Butterfly Dreams
Meditations: Still the Heart
© Ilah, 1999
the splinter of an empty life
The young ones look at all of the old ones in silent awe. Look, their whispers float one to the other, look, so old, so ancient... abiding, unthirsting.
Ah, and there is the truth of the awe. Unthirsting. They, who must drink once or twice a night look in undisguised awe at those who go for weeks or months without the blood, who might go years without the hunt. They look at the ancients with shining young eyes and see a foreign creature, no longer a slave to the thirst that beats in their children's hearts with angry hands.
So little they know. Or perhaps not - for in the darkness, in the stillness when they gather together, the young, the newborn, their whispers are still of awe but lower, softer, meant not to ever be heard by those ears they discuss. Look, they breath, hardly daring. Look, the ancient ones.
So vicious. So violent.
The tales pass like wildfire, like the whispers of a furtive classroom of mortal children. Have you seen...? Did you hear...? Atrocities in the modern news, the rare and seldom body found not just drained but wrung dry, crushed like a damp rag, heart and organs ripped forth and squeezed like overripe fruit. And then the young ones gather in darkened corners and whisper to one another, each denying knowledge, each knowing they themselves do not posess the strength to do such a thing. They look out into the night around them, clustered like chicks in a nest, and breath the words. The ancient ones...
The ancient ones, the old ones, the ones who hunt not for thirst but for pleasure. The ones who hunt with the vicious sadism of a sated cat who now has leisure to play with its hapless prey. They say it of all of us, whether it be true or no.
-------[falling, softly]
----------[forgotten, fading]I am not as old as some. I can still feel the echo of the true thirst, nipping at vein and plucking at nerve until it drives me forth to the hunt. But rarely. For months, the better part of a year, it will leave me in peace. The blood is still sweet but I put it aside long ago and the siren call of longing for pure hedonistic pleasure has little hold over me.
When I do hunt it is a swift thing - done in an instant, taking the first blackened heart which crosses my path without remorse or guilt. Leave that to the young ones; for myself, the kill is simply that which must be done and there is no sense in prolonging it or carrying on about it. Done swiftly, done neatly, disposed of quickly and pass on to other things.
Not now.
--tinged with acrid ash
There is a reason not to kill in anger - it is too easy. Too simple to do and you may not know the trap of it until the jaws close about you. It is so very easy to give in to the anger and the sweet pleasure of the blood is like a reward for that very lack of control. A very easy solution and it has nothing to do with the true thirst, nothing even with the search for pleasure. Only the satiation of an appetite that has naught to do with any real need but only with the surcease of control of simple temper.
There is pleasure in it, certainly. Pleasure in the snap of bone and the sodden give of flesh beneath the hand. Pleasure to bare fang and feel the fear radiate up in waves like heat rising to feed the flames of the anger that demands some satisfaction from someone... anyone. There are so many ways to hunt, and we try them all at one time or another. The breathless shivers of seduction; the righteous feast of the judge; the solemn, quiet passing of the one who longs for death. The gentle hunt, the brutal hunt, the quick or slow, calm or frantic. It flavors the blood, reflects our moods and needs.
Anger is the great equalizer. In the grasp of anger even the faces of those you love best become unbearable, their words meaningless and washed away in the tidal roar of your own heartbeat as it pulses in your clenched hands. Anger is blind and whatever is nearest to hand - friend, foe, or an unassuming wall - are equally likely to be the recipient of the rage boiling within you.
I do not loose my temper. I have spent long years and longer nights making that a reality. I may grow angry but I do not let the anger control me. A man is more than the sum of his emotion, more than a slave to the passion of the moment. Anger is naught but a lack of control, and if one can not control one's self then how is the man better than the beast?
And in those rare, hypothetical times when I do loose control... it is good sense and common decency, I think, to remove myself from the presence of those I care for and whom I might hurt with my words or deeds.
-------the bite of a winter wind
The hunt is, by nature, violent. No matter how one does it, no matter how it is disguised or what tricks are used it remains, at heart, nothing more than death. It is the hunt. The taking of life; and whether it is because we are damned creatures sentenced to compound our damnation with the sin of murder; or merely because we are faster, stronger, and it is a part of our nature; we are still the predator who takes his prey. Like one of those television programs one may see, when we step out upon the hunt the world around us becomes our savannah and we the sharp toothed crocodile, the snarling lion, the snake with the mouse within its coils. We are the hunters. It is the violence of nature and the very nature of violence. What better outlet, then, for the burning rage?
But anger takes the beauty from the hunt, removes the last scrap of dignity from it. It takes it and twists it, makes it personal and uncomfortably close.
The anger boils out with every breath, every gesture, but only in certain gestures may it know the blessed lancing of the fire within. Only the violent release will quench the fire. The fear, the screams, the crunch of bone and the give of flesh - these are balm to the madness of the soul. When you finally sink your teeth into the fount of blood it means almost nothing, for this was not about the blood. It is merely the dessert, the icing upon the meal already had. To call it animalistic is wrong - animals do not kill in anger. Only men do. And so, even in this, we reaffirm that we are naught but the men we were born.
----------swirling in the stillness
Looking down now at my blood stained hands and spattered clothes, feeling the life surge through my veins even as it drips, drop by drop to the bloody pulp at my feet - now, yes, I feel remorse as I never do after a clean hunt. Not guilt over the taking of a life; that means little. But disgust at myself for the manner of it, for the mess created and the loss of control. Remorse and disgust and sickness. Cursing, I find a scrap of cloth to wipe the worst of the blood from my hands and shake them dry. I can't bring myself to touch the blood soaked crumpled remnant, not even with the toe of a shoe. Bad enough to have to shove it by force of mind into the depths of a garbage heap. It is the work of a moment to kindle a flame in dampened paper and leave it, smoldering, a sullen ugly smoke that should not attract attention until far too late. A moment and I begrudge every one of them that I must waste before turning to go.
Still and all, it has done what needed doing. Filled with life, calm of mind and still of heart, I may return to face in rationality that which temper forced me to flee.
------of the silenced heart
The ancient ones, the young ones say, the old ones, the ones who hunt not for thirst but for pleasure. Who hunt with cruelty and greed. They say it of all of us, whether it be true or no.
Some truths are better left unexamined, and others are no sort of truth at all.