it used to be pretty common for there to be cats on boats. they’d take care of any rodents who would chew on ropes or wires and spread diseases. sailors were also superstitious and believed that having a cat aboard would bring good luck! this belief passed on to their wives, who kept cats - especially black ones who were believed to be extra lucky - at home in order to keep their husbands safe when at sea.
another popular superstition? that if a cat came aboard it was a sign of luck, but if it only boarded halfway and then left, it was a sign of bad luck.
most ship’s cats are only found in modern times on private vessels, but they have roots going back to early history. one such example is the Vikings, who took cats with them on expeditions.
I’m sorry, all lovelies, to have vanished from this fandom. To say that the Vampire Chronicles didn’t have a place in my daily life would be an outright lie. I respect, and admire those of you who interact with the text and film on such a consistent basis, keeping these pillars standing. I’m not someone who could do that, who could live and breathe it any more than I already did without it being worn out. Maybe I am! But I’d rather not know, I’d rather not risk loving this monster any less or any differently than I have for the past decade.
I AM THE VAMPRIE LESTAT.
I am immortal, more or less. I am immortal. I am.
I…
I am the sum of my existence. I am the monument to each life I have devoured. Some have deserved it; judge, jury, executioner, I have always wanted to believe my own myth. I have forgotten the taste of communion. I have tasted God on the dying breaths of murderers and the holy offer bargains to hell. I have wept over the skull of Adam and I will, should none stop me, witness the death of the human race.
I am.
I am driving over cobble streets almost too slowly, the balance of the motorcycle disrupted by the terrain and the rain and I am stepping into a bar that used to be a smoky bar, but the mortals do not smoke indoors anymore. I used to sing my songs. I am singing my songs tonight—they do no know that I cover my songs—
The rock star Lestat, yet another singer vanished from the face of the earth in the demonic nineteen-eighties. Does it mean anything? Does someone still keep my records pristine and my books all tidy on a shelf? I don’t care. I am in the pages of every cheap airport paperback novel I have ever written, I am, we are, the coven of the articulate under a collective pen name more proud of the books we see with age, the proof that for all the centuries worth of history and confession we have grieved onto paper that even the days since doing so are numerous.
There are mortals who have lived their entire lives after we have committed our own to the page, and who have died many years since.
I will lower my teeth to the throat of a young man in a dress, hear him mutter we are the dead, and in less time than it takes for me to see if I have influenced his path, he is an old man, another artist dead on the evening news that we watch with such morbid fixation.
The walls of the bar are a different color. I remember this place in candlelight. I am going to live forever in a city that will be underwater before those living in it have reached the end of their own lives.
