They say the past is a foreign country. For vampires, it's more like a shadowed manor, with countless rooms, some brightly lit, others locked and forgotten. My earliest memories are steeped in the weight of those rooms: the echoing silence of ancient halls, the chill of laws carved into stone, the relentless pressure of a legacy that stretched back for millennia. We, the Council, the Elite Clans, were the architects of order, the silent guardians who dictated the fragile peace between our known species. Our existence, our very survival, depended on an unwavering adherence to tradition, to the rigid distinctions between our kind and the humans who feared and respected our power. There was no secret to our existence; only the strict adherence to the ancient laws kept their terror at bay.
I was born into that order, raised to uphold it. Duty was my first language, discipline my constant companion. I learned to control every flicker of emotion, every predatory instinct, every rebellious thought that might challenge the established truth. The humans were not our enemies, but neither were they our equals. They were a species to be managed, their world a separate sphere within the one we shared. And the greatest taboo, the ultimate transgression, was the mingling of bloodlines, the impossible union of vampire and human. It was chaos, forbidden, an aberration that threatened to unravel everything we had built.
For nearly a century and a half, I walked that path. I observed, I learned, I obeyed. I watched the human world from afar, a distant, curious observer. I saw their fleeting lives, their vibrant emotions, their unpredictable choices. And then, there was Krista. The Church Leader's daughter. A beacon of defiance even from a distance. She was a crack in the ancient stone, a melody in a world of muted drums.
They say love is a choice. For me, it was an inevitable collision. A force that shattered the carefully constructed walls of my existence and demanded a different path. This is my story. The story of a life defined by duty, then irrevocably changed by an impossible love. The story of the battles I fought, not just for power or peace, but for her, for us, and for a future no vampire had ever dared to dream.