Vampayre's Dilemma

I'd written musical pieces for some of the greatest princes and politicians of our time during the past five hundred years.  Most people struggle through thousands of lifetimes in different forms with different circumstances.  We reincarnate with people from our soul groups, old lovers, parents, friends, enemies.  But we don't remember.  Awakening comes more easily to some, less so to others.  But I am an advanced spirit who has been gifted with the chance to work through my soul lessons in the same form.  Though I did not view my circumstances favorably when I awakened a Vampayre the morning after the Bonfire of Vanities that took place in Florence in the year 1497.  I'd wanted to die with my wife, Fiora, who had been killed during the frenzy.  I have since learned to live without her.  Though I have never forgotten our connection or stopped looking into strangers' eyes, hoping for a spark of recognition.

As the days passed, I lost my taste for food and most drink. I was irritable.  Soon I realized that I couldn't tolerate noise or crowds and I'd begun to wander through the forests at night, seeking solace.  I couldn't accept or forgive my mentor, Piero Cesco, who had turned me into the creature that I was becoming.  I'd felt that he had controlled my life long enough and his last controlling act had severed our relationship for many centuries.  I turned to him again when my love, Jasmine, was embroiled in my feud with the Vampire Phisto.

Learning one's life lessons while inhabiting the same human vessel has its challenges, and benefits.  Now that I have found Jasmine, I don't want to move on.  I wanted to stay and love her as I hadn't been able to during our life in the Renaissance.  And there were challenges.  Phisto wanted Jasmine as well.  And I would do anything, even imperil my soul, to protect her from that fate.

Even advanced souls have lessons and I have learned that they tend to get more difficult as we advance.  The question is can we love the divine more than we love our egos and earthly infatuations?

Violet Destiny

           The predeterminate moment is not when one succeeds but when one fails.  That is how I was able to accept my failure with humility and love for I knew that my interpretation would determine my fate, and Jasmine’s.  So I journeyed into the shadows of the pain that wracked my soul, not pain that I felt for my fate, but for Jasmine’s. And I remained shivering there for five months as I scratched away the days and focused on bathing my disappointment in loving light.

             I continued to love Jasmine with all of my five hundred years. And I knew that even though I had failed miserably, I hadn’t failed irrevocably.  If I kept my discipline and my love alive, I could still live to hold her against my aching chest.  Her lips would open once more to welcome my caress and we would be together, I knew…if I had the patience and the discipline.

            I could not survive without human breath, but I had been trained, three-hundred years ago, to thrive on the breath of spiritual energy or prana.  It was necessary that I concentrated on love and not revenge.  Revenge shred the soul and consumed more energy than love.  And I had enough love for my angel, Jasmine.  Love is the fuel that I used to slow my heartbeat and pulse rate. That was another technique that the yogis had taught me.  So I needed very little to survive.  And I slept in a web of love for five months awakening each day only to scratch the passing of another dawn on the lid of my coffin with my nails – that is the only activity that I allowed myself. Then I returned to my somnolent state and held her image, her voice, in my heart.  The more that I loved, the more love I had.  That and patience were my weapons. As each day passed, I was closer to stockpiling a powerful arsenal that could destroy only those without love, those without grace – those such as Phisto.  

The Violet Hour Before the Beginning - Parenting Self in the Void

I hadn't learned how to parent myself.  If one has to learn, 13 is not such an advanced age. But I think that I felt as helpless then as I would have felt had I been thirty or older still.  Parenting I think is in the little things like knowing just when to go to bed.  If you're half an hour too late you feel it the next day. And if you're too early, you don't have the time that you need the night before.  It's an art form really.  That's why so few women are good mothers.  Art, like life, is in the details.  But it took me many years to learn that.

Grappa was mother, father, friend and well grandfather to me.  But after the nightmares and my loss of speech he took me to a well known voice teacher, the best really.  But she was an older woman and I grew to idolize her because she helped me to find my voice.  It's not just that she discovered that I was a singer, but she really enabled me to speak from the heart.  And for me that was singing.  Few people ever find their authentic voice, mine just happened to be through music.  The journey was long and arduous and I didn't realize the destination when we started, as if often the case.  I just felt her warmth and concern so when she taught me to breathe from my diaphragm with long deep breaths that filled my lungs, ribcage and back with air, it released some of the tension that had swollen and engorged inside.  We practiced the breathing exercises until it felt like my first language.  I learned to inhale deeply before I did anything.  So when I spoke again, it gave me time to consider my words and to choose them with greater care.

Then one day Marlena taught me to phonate or put sound to the breath.  We started with trills which was like humming on pitch.  I was amazed at how easily the trills flowed and bubbled from the reservoir of deep, rich breath that I stored in my body.  My inner world was no longer silent, it was filled with sound.  And the sound nourished me. I didn't have to ask the hard questions or wait for the even more difficult answers.  i could communicate from a much safer distance that was controlled by vibration and pitch - music.  That became my only reality.  And I was satisfied.

The Violet Hour - Before the Beginning - Phisto

I'd spent the night with an unmemorable coloratura.  Her blood tasted like her voice, light and uninteresting.  I'd broken a cardinal rule when I compelled her from sheer boredom, to allow me to taste the thin line of blood that ran inside her thigh.  I fought my nature and sliced into the teal lined flesh with sensitivity that I did not feel. I couldn't afford to leave the silly little soprano, with the voice of a bird, scarred.   Her blood did little to excite me.  It was almost as insufferable as the antiseptic fare that I procured, through other means, from labs and hospitals.

"That was delightful my dear." I lied.  "I don't think that your talent will take you far, so I'd perfect  your other abilities.  Men can be very generous when you know how to please them in the bedroom."   I rose from the disheveled bed, gathered my few things and had closed the apartment door before a glass slammed behind me into the door's cheap wooden veneer.

I hated boredom.  It was too tedious.  I had begun to think of a little vacation or sport in a less populated area than New York.  We had auditions the next day for the new season at the American Opera Center.  Singers, singers and more singers.  Had I known that I was about to meet her, i would have spent a more comfortable night.

Jasmine was about to change everything.  I saw a way to accomplish everything that mattered   fame, power and the destruction of my bete noir - all because of one girl with a gift in her throat.

I laughed and laughed until lightening slashed the New York skyline.  I could now control the elements and that made me laugh even more.  And thunder shook the concrete that I stood upon, and rain slashed the night.

The Violet Hour - Before the Beginning - Phisto

            I came into my physical form, five hundred years earlier as Count Ferenc Nadasdy.  I was betrothed to a rare woman, Erzsebet Bathory, who matched my tastes for cruelty and was blessed with good lineage as the cousin to the Prince of Transylvania.  The Turkish forces of the Ottoman Empire had overrun the region. They and the Austrians fought throughout my distinguished military career for the blood drenched land that was not only bloodied from battle, but from Erzsebet’s fascination with torturing young female servants and bathing in their blood.  She was later known as the Queen of Blood.  I called her companion.  Though our tale is much more complicated than that.  Much.

            

           You understand that I was accustomed to having many enemies.  I had begun to thrill with each 

additional foe and spent my life plotting how to destroy them either through a gore-heavy death or 

through political and financial ruin.  Once again, my enemies were now escalating. 

The Violet Hour Prologue - Before the Beginning - Luca

My life had taken on a symmetrical solitary pattern that gave me peace.  That is until I began to hear her sound that caressed my senses until I was in torment.  It had a familiar quality and I thought that I was merely remembering my wife, Fiora.  But it was more than that.  Much more.

I'd grown complacent in my spiritual practice and hadn't maintained the vigilance that was prudent for a supernatural, such as I.  Even though I was half man - half angel, I'd forgotten the fires in which my supernatural form had been forged and became involved with the world.  I was a brilliant young composer at Juilliard.  It's not necessary for me to feign a false sense of humility. I'd had five hundred years to perfect my craft.  Nothing less than brilliance was acceptable.  But my spiritual practice hadn't developed with the same velocity.  I'd been celibate for the last three hundred years for I knew that intimacy would bring me to the brink of murder.  And I could no longer tolerate that.  I'd learned to survive by other means from Indian monks with whom I'd studied for two hundred years.

But my human longing had been awakened with her sound.  It snaked through my mind, my very veins with a sensuality that made me remember too much. And the remembering awakened my longing and in turn my desire.  I had to be near her.  Even though I hadn't met her yet.

When she came to Juilliard to audition, every sense, every cell was acutely attuned to her being.  And I wanted to seek her out, even as I knew that I couldn't dare to engage with her.  But I was again misguided for my inattention left her prey to the one creature whom I hated above all else.  He understood her talent and how he could use it to escalate our centuries old feud.  Phisto had also calculated how he could manipulate her talent to increase his fame.
So my effort to protect her had endangered her.  And I would do anything to protect her from one such as he, a Vampire.  Anything.

The Violet Hour Prologue - The Story Continues - Jasmine

I began to acknowledge some of Grappa's tastes and passions since we were then living together.  Basically I was something spectral casting shadows on the walls but not really interactive, so I was pretty impressionable.  My grief needed an outlet but I couldn't find a way to give voice to it. I felt like I was drifting amidst shadow figures and images of a world that no longer fit into a recognizable pattern.  I chose to leave my furniture at my parents' home and stayed in the room that Grappa had decorated for me years ago.  I floated through cool lavender colors and longed for the heat of recognition and love to warm my bones.


PTSD is how they classified my disorder, post traumatic stress syndrome.  It's one of the great conditions where time doesn't heal all wounds but you actually start to feel worse.  So after six months, when the nightmares started and I gradually stopped communicating verbally, Grappa began to get worried.  Really worried.  He was always cheerful, but I could see the strain behind the healthy rose color that stained his cheeks and offset his trim white beard.  His dimples didn't flash as often when he smiled because he smiled much less often, or at least without any real authenticity.  Grappa was a powerful man with a few boat loads of money so he started asking around for a good therapist.  He'd decided that the school counselor was less than adequate.

The first night that I awakened screaming from a classic abandonment dream, I saw his hands shake and hated myself for adding to his grief.  I had dreamed that I was in a car with my parents and that they had invited me to tour the Amalfi Coast with them.  My father was singing in his floating tenor voice and my mom was singing all of the wrong words when suddenly Dad lost control of the car.  The car began to tip over the edge of the hazardous pass when my parents disappeared and I was alone in the car as it fell over and over and over again.  All that remained was my screams, which apparently awakened Grappa.  When he asked me what had happened, I couldn't speak.  I could only shake and cry.

Desperate for a way to reach me, Grappa began to hum some melodies from operatic arias that comforted him.  I couldn't speak but I could relate to the music.  Then he'd bought me an I Pod and downloaded some of his favorite music.  I was compelled by the music of a young composer, Luca Cantanta.  Grappa told me that Luca's surname meant song, in Italian.  Something about his music seduced me musically and in other ways that were beyond my years.  I felt as though angels wings were brushing against my soul when I listened to his haunting and hypnotic melodies.

I didn't know that years later I would not only meet, but love someone like Luca.  Even though I was suffering, I was also preparing for my destiny.  I couldn't know then where it would take me.  Thank God for that.