23. Alexandria Reborn
Alexandria Reborn
Eighteenth century Paris was the perfect place for our kind.
We lived in Faubourg Saint-Germain, hidden amongst the aristocracy that clung to their positions as the scaffolding collapsed beneath them.
You found some old mansion on the verge of disrepair and claimed it as ours.
We’d spent the last few centuries developing a backstory as to why two unmarried women lived together.
I was frozen in time at twenty and three, you at twenty and nine.
It was reasonable that you should be widowed, and I should be your younger sister and ward.
Remember how we’d change the story from time to time? Once we were nuns, and I wanted so greatly to scandalize the towns with our intimacy. You always held back, though.
Humans must not know about us, and so we should not bring attention to ourselves.
But it was not you and I that merited such worry. A word whispered from Germany, just a country away. Vampyr. For once the word fit, unlike lamia and all those other ridiculous phrases your cult attributed to us.
Vampyr was a creature of strength, of cunning. Formidable, terrifying, unholy. This was more right than an angry woman wailing into the night, or a mindless creature that feasts on children.
We were vampyr, of this I was certain.
This designation brought its own concerns. We were named as unholy, and there were methods to kill us. Some worked, like the sun or a stake through the heart or beheading. Others were comical—water from a church, garlic, the sign of the cross.
Now we had a name and known weakness, just as you feared.
But that meant nothing to me at the time. We’d spent centuries roaming the world, preying on humans whenever we liked. So what if some obscure part of the world knew what we were? We’d watched religions crumble and empires fall. This too would crumble with them.
Paris reminded me of Rome and Alexandria, though dirtier and with worse poverty. It was a natural consequence of the last few centuries where free thinking was discouraged by all means. It meant a populace easier to rule over, but it also meant a populace that rejected advancement.
Our neighbors in Saint-Germain did not bother us once they realized we were new money and held no titles. I’m sure they whispered about us, just as they whispered about every other house in the district. You made sure to give them nothing to talk about.
Paris, I think, was an attempt to placate me.
I was tired of the snow of the north and the vast remoteness of it all.
In my youth I’d have thought it beautiful, but now?
It was another grassy plain dotted with humans I couldn’t kill for fear of discovery.
Your rules surrounded me and then suffocated me.
For not the first time, I realized I’d traded the box I made for the box that was your love.
And I wanted out.
Rather than give me what I wanted, you gave me what you thought I needed.
So we headed south.
“Paris is the new Alexandria,” you said. It was the first time you’d spoken of Alexandria in some time. Any time I tried to speak of it, it was dismissed. You didn’t shed a tear over the death of your little cult, you just ran away. You didn’t try to avenge them or figure out who killed them.
Would you do the same for me? If I were to die, would you mourn me? Or would you trace my ashes and sigh, before packing up and moving elsewhere?
“I hope this reincarnation is more befitting of its origin,” I drawled. There were countless “New Alexandrias” through the years. Constantinople, Florence, Córdoba, Venice. Only Baghdad and its House of Wisdom came close to Alexandria. More empires rising and falling, their memory fading.
“Alexandria was not the first center of learning,” you said. I felt the edge of your nerves and I thrilled at it. I wanted to poke my fingers into it, to strum the nerve until it snaps.
I wanted something you refuse to give.
So you just took me south, to another major city where we play act as aristocrats or nuns or spinsters or or or...
Paris will be much the same as the others, I feared. I still appeared youthful, though I was the daughter of empires long since destroyed. I was still a woman, though I have killed more than any army can claim.
But above all, I was still yours.
So I settled into Paris, strolled the banks of the Seine and tried not to vomit at the stench.
I fed on the poor that lived everywhere but belong nowhere, clustering where food, work, cover, and indifference overlap.
Pont Neuf and Les Halles became my hunting ground.
They are thin and ill and their blood never satisfied me the way the blood of old did.
I longed for bigger game, for a feast of our station.
You promised me decadence, as though a beautiful, empty home sufficed. As though the ground we buried ourselves in every night was more important than what we did when we were not asleep.
If this was your decadence, I didn’t want it.
You meant for Paris to tame me, thinking it was wanderlust I suffered from. But it was something much deeper than that, something I couldn’t ask for because I did not know its name.
And once I found it, I let it almost kill me.