you're too young & eager to love (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
impertinences) wrote2011-06-07 12:15 am
impertinences) wrote2011-06-07 12:15 am
Entry tags:
Maharet + Mael = vampire goodness
If I ever stop loving vampires, or Anne Rice, it may be time for me to transcend to the next, higher realm. Or something.
I was originally trying to do a Lestat and Maharet piece, but I wanted to do something more intimate (and with a male character that I could decently write). So, voila, Maharet and Mael instead.
Sometimes, when writing not-original fiction, I like to make notes before the story starts. Usually to explain/remind readers of certain things but mostly because I worry I won’t remember when I reread this in a few months. This piece’s notes are: Mael was a druid priest and seems to, at one point, favored haunting around Northern Europe. Him and Marius know each other, fight each other for what I consider to be petty reasons, but Marius does show Akasha and Enkil to Mael. This all, naturally, happens before Mael becomes Maharet’s companion. We, as readers of the Chronicles, know that legends of Mael existed when Lestat was still a fledgling vampire, and so he’s considered one of the ancient ones. You know, until Maharet arrives and makes the term ancient synonymous with youthful.
To my knowledge, we are never told how Mael and Maharet became companions. We’re only told that Mael is fearful of her but adores her, even in a slightly submissive, subservient way. So, I took my own liberties there.
There is a drum calling to him.
There is a rhythm tormenting him.
It pounds and never stills.
More constant than the thirst that rouses him nightly. But he recognizes it – a strange creeping sensation of familiarity – and it makes him think of Roman streets, the smell of incense, a hidden grove. The sensations, however, are too vague. He cannot place them; he loses them within the vastness of his European forests, within the wilderness frozen by winter. A force beckons, pulls, draws him from the isolation he so enjoys.
There are never any footsteps in the snow. The leaves do not move.
But the noise remains, and so he hunts.
He finds her, although it cannot be called a finding. She was a witch to him then, a goddess of lore. The frost in her hair – hair he had never seen, redder than the crimson dusk – the heavy fur around her shoulders. How tall she seemed in a forest of giants, how horrifyingly inhuman. Blood blindingly bright on the snow, painting her hands, sticking beneath her nails, on her breath, and the lifeless elk by her feet. Her heart -- the drumming, the endless rhythm.
But there is something else, something he is not noticing, a factor that makes the sight more frightful.
Her eyes, he realizes. Mortal eyes. Full of expression despite being stolen. The images disturb him. She is made of the same preternatural blood, the same marble flesh, but she is foreign. He imagines the tearing open of sockets, the breaking of ligaments, and the continual pain of exchanging one set for the other. She lets him know, with a suddenness that forces him backward, that, yes, it is exactly as he imagines. That she has ripped throats with the same delicacy and torn out hearts with far more brutality.
But she makes a gesture with her hands, opens them in the slightest of ways, as if to imply that the savagery of old is changing. The world is morphing and it lacks the gall for such bloodiness. It is the reason he finds solace in these ice regions, in a world unforeseen and unable to be judged by morality, ethics, and the human self.
Her movements are deliberate but with all the languor of a vampire. She, to him, is true immortality.
“Yes, my druid, my Nordic.” She says, her voice startling youthful, possessing an accent he is incapable of placing. “I am.”
--
They travel through the lands together. He must, at times, fight to keep up with her. She climbs the steep, iced paths of mountainsides effortlessly. He cannot find a source she cannot breach; even the sun no longer torments her, although she describes it as a fire across her skin, a necessary action that turns the pallor of her skin from pearl to old lace. Every new revelation about her frightens him in some way. Even her name.
“Maharet.” He says it a thousand times that first encounter, but it never loses its thrall.
Yet she never asks him his, though he offers it freely. She appears to already know it, just as she appears to understand the stories he tells her – of Marius and Avicus, of Constantinople – as though she had been with them the entire time. She is unendingly patient, listening with an affection that causes him to bristle with pride, but she is detached.
In those early years, when Mael is enticed by her strength, unable to realize the subtle, feminine liability about her, they make their homes from cliff sides and stone. He builds fires, large enough to be a pyre of faith, and watches as the snow melts from her hair. She teaches him songs from her childhood and prepares him for the inevitable sleep that he will face once she has left him. Leaving, Maharet explains, is inevitable. “But not yet.” And she lets him plait her long, sanguine hair.
Mostly, she answers his questions.
He is a vampire of faith, and it makes her laugh. Gods, she says, come and go with the stars. When he argues over spirits, she waves her hand dismissively, quick to displace his beliefs. “Yes, they still exist. They are more timeless, perhaps, than our kind. But they are frivolous beings, immaterial and possessing no great value. Yet you know this already – you ask the wrong questions.” Always, she tells him, he fails to seek true knowledge. The answers he derives are meant to placate him, confirm his suspicions and doubts, but she understands his fear of truth, although it will be the flaw that finally undoes him.
Mael talks of Those Who Must Be Kept. He is more fascinated by her, but the Egyptian immortals kept by the Roman servant interests him. Akasha, the beauty. Enkil, her guardian King. In the firelight, Maharet’s teeth gleam. “If she is capable of true thought, I am certain that Akasha is as ignorant now as she was in the time of her faulty Egyptian gods. She is fueled by her ignorance and constant greed. But you love her still, don’t you? Because she is the Mother. You love her as keenly as I hate her.” In her soft, passionate voice, Maharet scorns him. “What was she to you? A goddess statue? I tell you that for all her loftiness and vulnerability, she is impenetrable. Like a mortal, you love most what you cannot ever reach.”
It takes him decades to realize that she is searching.
Years more to learn of the ghosts she harbors in Egypt, of the lost, speechless sister, and a lineage she follows.
I was originally trying to do a Lestat and Maharet piece, but I wanted to do something more intimate (and with a male character that I could decently write). So, voila, Maharet and Mael instead.
Sometimes, when writing not-original fiction, I like to make notes before the story starts. Usually to explain/remind readers of certain things but mostly because I worry I won’t remember when I reread this in a few months. This piece’s notes are: Mael was a druid priest and seems to, at one point, favored haunting around Northern Europe. Him and Marius know each other, fight each other for what I consider to be petty reasons, but Marius does show Akasha and Enkil to Mael. This all, naturally, happens before Mael becomes Maharet’s companion. We, as readers of the Chronicles, know that legends of Mael existed when Lestat was still a fledgling vampire, and so he’s considered one of the ancient ones. You know, until Maharet arrives and makes the term ancient synonymous with youthful.
To my knowledge, we are never told how Mael and Maharet became companions. We’re only told that Mael is fearful of her but adores her, even in a slightly submissive, subservient way. So, I took my own liberties there.
There is a drum calling to him.
There is a rhythm tormenting him.
It pounds and never stills.
More constant than the thirst that rouses him nightly. But he recognizes it – a strange creeping sensation of familiarity – and it makes him think of Roman streets, the smell of incense, a hidden grove. The sensations, however, are too vague. He cannot place them; he loses them within the vastness of his European forests, within the wilderness frozen by winter. A force beckons, pulls, draws him from the isolation he so enjoys.
There are never any footsteps in the snow. The leaves do not move.
But the noise remains, and so he hunts.
He finds her, although it cannot be called a finding. She was a witch to him then, a goddess of lore. The frost in her hair – hair he had never seen, redder than the crimson dusk – the heavy fur around her shoulders. How tall she seemed in a forest of giants, how horrifyingly inhuman. Blood blindingly bright on the snow, painting her hands, sticking beneath her nails, on her breath, and the lifeless elk by her feet. Her heart -- the drumming, the endless rhythm.
But there is something else, something he is not noticing, a factor that makes the sight more frightful.
Her eyes, he realizes. Mortal eyes. Full of expression despite being stolen. The images disturb him. She is made of the same preternatural blood, the same marble flesh, but she is foreign. He imagines the tearing open of sockets, the breaking of ligaments, and the continual pain of exchanging one set for the other. She lets him know, with a suddenness that forces him backward, that, yes, it is exactly as he imagines. That she has ripped throats with the same delicacy and torn out hearts with far more brutality.
But she makes a gesture with her hands, opens them in the slightest of ways, as if to imply that the savagery of old is changing. The world is morphing and it lacks the gall for such bloodiness. It is the reason he finds solace in these ice regions, in a world unforeseen and unable to be judged by morality, ethics, and the human self.
Her movements are deliberate but with all the languor of a vampire. She, to him, is true immortality.
“Yes, my druid, my Nordic.” She says, her voice startling youthful, possessing an accent he is incapable of placing. “I am.”
--
They travel through the lands together. He must, at times, fight to keep up with her. She climbs the steep, iced paths of mountainsides effortlessly. He cannot find a source she cannot breach; even the sun no longer torments her, although she describes it as a fire across her skin, a necessary action that turns the pallor of her skin from pearl to old lace. Every new revelation about her frightens him in some way. Even her name.
“Maharet.” He says it a thousand times that first encounter, but it never loses its thrall.
Yet she never asks him his, though he offers it freely. She appears to already know it, just as she appears to understand the stories he tells her – of Marius and Avicus, of Constantinople – as though she had been with them the entire time. She is unendingly patient, listening with an affection that causes him to bristle with pride, but she is detached.
In those early years, when Mael is enticed by her strength, unable to realize the subtle, feminine liability about her, they make their homes from cliff sides and stone. He builds fires, large enough to be a pyre of faith, and watches as the snow melts from her hair. She teaches him songs from her childhood and prepares him for the inevitable sleep that he will face once she has left him. Leaving, Maharet explains, is inevitable. “But not yet.” And she lets him plait her long, sanguine hair.
Mostly, she answers his questions.
He is a vampire of faith, and it makes her laugh. Gods, she says, come and go with the stars. When he argues over spirits, she waves her hand dismissively, quick to displace his beliefs. “Yes, they still exist. They are more timeless, perhaps, than our kind. But they are frivolous beings, immaterial and possessing no great value. Yet you know this already – you ask the wrong questions.” Always, she tells him, he fails to seek true knowledge. The answers he derives are meant to placate him, confirm his suspicions and doubts, but she understands his fear of truth, although it will be the flaw that finally undoes him.
Mael talks of Those Who Must Be Kept. He is more fascinated by her, but the Egyptian immortals kept by the Roman servant interests him. Akasha, the beauty. Enkil, her guardian King. In the firelight, Maharet’s teeth gleam. “If she is capable of true thought, I am certain that Akasha is as ignorant now as she was in the time of her faulty Egyptian gods. She is fueled by her ignorance and constant greed. But you love her still, don’t you? Because she is the Mother. You love her as keenly as I hate her.” In her soft, passionate voice, Maharet scorns him. “What was she to you? A goddess statue? I tell you that for all her loftiness and vulnerability, she is impenetrable. Like a mortal, you love most what you cannot ever reach.”
It takes him decades to realize that she is searching.
Years more to learn of the ghosts she harbors in Egypt, of the lost, speechless sister, and a lineage she follows.