WMOM: Chapter 35 🦇 (+Role Reversal)
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
What Manner of Man is a queer gothic romance novel about a priest and a vampire, written in epistolary form, served a bite at a time. What you’re reading is a draft of the novel, which was originally published for free online throughout 2023. If you’re reading for the first time, I recommend you start from the beginning.
As ever, you can get the final edition of What Manner of Man here or DRM-free on Itch.io! 📚
We’ve made it darlings! This is the final chapter of the free version of What Manner of Man! I will be sending out the postscript tomorrow morning, so remember to check your inbox. I’ll be taking a small break from e-mails for the holidays, after which I’ll be in touch with news and updates about what’s coming next.
If you missed the newsletter I sent on Thursday with a preview of my next novel, you can check that out here.
Without further ado, the finale:
LETTER TO VERA ARDELIAN
Undated.
Dearest Sister,
I feel the need to write one final time, though it must never reach you. Oh, Vera, I’ve had such a wondrous experience — my lips have known the kiss of death.
I met my annihilation, and from it have drawn the breath of life. I have enacted the role I was never meant to fill: that of sacrifice. Not, however, on the behalf of any god. I placed myself between Alistair and the blow that should rightly have killed him. With my heart’s blood, I bought a temporary reprieve from the exigencies of fate, for what nearly destroyed me also destroyed its talisman.
In doing so — in choosing my terrible, murderous love over all humanity — I transgressed against something more primal than any law handed down by the Church. For my transgression, I was rewarded.
I transcended the barrier between man and beast, and in that moment I was free. I find I remember very little of the actual sensations of death; only the terrible pleasure of it. Through that act of violence, I was delivered from the limitations of my individuality. My wound became an aperture through which I could escape and touch sacred infinity.
I entered into a godly realm, and what I found there was love. Not the repressive, censorious love of the gods I have known but a love crimson with blood — lawless, ferocious, untrammeled. I perceived the whole of the mundane world for what it was — ever-burgeoning, extravagant life; the totality of being locked together in a violent dance of becoming. The knowledge of it was too much; I recoiled from it.
I passed, then, to a quieter place, where I no longer beheld the teeming chaos of it all. There, from my new vantage point, I saw that beneath and between and all around was suffused the light of love. With dove-like tenderness the world loves the hideous, thronging mass of itself, and I was a part of it. For one fleeting moment I glimpsed the true meaning of all symbols by which men have signified God.
What I felt, then — it could not last. It would have rendered me incapable of existing alongside other mortal beings. I had to leave this vision-realm. To embrace it would mean either to become god myself, or to die in an ecstasy of passion. I am not so advanced an aspirant as to be ready for either fate, nor do I think I ever will be.
I have been in hell and discovered the wellspring of the soul. It is clear to me, now, that the faith and cure I once followed was itself the spiritual poison I had sought to drive from my heart. At the heart of the mystery of life and death I found no token of the proscriptive god I had worshiped — nor of Lord Vane’s — only an eternal, immense and overwhelming bursting forth of potential. The essence and principal of creation, endlessly becoming; a bright, bewildering freedom to be seized and given shape.
There was no necessity to worship it, nor to praise or even pray to it. Those things within me which my Christian faith alone had made terrible blossomed, assuming the shape and hue of harmonious beauty.
It would occupy a lifetime of study to begin to understand even a fraction of this illumined world in which I find myself. What I have learned of love alone makes me tremble.
In the midst of apocalypse — a miracle. Death had been as inevitable as sunrise; yet as my vision cleared, the first thing that struck me was that it was still dark as night. My lover and I were whole, and the twin spirals of the ring lay broken in two pieces far below.
Alistair was insensible with grief. I opened my mouth, wishing to impart some of the joyous vision I had received — but my lungs were on fire and I couldn't produce a sound.
I reached up with my uninjured hand to touch his face, rousing him to sudden, astonished consciousness of me — of our survival. I don’t know how long he kissed my ravaged lips and wept and cradled me in his arms; saying my name over and over again until he felt assured of the reality of me. The inevitable had been prevented; I lay in Alistair’s arms. My love — the great beast. When the villagers came, eventually, to collect our bodies, to celebrate his death and mourn mine, we descended to meet them.
I have not returned to what remains of the grounds. The only things left standing were the bell tower and part of Alistair’s conservatory. I’m told the rest is little more than an uneven shelf of stone spilling into the sea. Yet a new growth of young life has sprung up all around, and the plants of the conservatory have begun to grow wild, free from their walls of glass. Further down, perhaps, a circle of upright stones now stands beneath the open sky.
We will live, Alistair and I, though we are neither of us quite what we were. I have suffered the loss of some fingers — the last two on my left hand. Quite trivial, compared to all I have gained. Alistair, too, is —
EDITOR’S NOTE: Beyond this point, two lines of this paragraph have been rendered indecipherable.
When I am stronger, I intend to go back there — perhaps I will ask Silas to convey me — and dispose of all the remaining journals and letters containing the record of these experiences. My writings prior to midsummer were consumed in the conflagration along with the manor. Those which are still in my possession, I wish to ritually inter as near to the place as possible. I shall commit their story to the earth.
I must forge a new path ahead into life for myself and Alistair, and if that means I may never see you again I must learn to bear it. I feel the need to make some expression of farewell. I will miss you terribly. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me, and that you will be happy.
Your loving brother,
Victor Ardelian
✧ FAN POST OF THE WEEK ✧
I’m so crazy about this role-reversed What Manner of Man AU in a post by Tumblr user doing-something-unholy. I’m honestly a little jealous that I didn’t come up with it. He’s really got both characters bang on.
OBLIGATORY TWICE-PER-EMAIL REMINDER: What Manner of Man has been published! You can purchase the e-book here (or DRM-free on Itch.io!) All those who dare to venture into the pestilential realm of either Goodreads or Amazon to leave a review will earn my gratitude for life.
(Keep an eye on your inboxes tomorrow morning for the postscript!)
Yours in love and terror,
St John