> Stages On Life's Way
>  by Cynewulf
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Stages on Life's Way
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Diary, My One and Only Reader,
Who would fault me, were I to put you aside at this juncture? I am a new woman, and I live a life so alien to the one I did when I began you. I am not the same woman. I am not even, if Twilight is to be believed, the same species. My own personal world has been moved, as if it were sat upon some great fulcrum and lifted by the weight of my transformation.
I was laying out my clothes the other day when I found you, sequestered in a forgotten corner of the luggage. My confession to you is this—I laughed, and I felt tears sting my eyes as I was overcome by a feeling too complex, too forceful for me to describe it so vulgarly with words, and I sat on our new bed and held you and was in such a state. I cannot begin to describe as well my gratitude that my love did not happen upon me in that moment, for I would not have been able to give account of myself, and I fear she would have taken it dreadfully.
But I am more calm now, calm enough to hold you and write in you, and I believe I shall. I brought you with me out of such foolish naivete. Perhaps in seeing this relic of a past that seems already a century away, I found the weight of all that has changed since I left my parent’s abode to come crashing in. The weight of the change that defined who I am now.
I am rambling on, aren’t I? I should write of what is now, and not shaded words of what was.




Twilight knelt quietly listening, and I watched her from my tree perch. My darling had been so happy with the hunting clothes I’d made for her: sturdy, no-nonsense leathers stained dark brown, perfect for moving at night in thick forest. 
She gave the smallest twitch of recognition as she heard something. My eyes, now far keener than in the life before, caught the tiniest fraction of movement before Twilight tensed and I was filled with the curious sensation of the surprise of hearing what something I'd expected all along. Her movements were faster than sluggish, mortal eyes could ever hope to follow with accuracy and every step was mechanical perfection. No, not mechanical - it seemed almost vulgar to describe it in the terms of the mechanical.  It undersold the divinely vivacious character of it all.
The takedown was smooth. The deer she’d heard in the underbrush had probably not had much idea that he was even being stalked until it was far too late. She weaved through the trees like an artist’s brush, and the knife I bought her in Whinnypeg months ago served her well. Her hand was firm as the knife slipped across the animal's throat with such little resistance that an unknowing observer might suspect the deer had given up. 
Watching Twilight hunt is fascinating. By all the gods that live, I did not have an inkling of what she was truly capable of when she visited our estate. Twilight without restraint is a creature of absolute power. 
We can survive on the beasts of the field for brief periods, and I understand why Twilight insists that we do when on the road. She would not be happy to expose any man born of woman to the ferocity of her strike.And yet, part of me is sad that no one living except I will see the artistry in her movement, so fast that it would be a blur to the human eye. Have I changed, or would I have thought this always? Were I still human, would I have seen it as beautiful, or would I have cowering, overwhelmed, helpless?
Regardless, once we were both out of our hunting clothes I laid out the blanket I brought and myself upon it. Propped up on one arm, I watched Twilight as she fiddled with the pack.
“You know, I miss wine,” she said.
“Do you? You know, I didn’t know for sure if you actually enjoyed it, before,” I replied, and then hummed. With what I daresay was graceful ease, I stretched and laid just so, knowing that I had caught the best of the moonlight on my naked form. Now if only she would look at me as I looked at her.
It is truly, deeply fascinating to me how quickly one becomes used to seeing a lover in a state of undress. The first time I saw Twilight bare in the pale light, half-awake and under the lightest touch of her vampiric glamour, it was like what I imagined meeting a goddess might be like. To touch her at all seemed almost sacrilege. At least, that is how I remember that moment now. But in the drowsy evening, with the stars wakening overhead, I cannot feel quite the same.
It isn’t that I do not worship every curve, every hill and valley, every inch. It is merely that the mind learns to love in familiarity what it cannot stand to keep at a distance. I suppose it is the natural way. If we were to live always in a state of awe, life would be unbearable. Humans would be in constant fear, lest they be driven to their knees every sunset and sunrise, or struck senseless by some sight or sensation. No, it was either become comfortable and familiar to experience or become numb to it, and I am happy that we do the former. I have loved as a celebrant in awe, and I shall again, But now I wanted my beloved to get the hint.
“I do not love wine as much as my teacher,” Twilight said. “Nor as much as her sister does. I doubt anyone loves wine as much as Lady Luna does,” she added, and fixed me with a wry grin. “Honestly, I’m really blown away by the science of it all.”
“Lady Luna is correct,” I reply. “Wine is one of mankind’s few joys.”
“You know, we actually can drink some. I experimented early on. You’ll probably have some trouble with it at first, but once you’ve gotten to a more normal intake…”
She eyed the pack, continuing, and I rolled my eyes. Twilight is so many wonderful things, but I must admit that she can be a bit dense.
“Twilight,” I said.
She looked at me and tilted her head. “Rarity?”
I gestured to her. “Come here, love.”
She blinked, and then... I swear, even in her vampiric state, she blushes perfectly. Her mouth settled into a little O of comprehension. “Oh, ah, I was distracted, wasn’t I?”
I smiled. “A bit. Come here.”
She knelt down, and I reached out for her and she crossed the distance eagerly.
Twilight pushed me gently back against the ground, and her lips met mine with a fierce hunger. She’s always high energy on nights like this, when we stop. I sighed as her lips left, only to gasp as they returned on my neck.
Her hand slipped down from my chest to my hips as she adjusted me for both our comfort, and I shivered with desire. I have felt her touch so many times, but each new time I feel a rush as though it were our first. 
But she didn't move much more. I understood that it was time that I take the lead, and I welcomed it as I turned the tables. Control was easy to take, and Twilight surrendered it happily. I straddled her, my fingers lightly tracing lines from her neck to her stomach.
“You’ve done well,” I told her, and meant it with all my heart. I feel honored, beauty or not, to be the only accepted witness to Twilight’s life. She smiled up at me with such earnest eyes that I couldn’t help but reward her with another kiss and pin her hands. She could probably free herself. Probably, but we both knew she wouldn't. Why would she want to? Why would she want to be anywhere else but here?  






“I am glad,” I began after we had gotten back on the road, “to know that one day I’ll have wine again.”
“Oh! Yes,” Twilight said, offering me a grin. We had moved quickly, far more quickly than I would have thought possible before. “It will probably be a year at least. I did a lot of research into the peculiarities of my predicament in the aftermath of the attack. I wanted to know everything. For the first year or so, you will be what’s called a Neophyte. You crave far more blood than I, need far more.” She wagged a finger at me tauntingly. “Needy, needy.”
I huffed indignant, but in truth a little thrill of memory went through me. Sometimes, I recall the Twilight that had visited me at first, the Twilight who had been so… forceful, yet gentle. 
“This town,” I said, changing the subject. “Remind me again, would you darling?”
“Southport,” Twilight responds. “The town is large enough to qualify as a city to some, but having been born in a city I find the comparison a bit silly.”
After leaving my parent’s abode, Twilight and I had drifted south, staying in town for a week at a time. After the troubling first week of my new life, she had taught me how the vampire moved and lived amongst an unsuspecting human flock. I learned how to walk without giving myself away, limiting my now unshackled body to their almost endearingly frail movements. How young and fragile they were! When I knew enough, Twilight had announced that it was time to find a place to settle for at least a few years, and I’d requested somewhere different, somewhere nice. Apparently this Southport was both.
“I was thinking,” I said to her, eyes still ahead of us on the lonely road, “I see and feel as you do, now. Is that so?”
Twilight gave me a quizzical look, but answered. “Yes, more or less. Though we are still different people.”
“I realized, in the last village, when you were teaching me how to move across rooftops, that I must have seemed so fragile to you. So strange and slow.”
Twilight fell quiet, and I wondered why. She did not answer me at all.
A few minutes later, she finally breaks that silence.
“I thought you were beautiful,” she says, and being that some things do not change even as a vampire, I smiled.
“That I am, and you are correct.”
For a moment, I thought she might go on, but Twilight lapsed back into thought again.
I was not surprised. Even before I was changed, Twilight was always given to reverie. I find it charming, generally speaking. At first I was worried that I had bored her, that she was uninterested, but as I became more comfortable with her I realized that I rather liked this rhythm, the ease with which one could shift from talk to quiet and back again. Removing the need to babble on, so that every word could carry a bit of her thought directly.
When she continued, she did so in a new tone. I recognized it and felt myself returned with her to my parents' library. Twilight was lounged elegantly, like a great cat at her leisure, speaking on a point of magic. Her eyes shone in the light like little stars. How can she be so beautiful, I thought then and now.
“At first, I was mostly charmed and attracted,” Twilight said. “You are beautiful, and I had had little company besides a well meaning elder aristocrat and his equally aging aristocratic friends as company for some time, as you recall. You were an absolute breath of fresh air in an otherwise rather dreary life.”
I smiled. “Normally, with how being this way is, I would say it would be too exhilarating to be dreary, but I suppose after meeting me everything before would seem rather dull.”
Twilight nodded, bless her, and we laughed together on the road.







We lived now in a rather luxurious apartment overlooking the western sea. Twilight had handled the acquisition while I’d had a look at the town. I have never questioned Twilight’s taste, and her opinion of the place only served to cement the high esteem in which I held it. What a place, and what people filled its happy streets!
But rest was the order of our day, and we took it gladly. I would have time to explore the night life of our new demesne. And it was that. I felt, and I know this is quite silly, a bit like I was some Contessa of Canterlot here to claim my fief at last. Did Twilight ever feel like this?
Twilight milled about, setting things up and unloading books which were placed with deliberate care. I watched her from our bed, content, but after awhile…
It was not that I was insecure of her affections, for I quite adamantly knew both our minds on that point. But now, as often before, my mind drifted to my girlhood bedroom and the first glimpse of her crimson eyes in the moonlight, and I wondered. Twilight had grown less bold after my change. Before, she led more often than not. Her hungry gaze, her soft touch, her voice of command… she would draw me down deep into the dark like she did our first night, when I hardly knew her. But the commanding tone was lacking now. Instead of her leading me by a line, it was I leading her. Instead of being told how I might serve, I was asked how she might. She would deny it, but I was rather sharp. 
What held you back, my love? Did you wish to give me space as the world changed? It has changed, and what space I might have needed has shrunk. I hummed, and waited, and watched. I could not exorcise from my memory the feeling of her bite, subtle and sharp, full of power and yet restraint. I touched my neck and marvelled that such a vision could stay with me as long as this and still hold such immediacy.
At last I rose and stood behind Twilight. I knew she could sense me, I knew what those of our kind could do now, and so I expected no surprise as I slid my arms under hers and rested my chin on top of her shoulder.
Her little gasp was satisfying, and I grinned. Sometimes, my new penchant for stealth impresses even me. “Focused, are we?”
“A bit,” Twilight replied. “I’m, ah, my mind wanders.”
“Aye, it does,” I reply, and kiss her neck.
Twilight shivers, and my smile grows. I want to feel her fangs, but that doesn’t mean I can’t remind her of how it feels. I continue, tightening my grip around her midsection.
Twilight melts in my arms, murmuring something wordless and distracted. I know the feeling. The warmth like a fire spreading down your spine. The prickling pleasure in your thighs. The way your chest heaves forward just a bit. I know how she moves and how to move her. It’s like being a virtuoso behind the piano, knowing every key’s place.
I move one hand up across her chest, making sure to get another little gasp before I move to holding her chin.
“You’ve done a superb job, Twilight, but I’ve another task for you, and a pressing one at that,” I said softly, letting her feel the warmth of my breath on her neck and shoulders.
“W-what’s that?”
Enjoy yourself, firstly, I didn’t say, for at that moment I was far too busy biting into her shoulder. Celestia on her golden throne may abhor it if she wishes, but I cannot get enough of the feeling of Twilight, this beautiful ethereal goddess, in my arms, for a brief moment in submission to my grasp. The only sweeter thing would be in her own. Twilight gasped, and her hands fell to her side. I captured one,  my fingers snaking between her own and gripping her pants leg beneath. 
“I’m not… I’m not sure if…”
Blinking, I let up just a moment. “Should I not be biting?”
She nodded. I kissed the spot, sorry to have let go. But I lingered still. “Why shouldn’t I? Is it dangerous?”
“I… Well, not exactly.”
I kissed the side of her neck now. “Not dangerous. Do you not like it?”
She let out a breathless laugh, almost half-hearted. “Yes, I do. Gods, I love it.”
“Then why not? Shall I ask you to lay your objections out for me then? Shall I find you an abacus and slate—”I let her feel my fangs on her soft skin. “Will you craft syllogisms for me to make account of yourself?”
 She tried to laugh. “I can’t think of a thing. Well, except that there are things you could be doing that don’t involve biting.”
I turned her around, keeping her hand still tight in mind, and pulled her towards our bed. We fell into it, our lips locked and our legs intertwined. Twilight groaned and in a moment she straddled me, pinning my hands against the bed. Her strength could hold me, but it is not her strength. Its her eyes. Hungry, focused, as if only I existed.
“This is what I wanted,” I say, almost without thinking.
“What’s that?” she asked me. Her hair was longer now than when I had met her, and it hung down like a canopy around us, bringing the world to a single sharp enticing point.
“Oh, just to see that look in your eyes.” I grin back at her. I’ve far, far too much freedom now. I’d rather have less. A lot less. So I tease. I beckon. “Woe is me! All I want is that intense smolder in those ruby stars you call eyes.”
I expect her to laugh, or to roll her eyes, but strangely she does not. I’m confused, until I realize that she’s taken advantage of my silliness to entrap my legs. Her eyes light up with magic, and I feel a tingling on my wrists. My suspicions are confirmed as she strokes my cheek but my hands refuse to budge. Magic restraints.
“I didn’t use magic the first time,” she says, her voice low. 
“You didn’t,” I reply, taken aback. I am blessedly unsure of where she is going, or what she is doing.
“You could have asked,” she said. 
“Fair enough. I have now.”
“You have. You wanted me to bite you? I don’t need to feed from you, you know.”
I couldn’t help but grin lopsidedly up at her. Silly Twilight. “It wasn’t the reason I wanted it. I’ve seen and felt your power, your intensity. Let me feel it again, Twilight.”
She traced a line from my chin down. Her touch was so light but I felt its warmth. Some distant part of my mind wondered if she were manipulating this all with magic, but the rest was a haze of want. 
“You felt it as a human. You aren’t a human anymore.”
“But I can still feel, love.”
“But I… Our situation was different. I don’t entirely understand.”
“And yet, here I am, bound. I think you do.”
Whether she blushes or not I can’t see, for she turns away from my eyes. But the restraints hold. “Cheeky,” she said. “Perhaps I have an idea. I’ve… I’d read about it. I’ve thought about it. I tried to imagine myself like that, when I came to you. In control.”
“Dominant.”
“It’s an odd word. Yes.”
Her hand lightly circles my throat. I gasp as she forces my head up, tearing my eyes from her. 
Her eyes could be anywhere. They were everywhere, just out of view. Looking me over. Examining, touching, owning. I don’t have it in me to care if she did it for effect or so she could gather her thoughts without me watching, my head is swimming either way.
“Perhaps… perhaps I thought we would find a new dynamic away from predator and prey.”
I click my tongue, trying to stake down some of the quick wit she prizes but it all comes out slow and nakedly desirous in my own ears. “Maybe I want to be your prey even now. Maybe I want to be your prey always.”
“Maybe you do. What would I do with prey like this? Blood too precious to drink, a body too perfect to mar.” Twilight grinned down at me. 
“Not too precious,” I said.
She laughed, like chimes. But then she looked down at me, as if considering me.
And I did feel considered. Examined. I felt like one of Twilight’s old arcane texts, picked apart by her intensity, read so thoroughly that if she had told me, my hands pinned to our bed and my face flushed with passion, that she could read my mind… I would have believed her. At last she spoke.
“Cheeky. But I think perhaps it’s alright.”
“I… what?”
“You’ll see. But we shall talk about it, tonight. I had a place in mind for us to visit, but I think we can wait a bit longer to go…”
Our eyes met, and I was caught. They were twin beacons, red fires in a night that shrunk away from their light. Like before, like long before, the world outside of those eyes sloughed off the edges of my awareness.Twilight and her piercing gaze were all that mattered to me.
She leaned in. Her skin had been cold before but now it just felt perfectly warm. Was it magic? Shifted perception? I did not know, and I had no time to think. She kissed my cheek as she leaned past me. The smell of lavender breached the last curtained walls of my resistance as I breathed her in.
Twilight bit where my neck and shoulder met. Deeper and deeper she sank, and I felt like for a moment that I was falling. My body warmed. Lightning—fire—whatever it was it rode my spine like a lightning rod, pulling from me a shocked, happy groan. My hands struggled, desperate to cling to Twilight, but she held me firm in check. 
I cannot describe it in any way other than being briefly possessed by her confidence, her surety. Even when she let my hands free, I did not dare to move, did not dare to go against such a righteous sentence.
She let up only to kiss me, and the sweet taste of blood on her lips stole time from us both, lost in the heady ecstasy of a long embrace. I lost track of who I was and what I was doing as she bit me again, on the other side. As she pushed aside the silk that hid my body from her and cupped and kissed my breast the void where ego had been was filled with an overpowering feeling of what I was: physical, touchable, graspable, pinnable. I was all feeling. She pulled me over onto my stomach and knees and I felt her nails on my back, tracing light lines. I felt her touch the inside of my thighs with agonizing sweetness, not too much, never too much, but so short of enough. I would not whine. I swore to myself in a flash of lucidity I would not whine.
She bit me again on the shoulder as she lay beside me. Where were her hands? Would she not touch— 
I admit I yelped when her magic thrummed along my thighs.
“T-Twilight!” I looked over and saw her grinning at me.
She hummed. “Something wrong?”
“No! No. Just…”
The magic spread from a single spot to a wider and wider area. My words fell away.
“And here I thought it was something you’d like quite a bit, Rarity.”
Finally, at last, I whined. “I do! Don’t stop.”
“How could I not indulge you?” Twilight laughed and I knew my face would be flushed as much from her confidence as from passion. 
She toyed with me, teased me. Her magic danced enticingly along my inner thighs and beyond until I was a ragged mess. When she pulled me up, my eyes were half-lidded and unfocused. She spread my legs apart with her knee and I whined, wanting more.
“You want me to bite you again, don’t you?” she asked.
I wanted to say yes, but I couldn’t. Words wouldn’t form. Too flustered, I could only make a kind of groan I hoped she parsed correctly. 
She did. Twilight kissed me, running a hand down my throat and over my chest, lingering here and there, wherever she felt like. I wanted her to just do it, just give me what I wanted, but that was what I had wanted, wasn’t it? For Twilight, confident and assured Twilight, to know just what she wanted and what I needed.
Her hand caressed me, not cool magic touch this time but true warm skin, and I quivered. “Please?” I asked, voice shaking. “Please? I’ve waited, I—”
She silenced me with another kiss. “You have. It’s been an awfully long time that you’ve waited, no? Be still for me, my love.”
I promised I would, or tried to, for the words died on my lips as she leaned in and bit me at the nape of the neck, where it meets the shoulder, and my mind emptied like a busted sieve. Every word, every plea and retort, chased out by the warm lightning that shot up and down my spine. I surrendered to it, let myself make the most ungraceful sounds and melted against Twilight’s body. She held me, but that was no respite. She bit and kissed up my neck, and only when Twilight replaced the knee between my legs with her skillful hand did I manage to say anything, begging her for more, for release, for her to bite and never let me go, not for even a moment, or I felt I would die of the cold.
She obliged. No longer did she keep me waiting. Her touch was too much, the biting was too much, the warm kisses that made me shiver and writhe in pleasure were too much, and it only took a few moments before I was resting against her, forehead to forehead, panting in remembered human exhaustion.
“Celestia on her throne, but I love you,” I said after my mind had returned.
Twilight rolled her eyes at the invocation, but seemed smugly pleased regardless. “You got what you wanted, then?”
I nodded, and she kissed me with a laugh. “I still want to talk. The night will be beautiful over the bay. I know a spot I can take you… but not yet.” She nuzzled against my neck and I whined. “Not until I have my fill of warmth…”
We fell back against the bed and Twilight clung to me and we talked in the comfort of our own room.






The long empty vaults of the city’s cathedral were lit only by a few lamps hanging over the beautiful mosaics below by chains. A few night guards walked below, keeping an eye on them. My love and I crept along the crossbeams, and I felt for all the world like I was a girl again, climbing delicately out of my window at home. But there was no knotted rope of sheets tonight. I no longer needed such things.
I had always felt a soft sadness before, as I grew and the things of my idyllic girlhood slipped back into the past. But I was not sure that I felt that way now, as Twilight silently opened the hatch and let in the moon. Perfected eyes unblinded saw more than just the silhouette of Twilight offering her hand to me. I smiled and let her help me through. The small things one clung to, the tiny humanity, mattered more now. I could see the outlines of where what I had called humanity faded out into nothing, and so I could appreciate it in a way others never could.
We walked the moonlit roof and I stretched, glorying in the cool night air coming off the bay. “Twilight, you really know how to spoil me,” I said with a grin.
She laughed and skipped ahead, turning to face me.
“I had a feeling it would be great up here. I’m just glad I was right. Helps that the clouds are gone.”
She led the way and I let her, following in her footsteps up a spire. Nimbly, but playfully, I chased her up and we perched on our own edges. Talk came and went, calm but trivial. Smalltalk and the sights, nice as they are, wasn’t what was on my mind right now.
I waited until we’d soaked in the night before I spoke up. “Twilight.”
“I know. I said I’d explain myself.”
“Actually… I wanted to say that it is all… Well. I’ve been thinking,” I said. “I just wanted you to bite me, Twilight. Not bite me, if you understand.”
Twilight chuckled. The wind picked up a bit. “I know. Drinking vampiric blood makes… so it’s a blood bond of sorts. The more that, say, you drank of my blood, the more you would be bound to me. You would become dependent, you could say. It’s magical, but of a type that I confess I know frustratingly little about.”
I clicked my tongue and settled against the sloped spire roof. “So… you’re worried for my agency then, love?”
“I was, yes, but I also think…”
“Hm?”
“I wanted to not worry. But I worried instead about that impulse.” I knew the pained smile that she was making, even if her head wasn’t turned towards me. “I also had another idea.”
I hummed. “Tell me about it?”
“I want to, yes.”
“But you are considering not. Why?”
Her head bobbed side to side, as if thoughts were bouncing from wall to wall inside. “I don’t know, Rarity. Maybe because what I have in mind is so grandiose that its ridiculous. Maybe because its perverse to anyone who hasn’t spent years digging into every esoteric darkness the world has books on for a decade. Maybe one reason or another. I don’t know. It’s hard to begin.”
“It’s harder to continue if you never begin.”
She looked back at me with a raised eyebrow and a slanting smile. “Aye, but harder still to begin when you have no way of knowing how you’ll be received.”
I confess, then, that I was a bit nervous. Not extremely! Just a bit! But it was hard not to be nervous. Her tone was so serious, her words so mysterious.
“Twilight,” I began, aiming for as serious a tone as I could manage, “it will be alright. I’ll hear you out, good or ill. I swear it.”
She was quiet, and I let her stay so. I watched the city beneath us and saw the hanging lamps. So many souls, so many people walking the night. They were like my Twilight and I, but so different. But we were just two lovers on a stroll, weren’t we? Whatever our situation, we had not become unknowable. 
When she did speak, she did so carefully.
“I want to share the bond with you, both ways,” Twilight said at last. “Both partake, both are bound. I worried because I was afraid it would go only one way. I wasn’t comfortable with that. But if it goes both…”
“Then you could be at peace.”
I focused on her again. She nodded.
“I could, yes.”
“Then it would seem that we have only one choice.”
She looked to me, eyes gleaming. “What would that be?”
“Which one of us goes first,” I said, and flashed her a grin. “Because I wouldn’t mind if it were you.”