It’s strange that after all these years I still find the cold gray of a tombstone so alien. After all, for the better part of two centuries, death has been my gift. I have given rebirth to hundreds from beneath such a grave, and the cemetery has been my home for so long…

Yet, it is different when I stand over the final resting-place of one I have loved for so long.

Perhaps it is the nature of our kind. We live forever – or, at least, the strongest of us do – so when one who has persevered for centuries finally crumbles to ashes… It’s humbling. And, for a moment, I can almost remember what it felt like to be mortal again.

In a way, perhaps that is what a tombstone is: a monument to mortality. That even an undead creature such as myself can stand before one and feel the icy grip of death…

Oddly, I have never felt this sadness before in all my existence. I have loved, lost, fought, fled, and seen more than any mortal can ever dream. But now…

That someone I have loved for so long has vanished into only a handful of dust… For the first time, eternity seems far too long. I have a marker before me, but that is no substitute for the vital (albeit only magically so) demon with whom I have shared this wild existence. We have loved and hated over the centuries, but never did I imagine…

I feel a tear sting my eye. The first I have shed since I first took up the mantle of Master. And long before that as well. I long ago abandoned tears. They are about pain and suffering, while I am about living, about savoring every moment, even if those moments go on forever. A vampire who gives into tears might as well be dead, for they are condemning themselves to an eternity of hardship.

Tears really seem such mortal things. They are things shared by humans and the most naïve of fledglings who are but almost wholly human themselves. Their own sort of monument to mortality. They mourn death, and while I have come to know the Reaper intimately over my unlife, never has death been visited upon one so close…

With one hand I sprinkle a handful of dirt on the ground above the small buried pot of ashes. A ritual from a long forgotten life, I’m sure. My human days…

I rarely reflect upon them anymore. Those days were dull, full of misery and tedium and a futile struggle against death that had already trapped me well within its frigid claws. I think all vampires remember them as such, like a rather fleeting dream. The gray, mundane life of a human pales to the rich, vibrant unlife we know. Yet, at this moment, I can almost see the appeal. To know for certainly that one will die, that one day the pain will stop, that one will not have to face an eternity knowing one they loved so dearly is gone forever… Yes, it is indeed appealing in moments like these.

A final sigh, and I turn from the grave. I cannot bear to look at the carved relief of the name anymore. To me that pile of ashes was so much more – sire, friend, companion, confidante, lover…

But I will persist because that is what my kind does. We are fighters, warriors, predators, and we will never be beaten. Not entirely.

Although on this occasion I do think back upon the events that brought me to this place, upon my first meeting with the demon who once inhabited the dust beneath me, and that one night two hundred thirty-one years ago that changed everything…