Narrator / Jore Grando Elilovic (14:29)
I turned to find my neighbor Braslava, a large, stupid man who I found myself frequently bickering with over trifles. Needless to say, he was surprised to find me there. Jure Grantor Aliovic. Braslova, my friend. Stay away, devil. Quiet. Listen to me. The devil. The devil has come to Kringa. Braslava, you damned idiot. Rise, neighbors. Help. I moved forward to quiet him, but as I got close, I felt it. His pulse, the heat coming off him, the smell of iron in his blood. And I knew the cause of my death. Before I knew what was happening, I was on him. My eye teeth, suddenly aching sharp, found his throat and pressed the flesh yielding with a gentle pop, the hot blood flooding my mouth, pulsing down my throat, feeling my empty stomach before my task was fully vanquished. Though he was dead, this wicked was closed. And it seemed my time in Kringle was up. Murderer. Murderer. I did not pause immediately. I ran, my cold muscles heating and nourished by Bar Slava's hot blood. I was revived, really fully revived from my time in the grave, More alive, it seemed, than I had ever been. As I left the town of my births behind and entered into the great forest of the night. I would not return for a long, long time. And so I ran faster than I had ever run. A wolf, an eagle. Long past the time that the villagers voices dropped away through the deep wood, I felt a Mad sort of glee. As I cut through the cold air, I radiated heat. Finally I found the road that cut through the heart of my country, the trade road. And I continued on, avoiding the occasional trader's encampment. I ran for hours that night. What stopped me finally was the appearance of the lights in the east. It occurred to me in that moment to ask the question, what was I becoming? What, in fact, had I already become in life? I never had the thought even to ask. I was the son of a stonemason, and so became a stonemason myself. I was a husband. I was a Christian. This was the way of our lives. There was no doubt about it. Death, it seems, had broken all of those bonds. And now? Where? Now I was awakened into a body transformed, hungry. The church wanders of fiends who fed in the night, against whom we hung crucifixes, wreaths of garlic. Was I such a fiend now? I hadn't been alive in this form an hour when I killed my forest man. Raslava was a fool, but our disagreements had always been minor. He was no enemy of mine, and I quite thoughtlessly drained his life away. Perhaps I deserved to die. And wasn't some light a weapon against creatures such as myself? I sat on a large stone on the sides of the road and allowed my situation to sink in. And as it did so rose a sudden wave of grief. Not to my shame, for Braslava, left dead on the public square in Gringa, nor imbalance. My Polycia by now had surely heard of her husband's horrible crime. No, I mourned for Joreh Grandohalilovic, the stonemason, the husband, the Christian, mourned his short, unremarkable life and his forgettable death. I mourned for his eternal soul too, now that he'd taken the life of an innocent. If, stupid man, I had committed a mortal sin, the worst of them all. The Holy Father would not forgive me. I thought too, in that moment that perhaps the most Christian thing I could do was to remove myself from the great filthy wash of the world. Perhaps the sun would burn me away along with the morning dew. And so I sat there on the side of the road, covered in raw dust and dried blood, and watched as the sky grew lighter from indigo to red to orange. I shivered as the horizon grew bright. I closed my eyes as the first rays of sunlight raced across the land and touched my face and did nothing but warm my eyelids. I would not get an easy way out. If I were going to die, I'd have to commit another mortal sin. Suicide. And so the next phase of my existence began in earnest. At first, I kept to the forests and fields, Subsiding on nourishment I could get from the birds or rodents caught in handmade snares. And then, with the theft of a spirit stronger and a quiverful of arrows, larger game. But these hunts yielded little in the way of sustaining blood. I had never been a great hunter, and even the deer that I did occasionally manage to injure and run down would only yield so much. For the hut, stopped when drained into flasks, would keep merely a couple of nights before becoming putrid. Finally, the horrible burning thirst outweighed any spiritual guilt that murder may have caused. And so I began to make little moral calculations. I moved north into Austria, Traveling from town to town. Began to prey on livestock. A lost lamb here, an errant cat there. A sheepdog himself gone astray. I tried to be as careful as possible, never visiting the same place twice. One lamb gone missing can be overlooked, but 2, 3 would draw unwanted attention. I had seen firsthand the fate of our livestock thieves. Though it may vary from town to town, it almost always ended at the wrong end of a blade. I had no wish to meet the death a second time. In this way, I made a sort of miserable part for myself, Skulking in the shadows, looking off, my shoulders cold and damp, boots perpetually caked with mud. A lone wolf cast out from its society. I was not content, of course, but had committed myself to the idea that my cursed blood meant that I somehow deserved my misery, that I was a shadow, a wraith, a sneaking, sniveling steth in the night. A man who had lost his life and now his dignity, which seemed to sting the first. But there was yet more for me to learn on my night journey.
