This is mine, I wrote it, but various names belong to Anne Rice and I won't contest her for them.

Spoilers: Tale of the Body Thief maybe.

slumbering dreams
-----in darkness born

In the silent hours before dawn I pull the tie from my hair; let the breeze lift it, set it tumbling in whisps against my cheeks. I drop it down to fall with the rest of my clothes, neatly folded shirt and slacks, discarded shoes. Cool grass and rough dirt beneath my feet, damp with dew. I spread my arms wide, stretching, feeling the play of muscle and tendon over bone with a bittersweet intensity.

The others have sought their resting places already. The dawn is near and even now the younger ones nod their heads, eyes heavy with sleep, thoughts drifting into the spun glass fantasies of dreams. The elders speak their final words, seek their beds, the last moments of peace in the fading night hoarded jealously to their chests. Lovers lay down together, limbs growing heavy, entwined in sated solemnity.

I stand upon the unkept grass, far from trees, far from shelter. My lover waits, alone, and I know his heart is heavy. This is failure to him, this is the basest betrayal. Regret, like knives, pricking at me. A thousand and a thousand years, and I have learned to live with that wound. I wish that I could tell him. I wish I had the words to explain.

------------[ softly... whispers... ]
--------[ tattered threads of thought spun on the moon's shadow... ]

There were no words when I left. They knew, but they said nothing. They do not understand, none of them do. The elders look away, the young are horrified. And through it all not a word is spoken. Recrimination and conspiracy in the air until at last I walked away, the shreds of my dignity stained with guilt. Slunk away, a common thief in the dead of night. Stealing from them something intangible, some vision, some image of myself that they had formed and cherished, taken out and polished, until it shone brighter than I ever might.

In the end they turned away, hurt in their eyes. I could not deny it to them. I had looked at others the same, when they took their turn upon the dawn.

But it is not the same.

They do not understand. This is not about death. I know immortality in my soul, I know I shan't die. It is not about death at all.

It is about life. The brilliant vibrancy of sun drenched life, as the dawn creeps across the land and the birds begin to stir, the world waking around you. The sounds and smells and sights of the illuminated hours, forever denied us. Photography and video, pictures upon paper and screen - how can that, so flat, so plain, replace the wonder of the experience? Year piled upon countless year in the heap of memory until memory fades and I can no longer say if the sky was ever so blue, the grass so green beneath the warming rays of the sun.

And so I look at the ancient ones, their skins flush with the touch of the sun, deliberately applied to ease their appearance. I look at the brash young one, old beyond his years, stained nut brown in a reckless abandon of life and sense. I wonder if it will hurt, the first searing caress of the dawn. Though my life has been long I have never done this act - will I wake as evening sets, trapped within an agony of burnt flesh? Will I wake at all?

--the night takes breath;
-------pauses, tremulous,

But in the end it doesn't matter. This is not for pain. This is not to ease the ivory of my flesh, nor an attempt to sear that flesh away and plunge into the vast unknown of death. There is nothing to prove and I can find no words to explain it. Not even to myself. Yet as the world slowly brightens around me I stand alone against the rising sun and I know in my heart that this is right. Regardless of what may come, this is where I belong.

Such subtle beginnings. From darkness, light. From silence, sound. From blackness, color, and so, from the transitory death of night, to the life of day. The soft chirps and rustle of birds as they wake from their nests, first to greet the glory, heralds of the dawn from the birth of time. Heralds, for centuries, of the end of my waking hours and the coming of sleep. Their song now rings dischordant in my ears - beautiful but forbidden, bringing with it a hint of apprehension to shiver at my spine.

Beneath moonlight the blades of grass are a silvery color, the earth a coal black. And though my eyes may pick out colors that mortal eyes can not there is still a starkness to them, a hard edged contrast that defies the softness of the day. Dawn flows like a cloth across the land, stripping away the darkness, filling in, bit by slow bit, the colors of the world. Emerald, ochre, cyan, rose... thousands of shades, fading into existence, picked out one by one, growing in brilliance. The entire world a stained glass window, breathtaking and beautiful. Tears in eyes unused to such splendor, blinked away to wash, unnoticed, down my cheeks. I had forgotten the palette of the day, the variety of color - it is as though the shades seep not only into the world around me but into my thoughts, staining them, brightening them, brushing away the accumulation of dusty centuries upon ancient memories until they shine once more. Yes, the sky really is that blue. Yes, the world really is that bright, and I weep for the knowledge any child takes for granted.

-------------on paper thin wings
---------of unspoken desire.

As the first rays of light creep across the horizon, bathing the world in blinding splendor, a million colors in one sweep of heaven, I spread my arms wide and step into the baptismal fire.

And as darkness falls across my vision, stealing from me the dazzling spectrum in all its glory, plunging me all unwilling into the depth of sleep, I clutch at what my eyes have seen and find, at last, the explanation. The words, so simple, so fragile, tossed aloft on paper thin wings of iridescent wishes.

I want to see the colors.

End.