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Ch.37 (Phoenix): Prelude to Eternity |
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A special word to all my readers out there. The next few chapters will be devoted to Phoenix's unique Point of View. (Sorry Flotsam. There's just not enough story to do a special chapter right now, not to mention my co-author's production is running a little slow.) Anyhow, read on and indulge.
"He walks in beauty, like the night. A shadow that leaves no mark. He lives in blackness, shuns the light. Forever in the dark." What I wouldn't give to go back to a time when my existence was, inherently, that simple. But I know that I never can, not after that night.
Known and feared by all, and yet shrouded in mystery, the Opera Populaire was mine to command. Music played, actors sang (some to my unfathomable displeasure Yes, after all this time Carlotta, I still think you're a toad!), and the ravenous bowels of hell surrounded us all.
I took her in my arms, savoring the sensation of her against my body. My thoughts were thrust back to that night, the night when she had first seen me; nothing else had mattered then except us.
"Say you'll share with me one love, one lifetime," I half-sang, half-whispered in her ear, saying the words I had wanted to say before the Vicomte had taken them from me. "Lead me, save me, from my solitude. Say you want me with you here beside you."
I turned her to face me, having her drink in the full intensity of my plea. "Anywhere you go, let me go too." She lifted her hand to my face, a sympathetic smile on her face. (Could it be all was forgotten and she truly loved me?) "Christine, that's all I ask of-"
She tore off my mask with furious strength, exposing me for what I was. Damn her, lewd minx! I would show her what it meant to defy me. One deft swipe of my sword sent the chandlier plummeting towards the stage, and a trapdoor sent us down into the darkness.
Looking back, I still have no regrets as to how I treated the Vicomte. However, I probably shouldn't have gotten in Christine's face, for her tears and false pity, while unwelcome, were still comforting. (I had experienced more than my fair share of that before I met her.) Even still, Raoul came after us (He never did learn, did he?) and begged me to restore Christine to him.
You'd think it would've been my choice whether I gave her back or not. No, it was Christine's choice to make, the choice of who she would follow into eternity. I'll never forget the innocent cruelty with which she shared our first, and last, kiss with me. I relinquished her with a heavy heart, too sick with love and grief to try anymore. The fact that she left me his ring still puzzles, and pains, me to this day.
I possess a small piece of perfection and yet I could not have it in it's entirety, not then, not now, maybe not ever. Why, one would ask? "Complications" is my involuntary response now, but it's more of a curse when it comes back to basics.
The night Christine left me was the night I recieved my "gift". I had just escaped the hellish bonfire of the Opera Populaire and had stopped to rest under a bridge over the Seine. (Without my mask, I needed a dark place to hide myself until sundown and I could start running again.) With nothing but the clothes on my back, and the broken dreams in my heart, I fell asleep surprisingly easily.
In my dreams, she came to me. I had not seen her since she abandoned me when I was 13, so I was half-convinced it was old memories I tried to suppress resurfacing again. "Much evil has been wrought by your hands, my son," the dark-haired woman said.
"You weren't much help," I retorted. "How can you go off and leave your own child to fend for itself, with no one left to turn to, and then appear suddenly after being gone for almost 2 decades?"
"Because you impregnated a young girl, who was barely keeping her balance in the ferocious whirlwind caused by your wrongs."
An angry scowl appeared on my face. I hadn't been with any woman during my time at the operahouse. Who would want a repulsive creature like me that even his own mother could never love? "I have no idea what you're talking about," I said truthfully, crossing my arms and turning my head away.
"Don't play innocent with me. Surely, you haven't forgotten your protege."
My eyes widened. Of course! In the stream of events leading up to this all faithful night, that most important detail had slipped my ever-calculating mind. The night that Christine had first seen me was the night she had slept with me. (She was unconscious of course, but that's beside the point.) I fell to my knees and stared silently at the light blue nothing that made up my dream.
"She knows not that the first child she bears will be yours, or that she will die in the process."
"I assumed as much," I said sarcastically, not daring to look up at my mother. Christine would die giving birth to my child?! Now there's something that makes you feel better "You were never one to praise anything involving me."
"Tonight, I assume the mask of Nemesis, mistress of judgement of good and evil. For your wrongs, you shall be granted the Curse of Calypso. You will be able to love, but you shall never be free until such a time as you have found your protege once again."
Curse of Calypso? Love? Find the one person I was trying so hard to forget right now? "What does th-" I looked up, but the raven-haired fae I called my mother had disappeared. I never saw her again, dream and search as I might.
I woke at sundown and looked in the water. In the fading sunlight, I saw the face of a handsome man staring back at me. I move my head, and the reflection moved with me. I blinked. It blinked. I touched the right side of my face, just to make sure I wasn't still dreaming. "You there," called a voice from above me, "are you hurt?"
I looked up. A young girl with delicately wringleted blond hair in a dark blue dress was shouting down to me. 'My next protege' I unconsciously thought. 'My, she is quite the little Venus, isn't she?'
Claudia, as I found out later was the girl's name, was the first of many muses I educated in the ways of music. She was companionable and friendly in our first few years together, not like she would have been had I been ugly, but the day came that she became a woman and fell in love with another man. She would talk of nothing but him all through our lessons, almost to the point of me wanting to lace a hangman's noose around her dainty neck. In my heart though, I knew I could never do such a thing; I loved her too much.
'That's it!' I thought after our final lesson had concluded. (She was to be married the next day, lithe figure, size-2 butt, and all.) 'So this is what my mother meant by being able to love but not being free.'
I found out something else that night; I found out that I was in desperate need of a new body. I could never take over the body of a living person, crushing their soul so that I would have complete control (This I found out after I did it for the first time.), so I decided to possess that of a dying person.
You would find it surprising which body I chose to possess: the Vicompte de Chagny. Yes, my old rival was still alive, though not nearly as handsome as I was, wanting to die because of the loss of his wife nearly 10 years ago. I came to him in the dead of night, changing my face to a more familiar guise. (This little power I had discovered during the nights I had been teaching Claudia. I was able to morph my body to perfectly copy that of another person.) "What do you want?" the old man demanded, startled out of his peaceful slumber.
"Whatever you want," I said simply. "Word circulates around the city that you wish to die, and so I have come to grant your wish."
"The Angel of Death. I always knew you were a devil but I never imagined you'd look like him."
So, he had been expecting me, to a certain degree. Without warning, and without another word, my body sublimated into smoke and drifted into the Vicomte's body, suffocating his will, making his flesh my own. (Since that night, I have had to exchange bodies every 2 decades or so in order to live comfortably in my "immortality".)
Time passed. I found more muses. Some of the more famous ones are listed here: Lea Sonlonga, Hayley Westenra, Chole Agnew, Orla Falon. (For those last two, I worked with David Downes.) I kept falling in love, but it always ended up the same. Even if they loved me, they all had to leave eventually.
Then one autumn day, I met a young man who was about 17. Jasper was his name he said and he was in a tough situation. His younger sister was being ridiculed by her peers for being different and actually going to school to learn instead of fool around. "I know the feeling," I told him. "Everyone's against you, and you feel like there's no one in the universe who can help you."
"You know, I've never actually met someone who's had some idea of what my sister's going through," said Jasper, his grey-green eyes turning blue in the cool sunlight. They were just like my eyes, bottomless pools which held endless secrets and yet so shallow when it came guessing what we were feeling.
"Is she a music lover?" I asked randomly because I couldn't think of anything else to say.
"Yes actually. She's been taking voice lessons for less than a year, in which she has had at least 4 different teachers, none of which neither of us liked."
This piqued my interest. A fellow music lover, intelligent, not to mention knowledge of how I felt back before the days of my curse. "Does she have a teacher now?"
"No. Mom just cut off connections with the latest one. As you can imagine, my sister is devastated and happy. Happy because she won't have to deal another one of those "opera grannies" again. Devastated because now she doesn't have someone to mold and shape her voice into something more than those old windbags could ever achieve."
He had said the magic words. "I'd like to meet her," I said.
"Three days from now, sundown, the secret place," said Jasper, indicating a green clearing behind the trees. (The curse had helped to enhance my senses so I could see where he was pointing.) I nodded and stood up from the stone bench where we were sitting, the long raven hair of my current body blowing in the breeze. I turned to go. "Wait!" Jasper exclaimed.
I turned my head. "What?" I asked, slightly annoyed at such an upstart.
"Didn't catch your name. You know mine, so it's only fair."
I shrugged. "It's Erik," I replied simply and then disappeared into the leaves swept up in the autumn wind.
Three days came and went. (Time passes strangely for immortals.) Sundown could not have come soon enough. I had been roaming the backwoods all day, thinking I'd do some exploring before I finally met the girl Jasper had been talking about. I stopped in the clearing, yet again, my eyes analyzing the trees in the receding light of day. Then, I saw Jasper, standing over by an old willow tree. His hand was on the shoulder of a young girl, who looked to be 12 or so and slightly depressed and surprised. I knew who she was before he even introduced her; the thing that was unfamiliar to me was the feeling I felt quivering in every fibre of my being, the feeling of familiarity.
 srs diva 2011 xxl · Mon Sep 21, 2009 @ 03:23pm · 1 Comments |
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