Incarnadine_prologue By Konstantin Kuzmanov

PROLOGUE:

In a Time of Silence

T

here is in my mind even now a single and horrible image that never leaves my thoughts: the empty cross, that

symbol of the Immortal Adversary’s primacy over the fetid tumescence of sinew and flesh. It does me no comfort to consider that this wretched ornament of servitude is thought lovely by millions of my onetime species, for it is their devotion to such icons of their indenture that besets me and that I have striven to escape from, and even to reverse. Hold a crucifix before me, with the Adversary’s effigy pinned to it

the way an entomologist might pin a beetle-bug before dissection, and my joy is unbounded. The Foe is imprisoned. Harmless. Constrained to partake by some small measure in the unrestrained suffering He has meted out to others in their billions down the blood-soaked ages. The vacated cross is another matter: God’s malevolent parlor magic made manifest, with all His grim trickeries revealed, enlarged and set like traps before the weak and thoughtless hordes who would rather writhe for a lifetime in His appalling grasp than taste the crisp and terrifying atmosphere of a single un-poppetted breath. Transfigured by some squalid vision of religious ecstasy, with hymnals to the benevolence of his Cruel Master deafening him, and puerile candy-colored phantasms of some fictive and invisible reward blinding his sight, the man who brandishes so profane an object is not the religious warrior of his own imaginings but a slave who kisses his chains. I shrink from this man, but not from his alleged and self-awarded sanctity, for he has none. I shrink instead from the vacancy on that uninhabited cross, an emblem of my own failure in a centuries-old war yet to be concluded. He has escaped me. What raw red mischief is He working somewhere? And who is to die this time for His unquantifiable sins?

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Incarnadine

I have traveled the world from end to edge and am older than forests. Men, of the sort I was once but am no longer, have spent centuries trying to finish me in ways both direct and imaginative, and I have faced unnumbered perils by spear and sword and gun and bow. The blades that bit deep into my body, bullets that cleaved my skin and organs and tissues then passed harmless by, images seared into my eyes of man’s viciousness toward innocent others—few of these things have left more than a glancing mark upon my mind and heart. Of a thousand-thousand horrors ingested, it is the vacated cross that preeminently haunts my dreams. My struggle against that unholy artifact now reaches for its decisive moment, and while many of my actions have not gone unspoken of, the Adversary’s minions have too frequently been my interlocutors. I am named Demon, Usurper, the Unconsecrated and Dread Prince. Peasant mystery stories accrue to me, heightening my depravities, clovening my hoof. And so the fetid odor of a grave I have eluded and taught others to evade scents my every gesture, a befouled and manufactured atmosphere that transmogrifies my one unquestioned accomplishment into something like its opposite, and sends those I might reach for across the mortal abyss scurrying from my hand—rushing for the shameful magic of ritual, crucifix, and prayer. I alone have perpetrated the one offense the Adversary abides least of all. I alone have conspired successfully to end God’s monopoly on time. In the indeterminate twilight of our pitiless campaign, the Wiley Foe may yet triumph against me, and my foundering offensive end in rout and ignominy. Against that outcome, I leave behind this testament, that fair-minded creatures of another time may see past

R. H. Greene

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my own imperfections as an insurrectionist and judge me by my motives and true deeds. Whether this is to be the final diary of a greater emancipation than the world has yet known of, or the object lesson of a defeat to rival bright Lucifer’s, can only be revealed in the fullness of a time yet to come. But that time draws near. And so I set down this story of a reluctant and fretful Spartacus and his inconceivable sufferings, that others unborn may take what is usable or consoling for their own skirmishes against the Great Antagonist out of the raw stuff of my pitiable and unachieved life. I set this down freely, of my own will and by my own hand, and avow that everything contained herein is true and factual, however incredible the exterior details may appear. - Konstantin Kuzmanov, nee “Dracula” London, Tuesday 4th October, 1887