Page 2 of Craving Carla

I turn back to the flames, unwilling to hear his assessment of my civilization’s flaws. But his words continue, relentless as time itself.

“History will remember Al-Andalus as one of the greatest fallen empires. They’ll study the splendor of the Alhambra and the brilliance of your scholars. They’ll paint this night as a tragedy of human shortsightedness. They’ll also study why it fell.”

“And why did Rome fall, Damon?” I ask bitterly, knowing he’s had seven centuries longer than me to contemplate his own loss.

Damon pulls out his coin again, but this time he just holds it, running his thumb over the worn face of the emperor. “We grew complacent. Corrupt. We believed our glory would last forever.” He moves to stand beside me, his eyes reflecting the distant flames. “Forever is a concept you and I understand differently now.”

A woman’s scream rises through the darkness, reaching all the way up to our position on the hillside. It’s a sound of pure anguish—not fear for herself, but grief for something lost. I scan the burning streets and spot her, a mother clutching a small, still form. Her child, dead in the chaos.

“Does it ever get easier?” I ask, my voice barely a whisper. “Watching them suffer and doing nothing?”

“No,” Damon admits, surprising me with his honesty. “You just get better at carrying it.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“You can. You will. Because the alternative is madness.” He gestures toward the woman below. “That child she mournswould have lived a handful of decades at most. The woman herself, perhaps a few more. Their grief, their joy, their lives—all brief sparks in the darkness. We endure, Amari. That is both our blessing and our curse.”

I don’t answer. What is there to say? My throat burns with thirst and grief. Below us, Ferdinand and Isabella’s forces continue their methodical destruction of everything my people built. Christians destroying the work of Muslims, repeating a cycle as old as civilization itself.

“You’ll see many more empires rise and fall, Amari,” Damon says softly. “The world will reshape itself a thousand times before your existence ends.”

“That doesn’t make this easier to bear.”

“No,” he admits. “It doesn’t.”

We stand in silence after that, watching as fires consume what was once the jewel of Islamic Spain. I note each landmark as it falls: the poet Ibn Zamrak’s house, now a pyre of manuscripts and memories; the observatory where I once studied the transit of Venus; the hammam where I enjoyed countless conversations about philosophy and science.

In the streets, soldiers celebrate their victory, drinking wine looted from Moorish cellars. Some drag women into shadows. Others hunt for hidden treasures in still-smoldering buildings. The conquest complete, the pillage begins.

“They’ll erase us,” I murmur, more to myself than to Damon. “Our language, our customs, our contributions. It will all be forgotten.”

“Not all,” Damon says. “Some things endure. Your numbers—what Europeans now call ‘Arabic numerals’—they’ll never disappear. Too useful. Your astronomy, your medicine, your mathematics—they’ll be absorbed, renamed perhaps, but not lost.”

“Cold comfort.”

Damon shrugs. “Comfort is rarely warm after centuries pass.”

Another building collapses in a shower of embers, sending a fresh plume of smoke into the night sky. In the east, the faintest lightening of the horizon warns of approaching dawn.

“You should find shelter,” I tell Damon, not looking at him. “The sun will rise soon.”

“And you?”

“I’ll stay a while longer.”

Damon studies me, his green eyes assessing whether I might defy his orders once he’s gone. Finally, he sighs. “Don’t do anything foolish, Amari. Remember what King Amir said: ‘To interfere with human affairs is to bind yourself to human suffering.’ We’ve seen enough suffering to know the wisdom in those words.”

“I remember.”

Damon stays with me for hours more, until the fires begin to burn lower and the eastern sky lightens perceptibly. Then he squeezes my shoulder once—the closest thing to comfort he’s capable of offering—and disappears into the shadows to find shelter from the approaching day.

I remain, watching until the sun crests the horizon. The daylight doesn’t harm me as the old legends claim, but it highlights what I’ve become. The veins beneath my dark skin become more visible in sunlight, my fangs harder to conceal, my golden eyes too bright, too inhuman. The sun doesn’t burn me—it exposes me.

Most vampires retreat during daylight hours. It’s not just self-preservation; it’s the natural rhythm of our existence. But today, I need to see the aftermath in the harsh light of day. I need to remember.

The great city of Granada, the last stronghold of Moorish Spain, lies in smoldering ruins. Eight hundred years of Islamic rule on the Iberian Peninsula, ended. My civilization, gone.

In daylight, the devastation is even more complete than I imagined. Bodies lie in the streets—scholars, merchants, craftsmen, women, children. People I might have known in my human life, descendants of those I once called friends. The mighty walls that withstood sieges for centuries now breached and broken. Gardens that once bloomed with roses and citrus trees now trampled and burned.

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