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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/vehino on 2024-09-27 19:27:20+00:00.

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Chapter theme: Nirvana - Where Did You Sleep Last Night {Lyrics} (youtube.com)

Chapter 35.

I have ruined you.

A day later, as we continued our meandering walk to Gardenia, I asked Rachel a question that had begun to bother me.

“Are we vampires who are forced to become human or are we humans who are forced to become vampires?”

I thought it was a stupid question. I don’t know what possessed me to ask it. Rachel was unbothered by it, though. She didn’t hesitate to provide an answer.

“Option number one, obviously,” she said.

“Obviously?” I asked.

“Obviously,” she confirmed.

And then I thought, I have ruined this girl.

Not long ago, Rachel was literally on the side of the angels. She was naïve, and arrogant, but essentially a good person whose disdain was reserved exclusively for those that wrought evil. Although she was self-righteous, that didn’t mean there wasn’t an element of righteousness to her character.

She wanted to preserve life and punish those who threatened it.

Last night, she’d torn a defenseless woman’s throat out with her teeth and drained her trembling body of blood. Then she’d tossed the corpse aside without a backward glance.

That woman had been our friend and benefactor for two months. A traitor and an opportunist, to be sure. But there still should have been some hesitation in Rachel before she committed to delivering the killing bite. But she hadn’t given Jamie so much as an opportunity to beg for her life.

It was all very tidy. Ordinarily, I would have commended Rachel for not dragging things out as so many of our kind do. The urge for sadism is strong within the vampire psyche. We’re timeless, after all, so we like our vengeance to be proportionate to our unending search for stimulation. All pleasure should be savored and extended. Satiation was best when it was gradual.

It occurred to me when I woke up this morning, that Rachel had manipulated me into increasing Cassie and Pankratz’ suffering by sparing his life. I had fooled myself into believing she’d overcome vampiric hierarchy through strength of character. But that wasn’t true at all, was it?

She’d spared Cassie because she wanted that girl to live with the knowledge that she’d killed her mother and could do nothing about it. And she’d convinced me to save Pankratz, because she wanted Cassie to grow to hate him for not being able to protect them.

Rachel had truly embraced her nature. Her answer to my question had proven it.

Why didn’t I feel proud of her? Why did I feel ashamed of myself?

Killing the people who’d assisted Jamie, and her family, shouldn’t have mattered to me. They’d attacked me first, after all. And yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I couldn’t forget the pain in their eyes and the fear they’d shown as the end drew near and they realized the inevitability of their own deaths.

I felt like a bully. Like a disgraceful ruffian, which I didn’t understand. Why should I care? I’ve claimed countless victims over the long years of my life. You could probably create a village using their bones as building material.

It bothered me that I was so bothered by this.

It was bothersome.

Human life has no intrinsic value aside from that which it assigns itself. It is an act of unbelievable arrogance to say that all lives matter equally, or that the loss of one is a loss for the world. From the moment of birth and onward, we are disposable and easily replaced. First there were thousands of us; now there are billions. On a macroscopic scale, we are a faceless, writhing mass that has spread itself over the surface of the continents.

We are not special. We are not unique. We are simply here, occupying space until the moment of death. Some of us are interesting, but most of us are not. How I chose to treat others shouldn’t have mattered.

But it did, didn’t it?

In the recent past, this line of thought would have been ludicrous. I was wholly a monster back then and consumed by my own excesses. I didn’t have any interest in their sufferings, beyond minimizing it to the amount necessary to keep them functional and docile. A peaceful society kept the herd pacified.

But now, I was a part of that herd. And with that inclusion came a growing sense of, well, empathy.

I may have stood apart from humanity.

But that didn’t mean I wasn’t a part of…humanity.

As a vampire, I’d spent centuries disguising myself as one of them. But now that I had become one, I couldn’t minimize my deeds any longer.

I’d done an unnecessary evil to those poor fools. I knew they couldn’t win, but I’d felt justified in attacking them, anyway. All so I could kill them to alleviate the embarrassment I’d felt at being caught off guard. And although I realized their intentions for me were fueled by wicked greed, did that really give me the right to deal with them as cruelly as I had?

This was something I never would have considered before. But now it was all that I could think about. As a vampire, I was the stalking lion, concerned only with his own pleasure and hunger. I gave no thought to those who fell prey to me.

But as a man, I was simultaneously the hunted. And I could clearly see the injustice of being toyed with by a predator. The thought of dying in the manner of my own victims filled me with thoughts of fear and despair. What a sad, bleak thing it is to fall to the hungering dark.

Lions wouldn’t care. They were incapable of it.

But I wasn’t a lion anymore, was I? Not purely, anyway.

But I was still a murderer.

And with my failure to understand my own feelings, I had led Rachel down a similar path.

What had Rachel seen when she saw that I was about to bite Jamie? What had I looked like? Had she really killed Jamie to prevent me from transforming her? Or had she been upset that I nearly prevented her from twisting the knife in Cassie’s wounds for the rest of her life?

Thoughts like this were slowly beginning to drown me in paranoia.

Jamie’s gift wasn’t helping much.

Adding [Appraisal] to the gore grimoire had proven to be a mistake. At first, the tactical benefits made it seem like an obvious choice for acquisition. Being able to see things like class descriptions, levels, and statistics would provide endless advantages in future interactions with this world. But Jamie’s gift went even further than I realized.

For example, when I looked at Schulz, I could not only see the expected things such as his strength, dexterity, and constitution, I could see his mood. Which was [Calm]. I could scan for mental [Stable] or physical [Healthy] abnormalities. I could even measure the strength of our personal bond [Deeply Loyal]. But it was the alignment meter that I found truly disturbing to behold. [True Neutral].

This couldn’t be real, could it?

Morality can’t be reduced to this level of simplicity. You can’t just arbitrarily assign a numeric value to one of the greatest questions that has bedeviled humanity since the inception of our intelligence. You can’t just slap a number on my forehead, declare me evil, and then move on down the line. It can’t work that way. It mustn’t work that way!

And yet, when I beheld myself with Jamie’s gift, the result was always the same. I possessed a karmic value of negative five thousand.

[Evil].

“Kyler, what are you so hung up about now, asked Rachel. My [immature], [Affectionate], negative two thousand karmic value [Evil] daughter, bearing the title [Archfiend’s Apprentice].

“Nothing,” I said sadly. “Nothing serious, anyway. It just seems that I’m yet another old man who’s learned that the world doesn’t work quite the way I once believed it did.”

“Well, doesn’t that mean you learned something new?” she asked.

“It does,” I agreed.

“Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it? Kyler, it seems to me that you’re always mistaking old for stagnant. There’s a big difference between the two. Growing older doesn’t have to separate you from the world. For people like us, it can make us more aware of it.”

“Do you really believe so?” I asked her

“Absolutely! But you need to stop being so fixated on how things change, and just accept that change is an inevitable outcome. That’s what I think, anyway.”

In that moment, Rachel seemed like a fount of hope to me. She represented a newer, better way of thinking. A sort of renewal that I’d never even considered before.

I smiled at her gratefully and nodded.

“Everyday that passes, your growing wisdom becomes more evident,” I said to her. “You will be a great leader one day.”

“Damn straight!” she readily agreed. “Now quit being so weird.”

“I’ll do my level best,” I promised her.

__

Some time later, the three of us became lost.

No, that’s not quite what happened.

Some time later, the three of us became ensnared in a maze.

It happened gradually, with such subtlety that even I failed to notice it at first. Schultz was the one who alerted me to our unexpected predicament. And a predicament, indeed it was.

The forest surrounding us was moving. New plants were growing at an unnatural speed, raising towering walls of green that divided and segmented the space around us, forcing us to hurry along before we were cut off from each other or enclosed in an …

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