My name is Aruka Maviro. I am the adopted daughter of the Healer Eshin Maviro. He found me in the forest when I was just an infant, wrapped in a bundle and abandoned. My strange eyes gave away my race immediately; eyes with hardly any whites to them, dark and deep with only a thin faded ring of lightness surrounding the pupil. The eyes of a Monster. My father brought me back into his village despite knowing what I was; a wolf to the herd of sheep.

Truthfully my story begins with a legend. In the beginning there was one race that split into three. One race that separated its bloodlines to form what you would know today as the Elves, The Vampires and the Demons. There are others with common ancestry and similar blood to them, but the Original Race goes back so far that no one alive can remember their name. I, and others like me, fall just before the final separation. We are a blend of the blood of the Demons and the blood of the Vampires; a potent mixture of bloodlust and rage, calmness and wisdom. Through our childhood most of us are considered ‘normal’. We are happy and calm beings, average and everyday, except for our eyes. Those years of normality do not last forever because the blood within our bodies is at war; a war soon lost without the balance of what blood now belongs to the Elves.

The change typically begins sometime between late adolescence and early adulthood. Some genetic trigger causes everything to go haywire, and we experience a period of temporary Madness that ranges anytime from a few months to a few years. This transformation is characterized by blood thirst, constant aggression and rage, violent behavior like you’ve never seen, and an absence of reason and restraint. During this time we are the full embodiment of a Monster… Many fear my kind for our murderous tendencies, they even fear us before and after the Madness presents itself, not realizing that for us it is almost a right of passage. If you can survive the Madness, you can survive anything.

Those who live past the Madness return to normal, or as normal as one can manage once you have been adapted into your true self. We are stronger, faster, and smarter than we could have ever imagined in our ‘human’ years, but few get to experience that time. There are Hunters charged to kill us when we enter the Madness, others, like myself, die by the hands of these same Hunters before the Madness sets in. We die from personal injuries because we cannot feel pain and lack any sense of self care; we get hurt, lose limbs, or break bones then just bleed out or let the infections take us down. Some go so Mad they find ways to end their suffering with what little sense they retain.

This is the story of my life, my death, and all that happened after for death is not the end.

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As a child I lived in the House of the Healer with my father; the living quarters assigned to the current Healer. Our whole first floor was a place for the care of the sick and injured. I remember cabinets and shelves filled to the brim with herbs, bandages, splints, bottles and jars with labels on them holding different materials for the healings, and a wide array of tools. It was the perfect place for a Healer, that fact cannot be denied. My father told me that when I was younger I used to watch in wonder from the stairs as he worked. The purity of the room always fascinated me; you never would have guessed a Monster lived upstairs.

The second floor was where I spent most of my time. Many of the villagers were too uncomfortable to have me near when they were being treated. Some wouldn’t even come inside when I was in the house, so Father had to set up a tent outside to care for them. Mostly though I would stay upstairs while my father worked, staring out my bedroom window at the small field in front of our house where the village children would play. It was one of my favorite pastimes, even though I wasn’t really allowed to join them. That never really bothered me, I was entertained enough to just watch…

When I was about eight years old things started to change. My father took on an apprentice, a young boy from the village by the name of Renivir Soeren; the Healer-to-be. Renivir was a few years older than I was; ten or eleven at most, not much older. He would come around midday and study with Father until he had to leave for dinner or, on occasion, when his mother would come to fetch him. He was a sweet boy with dirty blonde hair and eyes the green of a summer plain. I remember him as being the kind of child that always had a smile on his face. The few times I would sneak down the stairs to watch my father work and Renivir work, he had a smile one his lips while he measured and cut and mixed. It was the kind of smile that was contagious.

Some time after Renivir had started lessons with my father he started to stay longer than his lessons took. One day he came upstairs to my room and knocked on the door. I thought it was my father and called him in only to be surprised. I had never really had much interaction with people other than my father and was a very shy child around others, which Renivir quickly learned. My shyness didn’t deter him however, and he quickly made a habit of coming up to my room to talk with me for about an hour after his lessons. He started staying until his mother came for him more often and would just sit in my room and talk to me, telling me about things that happened at home and in the village, and during his lessons. I loved listening to his voice; so much so that even long after my shyness with him had faded I didn’t speak, I would just listen intently. We didn’t have a true conversation until almost half a year later, but by that time I already considered him my best friend.

He was just that, my best friend; the best friend I ever could have asked for. I never really knew what had possessed him to come upstairs and talk with me the first time, or any of the times following and I didn’t want to ask for fear of turning him away. I always wondered what it was that attracted people together, because I could never figure it out, because sometimes it didn’t make sense.

There was another boy in the village that caught my eye by the name of Vinius Katal. Hunter-to-be Vinius. As I said, attractions are strange things. He was one of the children I used to watch from my window-seat, and he always seemed to stand out from the other children in the crowd; all dark hair and dark eyes. It didn’t seem right for a Hunter to be so dark. It didn’t seem right that he made me so intensely curious about him; he who was destined to kill me.

I didn’t meet Vinius until I had entered early adolescence, but in all that time Renivir and I grew even closer. He and I were all but inseparable; a good thing too since I had become restless in the passing years and worked up the courage to venture outside. I was old enough that I could care for myself, so I started to help out Father. Ren and I began going into the Marketplace so I could pick up things for the house; food, more supplies for Father, and other necessities. This worked well for everyone. I burnt off extra energy and felt helpful, Father got his supplies in a timely manner and the villagers were more comfortable coming to see him in the house, and Renivir got to spend time outside where the two of us could play around when we weren’t doing anything important.

It was one day cutting through Marketplace to get to the forest that I finally met my Hunter. Renivir was assisting my Father in a complicated Healing and I had been sent to pick more of a specific herb that they needed. On my way over I ran in to Vinius, quite literally in fact. He and I were fast friends, as strange as it was to imagine; and so from that day on we became a trio, Renevir, Vinius and I.

It was no secret among us that I’d had a crush on Vinius for quite some time, much to Renevir’s displeasure. It was also no secret that Renevir had very deep affections for me; it was too early in our lives to call it love. He never showed any ire though, it was clear all he wanted was for me to be happy even if he didn’t agree with my choice of a crush. Its times like now that I wonder if my crush on Vinius had been slightly influenced by my fascination with the grim fate that had been decided for me – a desire to be as close to Death as I could. To touch it and be able to say I survived, and to be with Death until Death came for me. It would make sense in a way since he was destined to be my killer, but that hardly matters now.

Despite any of my twisted curiosities the three of us were close friends, the Killer and the Healer bonded over the Monster. In our youth we were quite the trouble-makers, often finding ourselves in places we shouldn’t be to the dismay of the other villagers. By the time of my wanderings the majority of the villagers had… ‘warmed up’ in a sense to my presence. They were still wary of course; there was no knowing when I was going to snap or what I was going to do when I did, but I suppose having my Hunter following me around was soothing to them. I was simply relieved that my presence no longer cut a swath in the crowd.

After that the next few years were uneventful but for the escapades of me and my friends. When I had my seventeenth birthday my father presented me with a medication he had contrived. He and Ren had spent many long hours working on the concoction while I slept upstairs. The medicine was intended to slow the coming of the Madness, to keep me as sane and ‘myself’ as long as possible. It was the best ‘gift’ I could have asked for. From that day forward I swallowed a cup of the herbal mixture every morning when I woke. As if to follow suit Vin came up with a plan to slow my change as well. He proposed to teach me how to fight so that we could have sparring sessions. His thoughts were that if I kept my energy low and my stress levels down it would be more difficult for the genetic trigger to ‘go off’, and thus my Madness wouldn’t strike any time soon.

The two of these combined worked fantastically. For the next five years I didn’t have so much as a nightmare to show signs of the Madness coming. Every morning I took my medicine, and every afternoon Vin would take Ren and I outside to the field behind my house to spar and wrestle. Wrestling was Ren’s favorite physical activity. Sometimes he wouldn’t even wait until we were outside to tackle me and try to pin me. As time went on he found it more and more difficult to hold me down, and as more time passed even the two of them couldn’t pin me when we wrestled. My strength surprised me… I think that was one of the first warning signs. But, regardless of my ‘inability’ to be pinned, the three of us would still have regular sparring and wrestling matches. It was something I looked forward to everyday, even though it brought out more of the demonic side of me, complete with a lot of growling and savage pleasure.

I think I was twenty two the first time Vinius went away. He had been called into one of the neighboring villages to take care of an ‘infestation’, and was gone for several months. That was when the signs of the Madness began appearing. Ren did the best he could to keep me exhausted like the pair of them had done before, but I had developed too high of an endurance to our exercises. A couple bouts of wrestling were not enough, but it was all that Ren could take in a day. After the first couple of months the change really became noticeable. I began to heal at an abnormally accelerated rate. Cuts that would have taken days to heal would have taken hours, and even that time shortened as the months passed. I had nightmares, tremors and fevers along with bouts of sleepwalking and delirium. It was never too severe but I could see the pain in Ren’s eyes whenever the tremors began.

I knew Ren loved me, but I was always so afraid of hurting him even more that I think I forced myself not to feel the same affections toward him. Vinius was safer to love; he was prepared to lose me, to kill me. I was so grateful for Renivir though. Throughout the months beginning my first slip into Madness he would spend hours on end with me, sometimes he would even stay through the night just holding me. I remember so many times where I fell asleep at my window-seat lying back against his chest with his arms clamped around me, holding me safe against him until morning came. There were even a few occasions where he would give me his blood to still the cravings that sometimes came with the tremors. I was always careful to only take a little. He did everything he could for me and I didn’t want to hurt him anymore than I already had.

When Vin returned from the other village my sparring sessions began again with a fervor. Both boys were desperate to try and return me to normal. Neither of them liked knowing that my Madness was looming closer; that Death would have to come soon. The three of us had discussed that possibility, even though we didn’t like to talk about it... We talked about my death, when it would come, what I wanted to happen. I had expressed the wish to die before I became Mad, because I did not want to hurt those I loved or die during the Madness. I wanted to be with Vin and Ren, and maybe Father too if he could stand it. But just then it was not my time though, I was still more myself than I was the Madness.

The next year or two didn’t change much really. I was not getting any worse, but I was certainly not getting any better. There were many more nights that were spent with Ren or Vin, or both on some occasions. I even remember coming to my senses once in the middle of the night pinned to the floor beneath Ren’s body; I had apparently been seizing and he did the only thing he could think of. That night was scary for the both of us. I spent the rest of the night curled up on my tiny bed with him, afraid that my seizure would happen again. Yet another warning sign was staring us in the face.

Vin was also going away more and more as the months flew by and he was fully titled Hunter; leaving Ren to fend for himself against me and the internal battle I was slowly losing. When I was twenty six things took a turn for the worse. All of my ‘symptoms’ worsened. I was plagued with nightmares, and frequently woke up somewhere else than I had fallen asleep with Ren hovering somewhere near by. Some days were spent entirely in delirium, and others I don’t remember at all. Almost all of my episodes were preceded with tremors, and then once my body had calmed my mind would slip away.

One episode was particularly bad. I had fallen asleep and Ren had run to pick up supplies for my medicine which I had begun taking twice a day. He had left me on the floor figuring I wouldn’t hurt myself if I started to move in my sleep like I was wont to do. He was right in that, I didn’t hurt myself, but I did end up hurting someone else. I had begun to sleepwalk again when Vin came to my house to check up on me after running into Ren at the Marketplace on his way back home. Trapped in the world of my nightmares I attacked him, pushing him and smacking him before eventually throwing him down the stairs to the basement of our house. Once down there we began fighting, and I vaguely remember Vin calling up the stairs to Ren to stay away, that he could handle me and to mix up the medicine for when I was myself again.

Things did not go as Vin had planned. We were down there for hours fighting, Vin slowly growing more and more exhausted as the minutes passed. Once when he backed away to catch his breath I knocked him down and he landed on a nail that had been embedded in the dirt floor. His horrible scream shook me from my waking dream. I have no idea where Ren had gone, but I knew what had happened to Vin was terrible. The nail had just barely missed his spine, and he was beginning to thrash. Without thinking I threw myself down on top of Vin as Ren had done for me on so many occasions. Once I had him pinned I slit my tongue on my incisor and thrust it into his mouth; I had long before learned that my blood held healing properties to those who consumed a small amount of it. As his thrashing slowed and he drank swallow after swallow of my blood I pulled him off of the nail so that he could heal properly.

A few minutes passed and my tongue had healed, but that did not stop Vin. His swallowing had turned to sucking and he kissed me fervently with a passion I had never known. I was so overwhelmed that I hardly stopped to consider that Vin had never shown any hint of such affections toward me before. Our kissing did not stop as we made our way upstairs to my bedroom… and, well, the details there I’m sure I don’t have to mention.

I could tell Ren faked a smile when he learned of what had become of Vin and I. I saw the wince when he saw my hand in Vin’s, and when Vin kissed my cheek. Ren told me that all we wanted was for me to be happy, but now I know that what he truly wanted was for me to be happy with him. I realize now that when I was alive I was incredibly oblivious.

Nonetheless, life went on. Vin and I got a house in the village outside of my Fathers. Ren had all but taken over as Healer and regularly worked with my Father at his house. When he was not with my Father he was with Vin and I at our house. It was rather funny actually; our house was designed around me. There were very few hard surfaces for me to hurt myself on should I have an episode when someone was not present. Almost all of our furniture, including the table we ate at, was made up of cushions, both thick and hard or large and soft. Ren and Vin had taken every precaution. Had I been more myself I would have been very touched.

The final stages preceding my Madness happened a few months before my twenty ninth birthday. Vin had gone away for some time again, and Ren moved in to take care of me. He practically lived at my house already so it wasn’t very different, but he even began to take patients in our main room so that he was near me at all hours of the day. My episodes were very frequent and drawn out at this point, hinting that my time was up. I was in the final stage before the Madness, the whole course having been drawn out over years by medicine and exhaustion. I didn’t learn until after my death that Ren had been putting together some sort of poison for me; a way for me to die quietly and peacefully without pain in the arms of my two best friends. He wanted it so that I would fall asleep and just never wake up.

Vin had other plans.

One day out of the blue Vin came home again. There had been nothing sent ahead to say he was returning, so neither Ren nor I expected anything that happened. I had been having a rather good day considering my state, with hardly any episodes. It was early evening I think, just as the sun was setting, when Vin came bursting through the door. Without so much as a hello he pushed me back into the wall with one hand and slid a knife under my ribs with the other. There were tears in his eyes as he pulled the blade free of its bloody sheath and dropped it to the floor. He kept whispering apologies which I only brushed away. I knew it was coming. I had known it would happen soon, I just didn’t know when. I wasn’t afraid to die… At least I was with Ren and Vin. At least I had that much.

I dropped to the floor and Vin gathered me in his arms, not caring of the fact that I was bleeding all over his coat and breeches, or that we sat in a pool of my blood. Ren stood a few feet away, his eyes wide in horror as he watched me bleed, knowing he couldn’t do anything to stop it. The Hunter had issued his decree; The Monster had to die.

Slowly Ren made his way toward me, kneeling as well in the crimson stain on the floor. He pressed his lips to my cheek and whispered something, but I couldn’t hear the words. Hearing his voice was enough though. I always loved the sound of his voice. His voice and Vins arms were enough to lull me off, and I drifted silently into darkness in the arms of my friends.

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It wasn’t until after my death that I learned so much more.

Vinius took on more and more jobs until he was hardly back in the village at all. I do not know how or when he died.

My Father died, of what I am not sure, and passed on his title and his house to Renivir.

Renivir took a wife some time after my death. They lived together for some years with no children before Renivir took sick with some sort of plague and died.

Since awakening as I did I have come to understand a lot of things. Renivir’s love for me was not as ‘across the spectrum’ as he had once claimed. It was much deeper and much more focused. I have seen him since I died, spoke with him, held him. As I said before, death is not the end. We have been reborn… He confessed to me that his marrying did not seem so significant now that he was with me again. That was the beginning of my new internal war.

He also told me that he had exploded on Vinius before Vinius all but vanished. Renivir was furious about the manner he had gone about killing me. It could have been painless. It could have been sweet and simple. He told me of his idea for the poison, and how it failed. He was not able to tell Vinius of his plan before I was stabbed with hardly a word.

Since awakening I have thought about a great many things. What was my connection to Vinius? To Renivir? Did Vinius love me as he said he did when he took me to bed, or was what Renivir gave me true and unconditional love? I’ve taken a lot of things from my life into consideration, and after several days straight of internal debate finally reached a conclusion.

I love Renivir, with every ounce of my existence. I always have. I’ve realized I don’t want to go through the rest of my existence wondering what it could’ve been like. I had often wondered what would have happened if I had chosen differently… Making a decision on what to do was murder. I could not choose one without hurting the other, and I certainly could not choose both, but in the end my decision was set. I want to know that love. Even thinking about him makes my breath come short with overwhelming emotion…

I confessed all this to him, my guilt, my realizations, my desires. It went a little different than I had anticipated, but his reaction was not entirely unexpected. For now there is a hold. We wait for Vinius and for Renivir’s wife so that things may be taken care of properly… I can only hope that it’s all taken care of soon. I am not a patient person, and that one kiss granted to me was too sweet, that one night spent in peace with him too wonderful… “You don’t know how long I’ve waited for that…”

I hope we won’t have to wait for too much longer.

By the Gods do I hope so.