TARQUINIUS
O lion, endure the unendurable with enduring heart; No man does wrong and shall not pay the penalty.
| The Basics
Name: Tarquinius Contiello, Quin for short. Species: Vampire Height: Approx. 6′ Language: For the moment, only knows Antiquated Latin/broken English. General Personality Traits: Painstakingly Quiet; Deathly Loyal; Often Melancholy; Brooding. |
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The Beginning || Humanity
You’ve no doubt heard the tales of the gladiators. You’ve heard of Spartacus and the grueling battles he fought against the Roman elite. I am not Spartacus. But I was there. I lurked in the background while my leader urged us onwards. He gave us our freedom back, even if it was for a short amount of time. He was a revolutionary; or he ought to be called so in the modern sense. I will not bore you with the arduous details. |
I was born in 101BC, a boy on the island of Corsica. As natives, and as a captive state of the Roman Republic, my family and I hadn’t the rights of the Roman patricians, nor were we even given the rights of the plebeians. We weren’t even considered citizens until the reign of Julius Caesar. But it didn’t matter.
By the time Julius Caesar became dictator in 46BC, I was already a slave. All my life I had an explosive temper, and when I was fourteen years old I was caught up in a pointless argument with my brother. A Roman soldier watched as the two of us wrestled each other to the ground. Of course, I came out victorious—but that pointless argument proved to be the point at which my fate was decided.
The Roman soldier senses in me a great talent and a great strength. He took me as a slave, and it was his perfect right to do so. He taught me the art of battle; how to fight with both hand and sword. Not once did he tell me why, though I had some idea.
When I was eighteen years old he sold me for a pretty penny. I became a gladiator; a swarthy fighting machine created only for the entertainment of the masses. For a while I was a favourite, and I was hailed Tarquinius—I reminded them of the Etruscan King who had taught their race so much.
I was glad Spartacus decided to revolt when he did—else I would have been forced to face him, sooner or later. I doubt I would have lived by his hands. But would I have preferred death, even if I would have considered myself too young at the time? I still do not know.
I followed Spartacus. I wanted freedom for my people. My people had become those gladiators I fought beside and the slaves of whose ranks I had once been a member. For three long years we struggled and fought. Although we lost many of our comrades, our army continued to grow. We were becoming a formidable force and the Romans would stop at nothing to quell our influence. Never did we consider ourselves invincible, but at least we harbored a hope of success.
It was a dreadful mistake to take that path through the Apennines. The Romans sent a mighty force against us and it drained us to the last dregs of our energy to fight them back. At first we thought we would make it through; that we had sufficiently proven our strength so the Romans would need to regroup and take their time to try again. We were wrong, however. The next army sent against us was mightier than the last, its soldiers more numerous. Spartacus, our great leader, was killed—the rest was confusion.
That day was my last day of normal humanity. I was ready to die for the cause of which I had joined. I was ready to follow Spartacus into the afterlife. I was not given the chance, however. I’d thought I was hallucinating; that I’d hit my head or had lost too much blood. Earlier a Roman soldier had broken through my defenses and his sword had slashed my leg. I was weakened to the worst extent, but I’d had worse injuries in the past.
But I thought I must have been at least a little delirious, for a beautiful woman stepped out from the shadows of the forest; she wore only a white toga, her ebony hair like silk and reaching to her waist. Her eyes were of the most luminous blue I’d ever seen and her skin was a smooth, marble white. I wanted only to protect her, to keep her from the merciless hands of the Roman elite. Within her eyes was a look of pure urgency and she lured me back into the shadows from whence she had come. It was as if she had thrown a rope around my waist and was pulling me into the darkness—I am quite certain that if I had tried to resist, my attempts would have been futile.
The Middle || Purgatory
I do not remember where the woman led me or how I finally ended up in the darkness. But I woke to a severe pain in my leg and a dull ache at the nape of my neck. There was no light; not even a glimmer of it. My fingers, thick with dried blood and dirt tried to explore the sensitive area at my neck but I found no untoward wounds; nothing big or life threatening. I tried to move but could only manage a stiff, one legged crawl.
Out of the darkness there came a low, whispering laugh; it chilled me to the bone but warmed every other sense. I knew it to be the woman who’d lured me from the battlefield; my urges fought one against the other—the desperate urge to flee and the desperate urge to see once again her glimmering face. I had only one alternative. I could not flee if I could not walk, and if I could not even see where I was going.
I was kept in that darkness for what seemed an age. At certain hours there was an eerie glow which filtered throughout my abode—only enough so that I could determine that I was kept in a cave. During these ‘daylight’ hours I circled my rocky confines, fingers slowly and achingly caressing each wall, looking for a way out. It was all to no avail. The only thing I did find she aided me was a small pool of ice-cold, fresh water in the corner. I will always consider that little pool of water my spring of immortality.
And when the complete darkness fell, she came to me. I was blind and couldn’t resist her. And by this stage I was certain the wound in my leg was infested; there was nothing I could do about it. And each time she came I was lost to her charms; her angelic voice as it whispered in my ear, the silken feel of her hair as it fell through my fingers, her cold, hard skin which was so wrong but so right at the same time. She was my marble goddess, and she smelt of roses.
Each night, she devoured me with kisses; each night, the pain in my neck grew worse and my general stamina ebbed. I was dying, and there was naught I could about it.
Soon enough I couldn’t even gather the energy to move. I lay huddled in a shivering ball in the corner with the spring. Even when she appeared out of the darkness, I couldn’t rouse myself to respond to her whispers. It was then that she told me it was time; that I’d lasted longer than she’d expected; that I’d passed her ‘tests’ and could now be welcomed into their circle.
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