Vampires of Light
She stands at the cusp of a gorge atop a mountain. It is the highest she has ever been, but that isn’t saying much. She knows from the magical dial on the cuff of her shirt that it is nearing noon. But the sky does not reflect it. Instead the sky is dark, filled with the artificial clouds of the vampires that had overtaken her world well before her birth. She was here at the highest point she had ever been to clear the sky and banish the vampires of light. The people had given up, but Atieno had grown up with knowledge, and that gave her hope.
She holds out a book and opens it to the first page.
“I call you out, Lords of the Night,” she says. Her voice barely wavers.
Atieno had been born in the basement of a bookstore, between the shelves for dusty books about history and less dusty books about magic. From the books she had read, most births in the past had been celebrated, filled with joy and hope. But she had been born in a dark world. As the light had gone out of the world so had hope. Of the dozen or so people who routinely lived in the dugout caverns under the bookstore, Atieno was the only child. She had been a fluke, a mistake, and the unwanted child of a passing traveller. The person who had been her birth mother had left Atieno in the care of the old book peddler Mūz.
This world had no time for children. It seemed as if everyone had given in to the hopelessness of the dark. And in the dark recesses of an old barely used bookstore, she had surrounded herself with her reading by the light of a candle and later, as she delved into the ancient manuscripts of magic, she created her own light.
“To your dark, I am the light.” Atieno continues. The dark clouds above her head begin to ripple as water ripples at the breath of a soft wind. Each page of the book that she reads from is one she made herself.
Old Mūz had taught her to read as soon as she could and let the young Atieno at anything she could read. Oftentimes when the patrols of vampires came through looking for fresh prey, Atieno was tucked away in the depths of the caverns below. Mūz was a gruff and foreboding person, but she wasn’t about to let her only charge be taken by the vampires. They preferred the younger over the older, and that was the only reason Old Mūz had survived as long as she had.
“Ignorance will not win, because knowledge is power.” Each cramped line that she reads, a carefully scripted fragment of a larger spell.
“I act like I don’t know anything, and they leave me alone,” Mūz would tell her every time a patrol came through. It was a subtle warning. Those who knew too much, and especially those who acted upon it were taken away, likely to be eaten or turned into the wicked, mindless sycophants of the vampires. The warnings never stopped Atieno from reading everything that she could in the bookstore or asking thousands of questions of the displaced pilgrims that passed through and stopped at the old store for a breather, fresh water, and a brief moment of safety behind walls.
Years later, on her twenty-fifth birthday, Old Mūz was on her deathbed and finally gave Atieno the one thing she had always wanted: to know how the world had ended up this way, with dark artificial clouds in the skies, vampires trawling the surface unhindered by the glow of a sun, destroying lives, and slowly sucking the world dry. It was a thing that had never been written into a book that she could read. And those that passed through never wanted to speak of it, or knew little.
“Ignorance,” Mūz had said. “Is a dark, endless pit.”
“Knowledge,” Atieno begins to whisper. “Is a candle in the dark.” She had bound the book with the fabric of Mūz’s favorite tunic. Wrapped in that dark blue fabric were the threads of a thousand memories from Mūz’s life and the things she knew and loved.
“When the vampires arrived, people couldn’t see how dangerous they were; they ignored the problems, because their hubris prevented them from believing their world was in danger. But in the shadows, in the dark of night, the vampires began to turn people into mindless sycophants. And then, in the bright of day, the darkened minds of the sycophants began to turn more people until there were too many to fight. No one was safe.”
When darkness fell over the world, the only light seen for miles around were the bonfires of thousands of books burning into embers, embers that rose into sky to replace the stars that were now hidden from view. The vampires knew the magic of the world, hidden in its books and its people, were the most dangerous things of all, so those were the first to go. What little survived was hoarded in old hidden places like Mūz’s bookstore.
“Speak to me, darkness.” The ripples in the dark clouds above intensify as the spells that govern the darkness begin to reach for her.
Mūz was a young mother at the time, and she hid herself and her children in the old storage areas while the world around them burned to the ground. Her eldest son had died trying to save people in the initial darkening. Her middle child died while wandering the world collecting taboo books for her mother’s illicit bookstore. And her youngest died while trying to fight the vampires on their turf, using the same dark magic they did. After all that, Mūz had little energy for saving the world anymore. She had given up, even though in the hidden corners of the world people knew to bring Mūz any book they could find.
“I am not like you, but I am not so unlike you!” Atieno called to the sky. The dark spells were used to meeting its own kind of magic and absorbing it. Or meeting something so unlike it and destroying it. But Atieno walked the thin line between the dark and the light, seeking acceptance from the dark while also keeping it at bay.
“The dark does not exist without the light,” she says and holds the book up in front of her that carried written amalgamations of dark and light spells.
Mūz had little hope any more, the last glimmer of which was for someone to take the resources she had managed to gather and put them to use. But by the time Atieno had entered her life, even that was a fading light.
In the many halls of hoarded books, Atieno found that glimmer of hope and turned it into the flame that drove her. With every book that was dropped off, she learned as much about the world and found the point at which all things, even the dark spells that covered her world could find balance.
In her final moments Old Mūz had said, “darkness can’t drive out darkness; only light can do that. You have been the best light in my life for the past twenty-five years, and I hope you can bring that light to the rest of the world.”
She reaches out with her balanced inner light, the weight of knowledge behind her and grasps at the threads of the dark spells above her, and with the lightest of touches whispers magical words into them, bringing them into the light. Force would not do, threats would fail, and aggression would only be met with aggression. With gentle, firm, and steady pressure, she makes the spells her own. Unraveling three decades of darkness. At her back, the people she had called upon to help her see the break in the clouds and add their own versions of the spells into the world. Their conjoined strengths coalesces into a wave of light. The vampires do not see it coming. They too have fallen victim to their hubris that they were untouchable. Ignorance was dangerous, but the illusion of knowledge even more so.
~Fin
~Fin
