Sage & Layla

Lowly creature. He wandered aimlessly through the night, searching. Although he searched, he knew that when he found what he was seeking, it would do him no good. There was no warmth, within or without. A heart lies still and cold within his chest, and left him in an agonizing limbo. This was his nowhere. Death wouldn't claim him and life had rejected him. His memories tormented him.

They devoured him more than the aching hunger. He refused to be taken to the level of animals, even though an animal was basically what he had become all those years ago. No-- lower than an animal. A monster, a soulless demon. His eyes saw no beauty or light, just the cold darkness. He was drawn to those things that lived and that could see beauty, only so he could destroy them and take it away.

He stepped out of the woods and found himself not far from a dwelling. It looked like so many others that he happened upon night after night. His hunger led him to these places, but he refused to give in. He had not killed yet, and tonight would not be that night. Still his instincts led him along, almost against his will. Sometimes it was the hunger that drove him, and sometimes he felt what he thought he remembered as curiosity.

He neared a window and so many scents surrounded him. The hunger pressed him on even stronger, he could not stop himself now. He began to dread that tonight might be the night. The beast was taking over.

He climbed as silent as a cat up the stone wall covered in dead vines. On this winter night all he could smell was the scent of blood. He lifted the frozen window with deadly strength, and still he was as silent as death itself. He watched himself as he glided in to the room and closed the window behind him. The room was chill and he caught the scent of candle smoke. It could have still been hours ago that the inhabitants had gone to sleep, but his senses were heightened to the highest degree at this moment.

He could feel the predator at full force now as the sleeping prey shifted, stirring maddening scents in to his nose and made his head ache. He crept over to the door and slipped a chair under the handle. If there was a noise there would be no one to interrupt. He despaired as he knew he was about to take a life.

There was no going back now. He walked with the movements of a deadly animal toward his kill. Just as he approached the bed, his prey rolled over and he saw her face.

His whole being was filled with the need to kill, but his eyes were the only part of him to rebel. At that moment he had been granted a vision of beauty. He had been given a gift, for the first time in over a century. This woman lay sleeping in a blissful peace, and had no idea that death loomed just inches above her. Death was crippled by this vision of peace and radiant life, and he could not follow through.

The years and memories flooded back in to his mind as fresh as they had been all those years before. He was taken back to that night when his life was turned to a walking death. He couldn't move. He was crippled by the need to feel again, and he had forgotten all about the hunger. He stood there for what felt like an eternity, even to him, gazing down at her. It was like the last 127 years hadn't happened.

He realized that the sun was making its way up to the horizon, and he tore himself away and back over to the window. The beast was clawing and howling inside him, but his eyes felt satisfied. The had feasted on beauty that night, and he himself felt full. Full of what, he wasn't sure, but he felt like he could learn again. He slipped from the window and down in to the woods like a wraith, like he had never been there. He knew this night would haunt him.