Tales of the Vampire Twilight

(Chapter One)

"A Post-Apocalyptic World...Hold the Apocalypse"

Once there were tribes. They loved. They fought. They raised their young and mourned their dead and killed for their gods.

Then, one day, perhaps a Monday, we awoke, kissed our spouse as we left for work, and, rather without ever knowing it, became individuals.

We worked. We wearied ourselves. We were bought and we were sold and still we fought. Honor was an illusion and kin was self-contained. We died a million slow deaths, little redeemed by those who rose above the carnage to inform us of our demise and point the way to resurrection.

We waited for the bomb to fall. We waited for the righteous firestorm of the Divine. We put up walls and took them down and still the fallen multiplied and corrupted.

And then, one day, the tattoos changed somehow. Once they were a brand, a mark of ownership. They marked one as property of Mom, of Betty, of the Corps. They were a drunken holiday's show of remorse or a shore leave's worth of bravado. But one day, no doubt on a weekend when the bosses were golfing, they changed. Now they were more selfish and self-indulgent, ostentatious even, but they spoke a different language. Somehow the tribes were speaking. Speaking through the tattoos. Through the piercings. In the beat of the drums and the sweat of the dance.

In the shadows of the corpses of the Apocalypse that never came, the children learned the lessons of the dead. The lessons of those who fell easily and for little noble cause. And the lessons of those who seemed long gone but linger in the earth, the air, the sweat of sex and the last breath of kin.

Now dark children begin the dance of death and rebirth.

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