Another century dies with the coming dawn and its worn-out revelers. They say there is no millennium fever, but I see with older eyes and think maybe they're wrong, though this is my first. Ask me again in another thousand years and I might know better.
It is for this reason, foolish though it might be, that I've decided to keep some sort of chronicle of recollections, thoughts, a bit of rambling. After all, how many true confidants might my kind have? There are not many of us and we don't share with each other, especially scattered as we remain—we like our solitude and lands undisturbed. Our servants tend to lose their minds so are not likely to make for great conversation.
The newspapers are amusing, in their myriad fashions. And those who write for them seem to suffer from a hunger to know as much as I do for the blood. There is great potential there. Though many are little minds suffering from delusions of grandeur, still, there are those who see with sharper eyes and are very much aware that they can help build up or tear down dynasties—and do it with great relish. With those few, I feel a sort of kinship. We see. We hunger. We reach inside.
But I am no writer. I keep to my own ways and leave them to theirs. Yet, it is a comfort to know that I have some allies out there, unknowing though they may be.
This chaos, this London, still suits me. It has called me across the years yet again and who am I, even I, to ignore its potentials, its life? A hundred years is not an eternity, but it can feel that way when you're separated from your passion. Still, time has taught me nothing if not patience. Passion I always had.
'Twas the jewels—O the jewels!—and not the sickly blood of the Royals that flows too freely—that first drew me and calls me back. Their fire—life from the dark core of the Earth itself, from the sun I've long forgotten but which still tugs at some hidden strands within me. This speaks to me. Their spirit speaks to me even as the call of human blood does and does not. Yes, they had their cost in blood, as well, and carry within them sparks from their makers and keepers, though most who encounter them seem to be oblivious of their true nature. They are mostly unconscious, humans are, as I was. Years, six hundred of them, can bring fog or blinding vision. I have vacillated between both.
But these jewels, family chroniclers, dynastic artifacts, carry within them the seeds of conflict, inflammatory as their brilliance proclaims, in need of but that catalytic spark from outside. I could unleash the chaos again, though it seems well on its way. Little less than royalty I, in all but name. Once a warrior-king much like their legendary Arthur. Now there would be one worthy to walk as an Immortal! I believe that he sleeps. Whether he will rise again remains a mystery even to me. But I dream of my Wallachia, far away Carpathian homeland—it is not as I left it last nor as I would have it, with tourists and scholars all about. Yet freedom is a good thing for my people. I remember how that felt—to win it, then to lose it once more. Surely, to my people I remain a king and more, a legend. I upheld my father's house and am no stranger to riches.
Riches. I know them more intimately than most. After all, I have already had many lifetimes to accumulate wealth in all its forms, stash it away against a long sun and transform my persona in the eyes of the humans. The jewels warm my long-dead and unbeating heart, for I know that if sun or stake should find me, the living stones would live on. Every man wants to guard his immortality, even we so-called Immortals. Death could come like a thief with the dawn and still there are too many ways to die. But age and cunning are with me, besides the Dark Gifts. I have plans.
Let that fool of a doctor think me vanquished. Ah, Lucy the Pale, my Lucy of the Light, released. What a loss! None believed that I could truly love her, thinking my heart as ruined as my home. But I did—not as humans could ever understand it, yet with no small part an echo of the human I had been. It hasn't left me. I wonder if it ever will. They say the old ones lose it. What am I, if not old? But I know better.
Those meddling men dealt me a painful blow, but a temporary setback, only. They had been careless enough to leave behind my family medallion with its bloodstone there in the coffin with my shattered body. A few years, no more, and I was able to reach out once again, return to London with more care and a single purpose. The jewels.
They waited for me. Victoria had seen to that, having bequeathed half her treasure to the Crown in perpetuity. And I watched as her Danish daughter-in-law, the queen consort, Alexandra, too long in waiting for her husband to take the throne, built her own legacy upon Victoria's foundation. The photographers snapped endless pictures of her, proclaimed her a great beauty, bathed in the light of the stones, "dazzling, dizzying." I found her to be so, though severe and too short-lived. She gave them to her daughter-in-law Mary, who grew handsome and a great presence of a queen in her old age. And what merry madness the Romanovs and Bolsheviks made together, necessitating the Dowager Empress Marie's escape through her British in-laws to her native Denmark. The papers called her not quite so comely as her elder sister, who dazzled. They were right. She was rich in jewels, but little else, least of all sense. Still, she eventually added to the jewel collection that carries the life.
I was glad for the demise of Victoria, the perpetual widow. The other ladies had necks long and strong enough to make my day-long sleeps restless with dreams of taking them. And how they covered themselves in the living jewels, like none before them or since—that Bowes-Lyons woman and her brood more reserved, less striking, and sometimes with less sense than their ancient Danish aunt.
Carfuks, where the four roads cross, named by the Saxons—would that I had had their sheer numbers, their heart, their hot blood, in my campaign! My thoughts wander back there to the abbey. How I miss the place. I never got to finish its restoration and I so hate to leave things undone. But I dare not go back there. London is vast and teeming. I can get lost in its crowds easily enough.
I used to love to stroll its streets after the opera. One night I encountered the mourning Queen there. I caught her eye, penetrated the central stone in a brooch set over her heart—a bloodred Burmese beauty that called all souls to its depths—and left a piece of myself there within, with a suggestion. I had to smile when I read of how Victoria had carried out my plan, leaving the best pieces to the Crown. Crafty woman. Not even the Hanovers won all they sought from her. Strong, if a bit too stubborn and sentimental. I can forgive her that.
Oddly enough, it was the Prince Albert opals that disturbed the new Queen—her husband, at sixty, was already too tired to notice such details. She thought them bad luck. But that ruby and its ninety-five cohorts, a gift from the Indian government, were the culprits. Even she missed that. So Alexandra had them all placed within a necklace that Burmese believe guards against the ninety-six illnesses that assail the body. Ninety-six rubies to protect her, possibly grant immortality. Ninety-six rubies to urge her on. She was close. So close. But I controlled the keystone and could not bring her over. She was not the one. Elizabeth wears it now, and my essence survives within it. I did steal them away, once—that leather chest so stealthily carried on her coronation tour. En route to Wellington, New Zealand, it was— now there's a beautiful and rugged land! I mingled with their essence, strengthened the call, then returned them, as much as I wanted to set things in motion right then. It was not yet time. I waited, and still wait.
I have time to wander, amuse and educate myself. I love to go to the Tower, the Jewel House, on foggy nights and dissolve to mist to absorb the history, the life there. The Black Prince ruby—before my time—makes the Imperial State Crown too heavy with blood lust. Still, I like the feel of it. It echoes with histories of monarchs that I wish I had not missed, of a mortal with the hunger so strong within him that he might have been reborn a prince of blood. But his spirit failed him in the end, like so many others. And there was no vampire there to help him across. His echo remains in the stone to beckon monarchs to hunger and unleash more chaos, possibly birth another Immortal. Someday.
None seem to have the stomach for it, though Elizabeth—the so-called Virgin Queen—and her aptly named sister, the saintly Bloody Mary, also came very close. Fine companions they would've been. I find the Catholics and Anglicans understand about blood, sing to it more. They and the Byzantines certainly understand jewels the way the children of the Reformation do not. How foolishly the new churches threw all that away. They knew only parts of the story.
I go to Westminster Abbey, stand outside to watch as people visit the sisters' tombs. Stand there. I tell you, even at a distance, the hunger still sings in them. They sleep, ever watchful, awaiting a time when they might walk Immortal by some means. They love their country. They love their power more and have not let loose their Earthly bonds. Mark me. They wait. Desire knows no bounds.
Time has become one large reality, for me. It is hard to keep the lines in order, since I live within them and without. But I watch. The present monarchy, in disarray due to all its petty bedroom intrigues and the ravenous press— think they that Royals have never dallied, before?—leaves me sad. They could've been so much more. Frail Diana wore not Victoria's and Alexandra's rubies and was large-hearted and of the Light. That's as it should be. They need a tragic heroine, the people do. She was more like them than any royal before. Charles is a melancholy, almost Byronic, and has no ambition—not like his father before him or his beloved warrior-uncle, Mountbatten of Burma. I'm sure that old one knew the lore, but the stones were not for him. Yet he had the heart where others did not. But the Irish won that battle. The present Queen is tired and her mother too sweet, the other Royals too fun-loving. But in William I sense a spark, that longing for something more, that hunger, maybe even a bit of the dark—hard to tell in one still relatively young, though tragedy and responsibility have tempered him. Maybe he would rise to rule a country that would welcome the power of an Immortal. They forget their legends. He might give them what they write of, what they dream of, though never suspect is within their reach. Henry and his, Victoria and hers, they'd nearly found their way. Maybe this time.
The sun has long since set on the British Empire. Maybe now the bloodred moon can rise.
I, Count Vlad Dracula, am ready.