A whispered echo lingered in the air after my pronouncement, and I had to cringe upon reflection for having even thought of it! My Arianna’s mind seemed similarly overwhelmed with this revelation, for she’d engaged in such a flurry of mental activity inside me that it rather discomforted my heart as it pulsed beneath a storm of skittering footsteps! Were it only my transgressing thoughts that burdened themselves upon me: I might’ve just laid down my weary head and let this day fall away from me like a bad dream!

  But such a fortunate destiny did not belong to me, for I could see how the glow of life still seeped in from the exposed bedroom door through my half-reopened eyes, and although I very much would have preferred to have remained in ignorance: I’d witnessed its warmth flowing in an unrelenting steadiness by way of our own drafty privacy window!

  We’d never had a true cause to repair it, for even in the most wretched of winters: we’d merely had to blanket the offending breach, and we’d have been free of its nuisance! Besides, we’d rather preferred its presence for myriad reasons, not the least of which was that it actually made sleep come more easily on days with little wind. Now it seemed that I had no more choice in delaying the matter, for once I’d taken life’s brilliance into my sight: I could not simply command myself to look away from where it flowed, and it held me captured as if I were under a spell!

  What a miserable thing it was to be made to ‘live’ like this, and with a biting disgust upon my mind: I pressed my will into sealing myself away from the villainous wants my body now held for me, and an evil mist of blood was sent out from my phylactery! It wrapped itself around the room’s connections to the world of the living as it began to dissolve away the inconsistencies between window and wall, and the gaps in the door were encroached upon by expanding wood!

  The window and door were gone in short order, and although my vision was still filled with the remnants of life that still floated around our room: they were now mercifully separate from the trail which might have led me to hunt down their source. Still, a terrible darkness should have expanded inside this enclosure I’d trapped myself inside of — for the aetherlamps had not quite finished developing before I’d called for Arianna to stop building — but I could see with a clarity that stretched far beyond perfection, if all suffused with an incandescent red glare!

  My eyes had never suffered from the deterioration that should have been expected from age, study, and sunlight… but now they worked so much better for finding details in the darkness that surrounded me that I nearly had to despair! First I was strong where I’d been weak, but now the world was also clear to me where my eyes had been definitively among the best I’d ever tested, even without having had the capacity to further enhance my vision with aether!

  This unlife had made such a mockery of the person I’d been, and it seemed to have entirely tilted and shifted my estimation of myself such that I was all flipped around, and it was not able to leave alone even one single morsel of the person I used to be! It had not left even my eyes unmolested by my unnatural return to life, and I might’ve near enough expected for my hair to turn black and my skin green! Not that I would have been able to see the changes, given this horribly oppressive colour that smothered everything I saw!

  I thought back through what I now knew myself to be, and yet I came to no conclusive answer for the condition I suffered from! None of those survivor’s journals had ever mentioned observing such a thing as red vision in ‘the returned’, even though there’d been revenant undead amongst those who’d written them! Whole cities had been obliterated by the sheer might by which the Ancients had gone to war, but still the dead had reformed from their very ashes, and they could not be put down again!

  For one entire year they’d been able to murder and devour and perform all manners of vile acts with reckless abandon! But only for the one year, for after it was over: near all of the revenants had fallen back to ash and dust, and no aspiring summoner of spirits either demonic or celestial was able to say their goodbyes to their loved ones; only those who had murdered the person they blamed for their death still remained, but they were made mortal again!

  This was how the world had come to know of revenants, and to fear them… oh Arianna, why did you do this to me? All of the scribbled texts I’d seen copies of suggested that 2044 was a year of death and undeath, of great blessings and terrible curses, and of terrors old and new come both at once to destroy the world the Ancients had built… and my strange symptoms suggested to me that I might well be of both kinds at once!

  Such old and trialsome horrors as vampires, ghouls, and the Fae had long been sealed away from the world, and they sought vengeance as they arrived again by the score. Would that they had come alone, perhaps the Ancients might have rallied to repel them and banish them from the Lord’s Earth anew, but they’d been joined in ravaging the world by such new and disastrous undead as liches, revenants, and wraiths, and not even the mighty and powerful Ancients could withstand the force that was brought to bear against their world!

  Even as I thought through these horrible histories, and came to a still more bitter hatred for what I’d become: I could not find any records which completely matched my strange symptoms! Although I searched my mind for clues across the hundreds of years that had passed, the only creatures I knew that had eyes that might see in red tones was the vampire, or the dhampires they sired, and what should a revenant even need a phylactery for anyway!?

  For the unlife of me: I just couldn’t remember having read of any such vampiristic elements as my bloody vision ever being experienced by revenants! The mysteries of my newfound nature so befuddled me that a headache was rather forming at the base of my skull, for no matter how I considered it: I just couldn’t rightly exist!

  The strange amalgamation of unnatural evils inside me was such ludicrous concoction that I was absolutely baffled for just how they’d each come to reside in me! Just how was a person to manage so many competing wants at once? Just what was I even supposed to be? Was there a cure for the undeath that so ailed me, and did I even have a future to pray for anymore?

  Who had ever heard of a monster like me? One that could have changed its own shape even while it was alive, and which could now twist and bend and reformulate the space around it with but a portion of will? If such a creature as I had ever existed, then surely the human race must have disappeared from this Earth long ago!

  Certainly there were dozens of examples where revenants had been seen eaten bodies, and even some were written in their own account of having done this… but it was not for ‘sustenance’ in the traditional sense — in the way that it was necessary for ghouls to stop their very skin and flesh from falling off of their rotting bodies — as revenants were supposed to subsist wholly off of the aether, and they’d only truly began to feed in those last days before their end!

  But even revenants and ghouls with their voracious appetites were still not known for devouring the whole of multiple corpses in a sitting as I had! Where was the sense in this existence? Why should I have to feel such a Hunger for flesh and a Thirst for life while I yet carried something so aetherial as a lich in my very chest?!

  If I really was a revenant as my Arianna had planned to make me — and I had a pulse despite my having very memorably died, so I was rather inclined to believe she’d had at least a partial success in her efforts! — then it remained that I would have to murder at least one person if I truly wished to live again.

  Being that I very much did not: what could possibly motivate me to murder a pious man with my own two hands? I may as well have slain my very self, for all that I would have to cast aside in the endeavour! Some things just couldn’t be done, and I couldn’t understand why Arianna had thought I could have just killed a man in cold blood! That wasn’t the person I was at all, and I didn’t believe I’d ever given her cause to think that I was such a fiend!

  Were it only so easy for me to put my vow behind me, and my morals, and my love for my fellow man, and for me to just hang all of my principles besides! I’d never been ready or eager to dole out judgement, as even triage felt like such a cruel thing in theory, even as necessary as it had proven to be in practice.

  Although His Holiness was responsible for affording the Cardinal with absolution for his many disgraceful, profane, and otherwise surely excommunicable acts: it was not my place to cast judgement upon him!

  The impunity with which Cardinal Stella regularly trespassed against the Lord had made it quite apparent to all who lived in the Vatican that the younger brother’s thinly disguised penchant to engage in ‘fatherly instruction’ had no effect on the familial bond he shared with His Holiness, as he was endlessly spared from justice!

  The brazenness with which the Cardinal performed his wanton acts against nature and good sense had given rise to a great discontent in the Holy See, but the His Holiness was ever silent on the matter, and it had seemed to me that an insurrection would never happen, for who could hope to even challenge a single spark of the power the Stella clan held? So it was for years, until the destruction of the palace paved the way for a massive outcry.

  Given the free reign that Cardinal Stella’s perversions were granted, it was only so long before his wandering eye had found a girl so exquisite as Carmen through her friendship with Arianna, and the fiery response my beloved had delivered to him and his palace was perhaps the very first actual reprimand the man had ever had! But I’d come between them as she’d brought him to such grave injury, and forced her away from killing the man.

  Arianna’d had the gall to renounce the greatest familial name in the entire world, and she’d aetherially expunged it from herself in the name of friendship… and I’d protected that terrible man, even as he’d done such unspeakable things to someone I’d loved like a sister. The betrayal I’d seen in Arianna’s eyes at that moment had been just dreadful, and although Carmen forgave me in voice and assurances: we had never been so close afterwards as we used to be.

  If I’d not held so firmly to my principles then, so many people would not be dead, for the Cardinal would not have massacred insurrectors and innocents alike in the name of his wounded pride, and Carmen might not have killed herself. If there was someone to blame for the death of our dearest friend, it was me… and yet I’d thrust that name back into my Arianna’s face these two decades later!

  The words I’d said were so cruel and unnecessary, for there were so many other ways I might have broken free the damnable truth from her! A shame mixed in among the rest of the feelings which mired within me as I considered again what I’d wrought with my morality, and I closed my eyes to the tears that demanded to fall!

  As much as I was bitter with the disgusting and unreasonable manner in which I had chosen to breach her silence: it remained that it was His Holiness’s refusal to punish his errant brother’s heinous behavior which had ultimately led to the Cardinal’s descent into depravity, and thus our deaths by proxy!

  Despite the guilt I’d long held for my own principles for their preventing justice that night, and the frustrations I’d had with Arianna’s murderous temper for being so uncontrollable that she’d exploded with murderous fury on the spot: our actions were a but a symptom of our births.

  It had been Cardinal Stella who’d brought both of these long-held traits of ours to bear by hurting someone so dear to us at such an absurd time as that, but his actions were but the result of centuries of having gone without a just retribution, which would have been delivered to him had his brother not always shown him generosity. If I’d had to choose the one person whom I felt most deserved the most blame for our deaths: it naturally had to be His Holiness.

  But that didn’t also mean that I had to act upon this observation! It may well consign my soul to oblivion, but I would sooner be forever lost in spirit than to have left behind a vile legacy as a testament of murder and treason against the Lord!

  Regardless, even I’d believed that my ‘target of my vengeance’ were the worst, most evil, and impious person to have ever existed in the history of this Earth: I could not have sent them to death by my own unfettered intention, as it was not my place to do so! I was a doctor, and I would do no harm!

  Arianna knew that I could never be knowingly made to bring about another person’s end, even though our circumstances might have necessitated it. In lieu of a proposal: my lover had promised to me that she would protect me from all the world’s evils, and from committing any other sins I might have yet made except for my loving her — and she’d always contested with me that my cursed birth did not specifically forbid my entering Heaven, and although I’d never actually expected to be granted clemency by the Lord: I had seen it! I’d been granted absolution by Him at the end! — so why had she seen fit to turn me into this abomination?!

  Whatever had happened to remake me this way, I felt so terribly unwell… as I could now see my every dark and beastial impulse staring back out at myself, and my Arianna really wasn’t helping matters at all! It very much seemed that near-all of the squirming steps that still ran across my heart were now traveling in the same direction! I couldn’t say what conclusion they were heading towards with such a certitude and surety to their steps, but such an unease gripped me that I felt absolutely unnerved by the experience!

  She’d taken so very long to think through the implications of what I’d said, and this had left me free to muse over the monstrous creature I’d become and the past I’d wanted to forget! How was I to cope with my own guilty history in the face of this monstrous future that awaited me?

  Reason would have it that I should put myself to death to avoid the suffering that would surely come to me and the wider world that my undeath had been unjustly inflicted upon, but I could not have done this, even if my soul should already be consigned to oblivion! Of course, if I had been so inclined as to attempt upon my own mortality: I could not have succeeded if I truly was the kind of revenant which might’ve driven me to such a desire in the first place!

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  Even when chopped into a thousand pieces, and burned to ashes: a revenant would still return to complete its vengeance! Not even the Ispanians dared to raise up the revenant undead, as if the target of vengeance was themselves: they should have to spend an entire year without sleeping, and not even with aether’s assistance could a person do this!

  It rather didn’t sit well with me to consider upon these immoralities: I’d eaten five men and I’d barely balked at my having done it, and I’d amorously enjoyed bleeding my married friend Lisset even though I’d retained a pulse myself! His Holiness had represented the Lord since nearly Ancient times, and if I were to actually reclaim my life and soul, then it was him that I would have to murder!

  What putrid things these were to think, and my leaking eyes just continued to outpour with emotion as I was brought to rocking on the edge of our bed! I so terribly wished to know what other horrible things I may yet discover of myself; to have the breadth of my monstrousness known for certain, but the full introspection I’d taken in Arianna’s extended silence just wasn’t getting me anywhere!

  It wasn’t as if there had been any revenants left to be properly studied in the last five hundred years, and of all the various creatures of Fae and Foul origin: it wasn’t as if the studious sorts that might’ve performed profane experiments upon inhuman creatures were likely to be such charitable despots as to tell the world all that they’d learned in the torturous process!

  Information held power, and those with the power to possess it are ever uninclined to share their ill-gotten knowledge with others! I might’ve actually had the ‘opportunity’ to have learned from some of them firsthand, if some of the Mother’s blustering declarations of how else she could yet recoup her ‘investment’ in me if I were at all unsuccessful held true! I snorted at this ridiculous remembrance, even as it did not provide me with any humor in the slightest!

  But I was not to be left alone forever, for Arianna eventually spoke her conclusion to me, and it took my indrawn contemplation from me like a fog blown away by a sudden gale,

  “So I guess we just have to kill my Uncle too, then.”

  As she’d said this, she had affected a shrug which seemed to move the muscles in my very own shoulders, and the sleepiness that had once clouded my mind at its fringes — even as I’d pondered upon such weighty matters of my unlife as establishing an actual baseline assessment of my seemingly amalgamated traits — was driven from me in total!

  So utterly banished was the lethargy with which I’d been reexamining myself that the return of total clarity upon my mind took me with rather a shock, and I was for a while lost as to exactly what it was she’d actually said! I’d found myself and her words again in short enough order, but I was still utterly unable to parse how she’d come to such a dreadfully foul determination as that!

  I gripped my hands upon the mattress edge as I rejected her unsavory suggestion, as it was simply so unacceptable to me that I very much wondered if she even remembered to whom she was speaking,

  “No, Rianna: we do not have to murder His Holiness! How did you even come by such a disgusting conclusion as that? It’s mistaken from its very foundation, and you know this!”

  My beloved pulled at my neck muscles as she instinctively shook her head in denial of my rebuttal, and a great rage rebuilt inside me as she continued to err against my person in her invasive new manner! Even as my anger mounted itself for another outpouring, she was undeterred from further pressing her foolish assessment,

  “Mira, I am not going to lose you, and so if there’s like any possibility that my awful uncle’s death will keep you alive, then he really does have to die. He’s close with that thing too, so it’s actually kinda convenient if you think about it: we were probably going to have to kill him anyways.”

  The ramifications behind what she’d said to me were as damnable as any I’d ever heard from her, and what a bitter hatred I had for the possibilities that arose in my mind! I could not allow these to sit inside me as a poison, and so I’d silently begged that she would provide an antidote to my concerns with her speech as I demanded that she explain herself,

  “Who else, Rianna… just which other persons would you find it acceptable to murder if it would keep me in this false life? Lisset, what if I’d blamed her for the attack: would you also send her to death so readily? Just in case?!”

  She shivered with a horror that seemed to extend through the whole of my body, so I’d naturally thought I could be relieved by that much, and the tightness in my chest alleviated for a moment. It was not to last, however, for my conflating her actions with her father’s must’ve been a more biting admonishment for her than I’d originally imagined it to be. It seemed to have put her into a surprisingly forthright mood, and I was astounded by the pure sense of honest intentions she now affected inside of me!

  The legs that foretold her thoughts stepped along my heart in a shaky manner, and alarm fast rebuilt inside me as it seemed that she was actually considering my fearful hypothesis! This couldn’t be, though… for her emotions had always run closer to the surface of her than mine, and for her to do this: she would have to actually imagine the horrible scene I had suggested to her as an experience, for she had always so strongly empathized!

  I anticipated her emotional self-brutalization with a quiver that ran all throughout my body, and I felt her swallow using my own throat as my own larynx trembled, for she was clearly preparing to say so sour a thing that I might’ve wept just to hear it! A great and worrisome quiet went out as she wrestled with her answer, and when at last her pained words rang out from within me: my lips might’ve almost followed after them in a hoarse whisper,

  “Yes. It would fucking break my heart, Mira… but I would definitely do it, if it meant saving you. I like her, Mira… I mean, I like her a lot even, and she’s always been so wonderful, and I would never fucking forgive myself for having done it, and I know it would wound me forever… but like: I love you, Mira. I’d kill the whole damned world and God himself if it… If it meant saving you from… I’m just, I’m sorry Mira…”

  Her voice broke into a thousand pieces by the end, and I was left to drown in the ocean of devastating shame she that felt for admitting the extent of her idolatry to me. What a thing it was to be worshipped in such a manner, and the tears I had shut my eyes to forced apart my eyelids as they streamed down in a torrent!

  How could honesty be such a repulsive and vilesome thing as this, I wondered as a dreadful tightness pulled upon my chest, and the fear of a second attack came again upon me, but I was so wholly encumbered with emotion that I could only dare it to take me here and now! Sorrow just poured out from within me, and I could feel that my Arianna suffered herself from such a weighty misery that she couldn’t keep her sobs from reaching my ears!

  Such distress my lover felt that even as she’d confessed the magnitude of her sinful love for me: I longed to hold her, if only so that she could cry in my arms instead of in that room of blood and gemstone that I’d last seen her in. Of course I knew that she would’ve rather kept her shameful debasement hidden from me until the end of this Earth!

  What I’d done to drive her to display her unspeakable and unvirtuous integrity to me, I could only suspect it had to do with the name I’d thrust back upon her. Still, as much as I should’ve appreciated her honest opinions and earnest way in which she had tried to explain herself to me: I also sincerely wished that she’d never revealed to me the depths to which her depravity ran!

  If a close friendship meant so little to her that she could exchange it for my life, then I just had to know who else she might have sacrificed for my unwilling sake! Even as I quaked with furious sobs, I felt that she might as well get it all out and done with at once, just so long as she felt so courageous — I could have spit at the word, I was so disgusted — as to present me with such unbidden and terrible truthfulness,

  “And Luca?”

  A horror like one I’d only seen upon her twice before came to life within her, and she was so instantaneously sick to the thought that she rather brought me to retching, though nothing came of the tearful heaves I was stricken with! At least this much must still be sacred for her: our family, even if nothing else truly mattered in the mind of the woman I’d loved for most of my life!

  But those ants stepped one lethargic foot upon my heart, and I was at once angered beyond measure! Even as her very own disgusted thoughts were burdened with that sordid scenario I had voiced to her in those two words: she’d actually made to consider it, and this rather deepened the sick convulsions I was assailed with!

  My ability to endure was tested against the mighty waves of my indignation, and each time they crashed over me: my resolution to hear her answer nearly faltered, and terrible cracks appeared in my fortitude! That she would bring her ‘consideration’ upon our family just endlessly incensed me: Luca may not have been made of our flesh and blood, but he was built of our love and spirit!

  “I… fuck Mira, I don’t know! I can’t even think about it! That’s just horrible, and I can’t believe you even fucking said it!” Arianna spat her disgust from inside me. She trembled with a fury of her own, and I could feel that itchiness spreading all across my body again, but she soon came to shouting from my heart,

  “You can hate me all you fucking want to, but that was a fucking outrageous place to go! I’m sorry that I don’t care enough about others when it comes to you but, Mira: you can’t have really thought I’d hurt Luca, right? Don’t tell me you actually thought…? Mercy, tell me it isn’t true?”

  Was it truly my fault that I’d come to doubt in my beloved’s character? No, I did not see how that could be, as she’d destroyed my faith in her all of her own volition, and through her own efforts. But she wasn’t wrong: it was cruel of me, and just as needlessly so as my having put her father’s name to her.

  I shouldn’t have pressed her so deeply into that corner of her own make, as she‘d surely never meant to include our son among that world full of persons she might have otherwise seen dead for my skin’s sake. But I was ever unwilling to lie to her, as had been a trait of mine for all of my life, and what a vice truthfulness had been today.

  Even as I was loath to speak of the confidence I’d lost in her, for I knew that it must be devastating for my Arianna to hear: I would have this last remaining ‘virtue’ of mine reflected regardless, so I clenched my hands tight with my conceited resolve, and I admitted to my beloved,

  “Rianna, I don’t even know that you have a basis for what constitutes right and wrong anymore. Although I am endlessly relieved that our son actually matters to you: I shouldn’t have to feel relief for that! Caring about one’s family is the basics, and you gave up on your last one. Sure: they deserved it, and I am very glad that you did… but you can surely see how the precedent connects with your willingness to have seen our dear friend dead if it might’ve been necessary to safeguard my living.”

  The edges of my eyes burned with her crestfallen spirits, and what a strange sensation it was to be brought to cry someone else’s tears, but I did not resist these. My limbs all ached with a desire to pull inwards towards my core, but this shriveling up I would not allow. No matter how much she might wish to close herself off and cry through me, I would have my final say on the matter,

  “You can’t save me, Rianna, for I will not commit murder. You should not have tried to make me a revenant, but I will live out this last year for you, and no longer.”

  My lips trembled violently with her sadness, but even as grating an experience as I found it: I wasn’t going to rise to anger over the strange influence she had over my body’s muscles, at least not while our conversation touched upon such a grisly subject matter as my inevitable death. But Arianna found the steel inside her again, and it seemed she very much disagreed with my willingness to meet my end with grace,

  “That… no, I'm not letting that happen, Mira. I’m not losing you — not now, not ever — and I’ll kill him myself if I have to.”

  I scoffed at this silly willfulness of hers, for her precocious influence always chose such interesting times to surface, even as it was totally ineffectual in this case, so I made my unwillingness very clear to her,

  “Rianna, really, even if you could do it in my stead, which you cannot: what makes you think that I would let you?”

  Her mood then darkened considerably inside of me, as if she were considering something truly terrible and wicked, and had begun to weigh whether or not she should do it. I suddenly felt very threatened by her demeanor, but although I hadn’t known what to expect from her: I watched for her aetherial work with such a hawkish manner, that I might simply destroy whatever horrible thing she planned to form up… and this left me entirely unprepared for her chosen methodology!

  Every one of the muscles in my body all at once seized up, and each of them abandoned me in the same moment! Arianna shakily lifted me up to my own feet by my very own twitching arms and trembling legs as they moved under her intent!

  She used my surprise and terror to send out my black mist, and before I’d known it: she’d recreated the door I’d ‘removed’, and she regarded me with a furious confidence I’d only seen in her once before. She breathed deeply using my own lungs, and she then spoke using my own voice, and my own lips, and my own larynx, and trachea, and tongue,

  “I can, and what makes you so sure you can stop me, Mira?”