A Tragedy

A story of unanswered questions and unnatural life

When does a tragedy start?

A young man lying on the ground, with his throat torn out. What could have caused that? Teeth? My God.

Or was it earlier? Was it somewhere before this? Between birth and untimely death? Between choice and circumstance.

A young man working for men he hates. A young man taking coin from others at the tip of a blade. A young man with no other options. Drinking to forget. Turning life into a haze. Kowtowing when he would rather turn and spit. Because he needs the money. Because he can see no other options.

Can a tragedy start in life?

Earlier. Before death. Before shattered dreams. A young man full of hope and potential. A young woman seeing all of that in him. The pair of them rolling in the hay, giggling and naked. A young man sweating and thrusting.

Then, the inevitable: a young man sweating. A young man listening to angry father tell him to make his daughter an honest woman. A young man with no options but one.

Can a tragedy start with love? Or must it start elsewhere? Elsewhen? A thousand years before? Must it always start in violence and bloodshed?

Long ago. Long before the young man was born. Before his grandfather’s grandfather was born. In a valley lined with corpses. Upon a battlefield going cold. Among the dead stands a warrior bereft of victory. A warrior betrayed. A warrior forsaking his God. A warrior cursed to wander in darkness forever, with an unquenchable thirst.

How long can a tragedy continue?

The warrior perches on a rooftop framed by the moon. The warrior looking down at a street drenched in filth and poverty. The warrior looking down on a young man counting money he didn’t earn. Who will miss this man, he asks himself? Who will come looking for him?

The warrior descends. He opens his mouth. He tears out a young man’s throat with his teeth.

Is a tragedy always a confluence? A meeting point of chance and misfortune?

The young man’s wife just wants him to come home. Her husband has always been too proud, she thinks, too certain that coin is the only way for them to find happiness. She wishes he would come home. That he would spend time with her. With their daughter. She wishes he would understand that she doesn’t want him to walk the path he’s on.

This is the night she chooses to tell him this. To beg him to come home.

This is the night she finds a warrior bent over him with a mouth full of blood.

Are tragedies simply unfinished stories? Potential erased? All hope of redemption eliminated?

A young man lying on the ground, his throat torn out. A warrior’s feeding interrupted. A clean finish denied. A young woman fleeing.

Perhaps a more pressing question: when does a tragedy end?

A young man sits up when he shouldn’t. A young man is infected with life. He is vigorous and virile, and full of desire than can barely be satiated. He wants so much. He wants to take life by the throat and drink from the source. He feels so much more capable of doing that than he ever has before. He feels like nothing can kill him.

I wish I could tell you that his wife and daughter survive this transformation. I wish I could tell you that their stories diverge here, and that they walk paths that climb toward the sun.

But this is a tragedy. And the young man has a thirst that cannot be quenched.

Is a tragedy a loop? An inescapable repetition?

The young man seeks his sire. He confronts the warrior. He has heard tales of the creature he has become. He knows he is powerful. He is eager to become in death what he never became in life. For dark castles in darker mountains. For women who serve at his feet. For riches and luxury.

The warrior sees a cycle repeating, his own story doubled. He offers no answers. He flees.

Is a tragedy inescapable?

A hundred years pass. Another. And the young man has no riches. He has no dark castles. No attendant women.

He has sleepless nights and silent days spent huddled in scavenged shelter. He has to flee like vermin before those who find him out. He has to fear the sun and the stake.

Death has not brought him power, only more life. Endless. Relentless.

He misses his wife. He weeps for his daughter.

Is a tragedy dashed hopes?

He seeks out his sire. If he kills the old warrior, he asks, will he be set free?

But the old warrior welcomes his ire. His thirst for vengeance. The warrior is tired and cold.

The tragedy—he tells the young man when their dance is done and he is dying—is that they never truly understood the life that is now finally leaking from him. They sought it in victories. They sought it in coin. In women. In blood. In dominance. That, he says, choking on the blood that seems to pour endlessly from him, was never where it lay.

Is a tragedy hanging a solution just out of reach? Is it a young man slaughtering the man who could the answer the question that has plagued him all his life? Is it a young man knowing that he is the architect of all his woes, but not knowing how to change?

Is the real question: how does a tragedy end?

Perhaps like this. Perhaps with a young man, out of hope, sitting on a rooftop, simply waiting for the sun to rise.