Aleph began the slow march with all the others. Finally, he was nearing an exit. Through the constant darkness, and barely lit lights, he saw what looked to be the light of the sun shining at the entrance. The facility that had tormented his mind would never become a distant memory, but it would become a memory, nonetheless.

Aleph wrenched out a mostly human breath of relief as he led the 144,000 out. An orange glow bathed them, the heat of the sun providing habitable conditions to the humans on the planet but irritation to any Vampire.

Aleph would’ve expected groans. But he heard a unified metal march that lacked silence, their voices sung with relief to one another. Although they march onwards to an early deployment, they are pressing forward.

” ATTENTION!” He gave out in a booming shout as he stopped partway out the facility, a wide open berth, a massive towering oak forest surrounding them, sporadic glimpses of the sunlight glancing upon them, layers of barbed wire, thick concrete walls and dead leaves even within the fort-zone.

He turned his back to the massive metal gate he once climbed to meet Arianne and addressed all ahead of him, he could see Saiyah her lithe distinctive feminine figure sticking out even in her robust angular armor yet smoothed in some points.

He had his helmet on as did they all and he saw all of them, visors shut off, even Asaph’s.

Anna gave him a nod as she sallied slightly ahead of everyone.

“We are to march to new Persia we have graduated. You are permitted to make your farewells.” He spoke fiercely, there was a warmth in the air, just as he had left and escaped in one moment it was summer, silent out.

Even as he paused there was no sound to be heard, not a noise to be made

stark contrast there was an honorable salute, fists coming down to chest plates, it was something that had Aleph filled with slight pride.

And expectations of his new duties.

-

Arianne’s final grief.

``I could recall most of my life as desolate, especially when he had left, it wasn’t as if I could be angry he felt trapped as I was, he broke out to see me once a year ago, wounds barely healed and he spoke apologies as if he hadn’t seen me in a millennia, it scared me…he was different, and it made me argue I begged him to run away and he wouldn’t. I saw it in his eyes..he didn’t want to go, he wanted what was happening to him.

I sometimes grieve It but maybe I was wrong, maybe I just was so attached I––‘’

Arianne’s hand falters, stabbing through the page, ink pools in a wave a the point of the pen snaps– Strains, even as she writes something meant to be read in mortem, she’s nearing a breaking point.

About to snap, her home cold, the heat as faded as the hope in her eyes, ocean blue eyes so worn they’ve lost saturation, her vision ten feet ahead is blurry and she can’t hope for a better future anymore.

Arianne is a human, and being human is a vital resource.

A vital resource treated with as much care as one might have in any other animal that sustains, she can remember the first time she’d seen a body hanging in the street, her mother's.

Those cold dead streets filled with the sounds of racing automobiles now outside her home.

She’s been through it for so long, and yet– I hear it.

-

Cold, I’m very cold and I hear it, cold steps, steps that are metallic it’s a horrific presence beyond any other, I lean up from my desk and dim the light.

I’ve done nothing wrong, the Vis-stasi shouldn’t come for me. I’ve done nothing wrong; I attended mandatory visits to the blood bank.

It’s the only thoughts that fill my head every time I hear footfalls near my home, I brace and breathe, I linger for a bit and think that it couldn’t possibly be for me. .it never is, I’m treated as though I am a well, seldom attention given until I am needed for blood.

But this isn’t stopping.

I can remember hearing screaming next door, a woman made a horrid mistake I hadn’t even known what it was, I heard the footfalls stop on mine, but they were scoping her home before performing a raid...They found something incriminating there, I don’t know what they did with her…Her execution never came..

But these footsteps stopped at my home, I can feel pain rise in my chest as I hear it.

Knock, knock.

They’re here… I have to assume it’s the Vis-Stasi, and my nerves scream at me to hide, but I’m rattled by routine and muscle memory into submission, I can only weep inside my face empty as I lack resolve to fight.

I cross from my room into the living room, looking toward that picture of my parents…Aleph is there..I almost find myself wishing I wasn’t human.

The knocks continue again, I’m broken from a realization I had hesitated, storming to the door to brace fate.

This would come eventually.

But it did not…I could see a figure tower over me, unlike anything I’d ever seen, he dwarfed me, and in the cruel dark-grey halls of the housing unit dimly lit in blue-light it gazed down into my eyes with one of its own, a mountain of metal and strong angular shapes, built for violence.

I can see that haunting eye as if it appears on a screen, it’s flat– to put it simply, yet its as if it idly rotates, I can hear an ambient hum…

It’s a helmet, it has a strange purplish hue, an odd change from– The usual red.

This was a Shocktrooper…A fully fledged one at that…

“What do you want with me!?” I gasp out boldly, it’s a gasp that turns into relief…Of any of them to ever rule over us, the Shocktroopers have earned a smidge of love for trading a rod of steel for wood.

As brutal as the others yet never to our deaths…. I can only remember how the Vis-stasi were hateful of these powerful beings.

And one was here–! It even speaks to me!”

“Arianne?” It knows my name….

“Arianne…It’s me.” I can feel my heart explode in revelation; saliva pours from my lips as I gag…

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

I can’t help myself from vomiting yet hardly anything comes out as I retch causing such a powerful figure to flinch in fright…; it knows my name! Alas, I know its name too!

ALEPH

There was something wrong.

I saw my friend before me, beneath him a victim- my couch, crushed underneath the unbearable weight.

Previously was a boy I had a young-love with, something forbidden, with someone that wasn’t human but felt as close as if he had been to me, now a living-weapon in my living-room.

“How–how did you get here?” I hesitate, of all the things that terrify me now, even a lingering wonder if I was insane and this wasn’t Aleph at all, what worries me the most is how he has otherwise appeared at my door like a dreadful ghost.

“Arianne….I ran.” He speaks simply with no life.

I hate his answer– “Wh-what…what do you mean?” I am left laughing in a bit of disbelief, his answer didn’t sound genuine.

He must’ve seen it in my face, I feel as though I’m an insect being read by him now, because he dashes my heart immediately.

“To tell you, I’m sorry…” He says nothing else; he knows exactly what he has just answered and it hurts more he’s made such a decision so quickly– It’s been a year, but that isn’t the only decision, it’s as if he has changed.

He had always been tall, taller than most, but he felt like an anomaly in my home, an anomaly staring toward me.

A Violet Mountain of what I imagine must be steel, an obituary to who I once knew.

“Arianne, I thought of you…I nearly forgot you–.”

“Stop.” I want to imagine that I’m maybe sarcastic, have a heart-broken smirk, but I’m collapsing again, I have my fingers on my scalp.

I see rigid shoulders slump as if my words could bring down whatever military-titan he’s become. I can’t hide the tortured laugh that escapes my lips.

And I feel what is like frostbite take my hands and bring them away.

“Arianne, I..” I don’t let him finish.

“Why are you here? Wh-who even are you now!?” I can hear my voice crack, I’m losing the words, desperate to ask, ‘What happened to you.’ He’s changed so much, and his voice is like torture crafted by the devil, I recognize the methodology of how he speaks.

Because of all the Vampires, he’s the only one to speak to me, not toward me.

“Whoever I was. –” The words leave his some strange breathing apparatus on the helmet filtered in a way that has him sounding like a menacing beast.

“Whoever you were? What-…Why are you speaking to me like you’ve rehearsed something…What are you trying to say?” I bite suddenly, yet I feel myself cowering in fear all the same…A horrid feeling that whoever’s in front of me is a stranger.

He turns his head at that cold mono singular eye slide as if he still is looking at me.. gauging my reaction

“I became a Shocktrooper, Arianne. I can’t hope to explain to you, how-to you I changed in such short time but–” His tone switches, I feel some sort of condescending tone thrive in it, like as my father oft scolded me with

“Spit it out! What happened to you, you ran!? You came here!? You have something to say!?” I blurt it out all at once, it’s too much for me and I can feel my mind unwinding.

For two years in and out of the grey structures, taunted and hounded by those feeding those who executed my parents, it all collapsed in on my mind.

It’s too quick and I feel the room spin.

“Arianne, I won't see you again.”

The room stops spinning yet I feel the deacceleration hit me all at once.

“Wh-what…”

“I met you here every day waiting so we could run away.” I believed in something so foolish and childish, but it’s as if the myth finally dies here, now that I’m facing it…

“Ar-are you here to kill me...”

“By God no!”

“Then why…why would you bother…. To come see me…..”

“Because Arianne, I wanted to know you were alive before I left.” He seems to take direction to console me, but it just makes me angry.

“What you wanted to console me, ask if I’m doing as horrible as I was the last time?” The words come out, my mind isn’t working properly, it's spilling out an object of my grief ahead of me victimized by my words.

He nearly flinches before he takes two wide strides toward me– Jumping up, I’m in a seat, and my head rises as he nears.

The white ceiling as plain as my mind filled the center with Aleph becomes something…. horrible.

Not that he became a shocktrooper…. but that he would leave me forever, in this horrid world.

Where I suffered, where my mother suffered

Till she met my father, and they suffered together until her suffering was put to an end.

Like I would end up if we didn’t run away now… I planned it since I was a child, Aleph had promised me, that this world was horrid, pain riddled us all our lives and we would run away– he slowly had abandoned such a promise…! –

I watched him confirm the end to this promise and turn aside from me, as he stood tall and spoke.

“I won’t lie, I feel as if who I was in your frame of a year ago is gone…but that doesn’t matter.”

“I learned something.”

“Learned what?” I laugh in disbelief, staring toward him.

He leans in, on the arms-rest of the love seat I lean back in, a cold helmet menacing lingers close, I see his cold frosty breath blow toward my face.

“I was never human Arianne…It would’ve never worked.” He hesitates and my eyes narrow at how he dismisses me like a child.

“That’s why– “I interrupted him with a pained laugh.

“No…no...” I pause for a long while and he unusually accommodates minutes of silence as I think-

I remember the moments he would sneak out, ‘claw through barbed wire’ he said, just to see me, he’d grown powerful strong, and I’d grown wiser. I knew of a way we could escape, together! We weren’t the first.

He rejected me each time, he put forth the effort to tear me down, to isolate me as he grew further and further.

“You’re right Aleph…” I wrestle out my vision filled with the blank visor, the harmful red glow of the mono-eye filling my vision as it burns my orbs.

“You’re not human…you never will be.”.

I see the visor fade, and blank dreadful eyes gaze into mine.

That isn’t him anymore…he’s dead.

Hours later

A buzz rings through Aleph’s helmet, but he ignores it as he leaves, he can somberly remember the times he ran through these streets, a time when he hardly found himself very separate from the humans.

Humans…– He can see them now, watching him, their eyes bore into him fearful but like hers calm and guided.

They perceive him with with the eye and look a servant might give a king he respects but is terrified by, it’s all worse all the same, he can remember in stark contrast how he easily passed among them but now he is different.

I’m different, I’m different. He shakes his head.

He has to die now and let the undead run free. His callsign is ‘Alpha-Victor’

That is what he is now, far from Aleph who was weak and couldn’t endure pain. Victor is different, he still feels pain magnitudes greater than a human does in sensitivity but is strengthened by it, he is faster, a leader, he’s met blades with those of the first generation and is impressed.

Yet he can still see Aleph.

The Quantum Vampires memories never fade because their immortality is as present as they are.

At that exact moment one may have become a vampire and the days after are pulled into one, one immortal day. He’d spent more than thirty-years in that training facility and it’s all as seconds ago.

So as the pain of the memories he spent with Arianne.

So is now.

Five hours linger.

His helmet continues to buzz, he’d gone awol, truthfully considering it. Leaving with Arianne, but that isn’t what he wanted,

‘I’m new right?’

He doubted that more and more now, he almost had an outburst with Arianne.

And now he is at the head of a structure, his helmet buzzes with curses, demands, and reprimands for his abandonment of post, yet he ignores it all. He sees a massive, towering elevator, surely that’s carried all the others ahead of him, and now it seems to rise for eternity past the clouds of the orange sky and into oblivion.

Surely no one ascends to heaven. He weakly speaks and crawls toward it on his feet, he’s struggling to move forwards but claws ahead, seeing what he thought was dead now die, be stripped away.

The grey maze-cities, it all becomes so dreadful, he remembers color back then, towering purple towers, the light of it all but now alone he feels nothing.

There is a massive open section, there are as expected operators at the base of the tower, they call in to alert he has arrived, vis-stasi facilitating his arrival.

Surely far above is a vessel

He doesn’t surrender himself; he walks into the massive platform that once held 144,000 alone.

A vampire should be used to darkness

Yet it feels too dark.

Far from the city shared by humans, there is no need for light. His kind love the darkness.

He stands on a wide platform, it grows smaller, and he feels crushed, as massive glass walls close in, it begins to rise.

-

He’s soon rising up, seeing the massive dim structures of the city fade, the lights shining as it grows tonight and slowly rides, the whine of the mechanics that whir as the elevator is dragged up a cruel whine.

With the growing distance between him and the ground, Aleph has never been so far from himself he’s decided to become something else.

The opportunity was there to escape and yet he grew emboldened to choose this over everything.

Choose it over her.

Yet he doesn’t feel triumphant in this one moment.

-

Melancholy.

Aleph was never able to convince himself he'd ever left that elevator.

Rather that he is still looking down and watching who he was before become more distant, more difficult to see.

A curse an otherworldly hell