Sunday Excerpt #amwriting #fiction #fantasy #excerpt

If you thought the previous post would take the place of my Sunday Excerpts, you thought wrong.  This one comes a bit in the evening (or night as the case may be), but it is still considered part of my Sunday postings.

Tonight’s excerpt comes from the end of Changing Times: A Vampire’s Tale.  Clarissa survived the Great Change and traveled the entire world after the human race was abolished and those who remained were turned into the first furs.  She witnessed many things and helped start the first Bard Hall where musicians would learn the art of diplomacy, music, and entertaining.  Think of it as a version of the Harper Hall from Anne McCaffrey’s books.  This whole story was written in a diary format so you see how she saw things as she wrote them down.

Personally, I consider this one of my better death scenes but we get to see her feelings before she does the deed.  I hope you enjoy this one.

I sit here now on my balcony, looking out over the forest with nothing more than the moon, and a single candle lighting the darkness around me. This paper, and this quill I use are but pale memories of what I once had. For the last several hundred years, I have sat in this very chair, contemplating the night sky and wondering if Adam did make it through that long sleep, or if any other I once knew survived as well.

The town this castle was built near has grown since I first made this my home. It was once a tiny village with barely a single street running through the middle of it. Now, its a bustling community. Once in a great while, I go down and walk among the mortals, watching them go on with their lives and adding a bit of musical entertainment. Just as in my younger days, I became well known, and my infrequent visits became a celebration for these people.

Their joy became my joy, but it was pale compared to what I had once known. This unlife of mine was becoming boring regardless of what I tried to do. The years brought me many good friends among the mortals. Mages and nobles alike were among my friends. Only one, an orphaned fox captured my attention. He had a talent that rivaled my own, and under my care, he blossomed into a great bard.

It is to him that I gave my final instructions. Before he left to travel the world and make a name for himself, I made him promise to return to this castle once in a while to make sure I was still around. If he ever returned and found that I had finally given myself to the sun’s rays, he was to take this journal to the only mage I trusted so that a preservation spell could be cast on it.

Yes, my dear reader, I am planning for my last days. This existence no longer holds anything for me, and my closest and dearest friend and childe knows it. He’s been watching me closely for about a year now. He and I have both lived for well over two thousand years now, and have watched the world change.

I’m trying to hang on long enough to see three thousand years, but I don’t know. That’s an awful long way off. Maybe a nap, but I doubt a long torpor induced sleep would do any good. I miss my family and friends, the life I had when I was just a simple singer trying to make it big, and the adoration of fans that would run up out of nowhere just to ask for my autograph.

There is only one question I have that I cannot answer. Maybe, you, dear reader, can answer this for me after you’ve finished reading this journal. The fame I have earned before the world was remade, and the fame I earned after, was it all due to my own natural talent as a singer and songwriter, or was it because of ability of mine after I became a vampire? Or could it, by perchance, been the result of my sire’s work behind the scenes? It is something I would like to know, but the answers elude me even now. Maybe I am just too tired with living to try to answer them myself.

The castle is finally quiet, dear reader. My only surviving childe is resting, and everyone else is either asleep or gone. Just so that you what it looks like on this last evening of my life, I’ll describe what I see now. This castle looks out over a valley, there’s a river down there, reflecting the starlight as each star winks out for the night. There’s a forest in my immediate vicinity, concealing this castle from the town sleeping below. The eastern horizon is just beginning to color with the rising sun.

Sunday Excerpt #excerpt #amwriting #fiction

Now that the fever that is NaNoWriMo is over and I’ve had some time to recoup from the massive effort to write so much in such little time, I am returning to making my Sunday Excerpt posts. There is no telling which story I will use from week to week, but don’t be surprised if something new and different shows up.

Today’s excerpt comes from an old story I call Changing Times: A Vampire’s Tale. It chronicles the end times of the human species, the return of the mythical species, and the birth of the furry races. It also tells of how magic first began to appear in the world as it settled back into the natural order of things and why there are so few hints or legends that survived the ages.

This story is written in a diary format. The speaker, or author as the case may be, was a woman who stumbled into the life of a vampire during her rise to fame as a country rock singer and witnessed the fighting and battles that brought the end to the world as she knew it and a sort of release from the darkness and evil that followed her since she was first turned when the god of the vampires was finally defeated.

When I finally went back to join my friends, Adam was gone. He had left soon after we returned, and was never seen again. With only two left, I wasn’t going to risk trying to find him. He was on his own in the dangerous world. All that he left behind was a single note, which I found weeks later, and the ring he always wore. He knew what he was going to do.

It was just me, the lead guitarist, and the fiddle player left in that lonely haven. Together, we made the best of the situation and lived in relative peace with each other. That soon became much easier one night about a month after Adam disappeared into the night.

Under the light of the full moon, I and my two friends were outside enjoying the last of the warm weather before the snows drove us back inside when a strange woman appeared. She was dressed strangely, like out of a pyramid hieroglyph, and what really stunned us, was that she had a cat’s head instead of a human face. Something about her told the three of us that she was no ordinary illusion.

For a time, she spoke with us, asking us why were in such a remote place, if others were with us, and other questions we thought strange, but could not stop ourselves from answering. When she was through, she knew we were alone, and our comrades were either missing or dead. Her answer to all of that was to offer us a new life, so to speak, since she couldn’t remove the vampire’s curse. We were all curious, and heard her out. She and her brothers and sisters were going to remake the world. Not destroy it, but change it. Those that survived the wars, and the cleansing would be changed into some other creature, so long as it wasn’t human, or human related according to her.