Donor House: Magda: Candlemas

[k_a_webb]

Written for LJ user ysabetwordsmith’s prompt: One of the older vampires celebrates Candlemas, rather baffling the younger vampires and humans. It kind of went in a different direction to the one I was expecting it to, but I like it.

Some thought she was strange, celebrating Christian holidays when many vampires were atheists, but Magda had her own story. It was one she wasn’t ready to tell, and she didn’t know if she ever would be. After lighting a candle she knelt, looking at the statue of Jesus she had, trying not to regret the choices she had made, and the choices he had made. The statue didn’t look much like him, because time and place had changed his appearance, but it was enough for her. Her feelings for him hadn’t changed in centuries, although he wasn’t the man everyone believed him to be after reading the New Testament.

The disciples all had their own version of Jesus, of the events that had happened to them all, and all Magda wished was that he hadn’t been made divine. He was the son of Mary and Joseph, a carpenter who was a devout Jew, who became the son of God after his death, because he was written about by men who wanted him to be something more than he was. Maybe, if she hadn’t hidden away after it had happened, she might have been able to stop the New Testament from being published the way it was, but losing him had hurt more than she thought it could.

A single tear trickled down her cheek. Magda had loved him from the moment she’d met him, although not in the way she would come to love him, and if she hadn’t of been so scared of changing him into someone else she might have made him her companion. It would have changed the world into something she couldn’t imagine. With a trembling hand she touched his face. His death, his crucifixion, had changed the world more than she could have imagined at the time, because she would never have seen him as the man who became the head of a whole new religion.

Magda had been a Jew when she had been changed into a vampire, almost thirty years before Jesus was born, and she was still a Jew, although she wasn’t as much of a Jew as she had once been. Part of the change was new, because of her time spent at the donor house with so many different vampires and humans, who had taught her about the religions they followed. She taught them too, about the religion she had followed before her faith had changed. The rest was the pain of losing the man she’d loved.

Candlemas was a Christian holiday that Magda celebrated because she felt it was the right thing to do, although it had taken her a long time to accept. Christianity was something she knew he would never have created, at least in the way it had been, but the some of the celebrations helped her to feel a little closer to him. There had been a time she’d contemplated joining him. She just couldn’t be sure that she would join him, because it was hard to believe in God and heaven when you were a vampire.

Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.