you're too young & eager to love

I felt like writing Maharet. You can never have enough of her awesomeness in this world.

Two little bits with her. The first centering around the time that Akasha and Enkil were left out to burn in Egypt by their unfaithful servant, which is the reason so many vampires were massacred. This happens roughly near (but obviously not after) Marius becomes a vampire, because he goes to Egypt to figure out the old myths and find out why the vampire that made him was burnt and, well, gross. I just can't remember exactly what time period that besides, vaguely, Roman.

The second is set hours after Mekare vanquishes (because how often do I get to use that verb?) Akasha.

-



The deep dark unsettles around her as she awakens, and Maharet knows. Her skin aches and for the first time in many centuries she feels something akin to hunger.

In the cellar of the Sonoma compound, she presses her fingers to her eyelids. The air is thick with fright; she can taste it. She thinks she can feel the grief of so many souls, a glimmer of some terrible injustice.

She opens her mind, projects invisible sight, searching and fearing. What thunders forward to her is an empty world where blood drinkers have been slaughtered. Only the oldest remain, darkened like her, or burnt to blackened corpses that wither in agony. She sees through the eyes and minds of the remaining – watches as her beloveds turn to flame.

The companions she created with her own strong blood. The others, immortals she drew into her company over the centuries of surviving (living). Gone with such suddenness that she hasn’t the force to express her grief. Only the walls of her timeless home seem to shudder against the mountainside, as though moved by some immense weight.

-

It is Eric she finds first.

Blackened like the others. A vampire of delicate features but such beauty. She would not have known him, not with her mortal eyes, had Santino not directed her.

She cries to see him and, in his desperation, he presses his charred mouth to her blood tears.







Mekare, the strong one, had gone mad. But she had risen too, become their new Queen.

And now in the aftermath he watches her, his Maharet, the gentler one, that has turned hard over the years, all of her, body and mind. It is the mark of her survival, this hardness, this relentlessness in her. That she would see things, and speak of what she sees, and never lie. There is no room for lies in her.

“Khayman, the loyal servant.” She sounds bitter in the night, against the giant red oaks, but she touches his arm eagerly. He cannot tell if she marvels at the sameness of their flesh – the ivory that immortality is made of.

He understands, he does. He wishes he could reach into her mind, show her what it had been like. The eternity that he had lived, alone. Tormented by the blood that he would not give into, never creating companions of his own kind since after that first reckless time in Egypt. And mortals withered and died so fast. The isolation that had gnawed at him and changed him, every time, undermining his essential sweetness, his contented disposition, causing him to spiral into madness and memory-loss, to bury himself in the earth hoping for release only to rise again, live again with the same gradually shattering hopes. A phoenix without a fire.

“Do you remember us, the last time we were together?”

“Yes.” He remembers more - the heat of that night, the soldiers rushing them, overwhelming them outside the gates of Saqqara. Darkness and the smooth forever of sand and sky, and then sudden sharp glints stabbing at his unaccustomed eyes: stars, starlight on metal, torches. How the mere light of a torch had hurt him then. And he'd seen it all, even the tiny reflexes glittering in the soldiers' eyes, even the gleam of blood spilling as he fought for his freedom.

“It seemed like your fault, once. All of it. You who were their loyal subject. You who came, always, to take us away.”

Khayman turns away, hurt by the violence of her words. The simple truth of her hatred that she, surely, must have walked with for eons. But her fingers remain, iron-like, against his arm. He faces her, tall and white like she is, grasping her throat in one of his hands. But it is desperately, not angrily, cupping the back of her neck with his fingers against her hair as though they were lovers. “This railing against fate is unlike you.”

She laughs, soft and surprised. “It is not a railing but an admittance. I have forgiven you. I did, long ago.” Taking his hand, she turns toward the compound. She, like him, can feel the others gathered there.

Recovering, enduring.