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On moonlit nights much like this one he likes to take a walk down the poplar lined road from his cottage to the old graveyards by the abandoned estate. The actual fields are still in use, owners (an off-shot of the Voorhis family, he believes) still operating the place, albeit as a business rather then a manor. But of course it is not their estate, as a such things are counted among mortals anyway, not in the sense that it is a living place they treasure. It is an investment, bought at auction as the last owner died childless in battle.
(He has seen his tomb, the gaudy but impersonal headstone commissioned by distant uninterested relatives, an empty cenotaph as the body had never been recovered from Brenna)
Regis has always had a penchant for graveyards, finds them fascinating in fact, as does many of his kin. Humans commonly misunderstand this, mistake vampires for undead akin to ghouls and ghosts, returning to their graves before the crock of a crow. But rather, it is stories and mysteries that intrigue his kind and graveyards hold the key to the deepest and most frightening (and thus interesting) mystery of all.
For an immortal being, mortality is the most peculiar thing of all. A mystery beyond mysteries, a threat that’s simultaneously alluring and obscene.
Mortals (and Regis has known many mortals) think they fear death when in truth they accept it, long for it, yearn for it and throw themselves towards it with abandon. Those who know them are left behind (but not for long, in many cases).
And there are interesting people buried here! He passes by another faded tombstone, eyes tracing the inscription. This one is a matriarch he knows, dead less then a century, multiple generations as humans count it. A noble lady who’s husband died early, who protected and defended her family through thick and thin, the rise and falls of emperors and usurpers.
(The brown-haired archer adjusts her hair moodily, scowling at the witcher all while Regis happily prepare the bandages for whatever scrap they’d gotten themselves into. A mother-figure, unwillingly so, a voice of reason and righteous anger alike.)
There is another one over there, older but similar to the first one, a young scion of the family gone to war, unclear against whom, and who’s bleached and boiled bones were interred here.
War is another mortal habit he occasionally has to ponder. Why risk so much for so little? Fighting for yourself or for your family his kind understands, but nations, rulers, ideology?
(I’m not Nilfgaardian, says the boy beneath dark locks and darker lashes, as if his identity was up to him and him alone. Regis does not correct him, even though he himself has long since found acceptance and even amusement in the incorrect beliefs mortals have about him. Let the boy rage against a world that seeks to slot him neatly into place.)
The graves go on and on. You can track the family’s fortunes by the headstones, big and gaunty and ostentatious when times were good, small and made from reused material when times were hard. This one here is the smallest of them all, belonging to a baby girl, gone before her time.
(I can handle myself ‘Nuncle, says the girl with a rakish smile and disappears out of the kitchen into the rare Toussaintese snowfall. Of course you can, he wants to shout after her, but can the duchy handle you?)
The main building of the estate is not actually that old, he knows. When he negotiated the rent for his small cottage with the groundskeeper, he’d been told some of its story. It was built but forty years past, during the penultimate generation of owners after the previous building was destroyed in a fire. You can actually see the remnants of it in the staircases and some of the stonework, late 10th century ashlar blocks with early 12th century fired bricks on top.
(Fire, fire, everything is fire, he’s been burned before but not like this, oh no not like this, fire not just on the skin and clothes but inside and everywhere and every sensation is pain and his flesh his melting off his hands and then-)
He shakes his head. It’s late and somewhere an owl is hotting, warning its prey that this night is death. It dark now as he continues his walk and a mortal man would have a hard time to navigate between the graves without a torch, standing in rows like megaliths left by the ancients, text unreadable or inscrutable. Why, here’s a family tomb, several generations of servants to the estate. Having come from far and wide to serve only to die here, in the middle of the Alban countryside.
(Five riders rode up to Stygga castle and only one rode back. Regis, who was not him, would later hear how he had fallen to an angry mob in a pitiful yet fitting end, dying as he had oft prophesied to protect people from monsters. The fact that the man had turned up alive again had almost made him cry, lying weak on his sickbed.)
Ah but here is a real rarity, he thinks. A small but well crafted tomb, all but hidden behind an aggressively blooming rosebush. This is a work, he know, commissioned by someone working of real grief rather than the dreary comeuppance of nobility. A child, no, a lover, someone who’s loss makes them all but mad with grief.
(Mortals will use the term ‘felt like losing a part of themselves’ as a metaphor for loss. For Regis there is nothing metaphorical about it; Detlaff was a part of him or rather he was a part of Detlaff, held together by blood, that most fundamental of all things. He misses Detlaff like a cripple misses his lost leg, arm and eye, a constant phantom pain that reaches far beyond rationality, that he just wants to crawl up and cradle his nonexistent body.)
Maybe, he thinks as he stands and dusts himself off, trying desperately to avoid the ache in his heart, that is why he has a fondness for graveyards. Unlike his kind, mortals have ways to process grief, are forced into it by the very circumstances of their existence. For his kind it is anathema and by breaking this most ultimate of taboos he has sealed his fate as to forever being an outcast.
But then again, he thinks and lets the scents fill his nostrils as he thinks of the friends left behind, aren’t outcasts the most interesting people of all?