The Immortal Sentence

The iron door clanged shut behind me with a heavy, reverberating finality. I stood motionless in the stark, sterile confines of my new home — a 6x8 foot cell built to contain the most dangerous of monsters.

Me.

The bare concrete walls seemed to close in around me, suffocating in their grim austerity. A rusted cot lay against one wall, a crude toilet against the other. No windows, no light beyond the sickly glow of the corridor lamps bleeding through the slot in the door.

Death row for the undead. How perversely poetic.

I was a vampire — a bloodthirsty predator who had stalked the night for over three centuries. I had feasted on countless humans, quenching my insatiable hunger with a greed to match Lucifer himself. Their pitiful laws and feeble justice system meant nothing to an immortal creature like me.

Until they found a way to separate my spirit from its corporeal form.

The specialists, the mages…whatever they called themselves…had discovered ancient rituals to imprison my essence. Like bottling lightning, they could trap my spirit in hallowed ground, powerless.

So here I rotated in a cyclical, cursed existence. I would regenerate a new body every seven days, only for it to be dragged from my cell, lashed with holy fire, and my spirit wrenched from its vessel before being reinserted into the merciless cycle of rebirth and immolation.

I stared at my pale, withered hands and felt my form already wasting away by the hour. Soon, oblivion would claim me again, followed by the agony of resurrection one week later.

Human justice is fleeting. But for a vampire condemned to eternal torment, every second is an immortal sentence far crueler than any mortal death.