My Lucid Reality

The darkness held onto me.  I felt utterly at peace, weightless and drifting through oblivion beyond description.  I had a feeling that all my troubles were far behind me, and before me, I saw adventure and hope, there was a light calling to me.  I stretched toward the light, I felt so glad to move toward the light, and then things got complicated.  I felt a tearing and had this been a nightmare I would have bolted upright, fully awake.

I bolted awake, the grass a moist mattress for my body, the air was still chilled, but the cold didn’t touch me, mist filled the air as the fog crept between houses, but it wasn’t ominous, it was comforting.  I wondered momentarily at the disturbing dream I had and took a moment to figure out where I was.  My face lay against the earth, the cold wet sensation peculiar, I could hear the earth acutely, beneath me earthworms crawled, about fifteen of them that I could hear.  A heartbeat echoed like the beat of a drum, if I focused on it I could feel the strength of that heart echo off the walls of a nearby house.  It took a minute to realize that this heartbeat wasn’t mine… when I tried to find my own I came up empty, it then occurred to me that I hadn’t been breathing, neither had I taken a breath since I stood up.  It then occurred again with just as much shock that I didn’t remember standing up, and even standing I felt absolutely no weight, as though gravity’s hold on me couldn’t have been more fragile.

My body pulsed with unnatural strength, the skin on my arms glowing in the darkness and I wondered at losing several shades of color so quickly.  I pondered who I was, and how I got here, and slowly, everything came back to me, not in whole, but your memories could be described as a handful of sand, and that handful was poured out, the grains that stayed behind amounted to the memories I retained.  I remembered being afraid, and the dark night… and the pain.  There was blood in my mouth, I remembered something about blood in my mouth.  With that thought I stopped, and tasted… but what I tasted bore absolutely no resemblance to the coppery distasteful flavor that had choked me as I blacked out… what I tasted cannot be described in words… as though someone who spent their life tasting the most exquisite wines finally found the perfect flask; for someone with a tooth for chocolate it would be like finding the richest smoothest bar.  The taste I enjoyed was sweet, rich, deep, full and with just enough salt to be satisfying and absolutely mind blowing.

I stood in a park bordered by houses, I could hear distant heartbeats, I took a slow exultant breath, not because I needed to, but to test my new sense of smell that I imagined matched this new taste… I was in no way disappointed.  I could smell myself, sweet as vanilla and rich as gold.  I smelled the grass and the mist, I could smell where a car drove down the road some hundred feet away about half an hour ago.  Then I smelled something to match that taste that still sent my mind spinning.  On the wind I smelled a myriad of flavors, each a different brand of the amazing richness that spun me.  I imagined an old man with a taste for exquisite cigars in a cigar shop where every one was different from the last, and all of them the more amazing then the last.  It was then that I felt the hunger… a desire to taste every flavor that I could smell, a desire to feel just how rich each new flavor could be.

My body had made changes, I didn’t know just how much at the time, my strength multiplied by about twenty, my skin porcelain white but with a strength that rivaled cold stone.  I had acquired a natural odor strong and sweet vanilla, the smell brought a coy smile to my face, and had someone been able to see me, they would have said my eyes glowed twice as blue and bright.  Teeth, always well cared for were a little more straight, where one had been chipped once, it was now whole, where the canines had ground down over the years, they were now sharp as razors and back to their original shape and size.  The curse of the undead, someone that would later come as a surprise is just how the body changes to accept its new nature.  There are plants that evolution has adjusted so that they attract their prey; there are animals that have evolved the same way.  I felt very much as though I had evolved in this way, and as I inhaled again I knew the direction and the flavor of my first quarry.