1/10/2024 0 Comments Bargain crossout![]() I could tell you how the legends of Those Who Must be Kept spread through the world. I could tell you how Mael, my poor Druid priest, finally drank from a wounded god himself and in one instant lost all his belief in the old religion, going on to become as enduring and dangerous a rogue immortal as any of us. And it is the simplicity of it that they want.īut the real perversion of us was accomplished when the Children of Darkness came to believe they served the Christian devil, and like the terrible gods of the East, they tried to give value to evil, to believe in its power in the scheme of things, to give it a just place in the world. Maybe they wish they could be that lusciously evil creature. They thrill at the possibility of immortality, at the possibility that a grand and beautiful being could be utterly evil, that he could feel and know all things yet choose willfully to feed his dark appetite. But he was distracted.And there are promises, he said, finally,which I must exact. I have a few more things to tell you, he said,things which are important, though they are merely practical things. Too many things, too many stories, stories with and without lessons. Of the last time I saw Pandora in the city of Dresden, in the company of a powerful and vicious vampire from India, and of how we quarreled and separated, and of how I discovered too late her letter begging me to meet her in Moscow, a fragile piece of writing that had fallen to the bottom of a cluttered traveling case. I will tell you of the other truly eternal ones whom I meet only now and then. Of how I have gone down into the earth with Those Who Must Be Kept, and risen again, thanks to their blood, to live several mortal lifetimes before burying myself again. I will tell you of my loneliness, of the others I made, and how they met their ends. But always we come back to the way the earth is now. It can draw us back to times when the earth was new to man, and wondrous. Its images and its poetry can be beautiful it can make us shiver with the recognition of things we have always suspected or felt. So how could we, gods who fed upon human blood, have been seen as `good'?īut I have told you the most important things how I came into possession of Those Who Must Be Kept, and who we really were.Īll the stories I have told you are finally as useless as all ancient knowledge is to man and to us. I had thought it ghastly that the Keltoi burned for the god their evildoers in the wicker colossi as I described. Human sacrifice had been a horror to the Greeks and Romans. No matter how violent have been the centuries since the fall of Rome, no matter how terrible the wars, the persecutions, the injustices, the value placed upon human life has only increased.īut this had to happen. Maybe without it, man will crumble in cynicism and selfishness because he really needs his gods.īut give them the Dark Gift and only one in a multitude will not be as miserable as you are. Christianity rose on the ashes of paganism, only to carry forth the old worship in new form. Of course we cannot know what will happen as the old religion thoroughly dies out. The mind of each man is a Savage Garden, to use your phrase, in which all manner of creatures rise and fall, and anthems are sung and things imagined that must finally be condemned and disavowed. And if he wields any lovely power upon the minds of men, it is only because the human imagination is a secret place of primitive memories and unconfessed desires. And it is the belief in the value of human life that carries man now out of the monarchy into the republics of America and France.Īnd in this world the vampire is only a Dark God. It is the belief in the value of human life that has caused the torture chambers and the stake and the more ghastly means of execution to be abandoned all over Europe in this time. What is crucial now is that you understand this:
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