Pro Luce Habere (To Have Before the Light) Volume II

By Krisi Keley

For eight hundred years, Valéry Castellane has known only one kind of light - the light in those human beings he's had to kill so he might live. The last of these has been the most brilliant light of all, the light of the one sent to tell him that heaven was never really lost to him. But did he destroy all hope for it in attempting to make this angel a human love he could hold forever on earth, or is the mystery of this vampire's salvation yet to be fully revealed? Sometimes the key which unlocks the secret of what's to come is hidden in the past. Take another journey with a vampire, through eight centuries of dark human history which have, all along, been leading him to the light.

Volume II: Out of the Depths
After an earth-shattering revelation by his maker that he doesn't truly understand, Valéry seeks a new world, free of the Old World's pain. Trapped in the darkness he can't escape, yet still touched by the light in the human lives he cherishes despite every dark deed, his attempt to determine who really is the monster further leads to him becoming one whose greatest deception is the lie he tells himself. Until two revolutions and two world wars later, the illusion is shattered to behold an enigmatic mortal girl.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Krisi Keley
• Release date: Nov 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781617520976

Krisi Keley

Krisi Keley was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and now lives in Chester County with her family and seven dogs. "On the Soul of a Vampire" is her first novel and is Book One in a planned series. A writer and artist with a degree in Theology and education in foreign and classical languages, she has always been intrigued with supernatural, paranormal and horror fiction and how these myths try to answer humankind's questions about the spiritual, good vs. evil and the nature of man. Pro Luce Habere Volume I, Book II in the On the Soul series was released in July 2011 and the author is presently working on Pro Luce Habere Volume II and Book III of the series, in which she hopes to share more new theories about both vampires and the human soul.

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pro luce habere

Volume II

Pro Luce Habere

Volume II

© Krisi Keley 2011

Published by TreasureLine Publishing

Smashwords Edition, License Note

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Front cover art: detail from St. Sebastian et l’Ange, Gustave Moreau, 1876

Cover Design: Krisi Keley

The following is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and

incidents are fictitious or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real

persons, living or dead, to factual events or to businesses is

coincidental and unintentional.

When you were called,

did you answer or did you not?

Perhaps softly and in a whisper?

Søren Kierkegaard

Part I

A Small (and Relatively Brief) Holocaust

1

I shook my head in incomprehension. Again. Still. Always, it seemed.

So that’s it? Your real lie to yourself… to me?

I trembled. With rage, with pain, with fear… with one of them, with some hideous combination of all of them or with something else entirely, I didn’t know.

A short, bitter bark of laughter escaped me, and Lukios closed his eyes, his expression bereft.

You are the greatest liar of us all, my maker. And the most pitiful one, I murmured. The greatest because you’ve maintained for two centuries that there was no reason. The most pitiful because you’ve kept such a grand reason secret for so long.

Lukios opened his mouth as if to respond, though he didn’t likewise open his eyes to look at me, but no words came forth.

Alas, I cannot deny what you did or didn’t know in me that night, Lukios, since one cannot see his own soul. But tell me, do you think the soul’s answer truly a valid ‘yes’ to act upon, when its owner’s mind and heart are not in on its decision to accept?

My maker finally opened his eyes to stare at me, although he still did not speak in either protest or acknowledgement. But why did it seem I saw a debate being waged within them – as if he fought with himself over whether or not to respond? Or over what response to give, at least.

Let me go, Lukios, I whispered. Let me go, so I don’t have to endure the pain of hating you as much as I love you, with all the other pain an eternity as this will have me suffer.

I can’t. I… I wanted to… He shook his head. I can’t.

This is not proof of your love, however much you try to convince yourself it is, I told him, my tone still gentle, my voice still soft, despite all the anger seething inside of me. You still believe it all, everything you pretended you did not and so, it can’t be for love, no matter how much it feels like it is to the both of us.

You still believe as well, and yet you wouldn’t let Trista or your cousin go, he attempted, but his eyes indicated he already knew it to be a futile persuasion, that he knew the game had long been up. Because he’d known all along, before I’d even known myself, every one of my reasons for giving immortality to Trista and Jules. Love of their human lives, fear of losing them no matter what choice I made when they went to Heaven and I to hell, guilt over those I’d failed as a mortal boy and a crazed sense of saving Noël and Nydia vicariously – all of those, yes. But most of all, I’d condemned an innocent girl and my beloved cousin to this evil earthly state of darkness, knowing that my love for them, kept alive here on earth, would keep me from ending the life I so despised and had wanted to end since the night the first human being had died at my hands. I would have risked hell to end this murderous existence, most likely not long after my first attempt to do so, but that I’d given myself a reason to live in them. However twisted, however insane, I’d made them this so I could live for them when I couldn’t justify living for myself. But whatever had inspired that dreadful, unfathomable notion in me then, it couldn’t overcome the pain in my sense of what I was and what I’d lost anymore. Not after the past twenty-four years. Not after tonight and witnessing firsthand the horror in making a killer out of a soul one loved.

Let me go willingly, Lukios, or you will have to kill me to stop me, and that will make the pain of my death a hundred, a thousand times worse for you.

And what of the pain to your children, if I let you go? he asked, and the rage I’d kept from the surface until then boiled over.

Damn you, Lukios! I sobbed. You could have prevented it. You knew! All along you knew and you let two more souls be cursed to have what you wanted. All the darkness you showed me, all the denial of reason and right, of goodness and light. You knew what it would lead me to, how it would warp and corrupt a bleeding heart, and you let me become even more of a monster than you’d already made me, all to keep at bay the death you would never let have me!

"You are wrong, Valéry. About why… about everything. You don’t know fully your own reasons; even less do you understand mine. And I… I cannot tell them to you. But I will stop you, no matter how many times you try. Your death will not come at my hands, but neither will I let it come of your own." He said all of this in a quiet, immeasurably sad voice, and whether in spite of feeling his pain or because I felt it so acutely, I launched myself at him in fury.

I slammed my hands into his chest, the combined force of my run at him and the blow knocking him backward. The momentum of the two carried me forward with him, and both of us crashed to the ground.

I landed squarely on top of Lukios’ chest in our fall, and immediately I was upright, digging one knee into his abdomen and pinning his legs to the ground with the other.

Yes, release it all on me. All the anger and bitterness, the fear and the sorrow, all the confusion. Silence the voice that directs you to end what you revile by putting all the blame on me, he directed, seeming as physically unaffected as he appeared emotionally unfazed by my violence.

And then with a frightful fluid motion, so quick I didn’t see him move, he grabbed my throat and shoved me backwards.

I choked, his grasp excruciating, but still I fought to hold my position. I raised my arm and brought the side of my hand down across the arm wrapped around my neck. The blow struck him on the wrist, directly over the side of the carpal bone, and Lukios did not so much as release his hold on my throat, as his hand fell away from it with an audible crack. I shoved him back again, this time his head hitting the ground as I grabbed his throat in my left hand and his other wrist in my right. I held that wrist, my thumb wrapped over it tightly and my fingers pressing his hand backwards at a sharp angle. One slight move more and it would snap as neatly as the other had.

I leaned down close, my face no more than an inch from his. Come, Lukios, I breathed, my rage at him for making me hate myself so profoundly warring with the depth of my anguish for hurting him, fight harder. Kill me now… Give me the death I should have had two centuries ago. One way or the other I die tonight, so bring it full circle. Let it come of the hand that ought to have released me long ago.

I’m not the one who should have let go, he answered, and I would have liked to believe the shock and confusion such words inspired only were enough of a distraction. But, in truth, before those words even fully registered, and before I felt any movement at all, my head had crashed into the dry, hard soil behind me and Lukios had me pinned down by his knee as I had pinned him only moments before. His forearm was pressed across my throat, not crushed painfully over my windpipe, yet firm enough to prevent me from having even a thought of trying to move. My hands went up purely out of instinct, but knowing it futile already to fight back, they did not attempt to knock him away.

You do not die tonight, Valéry. There is another voice being drowned out in you by the one that tells you you are too evil to be allowed to live, he said so softly it was difficult to hear his words. So when he continued even more quietly, I tried to convince myself I simply misheard what he was saying. It is that voice, more than any evil I’ve committed, which truly keeps you alive. And it will continue to, no matter the pain in you that persuades you it is the louder which speaks the truth.

I closed my eyes tightly for a long few seconds, the fight drained out of me, though the pain and anger were far from gone. I didn’t understand all of my maker’s words, maybe not even most of them. But there was one thing that made sense to me out of all he’d said, and this was that it was true that he wasn’t the one who had most needed to let go. If I’d ever truly wanted to end this evil existence as I claimed I did, I’d already had plenty of opportunities to let go. I’d had plenty of opportunities and yet I’d let them all pass by.

I took Lukios’ left arm carefully into both of my hands. Blood dripped down on the fractured limb that hung limply from the end of it. The first tears I’d let fall in a century, and the first time I was not sickened by the sight of them. Just a few, and they ran down over the slope of Lukios’ drooping hand and dripped from the tips of his fingers.

The bones will heal, Valéry, he said gently. "But it appears you will have the opportunity to prove that you can steal a horse without my assistance."

I blinked in stunned amazement that he made a joke at such a time, the cry welling up in me emerging from my mouth as a half-sob/half-laugh that sounded astoundingly like the satisfied grunt of a freshly-fed pig. And to hear that sound and to know I had produced it, forced up another and another, until I was certain I was going to be sick from the agony of the two conflicting emotions in me.

I have gone insane, I thought to myself.

Lukios moved off of me and rose to his feet with a slight grimace. Not yet, my child… But give it another century or two.

Lukios’ wristbones had begun their work at stitching themselves together by the time we were seated on the horses I easily procured from their hitches behind an inn near Porte Faugères. The animals had us past Béziers and a distance down the road to Carcassonne by the final bell signaling the hours of Compline, and when we reached the arid, artesmisia and rosemary-scented Minervois less than an hour later, he had regained the use of both hands. However, he admitted to me that it would not take much trauma to re-break a wrist in a state still so fragile, and I was concerned over how well he’d be able to defend himself should we encounter those I still had not entirely given up on encountering.

Lukios and I dismounted our steeds and left the animals tied to posts along the outer walls of the town. I held little confidence the well-serving beasts would be there upon our return, but this concern was all but a non-consideration for me. Despite my maker’s promise that he would stop me if I tried to put myself in harm’s way, I was convinced it was little more than a vow he wished to keep than it was one he could be certain to follow through on. My discomfort over the idea lurking in the recesses of my mind – the idea that had he been less than certain he could keep me from death, he simply would have prevented me from returning to the inn at all – was a discomfort I ignored almost as well as I refused to acknowledge that the idea was in my head to begin with.

We crept along the rocky banks of the Cesse toward the town, taking cover in a darkness made darker still by the surrounding trees, and we could hear the sounds of the feast day celebration winding down for the night, the wind carrying the music and voices to us from the village.

Lukios’ pace began to slow less than a quarter of a mile from our destination, and I looked to him in surprise and impatience, not understanding why he hesitated now when we were so close. I watched the expression on his face change from a wary look of close attention to a look so unreadable, it put a cold vise of fear around my heart. And then I heard what he had already detected.

For a moment I stood unmoving, incapable of action in my anger and shock, and then I turned from my maker, running toward the village.

Valéry, I heard Lukios hiss from already a good distance behind me, but I did not stop or even slow. I ran faster than I’d ever run before; faster than I even imagined I could run, barreling toward what I should have foreseen after all I’d witnessed in the past two centuries.

The twenty-seven men who had been our captors these past days had indeed left the holiday festival early to return to their posts. They stood not in those positions now, however, but in plain view out on the street before the inn we had escaped less than twenty-four hours ago.

I skidded to a halt in the shadows of the neighboring stables, almost carried further forward against my will because of the force of my run and the poor tread of the dry dust cover on the ground. Almost carried forward far enough to be easily seen by those who stood outside our rooms, as another inch would have placed me in the circle of bright light those rooms gave off – lit up by the fire that consumed them.

I backed up, numbly staring at the blaze as flames licked up the side wall and caught the stable I stood beside. Like a sacrifice to God, the burning pyre appeared, and I knew that was exactly what it was meant to be. The witch hunters had seen significance in the feast day long before I’d realized its import to us, and they’d had this planned all along – not to take us under arrest, as Lukios had assumed, but to slay the demons of the town for their God in the grandest fashion possible.

Except, I suddenly realized with horror, the demons who perhaps should have died in the blaze were not the ones trapped in those flames. Instead, innocent human beings were: those travelers who had stopped and stayed at our inn and, of course, had remained there even after we escaped.

Voices began to fill the night, drowning out the sound of the church bells that commenced to strike the midnight hour. Screams and cries of fear rose, along with a few saner calls to fetch water before the fire’s rapid spread took everything in its path, not just the monsters’ lair.

A man ran by close to me, carrying a bucket of water large enough to put out, perhaps, a small cooking fire. He got no farther than ten feet from the inferno, however, before he was grabbed by several of the watching men.

He consorts with demons, a woman shrilled, though I couldn’t see her in the growing crowd that had formed in the street.

Die with your masters then, warlock, one of the witch hunters growled, and the others threw him to the ground. The one who had pronounced his fate stepped forward, brandishing a torch, and the waterbearer went up in flames nearly as quickly as each of the buildings in the village caught ablaze from the one beside it.

My God, I whispered. My God, who is the monster?

I looked around at the hungry faces, not only of the self-proclaimed witch hunters who had done this, but also those of the villagers who watched their own homes and all they possessed burn for the sake of the monsters they hadn’t even known for certain lived in their midst. Villagers who, I was sure, had watched with the same ravenous look, when innocent men, women and children – their own neighbors and in some cases, family members – had burned at the stake over these past weeks.

A hand touched my shoulder lightly and I lowered my head.

Valéry, Lukios spoke firmly, his tone demanding that I listen to his words. Ask yourself the question again.

What? I moaned dazedly.

Who is the monster? he repeated my question and he turned me toward him, taking my face between his hands.

A jolt wracked my body at his touch, as if he had somehow captured lightning and sent it coursing through his hands and into me. My head rocked backward with the force of it, and a crystal clear image filled my mind.

A place that looked familiar and yet unfamiliar, very old and foreign to the cities I’d known these past one hundred and seventy-five years, but really, basically the same. So clear was the picture in my head that I seemed to actually stand in the middle of this place, and as I looked around, I saw it was a city being brought to ruin.

Screams of pain and terror filled the air, and tortured human beings, clothes aflame, hair afire, ran blindly from the consuming heat. Flames licked at the walls of every building, and the wails of those trapped inside rose with the crackling of the fire.

I was watching the extinction of a people, I realized – not demons, not witches and warlocks – but simply mortal human beings, strangers to the land, and so judged wicked enemies who must be wiped out.

And I suddenly knew as the vision vanished from before my eyes that all of those stories I’d thought Lukios had told me to incite me to rage and keep me from starving myself to death after my first victim… they hadn’t been stories told at all. They hadn’t been brought to such vivid life in my mind through descriptive words he’d spoken, but had been real events he’d shown me of man’s treatment of man. All the hatred and torture and death he himself had witnessed over his existence incomprehensibly long.

Who is the monster? he repeated softly when I opened my eyes and stared at him in horrified shock. And then I pushed myself from his arms and ran toward the burning inn.

I heard Lukios cry out my name in agonized terror, his fingers brushing but not able to grasp the back of my shirt, as I lowered my head and dove into the raging flames.

I killed to live. I had cursed others so that I might continue to live despite my hatred for what my life had become. But the innocent human beings, the trusting boarders who had looked to us for care and safety, I was not going to allow them to die in my place. And if God did want me removed from the earth, then He would have His best opportunity tonight, but not before I tried to prevent more needless blood on my hands.

2

For a long time there was no pain. Indeed, for a long time it seemed like there wasn’t anything. Or if there was, it was something I could neither grasp nor remember upon waking. Perhaps because whenever I did have some semblance of consciousness, there was so much pain in my body, it wiped out any thought or feeling that might find its way into my mind or heart.

Yes, they’re alive. They’re safe, Valéry, I heard Lukios’ voice speak into my nothingness at one point, sounding like he was answering a question I didn’t remember asking. And though the overwhelming sorrow in his voice struck me as odd, considering his words, the pain that was washing over me even as