"We arrived on a dark and alien planet," she said, "where the sun's wrath scorched one side while the eternal frost of night claimed the other."
Like that half-burnt, half-frozen microwave dinner that makes you question your life choices at 2 AM. Her memories showed me a world of extremes, where survival meant existing in the hairline fracture between apocalyptic heat and killing cold. The kind of real estate that would make even the most desperate house-flipper turn and run.
"Only one place on the surface was habitable," Lily's voice guided me through visions of a world split between fire and ice, "the twilight zone, a narrow, endless strip of land caught between the two extremes. Or the Underworld, where the planet's crimson veins of molten fire still pulsed with heat."
Not the TV show with the creepy theme song, but an actual geographic location that made Death Valley look like a luxury resort. I saw through her memories beings that had once commanded the heights of civilization now huddled in caves, drawing warmth from the bones of a planet that seemed to resent their presence. The cosmic equivalent of moving from a penthouse to a condemned building with questionable plumbing and neighbors who practiced death metal at 3 AM.
"Survival was brutal," she stated with such matter-of-fact resignation that it chilled me to the core.
The kind of brutal that would make Bear Grylls weep into his canteen of recycled bodily fluids. Her memories tasted of desperation -bitter and metallic, like blood and fear and the kind of choices that haunt you long after you've made them. I watched as beings who had once contemplated the nature of existence now fought over scraps, their former glory a ghost that wouldn't stop haunting them.
"But we weren't alone."
Because the universe has a twisted sense of humor and apparently double-booking planets is its favorite cosmic prank. The memories shifted to reveal titanic figures that seemed more concept than creature, entities whose mere presence warped reality around them like gravity wells. These weren't your standard-issue deities with neat domains and business cards -these were primal forces wearing the thinnest veneer of sentience, like hurricanes that had decided to try personhood as a hobby.
"The planet was already claimed," Lily continued, showing me visions that strained the limits of comprehension, "by chthonic gods and devils that slumbered beneath the surface, and goddesses of the night sky, whose silver tears shaped the tides."
Old-school deities with anger management issues and zero interest in sharing their cosmic real estate. I glimpsed beings that defied description -all teeth and eyes where neither should be, geometries that hurt to look at, beauty so intense it felt like dying. The kind of gods that wouldn't bother with commandments because they were too busy being walking natural disasters with opinions.
"To endure, we made pacts."
I witnessed rituals that defied description, ceremonies held at the boundaries between worlds, exchanges that cost more than lives. Because when faced with extinction, even the most rational beings will sign contracts written in blood without reading the fine print. Her memories showed me desperate bargains struck by firelight, oaths sworn in languages that rewrote reality, promises made that would echo through generations yet unborn.
"The Lady of the Moon granted the strongest among us shifting abilities," Lily explained, as I watched beings transform in ways that made werewolf movies look like cheap cosplay, "tying us to the cycles of the celestial body, making those who were cursed -or blessed- creatures of instinct, flesh, and change."
Basically werewolves, but with better fashion sense and significantly more existential dread. These weren't the CGI transformations of budget horror flicks -these were fundamental rewritings of being. Matter yielding to something more primal than physics, bones becoming liquid, then becoming something else entirely. I felt the phantom echo of that change ripple through me, a ghostly reminder of what I might have been in another roll of the cosmic dice.
"The abyss whispered to the desperate," she continued, showing me figures drinking from pools of living darkness, "those of us willing to drink deep from its well of power. It gave us immortality -at a cost."
Because nothing says "predatory lending" quite like cosmic forces offering you eternal life with compounding interest. The memories carried the taste of that bargain -metallic and sweet and wrong, like blood mixed with honey and battery acid. I watched as pale beings drank and changed, their forms solidifying even as something behind their eyes grew distant and hungry. The birth of my kind, narrated with the dispassionate tone of someone reading from a history textbook about a tragedy too vast to fully comprehend.
"Once noble and proud, my race was now divided," Lily said, her mental voice heavy with ancient regret.
"Two major factions. Light Blessed versus Dark Touched. Shifters and Vampires."
The words landed in my consciousness like meteors, creating impact craters in everything I thought I knew about myself and my kind. Granted, most of what I knew was from the pop-culture that I had consumed.
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Now I knew better, they were not just supernatural creatures that went bump in the night -but refugees from a cosmic tragedy, carrying the genetic memory of a fall from heights I could barely comprehend. It was like discovering your family tree didn't just have skeletons in the closet, but entire civilizations buried in the backyard.
"Two halves of a once-great people," she continued, "locked in eternal war over the last remnants of life on a world that was already trying to kill them. A war directed by gods and devils of absolute power, and cruelty."
Like Thanksgiving dinner with divorced parents, but with more bloodshed and fewer passive-aggressive comments about career choices. Vampires and Shifters were the same? Or at least shared a similar origin. It made a certain sense. Poetic irony. I mean, who would you hate more, a random stranger who did something you didn’t like? Or your brother who betrayed you?
It's often said that love and hate are two sides of the same coin. I’ve read that somewhere I think. My personal opinion is that love and fear are the true opposites. And mankind hates what they fear.
I watched through her memories as former neighbors became predator and prey, as siblings turned on each other with the special hatred reserved for those who know exactly where to plant the knife. A conflict born not just of hunger or territory, but of fundamentally different responses to the same cosmic trauma.
∞
The memories accelerated, centuries of conflict compressed into moments of pure emotional impact. I was a reluctant witness to a history that was somehow mine and not mine, like reading a diary I'd written in another life and couldn't quite remember.
"The war burned through the millennia," Lily narrated, each word heavy with witnessed horror. "Tribes fell. Clans shattered. Noble houses faded into myth."
History written in ash and bone, each chapter more depressing than the last -the kind of epic saga George R.R. Martin would call "a bit much." I watched civilizations rise and fall like tides, each one carrying less memory of what came before, each generation more desperate, more feral, more lost.
"Until one day, in another act of sheer desperation, my people activated the colony ship again."
I watched as descendants who barely understood the technology of their ancestors returned to a vessel now covered in the equivalent of cosmic cobwebs. The cosmic equivalent of hitting the reset button on a game console that's been running continuously since the Bronze Age. They approached the ship with the reverence of pilgrims, touching controls with the hesitant fingers of those handling sacred relics rather than technology.
It had long since been scavenged, the skeletal remains somehow still retaining some life.
"Except this time, the technology -once state-of-the-art, the pinnacle of the people's ingenuity- was now ancient beyond memory. A relic of a bygone era barely holding itself together."
Like trying to run Cyberpunk 2077 on a calculator from 1985. I watched as beings struggled with controls they no longer truly understood, working from manuals that had become religious texts, interpreting technical specifications like prophecies. The blind leading the blind into a void they could barely comprehend, armed with nothing but hope and malfunctioning equipment.
"The jump drive sputtered," Lily's voice painted the scene as I witnessed it, "the engines howled like dying gods, and we were torn from the world of our birth -our rebirth- once more."
A cosmic Hail Mary thrown by a quarterback with a dislocated shoulder and blurry vision. The memories carried the sensation of that desperate jump -the feeling of being unmade, scattered across possibilities, and reassembled by forces that cared nothing for comfort or sanity. It was like being turned inside out while falling from a plane, except the plane was reality itself.
"Until we arrived here."
The memories shifted, showing familiar landscapes, recognizable continents. A planet that still felt new to me, even after decades of walking its surface.
"On Earth."
A planet so absurdly perfect for our people it seemed like a cosmic practical joke -like finding out your blind date is actually your soulmate and they've already paid off their student loans. The memories showed me the first encounters with humans, the slow integration, the careful hiding. Not conquest, not invasion -infiltration, adaptation. The quiet desperation of refugees who have nowhere else to go and no strength left for fighting.
It felt sorrowful, and hopeless. And it struck me as a bit -off.
∞
The flood of memories receded, leaving me gasping mentally as I returned to myself. It was like surfacing after a deep dive, lungs burning for air, vision spotty with the pressure change between then and now, there and here.
I let out a slow breath, trying to digest it all. The mental equivalent of trying to swallow an entire 60lb Thanksgiving turkey without chewing. My brain felt stretched, taxed beyond capacity, like a flash drive trying to download the entire internet.
Not just the epic scope of it, not just the weight of this forgotten history -but what it implied. The kind of paradigm shift that makes discovering Santa isn't real look like a minor footnote in your psychological development. Everything I thought I knew about vampires, about myth, about myself -all of it recontextualized in a single cosmic history lesson.
Earth wasn't just a home.
It was a refuge. The cosmic equivalent of crashing on your friend's couch after a bad breakup, except the breakup was with an entire planet and the couch was an ecosystem teeming with bipedal apes who had just figured out agriculture. Vampires were not only the apex predators we thought they were -they were also the desperate survivors of multiple extinctions, carrying the genetic memory of fallen worlds in their DNA.
Earth was a place they had fled to, a place where their myths had intertwined with human ones, their legends warping into folklore, into nightmares, into monsters. Their history becoming our bedtime stories, their tragedies our entertainment, their fallen heroes our villains. Dracula wasn't just fiction -he was a historical figure viewed through the distorted lens of human understanding, like trying to describe quantum physics with finger puppets.
The implications settled deep in my bones like lead weights, the kind of truth that reshapes your identity at a molecular level. I could feel it changing me even as I processed it, like cognitive tectonic plates shifting to accommodate a new continental mass of understanding.
I knew my life had changed when I was turned, but now?
Now I wasn't even sure what kind of story I belonged to anymore. Was I a footnote in someone else's epic, a side character who'd accidentally wandered onto the main stage? The existential equivalent of an NPC who somehow gained player status mid-game. My personal noir detective story had suddenly expanded into a space opera with stakes higher than I'd ever imagined.
- Followers go up? Boom, bonus chapter.
- Favorites go up? Ka-ching, bonus chapter.
- Reviews? Cue the confetti -bonus chapter and a shoutout, because I care.
- Ratings go up? You guessed it -bonus chapter. (And I might even crack a smile. Maybe.)