Vampyre

‘Don’t look at his face’ said my master gently. ‘If you do you will see the troubled dreams he suffers. I want you to look at the wall.’
I shut my eyes. It was worse than death what had happened to him now, and I never so much as wondered, never so much as dared to think of him as alive. How very wrong I was. He was more alive than the rest. But then I hadn’t really ever known. The past to me had been but misery and chaos. All that was known to me was death.
‘Wake up child’. He said in my ear, so close that I could feel his breath on my cheek. I tried to ignore him and turn away.
‘Wake up child.’ he said again persistently. I arose to find my master alone, his face devoid of all feeling and his hands narrow and frail against the wall. His head was bowed as if in prayer.
‘Tomorrow we must leave, you will forget all you have seen here; it will exist no more in thought or conversation.’
To me he seemed old, older than he had ever appeared before, older than the marble corps reaching out at my feet, older still than Vladmir himself. What more could be done, what more could be gained from remaining within this isolated sanctuary. I began to understand my masters words, he was scared, his desire to leave sprung form his desire to exist and be rid of the guilt he felt oozing from the very same walls that lead to his creation.
How fragile he seemed to me now, no longer the infamous creature who had stolen my humanity, no longer the keeper of the cursed. The withered sheath of agony had not only captured him but had made him almost human, worse than Kabahn, whose existence he so much pitied.