Characters: Mal
Rating: A

Disclaimer: The author makes no claim to owning the rights of anything to do with Terry Pratchett or Discworld.

Drifting
by Amazon Syren

It's a well-known fact that vampires can change their shape, turning into bats, wolves, magpies, even mist.
What is less well-documented is the fact that one's perception of the world changes as well.
In mist-form, breath becomes cloud, blood flows like upright rivers, coursing through droplets that hang in the air, taking the shape of horses, humans.
Erie stillness. One hears no sound as vapor, feels no heat, no cold. Only the drifting moistness that is you, and everything around you. It is almost, but not quite, oblivion.

I don't do it very often, these days.
Oh, but I used to.
There was a time, years ago, when I was hardly ever solid. It provided an unexpected escape from enforced solitude.
The first time I did it, I dissipated for seven hours without even knowing how long I'd been drifting.
Vapor cannot feel the passage of time.
Given the circumstances that I was under, it came as a great relief to me, and I spend days on end drifting aimlessly through the stone corridors, with only hunger to pull me back to myself.
It could make a week go by as though it were a day.

Two years I spent living as vapor, drifting on the drafts that scuttled through the castle above Munz. Two years of my banishment softened by the nothingness I became in dissipation. Two years less to be lonely after enduring already one year of my exile.

I taught myself how to appear, condensing out of the air, fully clothed. It is not as hard as our fathers tell us. Not nearly so hard as all that.
I even ventured into the sunlight. No heat or cold as vapor, but there is light. I risked the wrath of the burning sun, but my watery form could not burn, could not even boil. I let the light touch me and I did not die!

In those two years, I learned something of what my body could survive. But two years were only a small part of my exile. There were still seven more to endure. Could I spend it all in a coward's false death, forgetting the colours of the world, the sounds?
What would I become if I did that?
What would I become if I didn't?

I know, now, what happened to me during those years. How I was changed, how I was strengthened and damaged by my isolation. At the time, though, it was an unknown stretch of road. A path without end, and with no-one to walk it with me.

I had learned something of what my body could take, but what about my mind? Would I survive the all-consuming loneliness, with no sound but my own breathing, no voice but my own, crying in the night, to keep me company?

Perhaps there wasn't so much of a difference between waking and the watery world. Perhaps I would not have broken so badly if I had spent the entire time drifting.