[Name:] Anselina Faa
[Gender:] Female
[Age:] One Thousand Four Hundred Ninety One (1,491 Born 516 AD)
[Apparent Age:] 25
[Place of Birth:] Constantinople, Byzantine
[Species:] Vampire
[Coven:] Amman
[Appearance:] Born near the beginning of the travels of the Romani people, Anselina carries much of the origin of India in her appearance. However, she is no exotic beauty. More handsome than beautiful, it is the way that the woman carriers herself – the aura that she exhibits – that draws others to her than her physical attributes. Appearing mysterious amuses her and she tries to uphold the image as much as possible.
A head of typical black hair falls about a face of distinct strong lines, giving one a small glimpse at the subtly headstrong woman that Anselina has become. Her skin still holds some of its dark brown texture, but has underlying lightened to a softer, milkier shade, having paled by the trademark fairness known in her species. The distinction is not as prominent as in those of lighter skinned races, which makes it slightly easier for her to blend in… at least in that retrospect.
In other aspects, she will always remain an abnormality. Something does not quite settle right when you look at her -- beyond the fact that she is undead. Despite her strong and very up-front temperament, she will never look another in the eye. However, it is not intended as a cheek. Her eyes -- once a deep hue of brown -- are filmed over, even misted. Anselina is quite blind and even the abilities gained to a Vampire could not repair her vision.
When in the Coven or about on her own accord, Anselina tends to favor robes and headdresses, or long skirts, to anything else; falling back on her original way of life. If she is feeling particularly rambunctious on a given day she will rebelliously wear pants. However, she never wears anything shorter than ankle length, having grown up with the belief of it being improper and unclean for a woman to bear her legs in public. When in highly human populated areas, she reduces herself to wearing that of common fashions… sometimes … though she has little love for them. Style had never been a big thing with Anselina. After all, she couldn’t see the fashions, so why bother? But the robes are comfy and give a decent breeze when she wants it.
[Talents:] Anselina has the abilities and weaknesses of any typical member of the Amman Coven. While not necessarily stronger, her talents tend to be more refined than the average coven member. One might point out that they do not understand the difference and she would calmly inform such a person that one could be the strongest vampire in the world, but if that power cannot be controlled and harvested, it is useless. She will not be considered the most powerful vampire in any regard, but what she does have she controls well. Trapped in the confines of her mind Anselina has had to use everything at her disposal to make up her loss of vision. Her very existence depended on it.
She can move objects freely with her mind, such as opening doors so she does not have to search for a handle, or calling in a gown so that she does not have to scramble sightless looking for it. She can communicate freely mentally and has learned how to manipulate lesser minds to bend towards her will depending on the strength of the person. Possibly a unique adaption as a result of her lack of sight, she can mentally gain a relative feeling of her surroundings; what is in it and a general area of where. If, for example, an individual enters a room she can reasonably track them. If that individual is a vampire, she can usually gauge how powerful that individual is. But this is, of course, limited and being blind still leaves her at a great disadvantage, making her more vulnerable than most.
It is said that she does not have a reflection in a mirror; trivial rubbish as far as Anselina is concerned. If she has the definition right, a reflection is a portrayal of you reflecting back at yourself. Well then, she never really had one then, did she? If she could not see it, it was never there and she does not miss it. However, she does fall into a coma-like state during the day, which has already proved almost fatal many times in her past. She is also extremely sensitive to flame to the point where she will not enter a room with an active fireplace ... whether this is due to actual sensitivity or engrained fear, it is hard to say. She certainly is too proud to shed light on the subject. Her livelihood requires her to feed from fresh and live blood. Usually her vampiric aides are advantageous in her conquest, yet, even so, she occasionally ends up with a very sour meal. Food can taste as bad as it looks, and it is even worse when one cannot use this precursor to their advantage before one takes a bite.
[History:] Much of what made up whom and what I knew the world to be has been lost. My memory runs deep but its vaults are vast and much eludes me until specifically called upon. Only the highlights remain in the foremost of my mind, and those are that which I would rather have forgotten. But even those are frayed at the seams and may not completely tell the story I am about to undertake in full. I have learned in my time on this planet that there is very little understanding between those who rely on their eyes to perceive the world and those that do not. The distance is unreachable; for one who sees the world through physical means has a much different understanding than one who must seek other aids. But I shall try.
The tale begins and ends with a race of people called the Romani. It is a name that I believe can still be recalled on the tongues of current aged Mortals -- today, we are worldlier known as ‘Gypsies’, a term that began long ago with the Egyptians that traveled beyond their borders. It disturbs me greatly in finding that it is now attached to my people, to be generalized to a term used loosely and generically in describing any wander of the land. We are the Romani, not contraband gypsies, but the distinction seems lost. As the ages progressed, the world’s inhabitants grow more and more strange and so, once again, I am forced to accept change.
The Romani, as I knew us to be, were indeed a traveling people (forced out of our home in the land you now call India) that embarked upon an adventure that would soon turn into a way of life. This was roughly sixteen years before I was born, for those who care about such recordings of time, and by the time of my birth, many customs had already been set. Many of which I was privy to in my raising. We were nomadic by nature, but not the uncivilized folk that today’s standards might make us to be. With the collapse of the Roman Empire, it was better to roam than fighting endlessly over chucks of land in a chaos of disease and despair. But as I will tell you, even wandering feet did not save us in the end. We lived in the wagons that we traveled upon with the closest of our families, for we believed much in such unity. My father was a great man; very respected by the other Romani families that we traveled with. My mother was a great woman, whom all the other wives looked to for help. She was an undeclared matriarch by any principle among the woman though none would admit so. It was improper to see a woman as a leader.
It is with great woe that I should have cursed this ideal couple with my birth.
When I was brought into this world in Five Hundred Sixteen, my life would prove difficult in a time where the odds were against even the healthiest of neonates. A time declared as ‘The Dark Ages’. Such a peculiar title. I can quite clearly recall the golden warmth of the sun on my face when I was alive. It was not constantly dark. It is a name that might be more fitting to my current life style. My opinion, however, may be irrelevant. I have never seen the world around me, never laid eyes on what most say the world is made of, for I was born without sight. Today, this disease is called LCA, or Leber Congential Amurosis. At the time we did not know this and could only defend the act as a will of Devel. Why our god would do so to such a good man and a woman was baffling to say the least, but who were we as mere mortals to question such a will?
I was born in the highly populated and commercial city of Constantinople. Here my family stayed, performing dances and mending pots until I was four, for the life of a traveler was perilous even for one of full ability. They wished to lessen the chance of death by staying in a standing community. Those we ventured with stayed with us out of loyalty. When it proved that I would not die we were quick to move on and did so far before the city fell.
The rest of my younger life was spent inside the wagon, learning what I could of daily chores and life. Still, for the most part, I relied heavily on my parents. I became a burden to them. My blindness was a caused for great discomfort. The only aid I truly presented was in playing the part of a fortune teller for those who believed we held such talents. It was a good source of income when we took time to visit cities.
It was for these reasons that I was at a full, and beyond ripe, age of sixteen before my parents found a suitable husband for me to marry. I had experienced few acquaintances with men over the years, all of course had been chaperoned -- as is proper when an unmarried young woman in the presence of an unmarried man. After such useless excursions they had at last found a man willing to take on the burden of caring for a disabled wife. He soon had me tucked safely under his roof with a reward of a bride price from his parents to mine.
Luca was a great man and I was timid to bear children for him, but he was willing to lay with me, even though the product from such might end up with my curse. I cared greatly for Luca. While we never would experience the ties of love as others might, we were fond of each other, and he readily took the criticism of having a woman such as me sharing his bed. Only one child ever did come of the marriage and not until I had aged five years in his wagon. We were fearful that a child would never result from our bonding. We came together late and a child at 25 was unheard of. At last, a beautiful baby boy came of the union, and from what reassurance I could gather from Luca, he had full capability of his eyes. But, alas, the joy was briefly shared indeed.
While we Romani tried to stick to ourselves as much as possible and venture into the populated areas whenever least achievable, it was hard to avoid the war and turmoil that claimed the Lands. As it were, happening upon a party of rouges was inevitable. I could not recall much of this. Just the ear racking sound of hoofs pounding, the laughter of men as vile as their smell, a baby’s cry, and Luca yelling. I was so scared that I could not have run even if the choice had not availed me. And where could I have gone? How far could I have managed to go? The ring of steel had filled the air, and then I could no longer hear Luca.
Later I would come to know that only a few women from the other wagons and I had survived. I had never crossed paths with men such as these. They were brutal and spoke strangely with the accents of Gaul. I had not realized that we had traveled into that territory. They were brutal and the leader treated me with a harshness I had never known before. He seemed to find my condition entertaining. It was for this reason that I believe my life was spared. Those of the women that did not meet their wills and wishes were killed. The rest of us were bound and placed in one of our own wagons and carted off. The excitement was too much for me. I was in shock. When it did sink in, and I realized my family was gone, I fainted.
When I awoke, I could no longer hear the creaking of the wagon and I felt something soft beneath me. A moment later and I realized it was a bed. It was not my own. A vile smell hung in the air. The bed was wet with sweat not my own. That was when I realized there was a naked body lying next to mine. I panicked and screamed and a hand clamped around my mouth. The sweaty body climbed on top of me and told me I was his prize. I screamed, kicked, protested with all my might, but nothing could stop what he prepared himself to do. Another man laughingly held me down while it happened. When they had their way, they threw me into the hall; a bruised, limp, and bloody mess.
I did not know the house I was in and I could not navigate it. I crawled into the middle of the room and stayed there in a small huddled ball wrapped in a blanket I found on a chair. Not moving, I remained in this fetal position long into the night; listening to the men’s continued laugher and longer still, even after their voices had died away. I felt violated; more defiled than anything else in my life. I could not make myself move, nor wished to.
After a long time, in the depths of the night, I heard someone enter the building that I was held in. Nay, I did not hear for whomever it was moved so lightly that I could not detect their foot falls. But I could feel the person was there. Knew it as well as I knew that I was breathing. Petrified I knew the intruder moved past me and then was gone. Sharp cries range from the room the vile men were in and then all was silent again. Suddenly I felt hands upon me. I had not even sensed that someone had been before me. Instinct told me to scream, but I was too scared. After a moment, I realized the hands were not trying to probe beneath the blanket, but had simply rested on my shoulder. A hand much colder than I had ever felt before. Softly a male voice reached out to me; pleading for silence and asking me if I was hurt. I did not speak, did not dare to. But something in his voice made me relax and calmed me. It was rich and textured, full of a depth that came with age. As if sensing my relaxing apprehension, the man took my hands into his cold ones and put them on his face, offering an invitation for me to see him. What I found startled me. His voice alluded to an older man, but I could find not a wrinkle upon his face, a face that was as cold as his hands. After this inspection, I found myself trusting this man; as if a voice in the back of my head had told me to do so.
He soothed me for a while longer and called me by name, telling me that if I was to escape I should come with him now. I questioned how he knew my name and he told me he was a friend of my mother. Hesitation smuggled its way back in and then he began to speak in my native tongue, making it slipped away like winter being frisked away by spring. Reflecting now, it was unexplainable as to why I trusted him so.
With my consent, he carried me away. Moving with much more grace and speed I would have thought of any man burdened with a woman’s weight. He carried me for a long time, talking as he did so, until I felt a sudden shift in the temperature. There was dampness in the air and I could hear water dripping. A cave. It would make a safe hideaway if the men came looking and would keep him from harm when the sun came out. Then he explained that I was with child from the Vile Man and would birth it. I did not ask how he knew; I simply gave a sob of despair. There was hesitation in the man’s voice as he told me he owed my mother a blood debt. He told me there was a way to not birth the baby. Then he explained what he was.
I spent a good hour contemplating, weighing everything. For, it sounded very much like becoming a Caxano, or a member of “the living dead”, even though he said this was much different. I therefore was presented with a choice, to take his offer and become forevermore banished from my people, or bear the child. Then I decided. He made me as he was.
What proceeded proved to be the hardest three weeks of my life, or rather the hardest three weeks of my Not life. The beginning of my time as one of the undead. While I had been merely hours with my captor’s seed, it took a harsher toll than anyone might have expected. My sire, Andrezej, did not believe I would survive the transformation. I had been discretely sick before, a fact Andrezej had failed to realize until the process was irreversible. And with a beaten body that was now also trying to reject the fertilization of a child… the odds were not looking good. But with vigilant feeding and delicate care I survived and gained strength.
My sire and I did not tarry for long. We left the land now known as France and to that which is called England today. However, not all was as well as we would have hoped when we arrived. He had a home that a family of commoners cared for him, but he had not seen it in many years.
The home was still in good condition. Three generations of mortals had passed beneath its roof since my sire left but they had kept it well. Here we abided doing our best to live discretely as possible. Andrezej told me of a life full of adventure, different tales of trips he had been on and dangerous stunts he had pulled. I thought hard about how he now insisted that we stay in one place. Over the years I could not help but wonder why he would wish such when he craved such activities. My heart knew it was because of me and I wondered just how much a debt he owed to my mother. I never did ask him. I regret that now.
We stayed here during the wars with the Anglo-Saxons, very discreetly hiding our appearances when we ventured out at night. This tranquility lasted three hundred years, until late 700 AD, or early 800, my memory is still hazy of this and therefore I cannot exactly remember. But the Anglo-Saxons war had long been diminished, replaced now by those called the Vikings. Yet another raiding and pillaging group of mortals. I have long learned that the main goal of humans seems only to kill each other, whereas I needed their blood to survive and preferred not to sacrifice life. Humans are a race that those who live by night need to be wary of, as they are a dumb and violent creature, a fact that was reinforced when a raiding party came to our town.
Their goal was the Monastery, but the people fought them, an event that happened during the day when my Sire and I were indisposed, unconscious completely to the world around us. The town put up a fight and some supreme being must have been looking over us as the Vikings did not start burning the village until night began to fall. We woke to the smell of burning wood and our flesh searing from the heat. It was burning down around us. My nose was filled with the smell of ashes, my skin burning from the wave of the heat, the fire roaring in my ears. I was helpless.
Andrezej was there. He picked me up and I could feel the tension in his arms as he waded through the house trying to find a way out. Then suddenly I was being tossed out of the burning home and into the cooling night air. I figured that he had thrown me to give him more movably to escape as well. I had never been so wrong in either of my lives. An agonizing scream pierced the air, but I could not return to get him, for I would surely share the same fate. He had taken that brief moment to save me when he could have otherwise saved himself. I kept from going back to the man I never really knew, or else his sacrifice would have been for nothing. But I will never forget that scream.
Unwilling to face the world, I slept then and remained asleep for another 400 hundred years, finding the world much changed when I came back. The Vikings and Anglo-Saxons were a thing of the long past and great Kings had risen into being in the land of England; foremost of them being that of Tudor and his scandalous line. The Roman Empire was a forgotten memory and a Catholic church bearing its name was being rebelled against.
For most of this, I remained a passive listener. I took in the worldly events, kept an ear on the wars, and even made some appearances around mortals, dressed in showy robes and veils to hide what I was. I took up the occupation of old, playing off as a ‘gypsy’ fortune teller, and made coin to survive in this new world. I did not hate these humans, and I kept to my oath of not to kill, but I was forever more weary; realizing in full that they rose up against anything that seemed a threat to them. Vampires, as the name of my race now seemed to be called, surely classified on that list, and I had experienced enough destruction to be in bad taste.
Even so, I turned more inward, for as I aged I began to realize that the capacity of my mind went far beyond what it had once been. I learned that I could use it to gather information about my surroundings. Nothing would fully replace the loss sense of my vision, but I seemed to have gained a new one specialized to my needs. I could not see my surroundings but I could feel them. In this way I found my eyes. The more I explored, the more I found I could do, and ever since then I have been honing the ability. Without my sire I had to survive on my own. It was either learn or die.
The world slowly began to change around me. The air became thick with smoke and loud machines, as they called them, groaning and croaking and coughing. The humans around me slowly began to forsake their individual talents and went to work in buildings called factories, were things were produced in mass. New lands had been discovered and these mortals were crossing the seas to venture off to them. For with this new world of – industry – there also came new losses and strife and they hoped for a better life.
I eventually went with them, after hearing two men talking about the lands called the ‘Americas’ and the opportunities that it could offer. This land, now as a whole called Europe and Asia, held too many memories, too much to recall. So I waited a hundred more years or so, to the time called the sixteenth century, and took a ship to this Promised Land of theirs.
Here I resided briefly in the region known as Massachusetts and the town called Salem. But, woe, my timing was horrible. Towards the end of the century, a group of girls began claiming that they were being possessed by ‘witches’ and a number of the women in this town were burnt at the stake or hung. I had to further hide myself and stay secluded even at night. But that was not enough. Up until this point I had managed to make it seem that I had been a woman living in a cottage with a daughter. At this point ‘I’ had long passed away and was now playing the role of my ‘daughter’. But that was not enough to force passed their suspicion. The town grew uneasy, whispers grew that I was a witch that did spells at midnight; for I was only ever glimpsed in the dark of night. Eventually, I had a group of the village at my door with torches and pitchforks. I fled.
I had mastered enough of my mind abilities to create quite a show for them before I did. It was better for them to think me a ‘witch’ then to find out the true nature of myself.
While I left that region, I still resided in the Colonies as they were referred, up until war shuddered on the doorstep once more. Mortals had found another reason to fight and had picked those I had known for hundreds of years as enemies. Those from the same Country that I had lost my sire to. They called it a ‘revolution’, but I knew better. Unwilling to be among human massacring again, and perhaps becoming a victim of it, I fled again, this time north to a slightly less populated land and a friendlier one. The land called Canada.
This is how I came to Demaitre. Not to long after the city was officially recognized as such. And this is where I have remained ever since. But this story did not end with my arrival. For while I might have escaped the vexation of mortal woes, my entrance was pursued by a war between my own kind, a war I knew, that had the potential to be fatal. It was between Covens, cabals up until this point in time that I had managed to avoid, but now could no longer avoid. Such reckless activities would draw the attention of mortals. Mortals whom I knew could wreck much havoc on my kind. So when Marcus appeared with the Amman, I supplied my skills and knowledge of Demaitre to help them. When peace was once more restored, I was offered sanctuary within the Amman Coven and never really left. A part of me had always believed that that had been the idea.
There are much more dramatic stories than mine, much more tragic, much more exciting. But mine is what it is, and I have seen and been through enough with it to be satisfied. But I have also forgotten much and so this story remains full of holes and gaps as I did forewarn you. But it is the story of Anselina Faa.
