Narmer the Charmer....

[Chad Worthington III]

Please sit down and allow me to tell you about the man who made it possible for me to be here now. To exist in the land of the living, to reap the rewards of an immortality thrust on me, then taken away 200 years ago without even a full day to enjoy it. This mans name was Narmer, I met him in the Shadow Realm.

I met my end being ripped to shreds along side my brother Silver. We had locked ourselves inside of a huge family vault in hopes to survive the onslaught of hunters who had come to destroy the three of us. I say three because my ******** of a sire was there at the time they attacked, he fell first allowing Silver and I to escape for a short while. It was dark in the safe, but we were alive. All our senses were alive. I could smell and feel the items around me. I could hear our footsteps and the crashing of crystal as the safe was being deconstructed and it hit the floor. The last bits of light I saw for 200 years stabbed through like a beacon formed by the tools they used to tear open the safe and to eventually create the hole from which they would enter one by one and surround us in this closet of a space. I was too weak from having just turned Silver to put up much of a fight. I died watching him being cut and screaming in pain flailing to hold on.

I was dead. And going from death I always imagined I would see my soul rise up from my body and make it's journey to heaven. And though I was not without sin, nor without corruption, I was a god fearing man. Surely our Lord would take me into his arms and find a mansion for me, even if it's was a small one. But the end was nothing like this at all. It was as if a mist surrounded me stealing away my reality and replacing it with an endless void. A place with no up or down. No boundaries or land marks. No temperature or sounds. Nothing at all for your senses to grasp other than your own voice which didn't carry far at all. It did feel like I had a form, something like a body but composed of the same mist that surrounded me. A body barely indistinguishable from the smoky realm around me and I felt very alone. I wandered... searching, for something. Anything. Someone. Begging for anything more than my own voice which without my control began to scream. Constantly, as if I were in pain. But I felt nothing. And nothing, was worse than pain.

After an unknown period of time, my wanderings took me into contact with the screamings and torments of others there. Vampires like myself who had recently died. Some of them had vast powers still. Many would reach out to the land of the living with their minds, others had vast powers to manipulate a darkness which I had no idea even existed there, and some even had the power to make the boundary between the Shadow Realm and the living world thin, to the point it almost seemed like you could walk through a portal and appear on the other side. But all were tormented and their powers seem to do very little but make it worse as if it held before them all the things they had lost making their time even more of a hell. In our loneliness we gathered, and in our gathering in many ways our suffering multiplied. The wailing and screaming was endless, and an even greater fear over took us as before our eyes we watched the powerful become powerless, and the bodies of mist dissipate into nothingness appearing to be swallowed up by the realm itself. Those that faded gave up and accepted oblivion...

One of the last vampires to appear in the Shadow Realm was an incredibly powerful vampire by the name of Narmer. He was one of 3 truly powerful vampires which I had met during these times, so powerful in fact that I believed he could have escaped whenever he had wanted. To look at the man, you would have thought very little. He was attractive, but he wasn't tall, or surrounded by an aura of invincibility or self righteous nobility like many of the other elders who shared this realm. He was humble in fact. And spent all of his time comforting the tormented souls here. Using his vast powers to help others know of things beyond the realm, such as their families and loved ones. I feared this vampire more than any other. He brought peace to those in pain. And those who found peace... they faded. They met their oblivion with a smile on their faces. I was not going to let him do this to me. I screamed in torment even louder! This torment is mine! I will not fade. Most of the time I cried tearless wales, hating this man. Hating myself that sometimes. I wanted this oblivion. Sometimes, I wanted... peace.

(To be continued)