This lasted for about seventy or eighty years. Joshua’s search for his creativity, his fire, never ceased. He returned to his haven one night, after spending his evening in a coffee shop, snapping to the almost-extinct beat poets. Frustration and anger racked him, tortured him, as it always did. He looked up to his writing table to see his oil lamp burning (a danger to his current life, but if he was being punished, he might as well tempt the end of the punishment) and the Queen of the Harpies sitting in his seat. She had taken ten or twenty of the crumpled pages of his work and had spread them out on his table. She seemed to be enraptured, as this Clan so often was when looking at something beautiful. Joshua politely cleared his throat, as this was one of the most catty and easily-insulted Kindred in London. She blinked and looked up. “Ah. Joshua. It’s about time you got back. Your poetry is passable. I will exhibit these at the next Elysium, which will be put on by my Clan. You will be introduced in your new station, as Harpy, then. You have a month to prepare. You will be representing your Clan and your soul at this meeting. I expect a new piece, better than these, and I expect you to read it in front of all those gathered. And I expect it to cause a stir. Do you understand?”

Joshua’s only response was a slight nod of his head. Then the Queen of the Harpies stood up, and floated out of his flat. A work. That would cause a stir. Something creative, entirely blasphemous, and that would upstage every single Toreador present. But his block whatever it was that had frozen his creativity, made it static, that would have to be defeated to complete a work of this type and magnitude. He chewed on the back of a ball point pen, as he had begun to do to emulate the poets of this age. There was only that static hold, that frozen cage wrapped around his soul, his emotions, and his creativity that held him back from accomplishing anything that would get him respect and praise. Slowly, an idea creeped up his spine, and swept across and through his mind. He put the pen to paper, and did not stop until the sun rose and forced him to sleep.