Mortality: The Story of Mortanius

Chapter Four

The next morning, Mortanius watched the sun rise. He climbed up onto the roof of the building by the Pillars, which by that time he learned was called the Home of the Guardians. He sat on the edge of the roof, his skinny legs dangling below him, and watched the sun come up. He liked the way the world seemed to change color. It was all muted gray and silvery blue, and when the sun rose the sky seemed to transform into bright orange and yellow, making the world come to life below. Bright greens and blues and reds all appeared where once everything was gray.

And if they turned him into a half-breed, he would never see it again.

He heard something behind him and looked over his shoulder to see a vampire drifting towards him. The vampire swooped up and pulled back so that he landed gracefully on the roof. Mortanius recognized him as Janos, the vampire who spoke to him on his first night.

“Good morning, Mortanius,” Janos said, nodding his head.

“Yes,” Mortanius said, trying to sound gruff, turning to watch the sun again. “Too bad Lora can’t enjoy it with me.”

Janos came beside him and sat down. “Yes, that is a shame,” he said softly. “I suppose that Lora and Romanen have told you.”

“Yes, they have. I don’t want to be turned into a half-breed.”

“I wish humans would not use that term,” Janos said, shaking his head. “It sounds so crude. When we turn a human, we refer to them as vampires, just as we are vampires. Call them human-vampires if you like, but not ‘half-breeds.’”

“You can call them whatever you want. But I’m staying human.”

“I’m sorry,” Janos said. “But it’s out of my control. Sometimes I feel that it would be better to let the humans stay fully human, but the others disagree with me. The Pillars are simply too important to leave anything to chance.”

“Why?” Mortanius demanded, turning to face Janos. “Why don’t you just tell us what the Pillars are for? Why all the secrecy? Why do you have to turn us into half-breeds before you’ll let us in on your big secret?”

“The others don’t trust humans,” Janos said. “Your lives are too short, your culture too simple. They think you’re scarcely better than wild animals.”

“And you don’t?” Mortanius asked mockingly. “You’re a vampire.”

Janos smiled sadly. Mortanius suddenly felt as if Janos had had this conversation in the past. Probably with a young Romanen. “Some humans hate the vampires, but does that mean that they all do? Some of my kind sympathize with the humans, but the simple fact is that our race is dying out. Turning humans is a nasty business, but it is the only way to keep the Pillars in vampire hands.”

“Lora is miserable,” Mortanius said. “She hates herself, do you know that? She can’t even go outside in the day time, she just hides in this building all day.”

Janos sighed and looked up at the sun. “I don’t think we’ll ever understand why human-turned vampires are burned by the sun. It must be some weakness inherited when the body adapts to our curse. They are badly burned by submersion in water as well.”

“What do you mean, ‘our curse?’ It’s not your curse, it’s Lora’s curse.”

Again the sad smile; Janos’s face seemed constantly haunted by it. “It is a curse for us as well, young Mortanius. My kind was not always this way. Someday you will learn about it. When you’re older.”

“When you turn me into a half-breed, you mean,” Mortanius said angrily. “But you’re not going to turn me. I’ll die before I let you do that.”

The promise hung in the air like foul-smelling smoke. Janos looked at Mortanius with his golden eyes and nodded almost imperceptibly. “When the day comes, that will be a choice you may have to make. Because the day will come, Mortanius. All my wishes will not prevent it. It will come for Romanen very soon. For you, twenty years may pass before your day comes. Perhaps in that time, you will change your mind.”

“I doubt it,” Mortanius snapped, turning back to enjoy the sunrise.

Janos said nothing more. After a few moments, he stood up and jumped into the air, spreading his wings and gliding away toward the Pillars, flapping his wings and gaining height until he was lost from view.

Mortanius could not bring himself to hate Janos, as much as he wanted to. The vampire was too gentle, too soft-spoken to arouse hatred. The other vampires, even if they were not as friendly as Janos seemed to be, did not treat Mortanius badly. They were sometimes curt and maybe a little rude, but that was all.

In a strange way, Mortanius felt they acted like surrogate parents. They did not love Mortanius, but they took care of him and watched out for him as a parent might. They accepted his attitude and attempts at rebellion because they thought he was young and didn’t know any better. And like most parents, they adopted the “when you’re older, you’ll understand“ argument that he hated so much. Mortanius wondered how long they would keep up their tolerance of him. If he still rebelled and argued with them when it was his day to be turned, would they be so accepting of his behavior?

He climbed down off the roof and ran off into the woods behind the Home of the Guardians. The ground was covered in knee-high grass in places and dense ivy in others, and the thick oak trees towered over him, blocking out the early morning sunlight. Flowers were opening up to display themselves to the world, and the familiar sounds of birds and insects filled the air. Mortanius walked through the trees in an attempt to forget his troubles for the time being.

He thought about his parents and his sister. What were they doing right now? His father was already awake, checking on the crops and taking care of any weeds that might have taken hold during the night. His mother was probably making breakfast, or maybe she was tending the garden since Mortanius wasn’t there. The vampires had told Mortanius that they had informed his parents that he was safe and would come back to them soon, so he hoped that they were not still worrying about him.

Another few days and he would be back home. They had promised he could go home and he was making them stick to it. He would go back home and take care of the garden like his father had taught him. And then, when he grew up, he would marry a girl and have his own farm and have children just like his father. That was all he wanted out of life.

And when the vampires came for him, he would fight them off. They couldn’t possibly turn him into a half-breed if he truly resisted, could they? He would learn to use a sword and fight them, kill them if he had to. If it came to that, he felt the vampires would just kill him and wait for the next Guardian of Death to be found.

Unexpectedly, he wondered about his powers as the Guardian of Death. Could he use his powers to simply point at his enemies and kill them? If he had control over death, couldn’t he find a way to do something like that?

He watched a bird fly overhead and pointed at it, trying to summon up something and kill the bird in mid-flight. The bird continued on unharmed. They had told him he needed to practice with his powers until he learned what they were, until he had true knowledge of his Pillar. He didn’t know what that meant exactly, but he guessed it meant he couldn’t kill things with a thought. At least not right now.

He sat down at the base of a tree and looked around. Life was everywhere, in the tree at his back, in the birds flying all over, in the insects zipping around, even in the grass underneath his feet. Life was thriving, life was in everything around him.

But so was death. Mortanius concentrated and could sense its presence all over, almost without even thinking about it. He could feel the stress of death in the ground below him, as the earth used death and decay to renew the soil and supply needed nutrients to the plants growing there. He could feel traces of death everywhere, from the traces of dead animals in the woods all around him.

He didn’t know how long he sat there, but it felt like hours. He heard something just beyond his vision, behind some trees in front of him. He got up slowly and crept to the tree, glancing around the side to see a rabbit scrambling on the ground underneath the paws of a red fox. He watched in fascination and disgust as the rabbit fought for life as the fox bit down into its neck. Blood stained the soft brown fur. And finally, the rabbit stopped struggling and the fox trotted off with the body in its jaws.

Mortanius let his consciousness drift and his vision changed. Floating in the air in front of him was the rabbit’s little soul. It had never really occurred to him that animals had souls, but they were living creatures just like he was. The soul was small and dim, unlike the human souls he had seen when he first came under the spell of his powers. It seemed almost fragile, as if a strong breeze might blow it away.

Mortanius reached out his hand and the soul floated over to him as if by command. Stunned, Mortanius realized that was just what he had done. He had called it over to him. The soul had responded to his command.

And then he felt a pull on the soul. Somewhere, there was a rabbit giving birth to a litter of little ones. Mortanius didn’t know where, but he knew it, could feel it in his mind, through his attachment to the rabbit soul. And he let the soul go. It zipped into the air and flew away to its new home.

Mortanius’s vision shifted back to normal and he collapsed to the ground, completely out of breath. He shivered as if buffeted by cold wind, as if his connection with the soul had left his as cold as the grave himself.

He understood a little of what his powers meant now. More than he had before, at least. As Guardian of Death, he didn’t have control over death, but he could see it, could communicate with it. He could understand what death really was, because he could look into the netherworld and see it for himself. He could see souls, could feel them, could have an understanding of the sadness of death like no human had ever known.

He sat up and looked at his hands. He had almost reached out and touched the soul. What would it have felt like? Would he had felt anything? Could he have held onto the soul and prevented it from entering a new body?

Slowly, he got to his feet and walked back to the Home of the Guardians. He needed to talk to someone about his experience. Of course, he doubted that any of them could help him with his questions. Janos had told him that all the Pillars work differently, so none of them would have the same kinds of experiences when using their powers. And of course, there was no other Guardian of Death to teach Mortanius.

The previous Guardian of Death had killed himself, Janos had said. The vampires lived for thousands of years, and Mortanius could not help but wonder how a lifespan that long could effect someone with the abilities he had. To constantly be surrounded by death, day after day, for centuries. Mortanius had a feeling that it must have been like torture.

He was not going to be turned into a half-breed, no matter what Romanen or the others said, so Mortanius was confident that he would not have to live with his powers for thousands of years. But he wondered what it would be like in ten years, or twenty, or fifty. How long would he be able to live with these dark powers?

Would he follow in his predecessor’s footsteps?

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