by Natalie Case

Created on: August 13, 2008

An excerpt from my novel: Forever

I am comfortable in the dark, when the moon slumbers and clouds dim the stars and the smell of the earth rises in the still air. Perhaps that still moment is the only place I am comfortable. My years have been long and have seen me travel nearly all of this world, often alone. I have given life and dealt death, but I offer no regret. Regret is a waste of effort when justice brings the guilty no peace. I will see justice in the end, I am certain of that, for all that I have done, and all I have not.

So much has gone now and I am ill at ease with the time, the waiting, here at the end of my life. The ancient game is played out and three souls, born together in the lost pages of time are as they were meant to bebut to tell that story, my story, I must go back to the beginning, before I came to be, before any of us had come to be.

It begins near to the birth of time, or man's keeping of it, when three brothers entered into an unholy bond, bound by blood to the night, trading the daylight for eternal life. The stories tell of their calling, the slaughter of their mortal families, and the beginning of what would be called The Family. The middle brother, a brutish man named Crenoral, chose my mother to be his first bride. She had been a farmer's wife, and was pregnant, only barely so, when Crenoral came and called her into the night. She followed him, bringing me with her, and leaving behind a mortal family of two sons to mourn her. It was some time after that when I came to be born.

Our existence and all of its dark burden was new to us then. There were no rules to our existence, save for the drinking of blood and the death that rose with each sunrise. The Family was small, those three brothers, their brides and the occasional other whom they adopted along the way. In all there were no more than twelve in my earliest memories, aside from Crenoral and his brothers.

I was born in a dark, dank cave somewhere in the Caucasus to a mother who wasn't exactly beautiful. She learned early how to make use of what gifts she was given, and when she chose, could be dynamically attractive, terrifying and compelling at once. I can still see her long, angular face and hair as black as the night, which made her appear somehow harsh, unforgiving. Her green eyes burned eerily in the darkness and smoldered in the firelight.

There was little to our relationship but for the vague, distant kinship we all shared and the occasional moment of maternal gesture.

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