LoKtober Day 3: Love You to Death
The first time he saw her, she wore a cloak of feathers and led the prayer, her deep, strong voice carrying across the square from the temple steps. Vorador turned away. He couldn’t stomach the church now, not after seeing what the vampires’ God had taken from them.
It was years until he saw her next, in a cold and abandoned chapel. He had come to offer some scrap of prayer that Janos might see sense, and she lay in the shadows drunk on communion wine. Their first mistake was speaking, the second weeping, and the third was loving. She fled from the forge before dawn, and wouldn’t meet his eye in the congregation the next day.
The city crumbled little slower than her faith. By day she belonged to the temple and tradition, and by night they talked and drank and slept in the same wine soaked bitterness.
Once the mansion was built, he would have made her the queen of his private kingdom, but she declined, laughing. She’d had enough of being a priestess, she said, to become one in the temple of lust he was building. The laughter lines on her face were deeper now, he noticed, and so he made a second offer. That one was refused as well.
In the end it became habit. She would visit every year or two, they would drink and dance and love until the ache became too strong. He would offer her the dark gift, and she would leave, each time a little older.
And after half a century, she stayed. Sleeping in his bed, she looked at peace for the first time since the chapel, and Vorador knew she wouldn’t wake.
He lay her to rest in the mausoleum in silence. They had already said everything worth saying. And then, mind focused on the memory of her face, he took out an easel and started to paint.