Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 85029 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 85029 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Because Tristin is right.
This is the dawn of a new age of vampire.
And every sacrifice I had to make to get here was worth it.
Epilogue - Syrsee
It’s me.
The Guild Headquarters in New Hampshire encompasses nearly a thousand acres and spans across a wide valley and several entire mountains. I didn’t see most of it as a kid. And I don’t think that was due to me being a charity case, it’s just everything but the school was off limits to anyone but Guild Citizens. Which is different than being a Guardian, even though the two separate statuses are related.
You can be a Guardian and not a Citizen, but all Citizens were Guardians at one point in their lives.
The first few years I went to school here I thought being a Guardian was the pinnacle of aspirations. I saw the headquarters that night I arrived with my grandma at age seven but it was dark, and mostly empty, and I was too frightened to take notice of anything of consequence.
It was also a quick visit. Maybe two hours total to sort things out. And then I was put into a gondola and sent up the mountain to the Guild school campus. This was a mostly self-contained community that had shops, and restaurants, and local services like a market, laundromat, and health center. There were other things to do on the school campus as well. Entertainment things. There was a lake with access to small boats, a campground and hiking trails, and a movie theatre.
So once I arrived at the school there was almost no reason for me to ever leave it.
The other kids did go home for semester and summer breaks, but I never did. Not even as a guest with one of the other students. Not even with Zusi.
At the time I didn’t think about this very much. Kinda like I never thought about the books. I just accepted the fact that I was an outsider. I accepted the idea that I should expect less because no one had ever bothered to teach me to expect more.
I didn’t feel worthy of the things other students took for granted like trips home to see family and reading the books in the library.
I felt like… like this incomplete existence was all that I deserved. Not that anyone ever said something like that to me—no one ever did. I always just felt… lucky? And that when given a gift, one should not look at that horse’s mouth too closely?
But lucky is the wrong word.
I didn’t feel lucky. I felt… indebted. Like I was getting something that I didn’t earn.
A loan. It felt like a loan. One I didn’t put up collateral for and would never be able to pay back.
Of course, it took a while for this feeling to fully bloom. I lived in the Community building with all the other younger kids until I was eleven and didn’t move over to the Merchant building until middle school. That’s when the differences between myself and the others really started to show.
All the other kids lived on floors two through nine. But I was put up on the fifteenth floor. The attic, as it was called by the other kids. I wasn’t given a roommate but Zusi volunteered to move in with me.
Looking back now, I guess it’s pretty clear that she didn’t volunteer.
She was assigned to me.
But even this realization isn’t enough to foul my mood today.
Ryet and I were not given some after-thought attic bedroom. We aren’t even on the same mountain as the Guild school.
We live with all the other Citizens. In a nice one-bedroom apartment inside a charming A-frame house that looks like something right out of a Swiss fairytale. The whole village that we’re staying in looks like that. A cross between a chalet and a ski resort—though most of the snow is gone now.
The village is vertical. Going up and down the side of the mountain. And I get the feeling that it’s a coveted spot because everything is close by. The research center—where Ryet reports every morning—is about a quarter mile down a little path that is so picturesque I can’t help but bliss-out out at the view when we walk that way.
And the library—not the same library where we came in through the mist—is another quarter-mile walk in the opposite direction.
I’ve only been gone a couple of months, so I don’t know why I was expecting everything to feel foreign and strange, but I was expecting that.
And it’s not. Like… at all. There are familiar faces from the Guild school campus all around me. They smile at me, greet me, and Ryet and I have even gotten invitations to weekend gatherings.
Each morning he and I say goodbye outside our little chalet house and go our separate ways until lunch when we meet up for an hour at one of the restaurants in our village. Then we say goodbye again, go back to work—or… whatever it is—and meet up at home around six.