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I saw the shadow of pain in his face after I'd said this I regretted it I wanted to say soo on

Oh, how cold this was, cushions be damned, and how hard I , listening to the sound of the torch snuffed, and to the grinding of stone on stone as he opened his own grave

I heard his voice:

"Good night,love, my child love, my son," he said

I let o limp How delicious was this simple relaxation How n

eere all things

Far away in the land of my birth, the monks chanted in the Monastery of the Caves

Sleepily, I reflected on all I'd reone home to Kiev I had ht know And in the last httime consciousness, I said farewell to them forever, farewell to their beliefs and their restraints

I envisaged The Procession of the Magi splendidly glowing on the Master's wall, the procession which would be ain It seemed to me in my wild and passionate soul, in i had come not only for Christ's birth but for my rebirth as well

Chapter 9

9

IF I HAD THOUGHT e or apprenticeship to Marius, I was quite wrong I wasn't immediately set free toin the joys of my neers

The night after an in earnest I was to be prepared now not for a temporal life but for eternity

My Master gave me to know that he had been created a vao, and that there were members of our kind all over the world Secretive, suspicious and often ht, as my Master called the of their existence but a string of dreary disasters until despair consuhastly bonfire, or by going into the light of the sun

As for the very old, those who like e of empires and epochs, they were for thefor the s who atte creatures of their own kind