For Love, Eternal

How do you love a monster? The same way you love a man.

With passion, care and gentle hands. With open eyes in every sense of the word. You love him with a steady presence and firm but kind words. By treating him like an equal. You listen but never let him drag you down too.

You love him by meaning what you say and not letting petty words spoken in anger determine your standing. You compromise and move forward together. You accept both your own faults and his. Cause no intentional pain, and never let him leave scars on you.

This perhaps, is the only advice she could offer, if anyone were to ask. Despite what others might have thought, she did not ignore nor forget the darker parts of her lover. His bloodlust; his passion for tearing the flesh of his enemies, of draining his opposition dry. Her love was a conqueror, a murderer. He was a monster, that she could not deny.

But how else could one describe the Vampire King?

Despite his hungry army, his stained blade and fangs, the madness in his veins -- she loved him anyway. Perhaps she was a fool, but she believed beasts did not spend all their time hungry for blood. In those in-between moments, she saw who her beloved really was.

Kindness in crimson eyes that watched as children and the innocent fled to safety. Mercy in those quick and painless deaths. She saw longing in the set line of his shoulders as he watched families make merry, and lovers kiss and hold each other close. Yes, her beloved was a monster, but who ever said he chose to be one?

She may have fallen in love with a monster, but she never let that predator bare his teeth at her. She was a beast herself after all, a creature of the night that drank blood from the living. And though she hated her nature, she kept living. Kept out of the light, weeping as the people around her faded while she remained unchanged. She was not the only one frozen in time.

Would a real monster hold her so gently in his claws, hide his fangs, and content himself with only moments of her attention? Would a monster slow his campaigns to spend just another night with her? Hang up his blade and silence his own bloodthirsty armies for her? Would he marry her and let himself settle down in isolated peace with her? Exchanging the necks of humans, for those of animals?

Only a man could kiss her so sweetly, could say her name with the same devotion a devote gave his god. She loved him, but it was he that gave up his life for her peace. So, when the 'heroes' of the story came to strike him down, he went with little struggle.

Only then, fading to ashes in each others’ arms, did the monsters slip out of eternity.