Post by Bex on Jul 2, 2016 1:19:55 GMT -5
Unto my Dearest Helen at the Keep of Bucharest Mooring on the River, fondest greetings.
I find myself these dark nights wondering what's coming. I feel it in the earth in which I sleep by day. My friends are all gone, my companions taken God only knows where. All but you, my first and most loyal, yet removed, friend. Helen, I tell you, we must be vigilant these nights. You are certainly safe in the keep and your high-born blood protects you. Something insidious is collecting my people. There are new monsters in these mountains. The same old ones play their same old games and some would say that they are enjoying a golden age. Below, where there is a new thing established, the usurper mages make new plans for the ancient clan of the Carpathians. I wish I could just be a bystander, but I witness things. The wolves know and they tell me. Low clans, they say. Low Clans, the dirty, the ugly, the feral and most of all, the useful. What do they do these dark nights? Screams, I hear screams. I hear guttural cries, the roar of frenzy and then silence. But ash? I smell none.
I fear for my childer, my three so young. The youngest I watch as she discovers the pleasure of the moon and feeding from careless night travelers. Some she killed, early ones. But she's more careful now and waits until they sleep in the stupor of the meat and the wine and the woman. Then when all the camp is asleep and the fire has gone down to embers, she creeps to the strongest among them and feeds only a little. They moan in their sleep, the ecstasy of her Kiss seducing their dreams. But so vulnerable is she and untrained.
I long to gather my progeny and travel east, across the mountains, through the ruins of Constantinople. Denis would tell me that I am too much mother hen and not enough wolf. I would tell him that wolves protect their young and he would be silent then and obediently follow me into Ankara, to the little village where I was born nearly a milennium ago. Timur, as he is wont to do, would simply observe and when Denis was off on the hunt, take me in his arms, kiss me and beg me once again for my blood. I might give in. My eldest son, my greatest grief, and yet so loyal does my blood make him, I simply cannot send him away from me. If love can warm a heart of stone...perhaps that is a thought best left unfinished. My youngest, the only daughter, I must meet soon. I must learn her name, this wild child who I found in the woods just this past spring. The nights are warmer now and she has survived. I will learn her name before she is stolen away by the usurpers.
I dreamed yesterday afternoon about winged beasts of stone. I looked into one of their eyes and saw the eyes of my broodmate, Tiller, trapped in the stone body, but unafraid because he did not know me. He did not even know himself. He only knew to obey without question. It has happened. They destroyed who he was and made him into something different.
Such grief.
By my own hand, I am Havva, Daughter of Melek the Turk, under the sky, free, this second night of July in the year of our Lord, 1206.
