Quill
Contents of this Site:
for the year

Character Background
     T he Millennium passed in Madrid, unobserved save by a few scholars, such as my Master, with an eye on Christian affairs.  No, the world did not stop its progression through the heavens, nor did a trumpet herald the eschation.  No, the only thing that came that year was a drought coupled with a baking heat that all but melted the flagstones throughout the city.  The inhabitants of Madrid, myself included, suffered on the high, hot mesa that summer.  Tempers ran hot, business struck their daylight hours en lieu of cooler evenings, and I spent my days in the basement of my Master's house, sprawled on the cold stone floor.
     I n this afterlife, I find the passage of time most prominent in my mind, save when I become intent on a project and time begins to slide as sand from a dune.  The summer I speak of here tumbled on and on, likely due to the odd hours, and certainly influenced by my growing knowledge of languages.  On my off hours, I would sneak back to the library to pursue reading on my own: the drive within me was, and remains, slightly more than an addiction.  I can only guess that this opiate brought me over to this dark existence.  Ironically, I would wager it will sustain me.
     As I said, the millennium was scarcely observed in Madrid.  The Christian empire to the north was little more than a myth, something akin to the Empire of the East.  The Almohad Empire was still strong, though men of the stature of my Master surely knew of the decay within and the aggression without.  He constantly had visitors, learned men from Granada, Seville, even distant Marrakech.  Their arrival always thrilled me, in the same small way a child anticipates an elder relative bearing sweetmeats.  You see, they brought works of art, tomes, strange musical instruments, a veritable cavalcade of weird and fascinating events.  It was in just such a manner, such another visit, that brought me out of the Light.
     P erhaps had I spent less time pouring over tomes, ruining my eyesight late into the night, perhaps then... But, I suspect it could have happened no other way.  You see, my addiction to the tales spinning endlessly from the pages of dusty books, the distant vistas revealing themselves to me- all these things lay in wait for me all my short life.  It took one night, one cry, one fiery moment to forge one small life into something hard and enduring, something with the strength and resolve to bear an eternity of learning.
     I can't recall, even now, what time of the night it happened.  You see, I was entrenched in an account of the life of Icerserus of Damietta, recently arrived in a case of scrolls brought to our house by a man from distant Turkey.  He was a strange one, strange by exception.  He, unlike many of my Master's guests, spent little time speaking with my Master.  Instead, he appeared all hours of the night throughout the manor, perusing a shelf of books here, pouring over sheaf after sheaf of transcriptions there.  He caused no strife with the house staff, as so many other guests failed to do.  That is not to say he was congenial.  In fact, my Master displayed reservation throughout his guest's stay, and in snatches of conversation that I overheard appeared even deferential.  To the staff, he displayed an indifference that seemed to stem from a lack of acknowledgment that we even were there.  It was with some great surprise, then, when the candle that lit my desk flickered: I turned and froze, transfixed, at the sight of our visitor not an arm's length from me, staring down at me with the hardest blue, no sapphire, eyes.
     O h, the eyes.  We know the eyes, don't we?   Many nights now, I have caught myself in the same rapt attention before a mirror, or glassy pond, snaring my thoughts in the penetrative manner only we Dark creatures may attain.  Sapphire caught me that night, caught me and drained me there in that cool, damp room.  I can remember the single candle dimming, as if snuffed for lack of air, then brightening an eternity later to a point of light more brittle and more dazzling that the noonday sun.  Such a sight brought my first sound, a fitting sound, as a creature of the Dark: a cry of joy that was choked and tortured to a wet screech as it passed my ruined throat.  Fitting, indeed, as my last sound, my last voice in this world, for it brought my Manuel, even then a servant of Light, to the room in haste.  Manuel, sweet Manuel, what did we look like there, sprawl and locked as lovers, blood and gore dripping from our canines?  Did you imagine such horrors even in your worst nightmares?  The shock, the horror, Manuel...  God provided for my Manuel that night, like so many others before him, by his perhaps finest gift to Man: fire.  The lamp, the heat, the moment of insane fear, the shrieks from Sapphire, from me, from Manuel, perhaps, all remain with me in one tight knot of experience.  Manuel and I have spoke of it, but once, and he related what befell my Sapphire.
     T he fire took both of us, full on, soaking each in pure imported oil.  The bench, the book I had been reading, everything nearby erupted into flame, needing little help after years of dryness.  Manuel stared with open horror, as Sapphire burned and burned, hot like pitched kindling, thrashing and spinning in all direction simultaneously.  He then froze, and leapt upwards, bodily smashing up through fieldstone above to disappear from the house as a sparking and flailing comet towards the town.  I, on the other hand, burned as a man, the heat converting my flesh into liquid pools of fat and sinew.  Manuel beat me with what he could find, then dragged me, still aflame, from the room that was quickly filling with flame and smoke.  Once out, he knew my wounds to be fatal, but went to fetch help.  Help came, but not in the manner he had intended.  A page, whose name I confess I cannot recall, came to me with water and bandages even as the fire spread through the house.  In the confusion, no one noticed his aid.
     I  lingered, as so many of us do, nearby the place I had known in life.  I was a wretch: burned, weak, angry, unschooled in the ways of our kind.  I was a plague upon my house, killing clumsily, cruelly.  The wounds from that time, both physical and mental, have never healed.  It find this fitting, as a Dark creature should appear as I do.  It was years before my nature reasserted itself in the form of a need to know what it was that I had become.  Paradoxically, the very unnatural state I found myself in aided my very natural and normal scholarly search.  It was easy, too easy, to slip within a house or mosque to rifle their storehouses of knowledge.  It was on such a foray that I first meet another of our Kind, and became known to the others within Madrid.
     M y tale grows stale here, full of years of study and silence, finding my place in this new Darkness.  Manuel remains with me, even now, in the form of his son, another man of Light.  The Christians came, eventually, driving me me out from my studies to witness their wholesale destruction of irreplaceable works of learning.  I have become a cat burglar, a blackmailer, a Crusader in my own way.  Each march of the Reconquista brings new treasures through Madrid, and some small amount find their way to me.  My place in monastic life suits me, and offers solitude and silence to study what I reap.  The nights such as these, spent with pen and ink draw some small comfort from rituals I have known in my past. 
Sunaira AL Falah
Q