For Elwyn Celtic.
By Kit.
Time passes more slowly as a person grows older. Birthdays and celebrations begin to have less meaning, days blur into months and, eventually, decades blur into the centuries that pass the immortal by. Stefan stopped trying to count the years once he realised that without written aid, he had no means of telling the months apart. Lives blurred, places became confused women melted into a distant past. Until Elena came into his life.
He had begun to despair of ever finding something to anchor him into the world again. Fells Church was to be his last experiment with humanity. If it had not worked he was not certain what he would have done, but he knew he would never have allowed himself to revert back to the madness that had consumed him for more than a century. He would never again be the terror of a village or the creature used to scare children into good behaviour. He remembered so little about that time knew nothing about who he had killed or what havoc he had wrecked in other people's lives. Never again did he wish to risk the lives of those around him.
Lately, he had found himself slipping, no longer did he allow himself to kiss Elena's neck while they made love, to let his sensitive teeth graze her breast. The temptation to bite down had almost overwhelmed him more than once. How soon was it now before he lost control, began the decent into madness?
Elena though he was being ludicrous, he knew. She was more than willing to donate blood, thought that he was being overly moral when he refused to let her. She had tried so hard to forget her brief foray into his world that she had almost managed to convince herself that she had not been a blood crazed monster, which barely recognized her friends. She had convinced herself that what she did in that short space of time was a result of the change, that she herself had no wish for blood or other people's pain. Stefan found that he did not have the heart to disillusion her. He did not have the heart to tell her that the change did not alter what a person wanted to do, only hindered their ability to see why they should not do it. After decades or centuries of drinking another person's life you began to forget why the smaller issues were once so important. You began to enjoy causing pain, watching it caused. You began to enjoy it yourself.
He was brought up to believe that fornication was a mortal sin. To even think of harming another of God's creatures was tantamount to trying to plunge a knife into the side of God himself. He was a good Catholic for all of his mortal life. His brother was so much the epitome of a man who had fallen to the Devil that he had done everything in his power to fall into the path of righteousness. How could he explain that he did not fear for his morality, but her life. She was the one thing that held him back from the madness, but she tempted him to fall into the darkness where nothing mattered but the joy of the kill.
She was his light and his life and he wanted to kill her.
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