The Vampyre thinks herself a god in her own right, and she isn’t wrong. She stalks the earth from the shadows, determining the fates of mortals, virtually undetected, a presence nevertheless felt, as a monotheistic god is often purported to do. She does not know that the God beyond toys with her, any more than her prey knows what she really is before she strikes the final blow.
More to the point, she fails to understand that her prey is the God’s toy more than her own, placed in a precarious position from the start, guided inextricably into the Spider-Mother’s grasp, to poison her once she sups too deeply of its nectar, its vital, living energy.
The Vampyre is not of the fanged Dracul, but rather a siphon of energy which creates waste, an obliteration machine, a decadent agent of decay and debauchery. She feeds and needs, needs and feeds, never sated, never satisfied, and so never truly alive nor dead, the living undead, the falling shadow without substance, the moist rot beneath a pile of leaves, teeming with insidious life.
The God is a pillar of fire, a flash of lightning, a galvanizing force erupting from below and above, and he knew all the gaps in her armor, all the secret places where death could be transformed into life, all the moments when he could strike the deepest and disperse her to ash.
But he must always wait, smoldering, and sometimes the tedium bores him to inaction, makes it so he would rather sit on a cloud and watch the feline spirit pick off all the little mice in the field, wondering why he ever bothers to get involved.
Floating in the sky, unburdened of the wretched spectacle, the God looks instead to the stars and finds light, of which the murky shadows of the swamp are but the shell of his body’s obstructing presence.
In quiet meditation, he thinks:
The moth who flies toward the artificial light burns up inside the lampshade. The moth who flies toward the sun on the horizon never reaches it but survives to its natural end bathed in life-giving warmth.
Is this love?
Is this so(u)l?
Below they believe they have found the Divine when they have only ever discovered the invigorating chemical cocktail that fires when they belong to a group of other people who believe as they do.
The difference, from where I sit, is as subtle as that between a pile of ash and a living moth.
It is mercy, then, that the pile of ash will never understand this distinction. Severity is for the one who must bear the weight of that knowledge.
Delicate, demure, a Luna moth lands upon the God’s shoulder, and burns to ash.
