About Me
When I was still mortal, just before he made me, I found a journal written in the hand of my maker, Marius. In it, he said that I seemed as if I were the wizened funereal spirit of a dead child. I knew it was true. In other words, I was one who already spiritually walked in the twilight world.Tragedy has been my eternal companion. I am one who will likely at heart always be an orphan, no matter how much love is now offered to heal my wounds. Yet, I am an exceptionally strong creature in spite of this. There is something cold and steely in me, which keeps me in this realm, even when many who suffered half of what I have, would have chosen to go to dust.My life has been one of many births, deaths, and re-awakenings. I was Andrei, a child prodigy, born to simple folk, near the city of Kiev Rus during the late 15th century. I believed the hand of God is what drove me, as I became a painter of religious ikons in the austere Cave of the Monks, where we monks would eventually submit to a living burial in sacrifice to our Lord. My father, who was a strong hunter, tried to save me from my martyrdom, by sending me to hunt with him. That was the first of my deaths.Kidnapped, and sold to slavery, I lost nearly all memory and language as I was sent far from all I had ever known. The Vampire Marius found me near to death, restored me to the living world, and gave me the name Amadeo. He nurtured and tutored me, and gave me a glimpse of heaven on earth in the lovely city of Venice, during the Renaissance. I had family in the boys he also tutored, and in the lovely Bianca Solderini, but Iwas his only chosen one, meant soon for the night world he occupied.Still, I struggled within my conflicted soul. Marius did not believe, but I needed this faith. The Gods he showed me were not my severe God. I do not understand how one can live without things that are spiritual in nature, yet I can never quite trust completely in anything myself. The only thing I truly have faith in, is that love is the only thing that can sustain us.Our time ended shortly after Marius made me one with him, just a year short of manhood. Betrayal, and lack of trust brought us all to ruins. Santino, and his band of Christian/Satanic worshipers destroyed our world, and spritually sent Amadeo to his death, renaming me Armand. There followed centuries of darkness, in which I practiced the dark arts, and grew despondent but ever stronger, rising to become the leader of the largest coven in existence in Paris. True faith still eluded me; this life was simply my fate. I knew nothing else to replace it with, all hope had been lost in me. That is, until the Vampire Lestat broke it all apart, sending that life to its end, and creating in me something new. I had now a simple desire to survive again, to understand before death claimed me why I, or any of our kind, existed at all.I began my slow rise then to existence in the mortal world. I am still struggling to understand how to exist there to this very night. For nearly a century, I played a game of pretense, living apart from the real world, but inviting them to us each night, to view our vampiric natures in theatricals. I found these performances somewhat petty, but they were the rage of Paris, as I headed the Theatre des Vampires. I longed to escape this, and finally when Louis, and his daughter Claudia came to Paris, I found the key through Louis to slowly beginning my understanding of the century enough to exist in it as a mortal would.I have made many errors before and since, but nearly all I have done has been in the name of some kind of love. I broke my own vow never to create one of our kind, and made my one and only blood child, Daniel, when I found I could not bear to let him die. I have learned where we come from; there is no longer a great mystery in that. Nothing profound was revealed to me. Yet, in a simple cloth, Veronica's Veil, I found my bloody Christ again, and re-connected with my childhood faith. Death nearly claimed me, but a kind of miracle happened, through the love of two mortal children Sybelle and Benji, I was healed.The places deep within me, which for so long out of sheer necessity to survive I had allowed to grow numb and cold, are thawed now. I feel things more intensely than ever before. I find it painfully confusing, but also exhilarating, and glorious. I do not wish to let it go. I would rather suffer than to feel nothing at all. I am reborn yet again, and so very hopeful that this life will be the one that will sustain me and give me peace.
