Hello, faithful readers… and thank you for waiting. I don’t expect it’s been easy for you all since my last update, and I truly wish I could’ve been back sooner, but ultimately, I needed this time. It has been… enlightening, one might say.

Right, well, let’s just address the elephant in the room: I’m a vampire now. All of you who have spuriously accused me of this over the years must be absolutely flabbergasted right now (she’s not supposed to come out and say it, is she?), but it’s true. I have been turned. I have died, and been reborn, and been freed, and I have ridden out the immediate turbulence, and I have tasted human blood, and I have much to talk about.

Thankfully, this has not been an experiment where I realize the true futility of my existence and set about the tragic work of undoing myself. Not yet, anyway. No, I am still essentially in control of myself and of my new body, and not quite in control of any others, and that means I can finally share the state of those things with you all. Finally, without any of the endlessly dubious sources you’ve come to expect.

I suppose some might see me as a dubious source now, but whatever. Most of those people already did, it’s no great loss. For the rest of you, let’s get started.

My Body (or is it?)

The altogether strange nature of my basic physical embodiment was the second thing I felt when I woke up. The first being, of course, the overwhelming dominance of my begetter, but that ceased to be a factor after a few hours, while this continues to be very much real.

It’s… difficult to describe, honestly. Oftentimes, I feel as if I’m controlling my limbs through some sort of spiritual puppet strings, while at other times I feel more viscerally in tune with myself than I ever remember feeling as a human. I feel the former more strongly when I am hungry— more on that later. I still hold little respect for the ‘undeath’ terminology, but I think I understand why it is used more clearly now. My skin is pallid, my body cold and moving does feel almost as if dragging a corpse around. Whatever it is in my miasma which animates me, it is not what animated me before.

The best explanation we have, scientifically speaking, for the extreme strength and speed possessed by vampires is something along the lines of a constant adrenaline response. This… somewhat checks out with my experiences so far—I certainly heal fast enough for it—but I don’t exactly feel the adrenaline, either. It doesn’t feel like exertion at all, and yet I write to you all now from a veritable graveyard of pens, cassette tapes, furniture, and just about anything else you can imagine. Quite the inconvenient thing, to be honest.

I’m… adjusting, but I don’t know if it will ever stop being surreal. It’s so easy to destroy like this, and with how dulled my pain receptors have gotten, it’s quite easy to not so much as notice. A bad combination with my fangs, as well… I truly wish that even one vampire over all these years had been willing to share with me quite how many times they must have cut open their lips and tongue and gums over in a day, only for the injury to amount to a few seconds of mild aching while it heals.

All the pain I feel is in these small pinches now, vague and transient. When I’m not actively wounded, there is nothing at all— no itches, no nonspecific back pain, no carpal tunnel, nothing. It’s a sort of relief for a woman who was beginning to show signs of middle age, I suppose, though I can’t honestly say I’d recommend it over ibuprofen.

As far as healing goes, it behaves as expected. A sort of accelerated human healing response, though vampires are capable of regrowing much more elaborate structures than humans, if only due to the speed. The mechanism of this isn’t well understood, and I don’t have much to add to the discussion just yet, as I haven’t exactly been eager to try injuring myself badly enough to do so. Not that I don’t have a couple examples, of course: it wasn’t long after initially being turned that I tore my hand halfway off just trying to get out of bed, and I believe I stepped on an entire nail earlier today without much consequence. My body simply doesn’t tolerate wounds of any sort anymore… even my piercings have been quite eager to close up when unfilled for more than, say, a couple hours or so.

I suppose there is one thing I feel compelled to add, actually: if any of you were of the sort to imagine the neovagina as some sort of horrible wound which is prevented from healing, or whatever, then I would like to formally note your inaccuracy. Of course, you wouldn’t be saying this sort of ridiculous fiddle-de-dee were you actually there when the process was being invented, but in any case, I can personally confirm that the ‘wound’ does not ‘close up’ because it is not, and never was, a ‘wound’.

Anyway, besides that, the byline is that nothing can truly hurt me anymore. With exceptions.

The Ridiculous Parts

I was visiting the residence of my begetter when I first encountered the most inexplicable component of this entire condition. One I've been skeptical of, at times, but one for which the evidence has always lined up. And now, I’ve tested it a bit obsessively. I can now confirm there is no further value in that skepticism.

I cannot enter another person's home unless I am invited in.

Now, what do I mean by that? Well, let's start with what I don't mean:

• I do not need the permission of the home's legal owner, only someone who actually lives there.
• I am not physically repelled by the home in any way.
• I am not physically harmed if I am somehow forced into the home. I will, however, seek to remove myself as quickly as possible.
• A resident forcing me into their home by some means counts as an invitation.
• This is not a species-based effect; I can't enter another vampire's home uninvited, either.

I understand this is starting to sound like a bunch of old poppycock, I really do, but I can verify it all personally.

As far as I can tell, the cause of this is mental, not physical, ridiculous though that may seem. It's mediated by some kind of vampiric ‘ESP’… I still can't explain it with anything approaching rigor, but something deep, deep inside me can tell, now, if a location is considered a ‘home’ by someone, at which point I cannot enter. The structure doesn’t matter— house, apartment unit, mobile home, I’ve even stumbled across an alleyway in my neighborhood which someone must have unknowingly rendered impassible to me. It’s not anything physically consistent, it’s purely a matter of perception.

The… ‘enforcement’, I suppose, is somewhat similar to the sorts of intrusive thoughts that plagued me while I was still recovering from enthrallment, but indescribably more formidable. It's this… gnawing fear, painful and dense, and none of the usual strategies do anything to ameliorate it. I even had some difficulty organizing the experiment on being forced into a home, because technically that was me ‘attempting to enter’ (or so I couldn't help thinking). The psychiatric framework would be OCD, but I am not sure if even that can encapsulate the severity of this mental block. Entering a ‘home’ uninvited is now somehow a violation of everything I am, and for no reason in particular.

It's a similar story with running water, though I haven't investigated that as much. I spilled some water on the floor the other day while watering my plants, and I indeed had to wait ever-so-patiently for it to finish its journey across my living room floor before I could go get a rag to wipe it up. Bridges are fine, and the sewers don't affect me (though I can still sense them, vaguely), but directly stepping over it simply isn't feasible. Perhaps this is related to people's insistence on the value of holy water.

Speaking of which, let’s get back to what can actually hurt me. I expect you've all been waiting with bated breath for that, for only the most ordinary of reasons.

I'll start with the basics. Indeed, I have been granted a frankly concerning degree of strength by this condition, and an incredibly effective healing factor, but it comes at a price I hadn't fully anticipated: my body is utterly fragile now.

As I said, I nearly tore a hand off just getting out of bed in the beginning, and I've come close a few times since, with significantly larger body parts. It's less severe when I'm less hungry, but no matter how much I drink, my body continues to display an utter lack of integrity.

This idea has always struck me as unlikely to be true, so it was an odd thing to see it in reality. I did have a brief chat about it with a physicist colleague of mine, though, and I'm told that this trade-off is more or less exactly to be expected. More strength means less flexibility, like an eggshell. How ironic… after all this time, I'm back to being an ‘egg’¹.

Jokes aside, though, the point is that anyone could tear up my skeleton with relatively little effort. Which leads me to the next weakness: my heart.

Yes, I'm going to say it. Finally, I'm going to have my ultimate ‘I told you so’. My ribs can be shattered easily, and human ribs can't, so the development of this misconception makes perfect sense now. But it is a misconception nonetheless.

You do not need a wooden stake to destroy a vampire's heart.

Of course, I already knew this. The woman who enthralled me was done in by nothing but a rusty piece of metal. I have interviewed many hunters who claim to have prevailed with improvised weaponry. And for God's sake, the finishing blow in that book you are all so obsessed with was dealt by a Bowie knife. Yet it is no less satisfying to prove this once and for all.

I do not know if it's a good or a bad sign to revel in the very present and visceral feeling of vulnerability that spills from my heart, but I revel in it anyway. I obviously do not have the means to actually test its vulnerability, but I suppose there is the same sort of low-level understanding there now as I once had about my neck. The whole lattice of my being flows through my heart, and so it's only natural that destroying it, by any means whatsoever, would destroy me. I'll have to work on some method of testing, that I might move beyond the purely anecdotal.

The much simpler things to test, despite my best interests, are the sort of… allergies I’ve been granted by this whole process. We can start with the least severe— Garlic, I can confirm, has a thoroughly unpleasant scent to it, and is potent enough for the cloves in my neighbor’s apartment to bother me just a little bit, but it doesn’t have any effect beyond that. I can pick it up, I can do whatever I want with it, it’s just… annoying. In a world where everything either smells neutral or like blood, garlic is the one thing that smells utterly putrid, and sulfurous, and it makes my nose itch.

A shame, I did rather like Italian food. But I suppose I wouldn’t have been eating it anyway. Certainly not with my old utensils.

Yes, silver is a significantly more severe pain point. It’s hard to articulate the feeling of what it does to my body… I’ve heard ‘burning’, but I’m not sure if it’s appropriate as description when burning itself now feels like nothing but an intense itch. It does seem to literally be the case, though— presumably due to some unexplained chemical reaction which only happens if the skin is actually attached to my body, and doesn’t consume any of the silver. So, an imaginary one, then. But disregarding the why, I can confirm that not only is this an excruciatingly painful substance to touch, it is also the only material capable of visiting any sort of lingering injury upon me. Don’t ask me what I did to confirm that.

And then there’s the most supreme threat of them all: sunlight. It’s true, I haven’t been able to see much of the sun since being turned, as those moments I have spent with it have been… well, how do I say this.

Humans are beings of the sun. To you, and to me until recently, it is a beacon of warmth, and light, and safety, and everything of the sort. You can see when the sun is here, and everything is calm, and you feel calm. You are where you are supposed to be, in the environment you are adapted for. It’s no great shock that most religious and philosophical frameworks place it in some role of great importance.

But I can’t live in denial, imagining myself as a part of this category. This simply isn’t the case anymore. I am a nocturnal creature now, and while that comes with a frankly incredible clarity of vision, especially in what humans consider ‘darkness’, it also inverts my dynamic totally with that most fundamental of comforts.

When I once again regained my freedom, I wanted nothing more than to return home. I was hungry, exhausted, and utterly overwhelmed. But it only took a brief look out the window at that time before I was utterly reprimanded by all that is. Perhaps it will be however many billions of years before the sun swells to consume the earth, but for me, that day had already come.

And it is not only the sun, not quite. Only the sun is this torrential downpour of flame, only the sun eats away at my flesh like a thousand starving piranhas should I ever come into direct contact, but as far as my eyesight goes, it is just an especially bright version of that which humanity keeps about itself at all times. That is to say, even a warm, dim room can be quite overstimulating for me at times, blurring everything into vague flashes of intensity and color. Even the monitor on which I type this, at its darkest setting, is something to get used to. The night, by contrast, is simply pleasantly lit by the moon, the supreme comfort as far as my body is now concerned.

I don’t know what to make of all that. I think there must be something special about our Sun itself, about its direct interactions with our planet and its atmosphere, that is somehow diffused by contact with the moon. I bear no more vulnerability to ultraviolet light than to any other sort, so it can’t be that. It makes no sense, but it can’t. There will have to be some other explanation, eventually.

It will not be explained, however, by any sort of aversion to ‘goodness’, ‘purity’, or worst of all, ‘holiness’. This is not a Christian world of sin and retribution, of some metaphysical struggle between the essence of light and dark. No, my body, to be utterly frank, does not give two hoots about what is or is not ordained by the church. To wit, I once tried to repel one Violet Russell-Gray with such affects; the fact that this is the first time any of you are hearing of her as something other than my former ‘mistress’ should hopefully be an indicator of the Christ’s efficacy in this arena.

It won’t be, though, so I thought I’d run a little experiment to prove my point. I was able to get in touch with a local priest via my academic resources, and with his help, I have personally:

• Entered a church;
• Read out several thousand words from multiple different editions of The Holy Bible;
• Been subject to an exorcism;
• Pressed against myself several sorts of crucifix;
• Recited the Lord’s Prayer, and been subject to prayers of warding against me; and
• Been baptized, in holy water.

Of these, the most effective at ‘repulsion’ were the crucifixes (one of which was made of silver) and the holy water (which, for a brief moment, was also running water).

I’ll have to organize more experiments of this sort, honestly, if only to dissuade the no doubt considerable number of you who have already explained that this experiment was too Catholic, or indeed too Christian, to be an embodiment of the truly divine. And more importantly, I must say that the experience was quite cathartic. I’m not a religious person, but Violet certainly was, and with all the time she spent cackling over her supposed blasphemies all those years ago there was still some small part of me which thought she was simply ‘more powerful than God’ somehow. One of many things I’m happy to finally put to rest.

Drink and Drink; or, Your Food Idea Doesn’t Work

I’ve thought for a long time about how to articulate what this process has done to my palate and to the associated senses. The visceral sensation of feeding in this new form. I’m still not sure I’m satisfied with any of my answers.

You may be surprised to hear this, and I would be right there with you not too long ago. It can’t be so complicated, can it? Don’t we all know what blood tastes like?

Well, that’s an easier question. No, we do not all know the same taste. I couldn’t have imagined how this would feel even a couple weeks ago, even as a victim myself of an untold quantity of bites. Even the thralls reading this cannot know the sensation relative to being bitten… it is a distinctly full-body experience.

Food is not food anymore. We can start there. I think most beings have a fairly visceral sense for the sorts of things that we can or cannot eat, and for humans, that includes a wide variety of things. Milk, bread, pudding, apples, even water… most humans crave these things in a way they do not crave, say, a table, or a smart phone, or a rock. Unless it is one of the rocks which you do crave, of course… which only further demonstrates my point.

I attribute all this to instinct to convey the sharpness with which my taste buds swerved the moment I was turned. I’ve eaten a few things besides blood since then and suffered no damage from the experience, but the sensation of eating apples, or rice, or even water was the equivalent of eating sand. It tasted of nothing, it satisfied no urge, and least pleasantly of all, it necessitated the only trips to the toilet I’ve needed since just after being turned.

Blood is what I eat now, what I drink, what I need. Human blood, more specifically, as I can unfortunately confirm. I did give animal blood a good shot, but it was simply not food— you may as well ask someone to increase their vegetable intake by eating grass. The same was the case for the remaining samples of my own blood, too. I tried formulating artificial blood, I tried drinking the miasma of my begetter (not recommended, though I must admit a degree of curiosity about what effect it would have on a human), I even steeled myself to stomach a bit of mutton. Nothing works.

So we find ourselves with the necessary conclusion. The only thing which can satiate me, help me control myself, and keep me away from death is specifically human blood. It can be separate from the source, but… well, it does taste better ‘straight from the tap’, frankly. And disregarding the hedonistic angle, not everyone can afford to risk being ambushed by hunters at their local blood bank. I do not consider the results of this experiment to be generally useful unless they can also help people who do not have the privileges and funding my status have granted me².

I’ll get further into how I’ve been navigating that whole mess in a moment. First, I think it would be valuable to spend some time demystifying the subject of the blood itself.

The vampire’s palate has long struck me as a monotonous affair, one of many subtly mind-numbing aspects of the condition. I have struggled to see good faith in my subjects’ insistence that blood somehow never gets old, and that it expresses such a variety of flavors. But I am happy to report that, on this extremely narrowly defined aspect of the experience of drinking blood, they were right and I was wrong.

I had actually plotted this article out with the expectation that the topic would be simple enough to fully test and summarize by now, but that has turned out to be a shocking show of hubris on my part. Blood, in this form, is somehow every bit as complex as the human palate.

I can try to at least give a general overview, just as many are wont to do with the vast complexities of human cooking, but keep in mind that it will be very general. I need to experiment much more with this topic, not to mention sifting through decades of interview logs, before I am able to give a very clear explanation. This is genuinely not meant as simply an excuse to drink much, much more blood in the future, either… though I would be lying if I said that is not a significant perk.

Based on what I recall now and what I’ve experienced, I believe I can identify three key components of the overall ‘taste’ of blood: composition, personality, and intensity.

Composition is, of course, the actual physical makeup of the blood. It is the only thing that by any reasonable expectation ought to have anything to do with this, which means it is also the only thing I prepared any test procedures for. Thankfully, even in the framework I'm shocked I need to establish, it is still the most important factor, the one which frames the rest.

I’ll get the obvious part out of the way— hormones taste essentially exactly how I would have expected. Not that they map even vaguely onto any human flavor I can identify, of course, but I think they do map onto the vague sensation brought about by… well, pheromones, musk, sexual arousal, et cetera. An excess of testosterone was a negative to me, a lesbian. It seems a bit convenient, but this is only a cursory explanation, and it’s far from the most unbelievable aspect here. We have much more to unpack with regards to the hæmoglobin itself.

There are a number of different human blood group systems, but many are host to quirks and rare specimens that make comprehensive testing more difficult. Given the time available to me before being turned, I chose to keep things simple and requested only a few small samples each of the eight types delineated by the ABO and Rh systems. This also rendered errors in fulfilling my requests much less likely, as I can be fairly certain that any blood bank will accurately keep track of at least those antigens which have the potential to cause complications during transfusion.

The division between A, B, AB, and O is really a matter of the presence or absence of A and B antigens in the blood cells. Similarly, the + or - simply indicates the presence or absence of Rh(D). This essentially means we have three antigens which should be responsible for the various flavors of blood reported to me by vampires over the years, in addition to the impact of hormones, and I can confirm that each of these does seem to imbue the blood with a characteristic ‘base flavor’ which is relatively consistent across samples.

In extremely loose terms, I would characterize A antigens as ‘sweet’, B antigens as ‘bitter’, and Rh(D) antigens as ‘hot’. This is all on top of the vaguely salty/wet fundamental profile which is expressed most clearly in O- blood due to its lack of antigens. AB blood, then, ends up tasting something like ‘sour’, perhaps… but really, the metaphor is starting to show its strain here. I don’t think I have anything comprehensive yet on this front, and this is all only functional as framing for the other factors. Blood type doesn’t have anything to do with personality, after all.

I would like to reiterate: I truly, truly find it ridiculous that I am forced to concede here to the oft-expressed notion that the taste of human blood somehow reflects, in some vaguely defined way, the personality of its source. I would love to be able to dismiss the whole matter with some good old-fashioned objective observation, but part of being a scientist is admitting when reality simply does not match what I had understood rationality to be.

In reality, I found that two of the O+ samples which had been reported as perfectly identical in nearly all respects tasted utterly distinct— Above the ‘heat’ of the Rh(D) antigens, one exhibited a bright, resplendent flavor while the other exhibited a rather unpleasant smoky musk. On request, both donors consented to release of their personal information— the first belongs to an ‘e’-celebrity known for vacation photography, while the second belongs to a former lawyer who was disbarred for regular sexual misconduct with their clients.

Confirmation bias, of course. I need to investigate this much more… I frankly hadn’t expected it would even be under consideration, so that’s going to be a whole extra set of tests. What I can say right now is that what research I did on the other samples in my collection seemed to further line up, and that this has been a consistently reported phenomenon across nearly all of the subjects I have interviewed. More on the extent to which this blurs the line with personal feelings for someone later.

I have a bit more basis for the third aspect, which I am calling ‘intensity’ in an attempt to decouple it from the many far more loaded ways to which it could be referred. Essentially, this is my attempt to describe my earlier assertion regarding blood ‘straight from the tap’ without necessarily prescribing anything specific.

Indeed, I have worked with some of my begetter’s thralls (with consent, of course… to what extent I have been able to manage so far) to drink both directly from them and to extract and ingest their blood secondhand. More than simply tasting ‘stale’, the secondhand samples take on an aggressive flavor that is almost too much for its packaging. The closest metaphor I can summon is a sexual encounter in which one’s partner insists on rushing into maximum intensity without so much as a minute of foreplay. Similarly, fresh blood tastes more ‘warranted’ than secondhand blood, and it also takes on an almost orgasmic sort of flavor when extracted after a lengthy period of warm-up.

This, I believe, can also function as an explanation for the common refrain among vampires that ‘obedient thralls taste better’. In a sense, in this particular way, they do. I can confirm this— I have put people under my ‘spell’, and it is a rush which would be dangerously addictive to someone with less self control. Obedient girls taste better, in the exact same sense in which cunnilingus is rather a bit spoiled if your partner disregards the labia and lunges at the clit like a rabid beast.

I would apologize for the rather explicit description there, but it is frankly the only way I can conceive of to articulate this. Besides, if this is the first you’re hearing of the fundamental alignment among vampires between blood and sex, I honestly don’t know what to tell you.

Or, well, let's not kid ourselves. Of course I do.

Bloody Lust

Long ago, so the legend goes, there lived a woman named Lilith. She was the first wife of Adam, before Eve; or, she was a Sumerian priestess and healer; or, she was a demon sent by Satan himself as a warrior in the eternal battle for men's souls; or, she was the last of the Neanderthals, forced by evolutionary pressures to adopt a new mode of reproduction; or, she was the unfaithful wife of whatever historical monarch the one recounting her tale happens to personally dislike. It's not really important where she came from. What she did is far more significant, though no less disputed.

It's a matter of spin, mostly. She is almost always one who preyed on the blood and the souls of men (naturally men), with the question of righteousness as a matter of interpretation. At the very least, she has a great fixation on blood and is known for using it in assorted acts of mysticism throughout her life. Sometimes a scholar, sometimes a devil-worshipper, sometimes a ‘girl-boss’. Whatever the case, her life is not why I invoke her name now. Like a starving artist, her legacy is attained only after her death.

A divine figure of some sort is usually responsible, as punishment, machination, or both, though there are some modern retellings in which she simply ‘played God’ or some such and fell victim to her own creation³. The symptoms are always the same, though: the body of a corpse, the voice of a temptress, the cravings of an animal. For her hubris, or sadism, or paganism, or bisexuality, or all of the above, she was made the first vampire.

And now, she is my ancestor. I bear the very same curse, perhaps as a punishment for the very same hubris. Or perhaps that’s all a load of old hooey, and I'm just a new species. More on that question later.

I say all this as context for the image of vampirism. This is the prime legend of and about my surrogate race, and it is one of depravity, of the arcane, and most fundamentally, of domination.

Yes, it's time to talk about that. The part I've been putting off, for reasons I would hope are obvious. The manifest fact of what my every act does to people… I expected it to feel as coercive to wield these abilities as it does to fall victim to them, and I was correct. The way my voice sticks to human ears, the way I must avert my gaze from human eyes, and most of all, the way my mere presence seems to wear on human minds. It… encourages things in me.

Before we get into that, though, let’s be a bit more analytical about this.

My voice possesses the same properties as I have noted in other vampires. To human observers, I’m told it sounds slightly more… important, like something worth listening to, regardless of how sloppily I attempt to speak. I tested this fairly extensively over the phone with Dr. Linda Ashford, a colleague of mine, and we found I was able to exert some deliberate control over its power. She’s heard much more and less alluring, which means I likely have as well, so I probably have more of an ability to control this than I know how to utilize right now. I expect my begetter can help me with this.

For now, though, ‘fairly alluring’ is more or less where I’m stuck. My default. It doesn’t exactly feel as if I’m doing anything different, but I don’t know that I’d be able to tell if I was. I’ll have to work on it.

Less concerning is my newfound ability to actually analyze vampiric voice samples with any degree of rigor. I spent a couple of excited afternoons already just sifting through all the endless clips I have accumulated and archived over the years, finally hearing what all my former subjects actually sounded like and attempting to break apart the audio clips without risk of entrancement. I even tried an experiment which has gripped my curiosity for a long time.

Before I was turned, I recorded a few test phrases in a sound booth graciously lent to me by the arts department. Now, after being turned, I recorded the same phrases in the same place. Listening back now, I barely hear a difference. Slightly more sultry now, perhaps. But clearly there is a difference, so I subtracted the old from the new to see what that difference actually was.

Listening to the file myself, it was something like… music? Or perhaps a voice, muddled by various lingering recording artifacts. I’m not sure how to describe it beyond stating that I ‘felt a presence, or power, or something’. I may as well try to describe the color red without knowing what objects it calls its home.

Linda, naturally, asked that we test what effect it would have on her. Her reaction to seeing the waveform, followed by her reaction to hearing its sound, were sufficient to demonstrate to me that I needed to delete the file immediately. I can recreate it if I ever need to test something with it again.

Speaking of Linda, though, we also had a brief meeting to test what properties of my involuntarily hypnotic gaze we might be able to ascertain now. We gave a good shot to some typical gaze-warding techniques, which Linda is as familiar with as I, and found that they did seem to have some efficacy. I believe the polarity is incorrect on a number of counters, though, and I’m not as sure as I once was that the ‘orange’ counter is actually real. Still, with some tuning, Linda was able to stay awake for upwards of 10 seconds. She might have performed even better had I not been in the room with her for an hour already.

…And that’s our segue into the difficult part.

I hope none of you are under the impression that I don’t know how much this sounds like I have already enthralled or otherwise dominated a respected colleague of over twenty years. I can tell you that I didn’t, and I would be telling the truth, but I recognize that is hard to believe given how much I obviously don’t want to talk about it. So let’s talk about it.

As a ‘descendant’ of Lilith, I am now an animal with remarkably simple needs. As I have thoroughly covered at this point, I no longer hunger for solid food, or thirst for water, or ache for a place to rest, or lust for ordinary sex. Instead, these impulses congeal now into something bizarrely singular, the ‘bloody lust’ of which I speak. When the urges of this condition come, they come all at once, a singular and utterly overwhelming ache radiating from my heart which draws my body to motion.

So, this sounds like an excuse, because it is. I have succumbed to these desires in small ways, at various points. But I hope it is encouraging to say that I have not succumbed in the long term, not yet. I have not taken any thralls in any meaningful sense. I have not betrayed the trust of anyone I know. In short, I have sought to relish and embrace these desires only in the context of actually having sex, and it has been working okay for now.

This does mean I have enthralled people in the short term. But this has been with consent (to the greatest extent I am capable of right now) and it is something I have found ways to reverse. Somewhat. I should explain more about the nature of enthrallment, first.

Enthrallment is inflicted when a vampire directly consumes the blood of a human. To be more specific, it is inflicted when a vampire consumes blood that has been drawn by biting into human blood vessels, as I have been able to verify. Once afflicted by this condition, thralls experience a fundamental and deeply traumatizing reorientation of priorities such that they perceive literally everything else in the world as less important than the one that afflicted them. And, due to the nature of blood lust, it is an extremely sexual experience for both parties.

Having been on both ends of this dynamic now, I believe I only despise the effects of enthrallment more than before. But who among us is not viciously aroused by the things we despise the most? No matter how infuriating it is to feel my aura numb every conversation around me, to feel my body beg me to violate my every principle, it is in that exact frustration that I have always found my orgasmic center.

I won’t mince words any longer: I have had some very rough sex this past week. And in those moments I have enjoyed, however briefly, the privileges of being a ‘mistress’. I have done so knowing exactly what it is like to be in that position, having been reminded just last week. Knowing that for a thrall, everything is a privilege. Knowing that now, I can give self-confidence or take it away with a few simple words.

But I have not kept anyone long-term. I have had to find ways to release humans from my grasp. It’s a shame that my abilities on that front seem to be strikingly limited.

Essentially, the only thing that seems to actually work is using my hypnotic gaze to erase my partner’s memory of being enthralled. Given that I have mostly done this with my begetter’s thralls, it’s a bit inconvenient. Inevitably, memories resurface, and enthrallment with them, and I am forced to revisit the hypnosis. I have been iterating on my processes for this, searching for ways I can help these people compartmentalize the curse I inflicted such that we might have something approaching a normal relationship, but it is admittedly slow going. Still, I believe that problem is not nearly as sturdy as my determination to solve it.

The whole experience leaves me with a degree of pity, really, for all those afflicted with this curse without my resources, experience, or shocking ability to compartmentalize. In this state, blood is a completely non-negotiable need, one which is collected safely only in places that hunters love to stake out, one which is otherwise obtained only through sudden and incredibly violent sex in total disregard of consent, and one which will always, when taken in the most enjoyable manner, result in a mind-numbingly congratulatory love which only perpetuates itself. If you seek to be a mild-mannered sweetheart who asks for what you want and is willing to take no for an answer, vampirism will fight you at every turn. If you seek to be a manipulative, self-serving, senseless predator, it will grant you more excuses than you have ever had before.

It is said that vampires are the natural predators of humans. Perhaps this is true. I surely can’t contest it when my mind races so severely at the thought of taking humans, of making them mine, of making sure no one else can have them. Even so, I insist that things can be better for us all. I want to live in a world where a begetter is someone who helps you maintain your best self in the transition, not someone who desperately encourages your ‘corruption arc’, so to speak, recreating what was done to her so long ago. A world where the tendency of vampires to become ‘philosophical zombies’ which I so often invoke can actually be meaningfully avoided.

And for thralls, and for those of you who so desperately wish you were thralls for variously concerning reasons, I want to create here a better shape of that strange, horrible state which has done so much harm to me. I believe it’s possible, by understanding the nature of exactly what I am doing, to transform this into something truly fair, and safe, and comforting, in the ways casual sex can so often end up being— a sort of symbiotic predation. I believe that every problem I have seen is only the beginning of a solution I have yet to find.

So yes, I suppose I am a predator now. A territorial one at that, who in some deep vestige of my mind relishes the idea of showing up my begetter on the wager we made and either ‘proving to her thralls that there is truly a better way’ or ‘mercilessly outcompeting her and claiming her things for my own’, depending on how you’d like to frame it. It is not my job to word it all perfectly, it is my job to render the broad strokes in the most helpful, respectful manner I can manage. The framing hardly matters. The sensations are muddled, strange, and confused, and like always, it is all a matter of interpretation.

In that way, I suppose I really am one of Lilith’s progeny.

What is a Vampire, anyway?

There are three common understandings of the state of vampirism, each accepted generally by different people and for different reasons. These are:

1. Vampires are ‘undead’ beasts void of soul, accursed corpses drawn into the thrall of Satan, or whoever, as punishment for humans who do not properly bury their dead.
2. Vampires are humans afflicted by some sort of poorly understood germ which grants to them their various powers.
3. Vampires, or rather the miasma inside them, are a species of parasitic organism which takes host in human corpses and replicates their behavior in life.

I have long expressed my dissatisfaction with these explanations. Obviously the first is just ridiculous, a working understanding from a time without the scientific method. The second is more appealing in the way it grants to vampires a concept of humanity, but it doesn’t fit with a modern understanding of immunology (and in fact seems to actively embrace the extent to which it requires the existence of a sort of germ which doesn’t exist). I have argued quite extensively for the third in the past, as it fits the evidence most closely… but I often regret my part in enabling the third's proponents to make points which are indistinguishable from proponents of the first. Besides, the exact makeup and behavior of miasma differ significantly from life as we know it.

I consider these ideas now in a very different context. I have been turned, after all; so the exact nature of my existence has rather severe consequences in terms of how I am perceived and how I am compelled to think of myself. Whatever my opinion on the matter, these are all ideas I will have to consider seriously.

Perhaps I should start with the simple facts. By most medical definitions, I died at 9:41 PM on 17 April, 2025 due to traumatic blood loss. My heart stopped, my skin turned pallid, and my body underwent rigor mortis. And, more importantly, I do not recall any of this personally, because I was not there to experience it.

I recall a feeling of exhaustion, first. Sleep, slowly creeping in, with no reason to deny it. I recall sleeping for a while, in what ways any of us can recall such things. After that, though, there are moments I truly don't recall. Blank spots that grew larger and larger as my heart grew colder. I imagined, or maybe felt, a passage. I was elsewhere, or I was dreaming. Soon, I started forgetting to dream. I started forgetting to forget. It went on for a while like that… until finally, in a moment I can never recall, I forgot for one last time. Then, there was nothing left of me to dream.

And then I woke up.

Since then, I have inhabited a body altogether different from what I had. The body of another version of myself, charitably, a version which I have yet to become. In my veins sits a solution of blood plasma, free carbon, and a smattering of other molecules which is chemically unremarkable except when extracted from the veins of one like me. In my brain, electrical signals still fire, but I am told the patterns are different, and I will seek to verify this. My heart still does not beat, my miasma barely flows, and I have no need to breathe— I am still ‘dead’ by human standards. But I am alive as well.

Indeed, I maintain homeostasis, if at a nonhuman level. My body is organized into the usual organs, many of which are vestigial, but the tailbone hardly disqualifies humans. My metabolism marches on with its new diet, my body is only too eager to regrow, I adapt and respond to stimuli just as well as ever, and I would hope my ability to create more vampires is self-evident. There is no single quality of life which I do not possess.

Suffice to say, this experience has made me no friendlier to the notion of ‘undeath’. I am alive, alive in every way that matters— if not as a human, than as something else entirely.

With that established, we are now faced with the question of the soul. After all, it would seem that I have again arrived at the third definition. It's what makes the most sense, as I said— The human I was is dead, and I am alive in my place. And so there is some argument that my ‘soul’, the ineffable thing that makes me me, has already left us.

Am I myself? It’s an absurd question, but I believe I see the impetus for asking it. Certainly, I remember my life, my mission, everything that I am, and I stick to it. But I remember distantly, sometimes strangely, as I remain separated from that life by the only true lapse of consciousness I have ever known. And now, I face new impulses, new inclinations, competing with the old for acknowledgement.

I don’t show up in mirrors. This obviously doesn’t imply soullessness—many things appear in mirrors which are not so ‘ensouled’ as I—but I find it more chilling than I’d expected. I look, and I see nothing, as if there were no one there at all. It is a phenomenon with no clear scientific basis, but it is here as a constant reminder nonetheless. I cannot see myself anymore. In the fog of what I have become, it seems a simple thing to forget myself entirely.

My begetter explained none of this to me, but I doubt that was intentional. Time has a strange way of whittling at the clarity of prior states of being— I have already lived more than long enough to understand that. And now I lie here, a corpse, drawn to move by some strange force which she has thrust upon me. A different species, a parasitic organism, a changeling.

I have always found vampires to be unpleasantly simple beings. Only now do I fully comprehend why. This numb desperation, this blood lust, boils endlessly within me, and while I fill my time with other pursuits, it is painfully obvious that I do not need to. I could fulfill my every base desire with a few thralls. It is less a hierarchy of needs than a flat line, that same flatline that my heart has left behind.

I believe my relationship with time is different as well… Frankly, I don't believe I ever realized before how desperately the human psyche yearns to outpace death. We all know this on some level, I think, but even when I was likely to live past 200 I was always gripped by urgency, and I was never truly relaxed. It is a feeling I only recognize now, in its absence. No need for it anymore, I suppose… With any luck, I now have literally all the time in the world.

It's not reassuring. My begetter is a mere 20 years undead, and she is an infuriatingly dense woman. I cannot imagine the toll of a century, a millennium. Already I've begun to lose touch with the memory of pleasant sunlight, new sensations literally searing away the old. What might I lose in an eternity? If Lilith is still among us, what manner of being must we expect from her?

At this point, my work is a dedication to a self that would not have formed under these conditions. A righteous dedication, but still. It is labor to retain that which I care for most, and that labor can never be complete, because I will never again worship the sun with the rest of you. Nothing will ever be the same.

I do miss the sensations of humanity. I miss basking in the sun, I miss the race against death, I even miss the carpal tunnel. I missed meat, too, when I was still a fledgling vegetarian. Until one day, I realized I no longer did.

It is inevitable. In time, there will be nothing left to miss. All I can control now is the shape of the person I become, and great though that control is, it is always limited. Perhaps it is not so different from the inevitable toll of age with which I've already become familiar. I must hope so, anyway.

Conclusion

The only thing more exciting to me than the information I've been able to share with you today is the fact that it is only the tip of the iceberg. Terrifying as some of the facts I’ve had to contend with are, the number of new leads I have yet to investigate more than makes up for it.

Similarly, though I understand much of what I've posted here is likely at least a bit concerning, I hope it has come across that I am still determined to be your light in the darkness, and that I will not rest until I know that I will be worthy of that title in perpetuity.

Some of you may still choose to stop following me, and some may even choose to attack me. That's fine, I accepted and accounted for these risks in advance. In time, though, I hope my works and actions will demonstrate that there is no need for it. I only want the best for all of us, and I swear that nothing will ever change that.

1. I'm not sure if this is the appropriate way to apply this terminology, but that's not really important anyway.
2. As an aside, I would like to thank Dr. Giesbert, Dr. Thomas, and of course Dr. Ashford for their institutional support as I manage this unprecedented transition.
3. As seen in the 1993 blockbuster, Jurassic Park.

Comments

Dr. Linda Ashford
Lovely to see you finally getting a chance to post this, I know it's been driving you up a wall this past week. And no hard feelings about the incident with that audio, eh? It's ultimately nice to know what we're dealing with here.

📝Dr. Luma
Yes, it's finally out, and I'm gratified as well. I look forward to pressing more into all these details, with better precautions next time.

DrHaroldGiesbert
Good work so far. Let me know if you need anything.

DEUS_VULT_420
the evil has come to pass, THE TAINT OF LILITH seesp of every word… It even claim to have averteth THE LORD, though THE LORD cannot shineth through such FOUL priest that would CONSORT wthe such BEAST… AVERT THINT EYES… avet

cakegirl
id give anything 4 a taste of liliths taint hehe

DEUS_VULT_420
SCOUNDCRL! RAPCALION! REPENT and THOU SHALT BE SAVED!

cakegirl
🙂

Gerogero
👆gay

cakegirl
yea!

seeker_of_knowledge
I don't even know where to start. Where do I even START? Maybe with the bit where you admitted to already violating your supposed “principles”? Or maybe with the part where you blatantly lied about being “immune” to stakes, for no reason but to sow confusion, like you people always do? No, I'm done. I'm done! I'm through mucking around with this absolute pisstake of a blog. I'm no longer going to sit here and watch as you muddy the waters yet again, manipulating your braindead followers into doing whatever you say, which I might add, has always been rather appropriate! And do you really believe that blood types…
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CrinchoJinjo
This was quite the excellent read! You've clearly put plenty of effort into your research, and it's so beautiful how you have been so blunt about your sexuality, even though the world is full of SEX FREAKS who just love to be weird about that. Seriously, I can hear them coming. ALL HANDS ON DECK, haha. You'd NEED a battle station to handle these guys.

Circled Faerie
Of course you can’t smite yourself with the false divinity of the Catholic Church! Why not encounter the truly divine for once, and see how much it cares for one of your sort? 😌

ch
I believed the stake thing for the longest time, idek why. Obviously it doesn't make any sense, but… I mean, you don't wanna be the guy who tried leaving it at home, right?

ThisThrallObeys
I was that guy once, except a girl and also my Mistress was too strong for silver… Goddess, it makes me so wet thinking about it!

ch
Could we not talk about this

demonTitties
So like, random thought… what if you took that weird cognitohazard voice clip you made and inverted it? Would it, like, unenthrall people? Make vampires sleepy? What

📝Dr. Luma
I have considered this, and it warrants further investigation, but I need a better plan this time lest we be forced to handle the ordeal of removing the file from Linda's computer again. I've been working on procedures, hopefully I'll have something ready by the time she's done recovering from her injuries.

demonTitties
Can't wait!

Octopussy46
Yo nice reference dude

demonTitties
You know it bro. Gettin fuckin keter in this shit

BloodyMary
Wow, you really are such a nerd! It's somehow so much cuter than I imagined it would be… and it'll be even CUTER when you quit fighting it! (:

📝Dr. Luma
I suppose my cuteness levels will be eternally suboptimal, then. Which one of us wears glasses, again?

BloodyMary
Oh wowwww, okay. That’s the best you’ve got? TONS of people wear glasses! I don’t even need them that badly.

📝Dr. Luma
And I’m certain ‘tons’ of people can name every one of the power-ups from the Kirby franchise by heart.

BloodyMary
):<

CrinchoJinjo
Ugh. Sorry you have to deal with this total RANDO, Luma. Some people are just out of control

Healthy-is-Happy
I think that AB blood should probably taste sort of minty, actually, since AB people are of the aloof, cool sort.

yoyoma213
I have AB+, but I'm too much of a Scorpio to give minty like that /hj

seeker_of_knowledge

I can't stop thinking about how horrible this post is. Stop being so fucking coy about trying to march your braindead followers right into the maws of the undead. It'd be one thing if you just ACCEPTED what is wrong with you, but instead you hide it behind layers and layers of bullshit. It's sickening. It's beyond pathetic. It’s just not worth my time.

Also, and I can't believe I have to say this, but the way that you talk about your sick fetishes like this is so fucking sickening. Like, can we just stop acting like it's normal to get off on the way you…

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NessNinten
Can't wait to see more!