Part One: The Catacombs
. . . Some hour later they leave me, my cold body forsaken in the darkness. The darkness transforms: Where vague shadows once outlined the shelves of bones, I now clearly count each displaced vertebra, every lost rib distinct, the whole desiccated abode revealed as if the darkness were a curtain pulled back. The stones beneath me possess nothing of the bitter chill with which they had tormented me the last three days. I felt nothing of the coldness in that tomb for the deep, black ice spreading inside me.
From the floor, a dead man I rose. Movement was but a thought, and to think of a place was to be there. In flashes, I found myself remembering the dreary passages where I and my companions suffered as meals for those damned vampires, retreading our steps until outside, I stood at a great precipice overlooking the sea. This island of the dead, secured by these terrible cliffs, viewed from my homeland rises just a dot above the horizon. From it, I look to my native soil, and long for Ella.
At the thought, I fly across the waves, born on leathery wings. Past the bristling surf now loving and then warring with the ever shifting sands of the beach, beyond the swamps with their moldering, rotting pits full of sinking carcasses, over the gentle hills rolling in the night, I dart like a spirit in mere seconds. So, to my long forsaken home, at the very door, I find myself.
A knock, and she answers. Smiling, my love takes my hand and draws me inside our house. Without words I embrace her, and she me. No thought comes to drive me out, to take me suddenly away. I’m with Ella, my tender companion, and for nothing other than her do I hunger. For the night we have each other, but only for this night.
Tale Told 
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