Raven Helvetti ~ There was no fear once. That sweet innocence of childhood that engendered rainbows and sunbeams in every moment of existence. When my father, a professor of comparative religion, told the most wondrous stories. When the touch of my mother filled me with the warmth of the truest heart and the comfort of simple things. When my brother and sister played with me out in summer rains and winter snows. When the Helvetti lineage was once something to hold sacred and full of deepest honor. I knew that life once. Once. So many long years ago. All gone. My brother and sister faded into mundane lives of proper British dullness. My father gone, into an envied dust. Murdered without resolution of motive or knowledge of the criminal behind the hateful deed. My mother is here, if you can call it that, living in misty dreams of foregone days, speaking words of love to a lover luckily long dead. I do not want to ponder upon those sad memories. She came...some strange dark woman-child with her deadly kiss, and I became what I am now. Unwilling undead. On some level, I knew the Dark Lady had called in her debts. I knew this Hell was the price I paid in return. I am not certain that I will ever find the cause of our ties. I only know they bind more fully than any imagined beloved's touch. The present preoccupies me, the future pulls me forwards. I strangle into control any emotion that lingers, writhes, wails, raises a weary head for one moment under the breaking of a dawn never to be wholly seen. Two hundred years of death and the charade of living. Hours of agony. Moments of sheerest passion. Seconds that become ennui, or excitement. The rising sun breaks all such into stillness that never fades. Darkness that cannot be pierced. I arrive at Drakesheath with some faint hope. I arrive in self-revulsion and anger barely held in check. I hunger for death! Hunger for blood! Hunger to die fully! I want this debt paid in full! I whisper...."Mother, mother!" I do not know if I send that soft wrenching prayer to my own mother or the Dark Lady herself. I only know I must be free! Free of this horrible life of death. Such is who I am.....Raven, a bird with broken wings clipped, a dark woman-child bound unto living death, craving past any mortal or immortal bearing the sunbeams and rainbows of lost days.