“The night never ends. I have lived long enough to see the future fade into the distant past. I have watched empires rise, I have seen cities build from hamlets to sprawling metropoleis. I have felt the turning of the world beneath my feet and I have listened to the ever changing hum of human civilization. I have walked from Mesopotamia to China, I have crossed America, I have built palaces and castles, I have raised towers and delved dungeons. I have climbed mountains and explored caves no mortal has or could ever reach. I have been reborn, reshaped, renamed and reconstructed by time, by my enemies, and by my own will.
But what of it? What has this corpus of experience given me? I have nothing but my skin and my flesh. My bone and my will. That has sustained me when all other trappings of mortality have fallen to dust. But is that enough? Does any of us retain a being? We are unliving, but are we not also dead? Something beats within me, but it is not a heart. Something wills within me but it is not a soul. Something yearns within me but it is not a hunger. It is a thirst.
That is what has driven me onwards. That is what drives us all onwards. Nothing more or less, nothing else sustains us down the aeons. Nothing else gives us the power we relish, the power we use, the will we exact. It is the thirst, the beast, the lust for life blood that animates our cold dead limbs. It is what consume us. It has consumed me.
Next to it all other passions, all other pursuits fall to nothing, all taste, all art, all emotion pales and dissolves like a shadow. A shadow cast by the blinding light of that need. That love, that burning desire. Can a being tire of such a sensation? Can even the numb existence of a Vampire diminish through contact with so potent a force? Can even we, the oldest of the old, wither and crumble under the weight of this addiction?
Perhaps, delicious friend, perhaps.