What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. . .
—T.S. Elliot, "Little Gidding"
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. . .
—T.S. Elliot, "Little Gidding"
So many things on the mind. So much to say. This Nut Up November has been truly inspiring. RavenBlack City, you glorious beast. What shape are you taking?
What rough beast, its hour come at last, slouches towards us?
I wonder.
So many things on the mind. So much to say. The Ferrymen have closed their halls. They’ve written their end.
What better hands to write their end than the ones that wrote their beginning?
What better boatman to help guide it along the floodwaters of this apocalypse than the one who joined it to keep himself and his blood from extinction?
Ferrymen. Ferrymen. I won’t lie. I hated you. I hated what you had become. What you had let the city become. But I’m glad you weren’t denied a good ending.
I can hate you for what you became. I can love the story woven so deeply into the fabric of the city, as deep-woven into our history as the story of The Capadocian Dynasty, the Splinters of Dusk, D’Dary, The Republic of RavenBlack, Yggdrasil, The Church of Blood—begat, begat, begat, I cannot name you all and to try would be an injustice.
I borrow the Lady of the Lamp’s words:
You have made the story of this world. And where would we be without it?
I know none of my homies fuck with Lucius, but the man had a “flowery way with words.”
“All I know is how to die.”Lucius The Gray wrote:My time is over
And over are all my dreams
My joys died in victim screams
I'm victor yet petrified,
Can you teach me how to live?
All I know is how to die…
The High Priest of Lies knew how to die. And I wonder if our so-called “immortality” makes us short-sighted, Mictian.
We test it here; we claim it here, our Immortality, every time we meet an End and begin again.
When we rise after we’ve been bled and beaten but not broken—never broken—even as fate shatters us, we too often forget about...
When the first vampire was laid to rest in the Graveyard, never to return, we were given a gift. We saw The End. We knew that End. When that End was in sight, it gave us meaning. It gave this city purpose.
You mean something, vampire, because one day you won’t be here.
Your bonds, vampire, they mean something, because they are fragile and they can be broken. Your clan, vampire, means something because one day, perhaps, the city will outgrow use for it, too. You in power now, vampire, may be corrupted by power.
Between you and me, if I’m not being staked and called an oppressor and a homicidal maniac in 10 years’ time, I’ll be very disappointed with myself.
I hope you’re there to bury me. I hope you make it hurt.
Every time we are staked, every time we are bled, we must wonder: is this The Last Time?
Is this how I want to go?
When I write my name in the book of RavenBlack City—when I finish my story—is this how I want to be remembered?
We die.
We rise.
We begin again.
But if this is the last time you fall, if this is where your story ends; if this is the red earth that will take the last drop of your blood; if this is the home of your True Death; ask yourself, vampire, before you go into an Immortality of a different kind…
"Is this how I want it to end?"
Choose.
One day you may not be able to.
