Vampire flash fiction - The Moon and the Cherry Tree

This is the second of four flash fiction pieces I have written specifically for my Halloween Spooktacular!

A flash fiction is a short piece of work, normally around 1000 words long. It's pretty much a single short scene. All of my flash fics this weekend are based in my Vampires Realm world.

This time we're gaining a little insight into one of my favourite (and yours apparently) Vampires Realm characters, Hyperion. Hyperion hasn't had his own love story told yet but he's appeared in several of the Vampires Realm books, including the Prophecy Trilogy and Winter's Kiss . He's also in the next book in the series, Masquerade.



THE MOON & THE CHERRY TREE

Slender moonlight filtered down on him. It whispered to him,  calling to his blood, touching him right down to his core. It spoke of how they  belonged together. The moon ruled the darkness. Hyperion ruled the night. He  was the splendid pale orb that all eyes turned to in the vampire world, looking  up at him, seeking his light.

That light fractured into silvery ribbons when it met the  ghostly pale blossoms on the lonely cherry tree.

Hyperion lay beneath it, his back against the broad trunk  and his head tipped back, basking in the beauty above. A warm breeze stirred  the white flowers, spreading their scent on the wind and casting him back one  hundred years to the last time he had visited this land. It had been on a night  like this that their paths had crossed again following their stormy first  meeting and her beauty had arrested his steps and stolen his heart just as the  cherry tree captured him now, holding him transfixed and under its sway.

She had been more beautiful than the blossom she had been  named for, as delicate as its fragile petals and as soft as its scent, destined  to dance away on a breeze and disappear from this world.

Sakura.

Hyperion lifted his hand to the sky, looking at the full  moon and cherry blossoms through his splayed fingers. If only he could have  grasped her more tightly and held her to him. If only he could have faced the  fear of watching her wither and fade away. If only.

He had been convinced that such a beauty would not have  survived in the darkness of his world and that it would have been cruel to  bring her into it. She had needed light to bloom and feed the warmth in her  smile and her heart, and that was something he never could have given to her.

He closed his fingers into a fist and stared at it. She had  been within his grasp though, her beautiful smiles and precious laughter  reserved for his eyes and his ears. She had given him everything that she had  denied her clients, supplying them with hollow imitations of their splendour.  He had taken them all, feasted on them. They had been his medicine to ease his  pain.

His salvation and his destruction.

The white cherry tree swayed above him, dancing in the wind  that stirred his dark hair and caressed his skin, carrying the perfume of the  other blooming trees in the grove and the city beyond. Hyperion watched each  blossom on the tree above as they performed a timeless ballet that could only  end in one way. A single flower caught in the breeze and broke free,  pirouetting through the air, continuing its dance until it finally came to rest  on his black-clad legs. He plucked the delicate blossom from his thigh and  brought it to his nose, inhaling the subtle sweetness of its scent. His Sakura  had smelt as sweet as this one. She had worn blossoms in her hair and on her  kimono. She had bloomed for him and in that moment she had ruined him to all  others.

Hyperion crushed the blossom in his fist and frowned at the  moon and the tree. Two different worlds that created such beauty when brought  together, but that were destined to remain apart. A cherry tree couldn't bloom  with only the moon as its light. The moon could only watch the tree from afar,  longing to smell the sweetness of its fragrance and feel its soft flowers,  knowing that it would never be his. The cherry tree thrived on light, but the  moon could only offer the gentlest of caresses, a ghostly cold touch under  midnight skies that would fade with the rising of the sun, driven away by the  world where the tree truly belonged and could flourish.

The world that the cherry tree blossomed for.

Not the moon's world.

A world of warmth and light. The human world.

A world that Sakura had needed more than him. Or so he had  thought. He had surrendered her to the human world, believing that she had no  place in his, desiring her to retain her fragile beauty regardless of the pain  it caused him and seek a happier life that she deserved. He had carried her in  his heart, forever true to her, willing to remain that way until the end of his  days. He had thought her long dead, alive only within his memories.

He had thought wrong.

Hyperion closed his eyes and listened to the moon, to the  darkness around him. The call to hunt was strong but another desire eclipsed  it.

The need to rise to his feet and continue his search for the  one thing he had never dreamed he would see with his own eyes again. The woman  who had walked back into his life barely two years ago looking as she had when  he had left her a century earlier in this very city.

He opened his fist and looked down at the crushed blossom in  his hand. Now that it had fallen, daylight would only speed its ruin. Now only  moonlight and darkness could preserve it. The cool touch of the night not the  heat of day.

Hyperion pushed himself onto his feet, reached up to the  branches of the cherry tree and plucked a fresh white blossom.

Someone had dared to pluck the rare bloom he had left to  flower in the human world and brought it into the darkness.

As payment for their insolence, he would take their life and  take back what was his.

The cherry blossom would bloom again only it would be under  the light of the moon.

They would be together again.

This time forever.

So, did you all enjoy this peek into Hyperion and his love story?