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Ghouls were more incautious than humans, new vampires moreso yet. Old vampires took a downswing, and at the age of around a century dipped below the human in indexed rashness. The rage, the passions that were added and subtracted to make a predator out of an omnivore, a demon out of mortal clay... Mason pondered. She wondered if she'd ever be able to ask for this change. It was clearly wrong. She knew that now, beyond doubt. Yet she felt such a sense of loss at the thought of going on as she was, age upon age; and even moreso if she were to leave Miss Semingsworth and return to ... what? Life? The quotidian, Mason thought. There was a name for it... quotidian life. The thought choked her. No, she didn't have to return. But to ask to progress... further into the yawning void she saw so clearly... only at the deepest level could Mason acknowledge that she wanted this. Not to ask for it, but to cage the desire. Lock it up but know it is there, it is an ever present danger.
Thinking yet not thinking, she wrote:
Beast
Cold and aloof, the moon and planets. So distant in the sky of the night.
They cannot see us here on earth; when those few of us venture up there, in the heavens,
They speak among themselves if they notice,
"How tiny, how warm," indeed.
Inside each a core of molten metal, a raging beast. Quakes, shifting plates, and volcanos erupt,
Magma rockets to the surface, the beast escapes. Not for long, but inevitably.
No one blames a planet for having a volcano.
They look at us, so tiny and warm, our cores hardly warmer than our skin;
They say, what place have such as those to erupt? No reason. No need.
Oh, for the license of a planet. For the pressure to be so great that I could let off steam,
And fire, and burning scalding rain of molten rock upon the plains.
For now, I twist in my cage, bite at the bars, rage at the heavens
That deny me all, and press for my own ascendance to the sky, carried in her heart.
Mason looked at what she'd written... thoughtfully pensive a few moments... then ripped it to shreds and dumped them in the wastebasket. Back to work, and the computer had begun printing out results already. How much time had elapsed? Nearly an hour, she hadn't realized it had been so long. No more of that daydreaming, she thought. Work. Leave the poetry and sentimental stuff to Aela and her friends.