Chapter 217 - FLASHBACK. Monsters

It was bad enough when I looked at Maria's face without glamour hiding her inhuman features from my gaze; it became worse when she put me to sleep with a glance and I woke up her prisoner.

Not in a dungeon, mind you. My cell was a posh room, but a cell is still a cell even when it's gilded. Maria could've bent me to her will with magic a hundred times, and told me just so—but instead, she found it amusing to use other ways to convince me to join her harem of young and handsome men.

As a jailer, she was a gentle one. Never put a hand on me, never was cruel for the sake of cruelty—if you forget the entire arrangement. It could've been much worse, but this was the farthest thing from my mind back then. Instead, I could only pray to God to save me from this den of a monster, unholy abomination that daily feasted on blood—mine included.

Oh yes, she couldn't leave me that much untouched, after all. She told me that my stubborn refusal to accept my position made the taste sweeter. She liked to talk to me, to tell in many details, often disgusting to me then, about the way she enjoyed life and how I could share some of that if I only did what I was told by my own free will.

She is a hedonist, Maria, a pursuer of pleasures of all kinds, but most of all, physical. If she were a human, she'd enjoy delicious foods and wine, elaborate parties and art. As a vampire, food and wine she had to replace with blood, and she never cared for those she took it from.

By Maria's beliefs, vampires, like her, were monsters and doomed to burn in Hell after their eventual death. Therefore, it was of utmost importance to enjoy their lives as much and as long as they could. It was also a factor that Maria was old even back then. She had almost ten centuries on her back then, and weary of life in some ways, for which she compensated with her entertainments.

I was one of them.

When I grew used to her enough that the only words I could tell her weren't "begone, monster!", I asked her what she was thinking, kidnapping me. I had little hope that anyone I knew would save me—not from Maria—but I couldn't put it in my head that a woman, even a monster, would kidnap men for what she called her harem and force them to serve her in bed and outside of it.

You know what she responded to me with? "Men had forced women by force, obligation or law to serve them as wives for centuries. I'm simply turning tables."

It stuck with me. Maybe because it was the last thing I expected her to say. Either way… it didn't change my determination to avoid turning into her harem boy. She would've treated me well, she would've let me go when I grew too old to please her with my looks—but this mattered little to me.

I spent three years this way, as Maria's prisoner. Many times I tried to escape, but someone—her guards, servants, or Maria herself—would always stop me. I wondered if I could simply outwait her, if she'd let me go when the first wrinkles would appear on my face.

She lost her patience long before that. One day, Maria started to force me to do strange things. If I didn't listen, she used hypnosis, so I preferred to listen by myself. I had to stop cutting off my hair, and had to train vigorously and in certain ways—not that I abandoned physical exercise in my cell, but it was hard to do it in a space I was given.

I didn't know then what she was preparing me for. If I knew… I think, back then, I would've decided that escape in death was better than living as an undead abomination.

And finally, one day, Maria made the final preparations. She put me in a deep sleep then—I didn't even feel it when her servants were cleansing and preparing my body, and when she was draining life out of it, only to replace it with her power.

I remember waking up, and feeling… cold. Something was missing, something important, but I couldn't tell at first. There was a total silence in my ears, and it was wrong somehow.

Then, I realised I couldn't hear my heartbeat. I panicked, wondering if I grew deaf overnight—but in that same still heart, I already knew that much worse thing happened. My worst nightmare turned reality.

And Maria was there, too. "Let's look how you will clutch at your dogmas now, fledgling! Will you be as stubborn now? After you make your first sip of blood, will you refuse it afterwards?"

She had a victim prepared already—a simple man, one that could've been one of her servants, or just any peasant she picked around. I remember his eyes—he was terrified so much that he refused to see us at all inside of his mind. I remember the scent of his blood, too, when Maria nicked him with a knife… It was overwhelming.

I knew the smell, and even the taste of blood by then—there's plenty of that on a battlefield. It didn't change—but now it was more tantalising than the best delicacies. And I was starving.

I drank that man dry, Diana. The only one I killed because I lacked control over myself. But it was enough to break me then. Maria turned me into a monster, and monsters… were bound to do monstrous things. There was no light for me anymore, and I deserved to have no pride.

I was lost, and without ground under my feet.

When Maria said, "You can go where you want now. You are free now, just like you wanted to" it was the worst thing she could've told me. I… I attacked her in anger at first, but when she fought me off, I pleaded her to have me, to not leave me alone. A lonely monster… She agreed, of course. That was her plan all along.

And it didn't help that for so long, she was my only company, the centre of my world.. Now she opened it, but still showed only what she wanted me to see.