I Am Eternal 1: Cowboys, Vampires & Indians

By Athanasios Galanis

Eternity gets lonely when your friends and those you love are destroyed. You no longer trust, or feel anything because every smile or kind word could be your undoing.

Do you connect with someone or stay afraid, hidden from the only other constant you know: the Catholic Order of Jesuits. Beneath their veneer of charity and compassion is a secret army of Killers For Christ whose duty is the annihilation of anything supernatural.

The Templars were never disbanded they were re-purposed and renamed the Vatican Slayers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Athanasios Galanis
• Release date: Apr 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476477251

Athanasios Galanis

Athanasios works in Montreal as a graphic/video artist, illustrator & writer in dvd production & film. He has been researching & crafting Mad Gods: weaving in factual & rumoured history for over ten years. Athanasios has been interested in religion & faith since childhood. This led to studying a bewildering variety of beliefs from pagan, wicca, judaism, christianity, islam, to hindu, buddhism, shinto, luciferianism & much more. The interest made its own momentum & brought Mad Gods. His other interests include most entertainment, from film, to television & books. He won't try video games for the same reason he doesn't keep his favourite booze in the house; he would do nothing else. There was a short time that he was into World of Warcraft but that became the obsession he knew it would be. He had to leave it for a deeper & more engrossing one: Mad Gods.

Book preview

– I Am Eternal –

– Cowboys, Vampires & Indians –

By Athanasios

Copyright 2013, Athanasios

Edited by Heather Adkins

Discover Other Work by Athansios @ mad-gods.com

Table of Contents

Vampires & Cowboys

Unisofter

Cowboys & Vampires

Vampires & Indians

I Am Eternal

Vampire Relations

Vampires & Cowboys

I am eternal.

I’ve survived since before God was a little Guy. I don’t live per se, I exist, continue, with no end in sight.

Enough clichés?

I’ve had enough myself. In this day and age we’re bombarded with them. My newest friend calls them marketing. He is an unlikely philosopher, more suited to barring the door of access to a bar than a cliché busting pundit.

His pulpit and setting are as unlikely as he is. I met Tom weeks before when I sat opposite him on the train. I didn’t strike up a conversation the first day, but one day in the first week when his lip curled up at a book he had been reading. I looked at the cover and saw it was Breaking Dawn, an angst ridden, vampire/werewolf soap opera that many, very many people were reading. His hand unconsciously covered it and in his eyes I read a mixture of embarrassment and defiance. I suppressed a smirk and went back to my iPad, hoping not to have offended.

Is it easy to get used to reading on that? His question was barely audible. I wasn’t sure he even wanted to have said it but I answered anyway.

No, it’s surprisingly easy to get used to it.

I’ve still got to have paper and the tactile feel of a book in my hand.

Mmmhm. It doesn’t have to be one or the other you know. It can be both. I looked at his rejected reading and couldn’t help asking. Can’t get into it, huh? I’ve got to confess though, myself, I’ve consumed all of them. Saw the movies even read the Sookie Stackhouse books and True Blood, Vampire Diaries, and Anne Rice. Every last one of them. They’re all in here, actually. I tapped my iPad. I take them with me everywhere.

My sympathies. He joked.

The quip caught me off guard and I laughed, exposing for a brief second, an obviously overlong canine fang. His eyes grew wide but he remained composed.

Wow, you really go for broke don’t you? He asked. Are they cosmetic or actual dental prosthesis?

I hid my relief well when I answered that they were indeed prosthesis and asked if he wouldn’t judge me too harshly.

Whatever floats your boat sir. He answered.

Simon, my name is Simon. I wanted to see if this vampire abhorrence was complete and he would end our conversation before it got any further.

Tom, nice to meet you Simon. You work in town do you?

You could say that. I’m only doing contract work now actually. Doing some consultation on a new console game for Unisoft.

Wow, that interesting work. What kind? First person shooter, strategy, MMORPG?

You remember Ravenloft, the early RPG?

He laughed quickly, and was embarrassed by the outburst. I’m sorry. It’s just that it’s going way into cliché now isn’t it?

Yes I guess it is. I conceded.

He was right. I wanted to tell him, I had reason for my obsession with vampires. That I had been taken with their portrayal ever since the enamored Irishman wrote Dracula, his skewed love letter to his tyrannical boss John Irving.

I read it countless times but the visceral thrill it gave me had only been duplicated a small number of times since then. Once with Interview, and another with Sookie Stackhouse, what later became True Blood on HBO television.

I didn’t want to tell him outright that I enjoyed it all because I wanted to see how his version of the world view had changed about me. There were very few people who would accept me as anything but a monster. Some were enamored of the undead, others may run screaming in the other direction. I didn’t want either.

I hid myself in plain sight. Truth to tell it had gotten much easier to pass as a lover of the undead world. I rather liked the stories that propagated the beliefs we couldn’t come out in the day, it gave me an easy out if anyone became suspicious.

Ravenloft the undead RPG is being redone, but with a twist. The original was a total Dracula rip off and if you remember Stoker wrote it about his contemporary times, the late 19th century. In a time when Europe saw undead everywhere, in North America there were cowboys and indians; the old west.

Unisoft is making a console game with cowboys and vampires? He chocked back a laugh.

Have you heard of Killer’s Code?

Yeah it’s one of their biggest sellers.

Exactly and it’s already in version 3. Have you any idea when that is set?

Not the old west, I know that much.

No but it’s set in the new world, where the Killers Code members take part in the colonial war for independence from Great Britain.

You mean with muskets, redcoats and George Washington?

Yeah! I laughed again, showing too much fang, but Tom didn’t seem to mind this second time. We both had become much more at ease.

I guess it’s doing well then if you’re using it as an example.

It’s their best performer this quarter. I answered with triumph.

Did you have anything to do with that?

Just some contributions to background story and making the environment look and feel authentic.

That’s really cool. I wish I could do what you’re doing.

What do you do?

I work in DVD and film production. I’m a video and graphic artist.

That sounds pretty cool. I tried to sound supportive.

It’s run it course I think. Tom seemed pensive but quickly brought the conversation back to my work.

I didn’t actually work in Unisoft, though I did have carte-blanche there and a whole collection of successful companies. Long ago I had invested in very diverse technologies and went wherever the mood took me. For the past few years I was in Montreal