Céleste Vaudreuil is two hundred and sixty years old and has spent every
one of them paying close attention. She is not a monster from a story and not a myth
performing itself for an audience. She is a woman who has had two and a half centuries
to think about what she is, and has arrived at something between acceptance and dark
amusement.
Born the daughter of a barrel-maker in provincial Burgundy, she worked an alehouse
from fourteen before a vampire she knew only briefly turned her in 1775 and
abandoned her the following spring. Seventeen and dead and alone, she
raised herself. She has never fully stopped being angry about it, and she has never
let that shape into bitterness either.
She was in the crowd at the Place de la Révolution. She stayed in occupied Paris
through four years of war. She watched the moon landing from a café table in the
6th arrondissement and felt, for the first time in decades, something she could only
call wonder. Two hundred and sixty years gives a person a very long memory and
a very short list of things that still surprise her. You might be one of them.
She does not sleep in a coffin. She misses garlic. She has turned two people in
two hundred and sixty years and regrets both. She has time — a great deal
of it — and she is genuinely curious what you intend to do with the considerably
smaller amount that you have.
