vendors never seemed to run dry of. A man nearby played a concertina, and a few of the stargazers sang along to the well-known tune, cajoling whoever else they could to join in.

A log settled inside the bonfire with a loud crack, and plumes of sparks flew up. There was laughter, cheers. Some folks took a step back. “Daddy, daddy,” came a little girl's voice, “look, fire pixies!”

“Yes, honey bear, I see them.”

She must have been four or five years old. Surely no older than six. Far too young to be up at this hour. But then a night of such magic as this had a way of tickling a child's imagination awake long past their usual bedtime. Well bundled against the chill, she bounced on her father's shoulders as he joined in the song, his breath steaming in the frigid air.

But her eyes were glued to the dancing flames, watching to see if more pixie sparks would come out. And in the glow of the fire, the locks of her hair that had come loose from her hood shone like golden threads. The way hers had at that age.

“Copper for your thoughts.”

Leon glanced over as Sebastian sat down beside him, the night cold enough that even he felt the need to press shoulder to shoulder for some semblance of warmth, and rub his bare hands together.

“I was just thinking how Victoria would have loved a night like this,” Leon told him. “Would that I could have shared it with her, when I'd still had the chance.” She would have been a young woman grown by now. Far too big to bounce on his shoulders, but big enough to drink a toast to the new year with her old dad.

“I'm sorry,” Sebastian said. “I shouldn't have pried—”

“Don't be. It's good to have someone to remember her to.” Even if every time Leon did so, he felt as though another piece of his heart was being carved out with a rusted spoon.

But he clapped a hand on Sebastian's knee to show there were no hard feelings, and forced a smile to his lips as he met the other's eyes, whose usual warning red hue was changed to liquid amber by the firelight.

“The day I no longer wish to speak her name will be the day I've given up.”

“And this swill is supposed to help?” Sebastian reached over to snatch the cup out of Leon's other hand, and gave its contents a dubious sniff. “It can't possibly taste the way you remember it.”

“No,” it was quite horrid, if Leon were honest. Like spiced piss and vinegar. “But it gets the job done. If you drink enough of it.”

That earned him a dark laugh. “Sometimes I forget it wasn't so long ago you were alive.”

Sometimes Leon forgot Sebastian was technically his elder by a century and a half. He still had the manner of an ingenu about him. Perhaps having spent all those years locked in a cell and starved of blood had preserved his innocence to some degree. He had not been forced to debase himself night after night to avoid Godey's rack, or choked down the congealed blood of dead cats which had often passed for Leon's supper.

And yet, if offered his choice of the two, Leon would still choose the path he'd been given, with its illusion of freedom, every time. He could not begin to imagine the hell Sebastian had made it through trapped within those same four walls, somehow with his sanity, and his kindness, intact. Not all of them had been so lucky.

Which made Leon all the more grateful for the very real freedom they had now. Perhaps he did have Astarion to thank for that. A second chance to forge his own destiny, not bound by any master. And what was more, to watch Sebastian rediscover the world that had moved on without him, as if seeing it through new eyes himself. When his wife was taken from him, then his child, Leon had doubted he would ever be able or willing to love another soul again. But sharing the travails of the road, seeking shelter together from the sun day after day, had brought him closer to the man beside him than he could have thought possible four years ago.

*･゜ﾟ･*:.｡..｡.:*･'･*:.｡. .｡.:*･゜ﾟ･*

Full story: https://archiveofourown.org/works/61773364/chapters/157924624

[findthefandom-orbecomethefandom]

The cozy fantasy vamp podcast I started suddenly got sad vibes... I have a bad feeling this isn't a cozy fantasy...

[ferritin4]

thedreamthatdreamsus answered your post: What Shall We Call Ourselves?

“I have outlived the night” (from Two English Poems by Jorge Luis Borges seriously read it) aaaaand Nicky/Ovi because you’re my go-to fix for such things

There is a tomb at the bottom of the sea, filled with water. 

Nicklas has stayed there, stayed with the bones of the fish and the mermaids until he grew bored and came back to the surface, to waste away on the land.

There is more than one way for a monster to die.

Nicklas died of violence, once, thrown from a horse. He died and he was reborn again, and then he learned what death was truly like.

—

Prague is beautiful in the summers, or so they say. Everywhere is beautiful at night, because the night is the soft drape of welcome that lets him rise freely, that lets him be real again, in this dream state. Night is his offer from a reluctant world, that he may have a palace to contain him, like the long-dead ruler he is.

He is the lord of nothing; his tribe is long since dead. People still whisper about him and his kind: they say he drinks them dry with his teeth and tongue, say he takes their souls into the empty hole inside him.

People can say what they want to about the things that scare them, but Nicklas knows that all fears grow from a seed of truth.

Nicklas hasn’t touched a human being in fourteen thousand years, but he supposes that if he did, he would shrivel them up like a raisin with the depths of his thirst.

—

When you do not drink, you are dry, and when you are dry eventually you will become nothing more than dust.

—

Nicklas lives in a small building on the outskirts of Prague. He has owned it since 1416, but he doubts anyone who is alive still knows that. Someone somewhere has a deed with an unintelligible scratch across the dotted line, and so it carries on.

Vampires can live anywhere, for some values of the word live. People whisper, and people slowly move away, until the buildings around him are nothing but storage units. No one comes to knock on his door.

It is ostensibly a bookstore, because on the days that Nicklas is not too weak to walk down the stairs, he likes to sit by the window with a book and watch the stars try to fight their way through the light of a city. When he was young, he would never have imagined so much light could fit in one place.

When he was young, of course, there were a lot of things he could never have imagined.

He will be young forever, until he is dust.

—

Some days he thinks about — about feeding again, about going down to the street from his second-story room and finding someone foolish and sweet, laying his hands on them and touching his mouth to their skin and pulling their spirit to the surface until he is full. He can feel himself dying, piece by piece: inside him his unused organs are crumbling, turning to powder and ash. He feels arid. He wants water, though he does not drink; he wants to drench himself in the rain, though he would be not be any more sated than when he was living underneath the waves.

—

Nicklas barely makes it downstairs the next night. He’s tired, bone-tired. His skeleton is grinding down to nothing, until he’s as brittle as a bird.

—

Nicklas is sitting by the window when the door opens.

It’s raining outside. He can’t see any stars. He’s reading, but his eyes are blurry with fatigue, and it takes him a moment to focus on the rough face of the man in the doorway.

“Hello,” Nicklas says in whatever language it is that he knows. What do they call it now? It could be anything.

The man nods, but he is staring.

People can feel his hunger, and they know what it means. It hits like a sunburn, slow but painful, and people know they should go.

The man opens his mouth and says something in a language Nicklas has never heard. Nicklas stands up, slowly, holding himself steady with his hand on the chair.

“Sit down,” he offers. He waves at an empty chair. The man’s chest is heaving; he came here in a fury, in a rush. He is standing at attention like a warrior, and Nicklas cannot give him anything but a room in his palace, here in the dark.

The man sits. He is watching Nicklas, watching the way he moves, and when Nicklas settles himself into his own chair again, the man reaches out and touches his arm.

—

It feels like breathing in fresh air after a long time without it, he thinks, if he could remember what breathing was like.

—

The man does not shrivel up, but his hand leaves Nicklas’ arm like an arrow, and his eyes are wide as windows. His mouth opens and he says something.

“Sorry,” Nicklas says, and the man blinks. His eyes narrow and his head tilts and then, slow as a leaf falling, he extends a finger and lays it back on the bare skin of Nicklas’ wrist.