Harper Rock by Night

[Macaria]

Coming to Harper Rock had been a good decision, she decided. It was one of life’s happy accidents that she had found herself stepping onto a bus into the cool air of central Ontario. Previously, she had only known where the state was from the Risk board, and had been mildly amused to find that it was not, in fact, a pale yellow shade when experienced in actuality. She much preferred its actual appearance, the green of the trees and the soft sighing of the breeze through grass pleased her. It was a shame about the sea of concrete that made up the rest of the topography, but that was something that could be overcome with a small amount of effort.

She had spent most of life in the city. Not that this was not just another city, of course, it was simply smaller than those she had inhabited previously and there was considerably more in the way of greenery surrounding it. She had always appreciated the countryside, ever since she had first ventured out into it on field trips with high school. It was why she had chosen archaeology as her major for college - plenty of opportunities to get out and see the forgotten corners of the world, far from civilisation, and discover the lost history of people long since passed into the shadows of history and myth.

It was there that she had first discovered a deep and instinctive love for history. The study of the past had always been an interest, and she had often read the myths of different cultures for personal enjoyment, but she had never before felt that such a thing might be a calling in her life, something that she would be content to do in a professional sense. At odds with her fastidious appearance and proclivity for cleanliness, she had found that she enjoyed little more than digging around in the dirt, uncovering some lost trinket of a bygone age and unravelling the hidden stories that each one held.

The mountains of Greece, especially, had captured her imagination. The stories that were attached to the area, too. These very myths had informed her decision to leave behind the name of her birth and choose for herself a new title - that of Macaria, or Makaria, the daughter of Hades most known for the transportation of the dead to the Fortunate Isles. To her mind, it was fitting. She had escaped from the confines of a large city, a hive of humanity, to a smaller settlement on the banks of a river, surrounded by verdant countryside. Harper Rock was her own, personal, fortunate isle. A place to reinvent herself, to live the life she had always wanted to lead.

The life she finds herself living now is considerably different to all that had come before. Where, previously, she had been a shy, retiring thing prone to embarrassment and self consciousness, she had found within herself a well of confidence that had previously gone untapped. She now exists in the supreme knowledge that her potential has been increased exponentially. Some things, naturally, have not changed. She is still cold, reserved. Distant. She still surrounds herself with objects rather than with other people, though now for rather different reasons. Before, friends were things that had happened to other people; now they simply did not live up to her expectations, in general terms. They were a distraction, perfectly acceptable for a moment in time but in the long term they could not be depended upon. Her turning had taught her that.

It was not that she had been expecting a family. She had no illusions that this was going to be something from an Anne Rice novel, a coven of vampires spending an eternity in each other’s company and seeing what they could take from their eternal night. She had also not expected to be abandoned, for that is essentially what had happened, though attempts to buy her off with random gifts had been initially helpful if not particularly wanted. In all honesty, she had not known what to expect, having always dismissed the existence of vampires as a fantasy, a work of over zealous fiction. That had all changed on a cold night in November, when she had risen from unconsciousness in an alley, drastically changed. She had no real memory of the specifics apart from the overwhelming feeling that she was different, in a way that she could not quite pin down as hard as she tried.

It had begun immediately when she had exited the alley. In her other life a deserted street had been a quiet place bereft of sensation other than the feel of air on skin. Now, though, new sounds pressed in from all sides. She heard the rustle of a discarded newspaper as the breeze sent it drifting listlessly over the pavement. She heard the crackle of the streetlights as though she had her ear pressed to their plastic guard. When she passed another person, as rare as that was, she could hear their blood as it coursed through veins and arteries, the pounding of their heart almost deafening her with its urgency. And the hunger. She no longer viewed people as people. They were something to be devoured, drained and discarded. They were cattle.

Looking back on it, this realisation was something that should have disturbed her or at least given her pause. Instead, it simply seemed natural. Right. She was no longer one of them; she was something more, something better. They were prey, nothing more, and at first she had fed indiscriminately. That had changed the night she had received an email from someone calling herself Velveteen informing her that she was on the city’s bounty list for exposing vampires to the local humans and that that was something that was generally frowned upon. Since then, she had learned to reign in her impulses and had instead taken to using her newly discovered inherent abilities to keep herself nourished.

She did not resent the vampire that turned her, though. If anything she appreciated the time alone as it had allowed her to find her feet and her own way, and that was entirely aside from the gift, for that is how she views it, that she had been granted. All that she currently possessed she had worked for and attained herself without simply being handed it. All that she had learned about what it was that she now is she had discovered by trial and error and experimentation. She had received, and wanted, no charity and that sat very well indeed with her. Independant as a human, she was now fiercely independant. Indeed, all of her emotions had been heightened slightly, though none more than her independence and sense of self. For the first time in what seemed like her life she felt, ironically, alive. Blessed, even.

A whole new world had been opened up for her. It is a terrible cliche, but it also happens to be the truth. Where before the realms of magic and the mystical were simply fictions that only appeared in the legends she had read as part of her studies in ancient history and in gross hyperbole, she had found herself spending a considerable amount of time penning a grimoire of her own as she learned the various rites and rituals of her kind. It was, and is, something that she had come to her quickly, moving forwards in leaps and bounds. A natural affinity that she had never felt before, but had made itself known following her rebirth.

It was a change, a good change, from her habitual slaughter of zombies in the local mausoleum. She had discovered and then cultivated that hobby, finding it strangely enjoyable. Indeed, it was her solo war against the denizens of the catacombs that had paid for her apartment, something she was very proud of. It was the first place she had ever had that was completely and totally hers. A space where she could retreat from the cacophony of the world and simply… exist. It was within those walls that she continued her studies into the mystical - quite a step up from where it had begun in an abandoned building in the quarantine zone.

Not that it had started off that way, of course. At the very start of this new chapter of her life, she had spent most of her time sleeping in abandoned buildings around the city, often within the confines of the quarantine zone, learning about what it was that she had become as she went. They were not easy lessons, for the most part, and they had been learned most often with injury to herself or to her pride, sometimes both. The harshest lesson had come whilst wandering in the wilds beyond the city limits and had been set upon by one of the fae that lived there, losing a leg in the process.

The one thing that was lacking, that had always been lacking in her life, was a feeling of fellowship. Of not having a group to call her own. It was not that she craved acceptance, or even companionship - the opposite is, in fact, true; but solitude is only good for so long. After a while, that solitude must be tempered by worthy company or it will eat away at the heart of a person, rusting and festering until what little that remains is barely recognisable. It was not something she ever wanted for herself, as much as she enjoyed her own company and cultivated her solitude.

It was why she had decided that she would go to the Andras fight night event that, she believed, Micah had organised. She did not particularly know him, or indeed any of them unless one counts a brief email conversation with Velveteen, but she had felt at the time that that would not matter and that it still might be good fun. While before, she would have hardly considered attending such an event as violence was never something that had spoken to her, she had, after all, found some measure of enjoyment in fighting one type of undead and felt that perhaps broadening those horizons might be something she would appreciate. It is, after all, through experience that we learn about ourselves and if there was ever a reason to make a change in one’s life it was dying and then being reborn into darkness.

So, as a result, she had made the journey from her apartment in the West Towers complex to Wickbridge and had subsequently descended into the sewers beneath the city. It had been some time since she had been down there, not since her first weeks in the city when she had first ventured into the quarantine zone where the zombies held sway and humans stayed away. She had not returned since then, preferring to live, if such were the correct term, in her tenth floor apartment above the city lights and especially its noise. The view was also quite spectacular, and she could not believably say that she did not enjoy the sensation of being literally above the city.

The venue for the event had taken some finding, the entrance hidden away behind false walls deep within the stygian tunnels. Once through the door, though, she found herself thrust into a gathering of people who were apparently part of a bloodline she shared, a bond that she felt was important to her kind. She had taken up position near the door, ready to slip away if it turned out that this event was not for her after all, watching the bouts take place in the caged area set aside for them, the others obviously enjoying themselves as they traded blows while the spectators chatted amiably with each other. As time passed, she felt her confidence growing to the point that she decided she would take part.

That decision, though, had already been made for her, as it turned out, and she found herself thrust into the ring with a pale brunette named Nevaeh, though she suspected the paleness was due, at least in part, to their shared condition. Zoey, one of her new acquaintances, was on hand to act as a referee as sorts and had obliged the combatants by performing a short countdown and then signalling to begin. Once more, she was confronted with something that had never appealed to her. Guns were one thing, she felt, they imposed a certain tasteful distance between oneself and the intended target, and also aided somewhat in preventing unnecessary… splatter.

As it turned out, in keeping with her experiences as a vampire thus far, she found herself pleasantly surprised. The time they spent in the ring passed far too quickly for her liking, flashing by in what seemed like the blink of an eye before the bell signaling the end of the bout, once again provided by Zoey, was sounded and the experience was over. She was left exhilarated, an emotional high that she had never experienced before. She had never thought she would enjoy such a thing, had never wanted it, had never needed it. Now, though, she wanted to feel it again, as soon as was possible.

Sadly, however, she was exhausted both from her journey to the venue and the fight itself and was subsequently unable to fight again. Though unable to compete once again, she had found herself enjoying the company of the larger bloodline and especially the company of her sparring partner, the two of them becoming nigh on inseparable in the following nights. Indeed, she had practically moved into Nevaeh’s new apartment in the Corvidae Flats in the quarantine zone and had only left for a night out in the Metronome Club in Wickbridge, meeting a couple more new people and getting to know Neveah better.

Completely aside from their first meeting, the pair of them had spent night after night in each other’s company, talking away the hours and exchanging gifts. Well, not exactly exchanging gifts. Much to her embarrassment, she was actually completely lacking in anything she could give to Nevaeh, never having planned for an eventuality in which she would be required to gift something to another person let alone actually want to. And she did want to. She found it hard, almost impossible, to put her finger on the root cause of why that was, but it was more than social convention that made her want to do something nice for Nevaeh.

It was new to her, entirely alien. While it was the done thing to reply in kind when one was given a gift, she had never particularly felt that need. It went deeper than ‘friends and presents happened to other people’. Closeness of any kind, aside from being something she was unused to, left her feeling profoundly uncomfortable. She felt put on the spot, unsure how to react and shuffling her feet. She had offered to take her shopping, true, but somehow it did not feel like that was enough. This was a person, a virtual stranger, who had let her into their home and made them welcome almost immediately after meeting her. A simple shopping trip did not come close to touching just that, and that was completely aside from the other little gifts she had received. It called for something special.

The first problem with that was that she did not know too much about the other vampire, apart from that she enjoyed her company. The second issue was the sheer number of items that were available. She found herself spending longer and longer browsing the various shops the city had to offer, trying to find the item that would say everything she needed it to and having very little joy. Should she buy Nevaeh a weapon, or would that send the wrong message? She could, of course, buy something for the currently fairly Spartan apartment, or perhaps she could follow Nevaeh’s lead and pick up a little something for the other vampire to wear. Deciding that this was possibly the best bet, she made her way to a store she found about a month previously.

The 8th Dimension Mall, rather typically, was only a short walk from her original starting point in the quarantine zone, taking her hunt for a suitable gift full circle, almost. The shop she needed was near the main entrance, and she slipped inside to begin the search for the perfect item. Sadly, such a thing did not seem to be available. Instead, she made use of the establishment’s ability to provide custom items and detailed exactly what it was that she wished to purchase. She felt that she had been quite clever with her gift, a black and white enamel flower pendant on a slender chain. As she was unable to handle actual flowers without them withering away, this, she believed, was a nice touch that conveyed the thought that had been put into it. Upon being presented with the finished item and finding it more than satisfactory, she handed the hovering sales assistant her debit card and completed the purchase.

The gift bag in hand, she made her way back through the sewers to the quarantine zone and then on to Corvidae Flats. Returning to the apartment, she handed Nevaeh the gift almost shyly and mumbled the phrase she had been repeating over and over internally to explain her choice, hoping it would be sufficient..

“Real ones tend to die on me, so I got you this instead.”