What follows was not easy to recount. I have alluded to such things before, but I have never been explicit, and even here I find myself forced to soften the words and the images. I nearly posted this elsewhere to keep it off of this site, but that would be inappropriate. If what follows offends or disturbs I can offer only that life often offends or disturbs. If it makes it any easier to accept, know that I still carry the sickening weight of this monstrosity. It haunts me to this day.

Roughly two thousand years in the past, I was quite insane:

It is a game, nothing more. I slip out in to the twisted labyrinth of the city’s stinking streets and drop my lure- in this case, myself. Naked but for a scrap of linen, or perhaps something finer, a little jewelry, and a pair of sandals I stroll the winding sewers that make up the Eternal City, centre of power and all things glorious. They think me a slave, a prisoner of their power, a thing.

I hate them. I hate their pretensions to civilization; their fascination with blood sport, their arrogant assumption of superiority. The very soul of their culture is warped and diseased and I had allowed it to infect me, to deceive me in to believing that I could become a part of it. Then I watched it destroy the first person I had ever truly loved.

So I play my part, enticing the lust-addled simpletons to my bloated mistress’s wretched establishment where lesser creatures sweat and toil for the pleasures of beasts. I bring a high price the nights I am there, but I serve my mistress better as an advertisement, and this permits me to satisfy my own need. Every day I seek what I crave, some misbegotten fool believing he has a right to my body, to my undivided attentions. I entice him with the easy promise of fulfilling my duty.

It is always the same, yet it is always just different enough. Each is unique in his own way. A dark corner, or a back room, private and unnoticed, a perfect place for his brutish pleasures, except… It is always such a surprise. Private for him, perfect for me- I delve in to my deepest place and produce a work of art. I never use a weapon; I delight in taking my prize with my bare hands.

A soft caress transforms in an instant to a sharp blow to the throat. Perhaps he is confused, not understanding what I have done. Then the panic sets in, the fractured airway sealed forever against the precious release of life-giving breath. Some, the pathetic ones, clutch at their throat, struggling to breathe, thrashing and kicking as I laugh, taunting them. Others are more entertaining, spending their last moments in a rage, trying to lay their hands around my pretty neck and send me to Hades before them- and they learn I am swift and strong and disinclined to die. I take small pity on those, as their strength fails and they fall, easing them to the ground, whispering to them, telling them how they have lightened the day of an ancient creature.

Playful wrestling, a game of chase that incites his lust until that moment when I dance in to that one spot, poised just so, where I have all the advantage and this fool is at my mercy, confident there is naught to concern him in the form of this curvaceous, giggling wench. I slip my arm about his neck and he laughs as I trap him, then stiffens as I pull. There is a spasm of reaction as I apply all my strength in a single, savage wrenching twist. Flesh tears, gristle popping, and bones grinding until the sudden deep, thick crack of separation is felt and he goes limp in my grasp. I let him fall, grinning, gasping as the laughter forces its way up to my lips and I am trembling from excitement and exertion- it is no small effort to break a man’s neck. It lacks the artistry of other methods, but the pure adrenaline, the sudden contest of strength with the certainty that I shall not be denied my trophy, it is the closest this comes to a pure sexual thrill, and it surpasses all in the sense of being suddenly, vividly alive when it is done. Again, I lower my lips to his ear, and whisper the secret I shall allow him to take to his grave. A parting gift he hardly deserves.

“Die quietly like a good fellow, yes? You have fallen prey to a Goddess…”

Let my whispered words mock them and their worthless gods.

The first few become a dozen. The dozen become scores, then hundreds, and then many hundreds. This city is an abattoir- a few extra murders per week can hardly be expected to elicit concern. Still, eventually they come to suspect something is amiss, and even then they have no inkling. My score stands at Eight Hundred and Forty-Six the first time anyone thinks to question the pretty slave seen here and there where the corpses are discovered, and yet all they ask is “Have you seen anything?” I am too small, too feminine, too submissive and far too deft at manipulating men to become a suspect, even when so many things point directly at me. It is a blindness born of arrogance, and fully thirty pay for that with their lives, tortured to death by frustrated agents of the law and other interested parties determined to punish somebody while I add another fifty or so by my own hand.

It had begun slowly and so does it end. Even one such as I cannot ignore the growing scrutiny and my pace slackens, and with it the madness that drives me ebbs, until one day when I draw a man in to my net… and then let him go. He would have been number Nine Hundred and Thirteen…

Six years of homicidal madness, arguably the price paid for my first taste of love.

Posted on November 16th, 2003 by Zsallia
Filed under: Immortality, Regrets, The Past