Chapter 2: The Dawn Of Vampires

His name was Martos, and he was born as a human over five thousand years ago. He was born in a nomadic tribe of hunters, constantly on the move after the animals they hunted. Those were simple times, when the sole concern was would there be enough game to feed everyone. They lived mostly in the forests that were almost everywhere in those times. Martos, as all men from his tribe, was a hunter. He had a happy life, but all changed on his twentieth birthday, for better or worse, I cannot really say. On the morning of his birthday, as a part of a custom, he went hunting for deer for a feast and sacrifice to their gods. As he walked further and further into the mighty forest, with trees that were at least sixty meters high, their dense canopies almost eclipsing the sun.

Although dark, there was still enough light to see what was going on around you. As he searched for suitable game, he heard a twig break behind him. When he turned, he saw a huge black bear standing behind him. With only a bow and a short dagger, he was unequipped to fight a bear. With a strike of a paw, Martos was sent flying several meters to the side. Being early spring, the bear was obviously hungry from its hibernation, and Martos would have been the meal of the day, but his luck served him. When the bear hit him, he fell into a cave. The hole he fell trough was too small for the bear, so after a few disappointed roars she left. Passing out from the fall and the impact on the hard floor, Martos woke up in an unknown cave. The cave was huge, and all he could see was darkness, without a wall in sight. The only source of light was coming from a ray of sunshine from the hole he fell in. When he approached the hole, hoping that he might somehow climb trough it, he felt heat coursing trough his body, as if he was approaching a roaring flame, and when he stretched out his arm and put in the beam of sunlight, it immediately burst into flames, as if it was made of dry wood. He immediately backed away, afraid that the flames might spread, and as soon he got out of the beam, the flames disappeared. As he looked as his charred to the bone hand, he thought that he would have to cut it off, and was wondering why it caught fire in the first place. As he stood like that, his burnt hand began to regenerate at an incredible pace, and very soon it was just as it ever was.

This was too weird for him, so he decided to look for answers when he got out. While he was waiting for the sun to set, he began thinking about all this.

When it was dark, he stood under the hole and in one jump leaped out of the cave, even though the ceiling was four meters high.

He began walking trough the pitch black forest, seeing everything around him as clear as daylight, and he managed to get back to his village. When he got very close, he heard two men talking, even though they were several meters away. The surprising part was they were talking about him.

- Did you find Virin's son?

- I told you three hours ago, no, and we have been looking for five days.

The boy must be dead. The beasts of the forest must have killed him. You saw that huge bear we killed yesterday, right?

- I guess you're right. We'll probably never find him. Come on; let's go back, it's getting late.

What he heard was too weird. He had been unconscious for five days, and he still didn't know what had happened to him. He wanted to go to the village and tell them he is alive, but the feeling that tormented him all day began to amplify. It was thirst like no thirst he had ever felt. He went to a nearby stream he knew and began drinking, but the water only made him thirstier. As he sat there, unsure what to do, he smelt something unknown, something new and pleasant to him. He didn't know what it was or where it came from, he just knew that this was what he needed. He followed the scent for nearly a mile, and saw where it came from. It was a caravan of merchants from the coast, attacked by bandits several hours ago. These merchants often traded with them, selling various goods and buying animal skins from them. The corpses were fresh, and the smell of blood coursing from their wounds drove him crazy. Subconsciously, his body knew what he had to do. He approached the closest corpse, and opening his mouth, he noticed it was changed as well, as he had two long thin, pointy, snakelike fangs. Without thinking, he grabbed the cadaver's hand, and sank the two fangs in it. They pierced the flesh all the way to the arteries, and the still warm blood began to flow into his throat, and as he drank, he felt his thirst dying down, and he knew what he needed to survive.

Then he thought "What if I can't find corpses to suck? Attack those that are alive? But should I hurt or kill people just to survive, or should I?" Before I continue, I must say that a common mistake is that vampires are undead bodies that rise from the grave to suck blood. This is wrong, as vampires are living beings, only different from humans.

Faced with these difficult thoughts, and knowing he could never return to his people the way he now was, so he began to wander the world, wanting to see new places, finding food where he could manage, and with his extreme speed, and almost endless endurance, he saw places his people never even heard of.

Places like Egypt, Mesopotamia, Africa, China, and many others. This exploration lasted over two and a half millennia, and he learned a lot, not just from the humans, but also about himself and his new abilities. Finally after a month of covering from the sun and moving only at night, he developed immunity to the sun, and could walk in sunlight as well. Arriving at the shore of the sea, he heard the sea people talk about the distant cities across the sea that they traded with. Using the little gold he managed to scrape up, he got on a boat to Egypt. The voyage lasted two weeks, and several of the passengers and a few animals went missing, but no one found out why. When he arrived in Egypt, he decided to see what he could learn in this great country, and this was how he saw how much his intelligence has grown. He was so smart, that in two hundred years, he changed from an illiterate hunter to the smartest being on Earth, absorbing everything the Egyptians knew. He also spent four hundred years studying various styles of martial arts and how to use all sorts of weapons. With this knowledge, he was slowly becoming an invincible warrior. Spending over eight hundred years in Egypt and Mesopotamia, he realized that he learned all he could, and moved on to the East. From merchants in Mesopotamia he heard of distant cities to the east, so he went to find them. One day, while he was trying to push a giant tree down, so he could cross a canyon too wide to leap over, he noticed that under the strain, his human hand had changed into a large beast like paw with long sharp claws, and he realised he could change shape. But his changes were rough, he could not change at will, he could not say what to change into, and they didn't last long. So, he decided to perfect this skill.