There is nothing left of you. The blows given by fate have wrecked your last fragment of optimism.

Annihilation vertigo does not scare you anymore : you are as low as can be in your self-esteem.

Then it is time to be born again... Having touched the bottom, now you can get moving again. After winter and its terrible solitude it is time to open out.
A new breath of air comes to cool your forehead. You have left everything in your fall. So you have everything to gain. Naked with your chest popping up and your hands open you now feel strong enough to reach the highest summits !

All the same it is difficult not to figure out that you are slightly neurotic. Or even a complete manic-depressive ! As such you jump from the purest optimism to dive into the hardest despair and mope in it for a while.
But it is also difficult to imagine that a person in a precarious situation such as yours could have held on until now without periods of respite, without taking a breath ?
So you sometimes make as if to feel like anybody else.

You imagine yourself in a life well organised by a goal and ambitions. Routine may just set up through projects. Still, there are some relapses.

You slide down the slope of harsh melancholy and consequently, from this point, you sink into terror and despair.
Be that as it may, your demanding insight forbids you from lingering in the deluding world of sweet consolations. You can not lie, and certainly not to yourself. For the main thing is to keep a unified and sincere conscience, you say.

But those feelings are sometimes so far apart. Your morale is like a yo-yo !

Although from time to time you can not find your place and you are not worthy of anything, the world occasionally shows an ounce of kindness. And it opens its arms again to the inconsolable peevish man that you are.

You were already damned on earth. You did not feel like inheriting from society or anything whatsoever.

An affable looking vampire comes to you. He is little and very old. He politely suggests to you to go with him.

" Young friend, your journey in these caves has really afflicted you. All those forms cast on the walls sometimes take extravagant and immoderate shapes. But they are to be watched like the simple appearances of a reality, which is, well, far more banal. "

His face exudes kindness and he mothers you with compassion, asking about your health as he takes you down through a dusty wooden staircase polished by age down to an even deeper cavity.

The old little guy takes you to his retreat. It is a damp cave lit up with the flame of large silver candelabras. At the back, two elm armchairs covered in a sober way with red velvet face a big fireplace, which throws its orange wings on the surrounding relief.
With his right hand your host politely motions you to sit down.
Then begins an intimate and long conversation. You both talk about your respective lives, wanderings, dependence and chains from which you can not extricate yourselves but that you must use to build a base for living ; a liability never fulfilled that put a hard strain on life, but that nonetheless makes the deepness of a personality.

10,000 years old, your vampire friend seems to have a clear but kind view on men.

" As a reject of my kind, I have learned how to look from outside at the senseless gesticulations of my fellow vampires.

" I am not so different from them ; human blood is my necessary food. No, I am not better than they are. But I would not have the arrogance to disguise these uncontrolled instincts, this kind of hunger that makes me a beast more than an immortal, in a perfect argumentation aiming at making them the tool of some power or freedom.

" These innate powers have tormented me badly enough by the past... They condemned me to the solitude in which you find me now. But I got used to it and I kind of find it quite sweet. "

Here is one who found happiness ! And he does not deny it when you tell him. You have to take your share of misfortune and, never departed from a certain fatalism, build what you can on this precarious base.

Yet not so precarious : in life, adversity is more likely than happiness.

To build something...

You only meet this kind of person two or three times in a life time. Your friend holds your hand in his hands. He spent a very nice time in your company, time like so few of them. But you know that you have to live your life and that you must get moving.

You feel like you are going to miss the old vampire's friendship but you have to go.

On the left, the opening takes you to your fellowmen.

He takes you to two doors.

" Over this way, do not venture on hazardous paths. The Nun is so keen in tormenting the poor souls who get astray here below ! But I will disobey her this time : whichever door you choose, you will be spared. For the one on the right drink this elixir that will make you look different. "

On the right, the doorway leads to the world of bloodthirsty immortals, vampires like your host.