TEXT: TM
  
  “I saw in the abbot’s
  mirror my twisted
  countenance and
  I knew the hell-wolf
  I had become.”
  —Vlad Dracula
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  • The story of Dracula’s transformation
  and the curse laid on him by a wrathful God
  • The origins of the Ordo Dracul,
  as told by Dracula himself
  • Hidden secrets of the covenant
  and its philosophies
  ISBN 1-58846-254-4
  WW25300 $24.99 U.S.
  
  
  Vampire® created by Mark Rein•Hagen
  
  
  
  
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  Were I a pagan bard, I would in-
  voke a muse of fire to fill me with
  passion for the task ahead. I would beg
  a god to put his words in me, to blow
  his wisdom through me like a trum-
  pet, to make me resound with truth
  for the people.
  I am no pagan bard. My enemy
  is fire, and I am more likely to re-
  buke my passions than to bid them
  spill forth.
  What am I? I have been a tyrant,
  a warrior, and one of the fallen on
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  battle’s field. I have been a Chris-
  tian and a wanderer and an enemy
  of God. I have begged and murdered,
  tortured and rescued, pledged loyalty
  and given treachery.
  I have died and returned and I
  drink hot blood.
  My name is Vladislaus, onetime
  Prince of Wallachia, onetime com-
  mander of armies. Called Tepes, called
  Kaziglu Bey, called Dracula, I am
  now much more than once I was. Per-
  haps much less, as well.
  
  
  I write this in Rome, far from my ancestral seat, far from my adopted
  home. Here I rest, sated by my beloved as she hunts on my behalf, luring men
  to their doom upon my table. Men only, for she is a jealous creature. She
  believes I have sent the others away for love
  of her, and that is the truth. It is not,
  however, the entire truth.
  I put them aside from fear. I fear
  their jealousy of her. I fear the fate
  of all I have dragged down into my
  doom. All things alter, as she
  knows as well as any. She fights
  against this change, foolishly, and
  her struggles may but speed it. I
  have learned, to my sorrow, that
  nothing I can do endures. She will
  be lost to me, and it is my damna-
  tion to choose if I lose her swiftly
  or by inches and decades, but in-
  evitably she will slip my grasp.
  
  
  
  How can she think
  she will remain, when
  all is flux and chaos? In
  Paris, in the icy North,
  in the heated East, the
  watchers of the sky are
  amazed, chapfallen, at
  the prodigy in Cassio-
  peia these recent years
  past. The holy aether,
  untouched and immu-
  table, is now shown to
  be fickle as the love of
  man. A new star flares,
  unseen and uncharted—
  no bearded vagabond,
  like the shaggy star of
  1456 which shone on my
  first, brief reign, but
  a fixed light! As if the
  angels of the spheres
  had 
  untimely
  coupled, birthing a
  celestial bastard. If
  even the stately
  constant tread of
  stars is vulnerable
  to change, how can
  any earthly thing
  be fixed?
  I study the heav-
  ens. I study the words
  of ancients. I study the
  signs I see, and those I
  taste in the flesh of those
  around me. I know the
  time draws near.
  
  
  
  Soon I will sleep, and it is good that I
  will sleep. Too much strength is overpow-
  ering for us. My beloved weeps, she wipes
  her crimson tears with golden tresses, but
  I am not sad. Those around me fear
  the great slumber, shy away from the
  nightmares and visions, but not I.
  They see a prison, another torment,
  another cage forged by God for their
  worthless souls.
  They are blind.
  I see opportunity. I see a road be-
  fore me, a new world to explore and
  conquer. The elders tell me in
  chastened tones about the
  madness of their resting
  visions, but I saw, be-
  yond their fears—the
  loss of self, the loss of
  sense, the loss of
  memory—tools of sur-
  passing potential, if
  only the hand that
  grasps them is strong.
  I shall sleep but not
  rest. I gird myself for
  battle, not of the body,
  but of the mind. As I lie
  in torpor I shall duel my
  weaker selves, I shall kill
  any memory that makes me
  less than I ought to be, less
  than I need to be, less than the
  greatest of my kind.
  The visions of the elders
  were oracular, though in their
  terror they kenned not what
  they saw. When I triumph in
  this new combat, this unseen
  and still place beyond reason
  and closed eyes, what won-
  ders of knowledge will be
  my plunder?
  
  
  
  Even now the
  stillness creeps upon
  me. Even now my bones are
  weary, my muscles groan with the
  stiffness that is their deathly due. Each day is a greater weight, every sleep harder
  to batter back. Soon it will crush me, and like a young bride who yearns for the
  harsh strength of her lover’s arms, I shall revel in being crushed.
  Before my slumber war, however, a task remains. Like any good scholar, I
  must put my books in order.
  It is typical of my kind to keep a book of memories, as if mere ink on paper
  could contradict a Reason bent on torpor’s lathe. My books have a different
  purpose. They are no fruitless attempt to taste again air once breathed, to be
  again the youth I was. No, their role is to trace the changes worked in, through
  and upon me. I am not the angry and ignorant monster whose home was stolen.
  I am not the sorrowing scholar who lurked in his ruin. I am not even the tem-
  perate teacher who set forth to bring new knowledge. I am none of those things
  but was all. I change, I am remade, I am both the sword and the smith who
  forges it. Who is to say that I, as I am now, cannot learn from the brute, the
  student, the prophet? Every season has its lesson, and every lesson has its price.
  He is a fool indeed who scorns that which he has already bought at dear cost.
  
  
  I turn my musty pages and recopy each
  word in my own hand. The temptation is there
  to change them—all things change, do they
  not? Is this not my credo? Yet I refrain. I
  will not sand away one bleat of self-pity, I
  will not soften any stark cruelty or brassy fool-
  ishness. Through changes without ceasing,
  something still and permanent can remain. I
  cannot see clearly ahead, but I can keep a grasp
  of what has gone before, even when my new
  self, new vision, sees through the shades that
  then held me blind.
  This is my cause, my hope. That I can
  pierce the shadows of hate, and even the bright
  glister of love, and find beyond them some-
  thing greater than either.
  Let us end. Let us begin.
  
  
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  I rose up among the dead, and I was dead with them.
  The Turks struck by night, damned infidels, coming in a
  horde like rats, and our gates were opened by a traitor within.
  We fought, my patriots and I, my bodyguard and I, two hun-
  dred men hand-picked by Prince Stephen the Great to defend my
  royal flesh, and yet it collapsed nonetheless on the thirsty ground.
  My enemies paid for their triumph, paid dearly. For ev-
  ery stripe upon me I took a life, and for each of the fallen by
  my side, two arrayed against me perished. It was good war. It
  was cold, and mad with noise, and the stink of a man when
  his bowels are opened, it was all that I was born to do. An
  arrow struck my shield where it had splintered under a spear
  thrust, it glanced off upward and transfixed my lip and my
  nose, the pain was maddening and the blood poured
  down my throat. Every breath choked me and each
  shout sprayed crimson.
  
  
  
  Then I saw him and I knew him. A
  thick brute who had curried my horse,
  grinned and bowed, now dressed in the ar-
  mor of my enemy. I remembered no name
  for him but it must have been he who be-
  trayed our position. I saw him and he saw
  me and we knew each other. In that moment
  death passed between us and we were married,
  tied together in hatred. Stronger than the ropes
  of seed that tie a woman to a man are the
  chains of blood that tie a warrior to his en-
  emy. Six men, mixed of his and mine, stood
  between us, and then three, and then one. That
  last was my loyal friend, yet I shoved him aside,
  eager for my nemesis.
  With no word spoken we locked arms, his
  pagan sword to my axe, and with cruel joy he
  shouldered the very arrow in my face, I fell back
  as he raised his weapon, but the pain had not felled
  me, the pain had made me fierce. I cut him through
  at the knee, at the join of his plates and bones, and
  he fell, but falling, struck. The blade sheared my
  side through, and now each breath was mixed with
  blood from above and below. He crashed upon me,
  face to face in the ardor of combat, he pinned my
  weapon so I clawed off his helmet and raked him
  like a cat while he turned his scimitar, ground it
  within me, like ice and fire shearing in my side.
  My other hand found his throat as his face eclipsed
  the moon, his nose and mouth bleeding into me—
  or was it my own blood, spat upon him, dripping
  back?—and even as I crushed his throat I felt the
  spirit in me slip free.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  In an instant all was still and clear. I rose up and the fierce cruelty
  of battle was replaced, transfigured, as if all I beheld was made of shim-
  mering light. Crystal soldiers beneath me gave silent groans and died
  but I was above it all, higher still, and I came into the luminous pres-
  ence of the Almighty.
  SON OF WALLACHIA,
  said the Lord unto me,
  IS YOUR WORK FINISHED?
  
  
  “Oh great Lord,” I said to Him, “Return me to the world,
  that I may smite the unbelievers in Your holy name!”
  ARE THEY NOT MY CHILDREN TOO?
  “They have rejected your Son! They have turned their backs
  on salvation and deserve only the scourge and the fire!”
  AS DID THE BEGGARS AND INDIGENT OF YOUR NATION, WHOM
  YOU LURED WITH KIND PROMISE AND THEN BURNED ALIVE?
  “Christ said for the poor come unto him. If any who died
  were saved, did I not send them to His presence?”
  YOU SWORE AN OATH TO ME, CHILD OF THE DRAGON. BEFORE
  THE ALTAR AT SNAGOV, YOU SWORE TO SHOW THE TRUTH OF CHRIST
  TO YOUR PEOPLE, IF ONLY YOU WERE PERMITTED YOUR THRONE.
  “I have kept my promise!”
  INDEED? IN MY SIGHT YOU HAVE TORTURED AND MURDERED
  AND DISGRACED THE SACRED HUMAN FORM, WHICH IS IN MY IMAGE.
  “I did as You did to Your son! Is any man better than
  Christ? Do any deserve less than the hurts He suffered? Every
  cry and groan was a hymn to Your glory! All that I did, I did
  in defense of Christendom! Ought I have let the Turk take
  them instead, and show them the tender mercy of Islam? Ought
  I have left them in indolence, to laze and fatten, to plot and
  scheme against me?”
  I THE LORD AM JUDGE OF THE WORLD!
  “By divine right, I the Prince am judge of my people!”
  AS YOU WISH. YOUR WI LL SHALL BE YOUR CURSE,
  DRAGON KNIGHT.
  
  
  
  Instantly, I felt myself gripped once more by
  the inclining of Earth, plunging toward the battle-
  field once again.
  TAKE DOMINION OVER MORTAL FLESH, BUT
  SURVIVE ENSLAVED TO IT. TAKE COMMAND OF
  THE BEASTS, FOR YOU EXCEL THEM IN SAVAGERY.
  YOU, WHO WOULD BE MY EQUAL, METE
  OUT DEATH TO HUMANKIND. BUT KNOW
  THAT FOR YOUR ARROGANCE, I HAVE
  MADE YOU UNCLEAN IN MY
  SIGHT, AND THE TOUCH OF
  PURITY SHALL HENCE-
  FORTH DRIVE YOU OUT. RE-
  MAIN IN DARKNESS UNTIL
  YOU LEARN, OR ELSE PER-
  ISH IN YOUR IGNORANCE.
  The light drained
  out as down I fell, and
  at the moment of deep-
  est dark I was myself
  again. I felt the pain
  of my face, my side,
  I felt the agony of the
  world once more and
  I screamed, I rose up
  and cried my rage and
  misery. A black cloud of
  carrion birds rose and
  worse than my side, worse
  than my mouth, was the
  thirst that burned in every
  member. My Rational Soul was
  unseated and in its place the Animal
  reigned. I fell upon the dead, lapping the dried
  blood from armor and weapons, cutting my
  tongue on dirk and spearhead in my eagerness for
  more. I fed upon Christian and Muslim alike, I
  plunged my fingers into the mud and sucked at the
  battle-gore that seeped to fill the holes.
  When I returned to myself—what self? Myself as ghul,
  as monster, as carrion devil!—I howled again, but this time
  cursing as a man. I cried to the sky my hatred of God, who
  had thrust this woe upon me. I swore that as He had made me
  for His enemy, I would be the direst foe He had fought, a worse
  Lucifer, a greater Judas, a name to blacken the world and a tor-
  ment for all humanity.
  
  
  
  
  First, however, I would
  avenge myself upon my slayers.
  First the soldiers, then the generals, and perhaps in time the great Sultan Mehmed
  himself. He will rue the day he challenged a Prince of Wallachia! Beside the evils
  I intend for him, his own blasphemy will seem a hymn of praise, his sodomy a
  sacrament, and his cruelty the balm of Gilead.
  Clutching my axe and an unbroken shield, I made for Snagov monastery—the
  abbot there was loyal to me. But before I had gone a mile I scented blood and
  followed its lure.
  Creeping through the chill dawn, I spied the Ottoman camp, the very sol-
  diers who had taken me and mine. Like a hound that spies the hare, I could not be
  restrained. I rose up, I charged on foot, howling. They started and two were
  struck motionless, unmanned by cowardice, but the other two kept their wits and
  fired. Arrows pierced my shield and my flesh, but the hurts were nothing next to
  the call within me, clotted and dead blood calling for fresh. The guards shrieked
  the alarm as I fell on them and I was sunk in a delirium of lust for them, they
  were delicious in my sight, the maddening aroma of their life sweet in my nose
  and each who crowded forward was a new temptation, a new delight, a new deli-
  cacy and I the glutton who would taste them all.
  
  
  
  Battle is always a red rapture, but this surpassed in sweetness any berserk fit
  I felt in life. To bite and kill these lowly Ottoman infantrymen gave me nearly
  the spiritual joy I had felt killing the pretenders Dan III and Vladislav II, who
  dared cast lecherous eyes on my throne and claim they had taken my fair nation
  in adultery. As for the physical bliss! It was transcendent.
  I was struck a dozen times, a hundred, but with each kill and taste of blood I
  knit my flesh anew. Death ought to have come to me twenty times that night, but
  instead I stole the lives of my slayers, becoming stronger with each sanguine
  draught. I fought my way to their tents and fires and they fell back. My shield was
  tattered and I dropped it in favor of a severed arm, that I might sip sweet blood
  from it as I battled. I would have slain every man of the camp, save
  for an unforeseen peril, the rising of the sun.
  I felt an awful sting, I smelled the charring of my flesh
  as my enemies rallied, arraying themselves
  with bows, the cowards, but their feath-
  ered sticks were nothing beside the
  agony of the breaking day. Much as I
  longed for the slaughtering bliss, I could
  not drive myself at them, into the
  light. Mad in terror, I cried out
  for the sky to fall on me, for the
  earth to swallow me.
  The earth obeyed.
  
  
  
  When I arose from the sheltering soil, the Turks had fled
  their campsite and the shelter of darkness again roofed the sky.
  I felt the hunger within me but it was less. Greater was the
  pain of my burns, sores showing where only the faintest bite of
  sunlight had fallen.
  Alone, I had time to regroup my thoughts. Clearly I was far supe-
  rior to any mortal—as any fit enemy of God must be. Their blood
  would be my food, as in living days I fed on their toil. So be it. It is
  fitting that the greater should meet their needs on the necks of the less.
  Is this my fate, then? To be a lash on humanity’s back? It is a
  duty to which I am fit, for I swear my thirst could drain the
  world, if only I had time enough and the power.
  Yet inside the monster is the man, and the man craves re-
  venge. Without aid I cannot be more than a pest, a small nui-
  sance in the hinterlands of my own nation. No, to oppose and
  offend the Lord in any meaningful way, I need my throne, for
  even my terrific hate cannot corrupt all the world unaided.
  
  
  
  To truly punish the Most High, I should pervert and cor-
  rupt that which is best in the world: The Christian Church. Yet
  while my hate is fierce for the Catholics who despised me in life,
  and the Christian rulers who betrayed me, like Matthias
  Corvinus and his father Hunyadi before him, that is nothing
  beside my loathing for the Turks. They who imprisoned me when
  only a child, who harassed me, who humiliated me with their
  threats and demands for tribute. Now Mehmet moves to put his
  catamite Radu upon my rightful throne, and that I will not
  stand. Even though it serves God’s purpose for the nonce, I must
  slay the great Turk. Yes. I shall start my career of evil with the
  Ottomans. First I reclaim my throne from them, then I slay the
  Sultan, and then I negotiate with the new Sultan from a position
  of strength. For whose strength is greater than one who can hide
  in any patch of soil, who can refresh himself from any man or
  beast indefinitely, for whom common blood is the sovereign
  salve of any injury?
  
  
  
  Before I could claim my kingdom,
  and then the world, I had first to re-
  claim a fortress. I turned my footsteps
  toward Snagov monastery, hoping to
  gather loyal troops on the way. To my
  shock and disgust, it soon became
  apparent that the triumph of my en-
  emies was nearly complete. I saw few
  forces I could approach and demand fe-
  alty—my loyal soldiers had all perished
  by my side, Corvinus’ Hungarians
  had abandoned me, and the fickle mer-
  cenaries in my employ had fled like
  dogs to lick a new master’s heels.
  I did encounter one small group
  of my secret police, but when I re-
  vealed myself they fled in terror, hav-
  ing heard accounts of my death. I gave
  them something to fear, in truth! Half
  who broke were run down before their
  companions, and I slaked my thirst
  upon their cowardly blood before the
  eyes of those stern enough to stand and
  fight. Once more I reminded them of
  their oaths to me, and having seen the
  might I now possess, they reconsid-
  ered their earlier flight.
  
  
  With that paltry honor guard, I came at last to Snagov and demanded ad-
  mittance as their rightful lord. The monks who rowed me across to their island
  fastness were pale and they trembled, perhaps more than they had even when I
  was their dread sovereign.
  I took myself to the chapel to consult my friend the abbot, and there a
  dreadful thing befell me. As I opened the door and looked upon the holy ikon, a
  weakness filled my limbs and I was flung back. The abbot saw me fall and,
  thinking me wounded in body, ran to my side. Then he realized my wounds
  were altogether more grievous, and he stood back.
  “My lord,” he asked. “What has happened to you?”
  “God has flung me from death to life. In battle I fell but, like Christ him-
  self, I have returned!”
  “No, my Prince. Not like Christ.” He knelt, not as a vassal kneels in
  subservience, but as one kneels to lift a fallen child. “The punishment of the
  Almighty is on you. I can see and feel it.”
  For his insolence I would have torn his flesh and made
  his neck my chalice, but he was across the threshold and
  I could not reach to strike him.
  
  
  
  “You have the debt of blood,” he said to me. “Yes? You feel
  the bottomless thirst? The sun in the sky punishes you?”
  “You know of this curse?”
  “I have seen it before. You are wampir now, my lord—a sad
  and twisted parody of the Savior himself. As Christ died that
  we might live, you now live by the death of others. As His holy
  blood became a saving sacrament, your unholy blood is a pesti-
  lence, corrupting all who partake… and as He rose again at
  dawn, you shall die again each sunrise.”
  “These are only tales to frighten children!” I spat, but
  in my heart I knew he spoke the truth. I had become a thing
  of night terrors, existing only to wreck and destroy all that
  was good.
  “Behold,” he whispered. “Even your tears are red.”
  “What can I do? What is left for a creature such as I
  have become?”
  “Repent. All is mutable, my lord. That is the last aspect of
  your Christian perversion. You change not, age not, and die
  not, but Christ is rebirth and renewal! Any grievous sin can be
  undone by His intervention. You have chosen this path, to be a
  human plague, but you can choose to return to the light as
  well. Admit your wrongdoing, beg the forgiveness of your Lord,
  and this change worked upon you can be undone.”
  For a moment, I gave myself hope, but I have always taken
  greater strength from truth, no matter how bitter. The abbot
  was wrong, I could feel it in my bones, in the very curse that
  seethed within me. Change was for men, as I had changed from
  an ally of the Turk to his bitterest foe, as my crown and country
  changed hands with each assassination and betrayal, as my own
  father bought his freedom from the Sultan with my captivity
  when I was but twelve years old.
  No longer man, I could be only what I am. There is no
  redemption for me. I will not change, and neither will God.
  
  
  
  I left Snagov burdened by bitter truths. I saw in the abbot’s mirror my
  twisted countenance and I knew the hell-wolf I had become.
  This news left me grieving and heavy at heart, but other news fired me again
  into rage. The monks had news that my own home, Castle Dracula, is infested by
  the usurpers. Intolerable! Those sacred walls, built by the bloodied hands of dis-
  sident Boyars whom I made haul stones until they dropped into the mercy of
  exhausted death, them and their wives in their Easter finery toiling for my glory.
  Am I now to let it rest in the hands of sniveling Radu and his Turks? Never!
  Yet as I write this, I am cast down. All but three of my vassals are dead at
  the hands of the castle’s defenders, and those three cower in madness, fit only to
  slake my thirst as I wander south. I, Dracula, who repelled the great Turkish
  invasion, have been flung from my home like a common mendicant.
  It was by night we came, and disguised as a Turk I gained admission, slaugh-
  tered the door guards and raised the portcullis for my own small band, when I heard
  from behind me a chortle of laughter and a small round of mocking applause.
  I turned to see two Turkish women, garbed for the seraglio, but standing in
  a doorway that opened to the courtyard.
  
  
  
  I have faced untold battle terrors, I have supped in a grove of
  the impaled and slept easily afterward, but the sight of this pair
  boiled my heart with fright as nothing ever did in my living
  days. Yet I bit back this fright with the aid of my wrath and
  pride. If I am to be compelled to a sinful existence, then by my
  oath I shall choose my sins.
  “Look,” one crooned. “A native whelp has come to bark.”
  “Speak a Christian tongue!” I shouted in response. Though
  I could understand their courtly Turkish, I have often found
  value in an ignorant seeming.
  “If you seek to insinuate your woeful self to the governor
  here, that place is taken,” said the second, this time speaking
  German. “But here. Pledge us fealty and we shall give you the
  shelter of Invictus.” With that, she shrugged her breast free
  and pierced it, letting blood well up like milk.
  “I pledge fealty to no God, demon, or man, and least of all
  to any woman,” I said. “The name Invictus will suit you poorly
  when I have shown your remains to the sun!”
  The first laughed again. “He thinks ‘Invictus’ is your
  name,” she trilled.
  “Who was your sire, whelp?” asked the other. “Who made
  you a ghul?”
  “God himself!”
  They laughed again, and I chose that moment to strike.
  There is little point in committing to ink exact means of
  my defeat. Suffice to say that the Turkish strigoi were swifter
  and stronger than I, though even now the notion of a woman’s
  blows upon me causes my teeth to gnash. As they hurled me
  down the steps of my own residence, they spat upon me, told
  me I did not even deserve to be their slave, and that I should
  mark well the inevitable triumph of Invictus, the rulers of all
  the undead.
  
  
  
  My surviving servants were those who fled in terror from those harlots of Invictus,
  whatever that might be. I write this on paper begged from the abbot, as I crouch in the
  crypt of some long-forgotten boyar.
  The abbot said others were as I am, and the pair in my castle affirms it. This explains
  much. I had never paid heed to legends of ghuls in Turkey and strigoi here, but as I think
  back on my experience in Sultan Murad’s court, and the nigh-unbelievable prowess of some
  who defended Sultan Mehmet’s person during my night attack so many years ago… yes, it
  becomes clear. If such creatures existed, could they rule? Indeed, what force could stop
  them? Only their own might pitted against each other.
  Yea, as in the world of men one king naturally strikes his brother, so in the world of the
  dead must one monster naturally compete with others of his ilk. I shall have to learn more
  of this ‘Invictus’. I shall have to learn more of my nature. To do so
  I needs must follow those two beasts to their source. I must
  journey to Adrianople, the Ottoman capital.
  When I have the answers I need, I shall re-
  turn here and teach those bitches the abbot’s
  lesson—that in this realm, all things
  may change.
  • • •
  
  
  
  It is the year of the Christians’ Lord 1480 and I have re-
  turned to reclaim my castle, at least.
  How I have learned upon my five years’ journey! The blood
  inside me cries, in anger or fear, at the sight of another of my
  damned ilk. By this means I have seen the thin film of ghul-
  kind who float on top of the human herd, like a skin of ice
  upon winter water. In the slums of Adrianople’s bazaar I have
  seen them hide and scuttle, and in the depths of the Sultan’s
  harem they plot and connive.
  ‘Invictus’ is simply a cabal among them, intervening it-
  self wherever the mortals’ governments have power. They have
  the Sultan’s ear but not his heart, for his advisors are wise to
  their tricks and watch him closely for signs of blood madness.
  As I peruse my old notes, I see that the abbot referred to
  this—that my blood would corrupt any who partook. This is
  literal truth, as my sniveling brother Radu has learned, to his
  regret. I came to his window in the form of a bat—another power
  of the blood that I have chiseled from God’s miserly grasp—and
  forced myself upon him, not after the perverse fashion of Radu’s
  sodomite master the Sultan, but in a way perhaps more ghastly
  yet. Now that my blood runs within him, his Reason begins to
  sway toward my will.
  
  
  
  I have given him a month to dread my next visit, a month to hide in fear
  and sleep in a sealed chamber. Perhaps tomorrow night, or next week, he will
  let down his guard and a second taste will make love of me a fire within him.
  With the third taste, he will be a
  hollow man, living only to
  fulfill my whim and wish. I
  will never rule Wallachia
  again. My death is too
  widely known, and the se-
  cret undead lying in the
  Sultan’s seraglio know
  what I have become. Nev-
  ertheless, my evil blood
  shall make puppet Radu
  dance upon my strings,
  not those of his
  turbaned lover.
  
  
  
  The enslavement of men is
  not its sole use. I have learned
  how our kind beget. It is not
  through fumbling and uncer-
  tain rutting, but by an alto-
  gether more reasonable means.
  Those who die beneath my
  fangs can, should I choose it,
  return by my blood. It is hard,
  deathly difficult, but for one
  of true noble lineage the dif-
  ficult is the commonplace.
  I have a daughter now.
  Or a wife, or a sister in
  damnation, it matters not.
  Human words fail for what
  Mara is to me. I met her
  in Adrianople, a beauty
  stolen from Afric shores
  and sold into Turkish
  bondage. Despite her
  charms and strength she
  was being sold on the cheap,
  for she had murdered a sailor
  who tried to woo her by force.
  I saw in her eyes a madness and
  hate equal to mine. Before
  purchase, we spoke.
  “I was baptized into the
  Christian church,” I told her.
  “What think you of that?”
  Her answer was to spit in
  my face.
  
  
  “I have killed many for
  much less offense than that.
  Are you afraid to die?”
  “I 
  would 
  cherish
  death,” she said in her bro-
  ken Turkish.
  “Yes, I believe you. If
  God, or whatever spirit
  you revere, came to you
  and gave you the sword of
  the angel of death… would
  you pick it up?”
  “What mean you?”
  “If you had a weapon to slay
  at will, unconcerned, would you
  wield it?”
  “Who would not?”
  “How would you use it?”
  She did not answer with
  words, but her eyes narrowed
  and her gaze became distant
  as she looked at the streets
  about her.
  “Would you kill them
  all? The children and the women
  as well?”
  “The children would only grow
  to be vile, and the women would only
  swell and birth more evil.”
  “Then if God gave you a vial of
  pestilence, that could spread across
  all Europe and all Asia and your own
  nation, every nation across the sea…
  would you open the vial?”
  
  
  
  She knew. She did not know my nature, but she knew my
  questions were not idle.
  “Are you the Devil?” she asked, and her voice was all hope.
  “I have been called his son,” I said, and brought forth gold
  to purchase her.
  I ignored the name she came with. I called her Mara—my
  little joke on the Sultan’s mother.
  Later, she did not sigh in pleasure when I bit her neck, as
  many do. Nor did she cry out as I became more savage and hacked
  at her to bring a faster flow, as most do. When I brought her
  back, she fed like an animal, as she has each night since. She is
  magnificent and shows no doubt, no regret, no uncertainty over
  what I have made her.
  “Now, being this, the world makes sense,” she says.
  Together, alone, we returned to my homeland.
  • • •
  I have once more traveled to Tîrgoviste, and once more fed
  myself to Radu. As planned he becomes more servile. One more
  taste, for which he now begs, and my grasp on Wallachia will
  be all but complete. In the meanwhile, I entertain myself with
  Mara, showing her how to invert our Curse and make it serve
  us as power. As I taught, she asked me something.
  
  
  
  “What is it like, to be a king?”
  “It is very much like this,” I said in reply. “You have
  power, and the right to do with it as you will. You have might
  and dominion such that no ordinary man can stand against
  you. Yet at all times you are aware of greater powers yet,
  which you must always fear and pacify.”
  “What powers? Do you mean God?”
  “That is a simpleton’s view. I mean popes and emperors,
  and the powers that support them. Even an emperor can be
  held hostage in his own home, should the people of his lands
  have an excess of anger and insufficient fear. Too, there is
  always another heir, and there are always those with power to
  gain by exulting that heir in your stead.”
  “I thought you killed all your rivals as children.”
  “I made a good try of it, but my relatives excel rabbits in
  fecundity. For rulers less practical than I, there are even more
  challengers.”
  “But who are the challengers to us, the damned of
  the night?”
  This led me to thought. For in truth, if fear is the great
  ally of a ruler, how can ones so fearsome as we avoid the
  thrones of the world?
  “I believe it is the changeability of the world,” I said at
  last. “We are, by God’s affliction, immutable. When the
  world changes, we are left behind, for maintaining power is
  always a wrestling match. The complacent ruler is not long for
  his throne. In my mortal days I was enthroned three times and
  thrice deposed, I first allied with the Turks and then became
  their greatest foe, I was baptized Catholic, raised Orthodox,
  converted back to Catholicism to marry, and died blasphem-
  ing God’s name. I allied with the man who helped assassinate
  my father and was later betrayed when I soldiered beside his
  son against my own brother. By Hell, my brother Radu once
  defended his honor against Mehmed with sword and dagger,
  but now claims the throne as the Sultan’s lover.”
  
  
  
  “Certainly there is truth to what you say,” she said. “But
  are we doomed to be left behind by the world’s mutability?”
  “Not while our minds retain Reason. It is clear that God
  has taken half my Rational Soul, for the lusts and hungers of
  my Animal Soul are held much less in check thereby. Yet I still
  can learn, and therefore change, and so long as we can change
  we can hope. You and I, Mara, are drawn tight between our
  immutable bodies and our capacity to learn and think and begin
  anew. This tension would madden lesser souls, but we can draw
  strength and even grace from it, as a musician draws music from
  the taut string of his harp. We are given decades from which to
  view the world and learn its secrets, without men’s distractions
  of aging and daily toil for bread. If we seize our punishment
  and make it a gift, while clinging tight to what power of thought
  we retain, we can be greater than any mortal—indeed, greater
  than any ghul!”
  To demonstrate my point, I rose above her as a bat, circling
  the room before standing before her again.
  “But to what purpose?” she asked.
  
  
  
  “Must change have a purpose?”
  “Indeed,” she said. “Else all is chaos.”
  “What troubles you about chaos?”
  Her eyes narrowed. “That what we call chaos is, from an-
  other perspective, the hidden hand of God.”
  Something in her tone chilled me. I sat, and peered into her
  eyes. “Explain.”
  “You were a Prince, a politician. You schemed and con-
  nived to alter the deeds of men. Whose actions are easier to
  mold, the man who is focused and driven, or the man who is
  confused and uncertain? You have been a soldier on the field.
  Which enemy is more readily tricked and destroyed, one with
  discipline and training? Or a muddled rabble?”
  Though only a woman, Mara made great sense, and I shall
  forever be grateful for what I learned from her that night: That
  change must emerge from reasoned plan. If you move blindly,
  you are at the mercy of any who see you.
  “Mara,” I said. “I believe you have been sent by the Devil
  himself to aid me.”
  
  
  
  Tonight was the climax of all my plans, and it was de-
  lightful. Radu was shocked to learn that there were undead
  within the court his turbaned master sent to “attend” him.
  After the second drink of my blood, he was more than ready
  to believe my words about those two devilish concubines. At
  my direction, he took them by day. The pretty brace of them,
  upraised on stakes, were his offering to me.
  “Ah,” I said, looking upon them. “Is there any form so
  fair that it cannot be improved with the proper pedestal?”
  I was not sure if they could see me, though I had done
  them the courtesy of cutting off their eyelids.
  
  “I would love, dearly love, to hear what final words you
  might offer. Some defiant paean to Invictus? Some futile
  pleas for pity and release, spiced perhaps with promises of
  service? Would you abase yourself before Christ, or Allah,
  or some other virtuous deity? I think that perhaps you might
  be the type to suffer in dignified silence. My curiosity is
  deep… and yet, not that deep. No. It is petty to risk myself
  and my companions for such childish satisfactions. It is
  beneath me. You shall have no final say.” I turned my face
  to Mara and said, “Mark well that you drink until the final
  speck is gone.”
  
  
  In all truth, my sole intention had been to kill them in a
  physically gratifying manner. Yet when I took the last sweet
  dram of blood from one, I felt a new stirring within me, the
  first caress of a new power. Eagerly, I attended it, and knew—
  knew as a dove knows the sky, as a dolphin knows the sea—
  that I could go deeper, could extinguish not only life, but that
  inner spirit which has no form in this world. I knew it would
  be delicious, that it would nourish me even as blood could
  not, and the instant I knew it could be mine, I decided it
  must be.
  What does it mean? Can my power be so great that I can
  devour a soul—a spirit no longer immortal but only grist for
  my gluttony? It seems that what I felt could be naught else,
  yet if it is so then there is truly no permanence, even beyond
  this life! If what I felt was true, then the immortality
  promised by Christ the Redeemer and Mohammed the
  Prophet are both equal lies!
  Are we truly spirits cast adrift, impermanent, sparks in
  the void? Have our great saints and leaders lied to us? Do no
  fires of Hell await the vicious, and is Heaven void of penitent
  souls? What God could make us so and yet see fit to punish
  an individual such as myself with perpetual existence?
  Perhaps God is crueler than I. Perhaps the justice, prom-
  ised by defiant monks from their dying stakes, is just an
  illusion more vicious than any torment I have devised.
  
  
  
  Perhaps this world is all that there is. Perhaps
  God told me one thing but showed me another,
  spoke lying words to make me weak while giving
  my blood the tools of eternal strength…
  When I completed my feed, Radu humbly be-
  seeched me, that I might gift him again with my
  sanguine strength. No meek convert ever begged
  Christ’s blood so prettily.
  Who could resist such imploring? Especially
  since the gift chained a ruler to my will, utterly,
  mind and heart.
  Through my poor weak little brother I sent
  away the guards and vassals and lackeys. I had
  tender virgins brought to slake my thirst (though,
  in truth, after my feast of Invictus I only killed
  them for the sake of appearances). And I sat upon
  my throne with my crown upon my brow, while the
  recognized Prince of Wallachia capered and
  clowned for my amusement.
  My nation knows it not, but the Impaler Prince
  rules it once more.
  
  
  
  Now the time has come to set aside this journal, divert-
  ing though it has been. I no longer need to echo my thoughts
  back at myself, for I have a world into which I can bellow
  commands. Tonight I fly back to Castle Dracula, to conceal
  these papers safely. Tomorrow, the return trip to Tirgoviste—
  and the dawn of a new state.
  • • •
  Not damned, not thrice damned, but four times cursed is
  the name of Dracula. Who else in history has been con-
  demned to lose his throne not twice, but four times? Surely I
  am the plaything of God, or the Devil or malevolent Fortune.
  I am wroth unto madness, but I am not surprised.
  Radu, by himself, was a poor choice to rule. He prefers
  love to fear, which is wise for a minstrel but foolish for a
  Prince. His will was weak, as witnessed by the way the Sultan
  swayed him into unnatural vice, and I swayed him into
  unnatural service.
  Furthermore, the bonds I placed upon him seem, from
  the perspective of experience, to have strained overmuch his
  Reason. I gave him wise commands to keep order in the
  kingdom and ensure the strength of his position, but a Prince
  must react moment by moment, not day by day (or night by
  night). He followed the letter of my commands and would
  have obeyed their meaning, had he only the mind to discern
  it. Blinded by his fixed and unhealthy love of me, he did not.
  If I had a brighter ink than him with which to scrawl
  my intentions, I might have ruled by proxy. Now Basarab
  III claims the throne from Radu, with the aid of a fickle
  Sultan who suspects, no doubt, my unclean hand in this
  matter. Ah well.
  
  
  
  My final and lonesome retreat is here, Castle Dracula, built by my ancestors
  and, by my command, rebuilt by my enslaved enemies. Through Radu I have or-
  dered it abandoned and the roads to and from it—rough and ill-used at best—to be
  torn up and left as mud. A winter and a spring will suffice to erase them completely.
  Here I can stay. There are several towns and villages close, within the night’s
  flight of a bat, and I know that the gypsies will come through these mountains
  whether there is a road or not. I need fear no thirst.
  I can rule a nation no longer. I cannot parley with my equals, I cannot mete
  out justice by daylight, I cannot command an army when the sun holds me
  frozen like death.
  I will not retake my throne, tonight or ever, until the sun in the sky is no
  longer my foe. Instead, I turn myself to other matters. Before the conquest of
  the world, I would be well advised to conquer myself. As a man, I had total self-
  control, but as one of the strigoi, much eludes me. Here, alone in my keep, I
  will wrestle this beast within and break it to heel like my hunting-dog.
  Ah, but first, there is a final matter to be settled and made orderly. I hear
  the royal carriage arriving. Basarab will no doubt be disap-
  pointed that Radu absconded with it…
  
  
  Radu died better than I would have expected. First he
  arranged for his honor guard (a mere twenty
  troops! Even I had more aiding me when I
  fell) to walk directly into the trap I pre-
  pared. I’m delighted to have my larder so
  readily stocked.
  Then he begged forgiveness for failing
  me, which lightened my anger somewhat. I
  told him that I would still give him the re-
  ward of eternal life (for that is how I have
  described our condition to him) if he could
  endure a test to prove his loyalty.
  “Anything!” he promised.
  Remarkably, he blanched only a little
  when I showed him the stake.
  I have overseen the impalement of over
  twenty thousand men, women, children,
  and one donkey. Radu was different from
  all of them, and not solely because he
  was also my father’s child. Radu went
  willingly, if not eagerly, and lasted as
  long as any. He said he could feel my
  blood within him, giving him
  strength, battling against the
  wounds that would end him. Fas-
  cinating. Was this literally true,
  or only a fancy of his poetic soul?
  To the very end, I promised him
  that after he breathed his last, I would restore him,
  and more, make him better than he had ever been.
  Mara and I knew the moment he perished—
  we could tell from the glaze of his eyes
  but more, his scent in our nostrils was
  no longer that of fresh prey, but only
  of a cold and unappetizing corpse.
  This too is a puzzling quality to
  investigate.
  “Will you restore him now?”
  Mara asked me.
  “Don’t be foolish,” I replied.
  “Feed of him as you will.”
  
  
  
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  If all is flux and change, how is it that I find myself return-
  ing to the same places once, and again, and once more? As a
  mortal I gained my throne and lost it, and gained and lost twice
  more. Now undying, I nevertheless find my feet once more tread
  the cobblestones of Castle Dracula.
  Perhaps change cycles like the seasons, with spring inevi-
  table after winter. Perhaps my own unholy nature—a permanent
  thing in an ever-changing world—draws me back time and again,
  here, to my home.
  Yet even as I return to the same place, it is not the same nor
  am I. The walls, bulky and strong, are thick with vines and li-
  chen. Wooden roofs have fallen in and even mortar has given way.
  The vault remains secure, however. That will do for the
  time being.
  In that crypt I found my old writings, and I wince at the
  callow and preening peacock I was. To think I could rule, or
  that I had, or that any reign is aught but trickery and misdirec-
  tion in this vale of tears and deceit! It’s laughable.
  Who can truly reign when the choice between darkness and
  light is always and utterly within the human heart?
  
  
  
  If the years have wrought their
  changes upon my castle, they have
  done so upon my spirit as well. Has
  it grown toward greatness like an
  oak from an acorn? No. Like the
  home of my body, the home of my
  heart is worn and decayed.
  In life, as a man, I thought no
  glutting on blood and death could
  sate me, but my murderous sojourn
  in the lands of the Turks taught me
  otherwise. I killed nightly, strik-
  ing high and low alike, as impar-
  tial as Fate, and I, Dracula, wea-
  ried of it. The physical bliss re-
  mains as rapturous as always,
  but even rapture stultifies the
  mind with incessant repetition.
  I needed more. I needed
  something to make me think and
  feel, and to that end I traveled to
  Jerusalem in search of the
  Lancea Sanctum.
  Should any reader beside
  myself one day peruse these
  pages, let me clarify that
  there is a vampire religion
  that reveres Longinus the
  centurion, holding him to
  be the representative of
  God’s will among our kind.
  They have studied our con-
  dition and delved deep into
  the mysteries of our blood,
  and for a time I hoped their
  Theban sorcery would il-
  luminate the dark questions
  in my mind.
  They welcomed me
  eagerly—their leader had
  been Christian in life and
  despised the infidel Turks
  even in death, so a hero such
  as I was folded quickly to their
  bosom. Their initiations—by
  fire, temptation and the sword—
  were little compared to trials I
  have inflicted on myself.
  
  
  
  Yet ultimately, I turned aside from the Centurion’s path.
  They were able to push against the limits of our state, but only
  briefly, only in reprieve. Their changes to the world were mi-
  raculous, to be sure, but as impermanent as the dew which fades
  at sunrise. Further, they still trembled before God in the man-
  ner of those who secretly crave punishment for their sins. Now
  I regret turning aside from that wisdom, but then, I sought
  only the means to make my reprimand from God retribution
  unto Him in turn.
  Perhaps Mara’s blandishments led me astray, for she was
  ever disdainful of the Sanctified, as they called themselves. Yet
  I cannot blame a lowly woman (even an immortal one) for the
  poor decision I made. No, it was my hand that burned the bridge,
  my own willful tread that led me away from wisdom. That door
  is closed to me now.
  Before I turned aside from them, their master had spoken,
  with the contempt that masks fear, of a band of pagans in the
  steppes who terrorized even the fearsome Tatars and whose blas-
  phemies against God had lured demons to give them worldly
  power. In my madness and heresy, this sounded honey-sweet,
  and so to the mountains I went.
  
  
  After a year of
  pointless searching and
  frenzied questioning of
  any who might know, I
  found the Circle of the
  Crone. It took another
  year to pass their tests
  and learn their litanies—
  madly rapid progress by
  their usual standards,
  but painfully slow to
  me. At last, I was
  initiated into the rituals
  of Cruac.
  
  
  The pagans had much to teach, and their crescent symbol
  made me wonder much about that same symbol being used for
  Islam, but in the end I find their secrets as hollow as the Theban
  rites, and their so-called philosophy far more so.
  It is certainly accurate to say that only through testing and
  trial can one overcome limitations, but the Passion of Christ proves
  this far more readily than the pains of Odin. The assertion that we
  are creatures of nature but beyond it will not stand rigorous scru-
  tiny, for what else in the world of the earthly is as inalterable as we?
  Only the stars in their orbits show the same eternity, and to brag
  that we have their lofty matter within us is bold indeed for crea-
  tures who die every day and live only by the grace of suckling in
  need at the veins of the living.
  Further, for all their claims about the infinite and abso-
  lute, the Acolytes can bend the world but lightly to their will,
  and only for a time, before it springs back with the vigor of a
  green twig.
  Holding a boulder over one’s head does not alter the nature of
  the stone, and to say that it is higher or lighter is to attribute to
  rock that effort which wearies one’s own sinews. Both the Theban
  and the Crescent paths are strong, and not to be mocked nor taken
  lightly, but ultimately they share they same failing: They can
  deform the world, but not truly change it. They write their power
  with air on the wind, and in an instant it fades.
  To truly make the changes I seek, I must delve within and
  work my wonders upon myself.
  
  
  
  This is the reason for my return to Castle Dracula, with Mara still at my side.
  While she has myriad flaws—most of which I counted as virtues when I gave her
  the dubious gift of our condition—disloyalty is not one of them. Yet can stead-
  fastness be a virtue in a creature immune to change? Does she remain with me
  from devotion, or the inertia to which our kind is inevitably prone? I know I will
  get no meaningful answer if I ask her, any more than I would receive a thoughtful
  reply quizzing a dog about its faithfulness. Mara hunts and kills and is a well-
  honed predator, but she will never look deeper into
  the world than at her next source of blood.
   • • •
  I have progressed with the
  great work.
  Theban sorcery is predicated on
  the submission of self to another—
  to the higher power of the blood
  and to Longinus himself, who
  is a dark Christ to his followers
  and revered beyond all reason.
  Cruac is in some sense the op-
  posite, the submission of an-
  other to the self—but self as
  blood wielder, self as mon-
  ster. The Sanctified sacrifice
  the man to the Beast, and
  the Acolytes sacrifice the
  world to it, but these are ul-
  timately temporary sacri-
  fices because the Beast
  cannot change, while
  world and man al-
  ways must.
  I have found a
  third way.
  
  
  Both those practices move on straight lines, but any leader
  can tell you that the real course to power is often a crooked path.
  I have found that path, and it winds and binds the very essence of
  what I am. With its coils, I can sacrifice the Beast to the Beast.
  Observe. What are the qualities of the strigoi, the ghuls,
  the vampires?
  CRAVING is the first quality. We are incomplete creatures,
  robbed of something essential by our curse, and to offset this
  lack we take blood. We take sustenance from blood, we take
  meaning from blood and we take our only unalloyed pleasure in
  blood. The emptiness and hunger defines what we are. If we do
  not feed, we shrivel into nothingness.
  STAGNATION is the second quality. We do not age, we re-
  sist illness and poison, we change ourselves only with the great-
  est exertion, we breed more of our ilk only through the most
  grievous straining against what can laughably be called our
  “nature.” This is why fire and the sun are our banes, because
  they cleanse, renew and give life. Life is the only thing that can
  overcome our suspension from time.
  UNREASON is the third quality. Our Rational Souls are
  crippled by our transformation, leaving us animals with a man’s
  contempt for our bestiality. This curse makes us craven against
  our elders and vicious to all others, makes us cringe or rave,
  makes us act on instinct and not by proper thought.
  These are the chains that bind us. Yet each link can be
  forged with another into a key for the third.
  
  
  
  To overwhelm my first, fiercest and most en-
  during flaw, the thirst that makes me murder, the
  hunger which makes me unclean… this is the chal-
  lenge, to coil upon the blood and squeeze that need
  into submission. What allies can I find in the fight
  against this need?
  Stagnation is my best and most powerful ally.
  Already my body is built to change not, already its
  power resists time and decay. It is but necessary to
  marshal this prowess against a new foe, against the
  thirst which, when thwarted, dries my skin and with-
  ers my sinew. Stagnation calls me already. I need
  but heed the call on my own terms.
  Blood is not mere sustenance for me, of
  course. It is not only the gross physical matter
  of the sanguine fluid, but also the stuff of soul
  which beats through it—the passion for love that
  warms it, and the passion of hate which boils it.
  Blood is not solely blood but also vigor, strength,
  and it is for this purpose that my angry unrea-
  son can be harnessed. The rage, the heat, it is
  within me already and need not be borrowed from
  without. Let the Animal Soul bite and suck it-
  self and thereby be sated.
  
  
  
  The second challenge is the terror of the flame and that
  penultimate flame, fiery Phoebus above. Fire is the principle of
  change and therefore my blight and anathema. Yet am I not the
  Dragon? Is flame not my very breath? Am I not the fire’s kin?
  Fire consumes and grows as it is fed, and do I not as well? I
  turn to the craving, turn to the red thirst, and know what it is
  to be fire, to crave all, to have an overwhelming passion to feed.
  I recognize fire’s hunger in my hunger and fire’s nature in my
  nature.
  If the spirit of fire is one of hunger, I know also that it is
  one of wrath—heedless, remorseless, caring not that the destruc-
  tion of its fuel inexorably starves it away. This madness also has
  is cousin within me, in my unreasoning Beast. If I turn rage
  on rage, what merely natural flame can overcome the wrath of
  the All Powerful?
  
  
  
  The third and most insidious opponent is one
  that dwells, lover close, within me. It is my own
  damned nature, my unreason, my urge to live in an
  endless crimson now of slaughter and animal ful-
  fillment, heedless—indeed, incapable of con-
  sidering!—the demise my madness invites.
  This battle seems doomed to stalemate,
  for my enemy is very much my self, perhaps
  my self of selves. What offsets this? My
  lacks. My emptiness. My thirst. Oh,
  compared to what I am missing, what
  I have is very weak indeed.
  Too, my own eternity bol-
  sters me in this fight, for while
  the Beast is always and essen-
  tially a creature of the Now,
  I am forever composed to be
  a creature of Forever. In
  the blank depths of eter-
  nity, the rage of an in-
  stant, no matter how
  fierce, is ultimately
  but a spark. I can
  stretch a rope be-
  tween my stag-
  nation and my
  wrath, and
  c l i m b
  cross the
  abyss upon
  it.
  
  
  
  It is demonstrated thus. What force is stronger than the curse
  of God above? The strength of two divine curses combined.
  Such is the philosophy of the matter. Now to test my airy
  thoughts against the fire and the blood.
  • • •
  
  
  God is cruel.
  I read the pages that lie beside this one and see my pride once
  more pushing higher my hopes. Indeed, my theory of Coils has
  proven correct, and my explorations have been profoundly prom-
  ising. I had dared think that the mercy of the Lord is truly
  boundless and that even a wretch such as I, a murdering fiend of
  the stripe I have been, might find freedom from His curse in the
  fullness of time.
  I thought and hoped and dared dream of becoming more
  than a bloodied night-taker, and then Fortune, God’s mastiff,
  growls and bites.
  My castle home has been invaded.
  
  
  
  The intruders are no mere gypsy band, of the type I have
  affrighted away before. Nor are they a troop of soldiers, who
  could easily be my prey for long months. No, they are but three,
  traveling alone and lightly armed. Surely they should hold no
  fear for terrors like Mara and myself?
  Yet they built four fires at sunset, large and bright from the
  seasoned timber of old doors and outbuilding walls. They built
  their fires and slept in the middle of them, despite the warmth
  of the night.
  One fire is sufficient to repel wolves and vermin. Their
  intrusive camp is set so that none may enter without passing
  between two fires—something many strigoi would be loath
  to do.
  I gave them their first night. I watched them from beyond
  the fire’s glow. Each in turn kept guard. Each in turn I exam-
  ined closer, in bat form, relying on the Coils to offset my in-
  stinct to flee the flames.
  
  
  The first, who took the early watch, is a scholar. To the
  eye, a lean man of monkish mien, elderly—perhaps as old as
  fifty. He had no cleric’s tonsure, but his back bore the bend of
  a habitual reader. Perhaps a Jew but more likely French or Ital-
  ian. Upon his face he bore some of the waspish suspicion those
  nations lend their people. He carried a dagger in his belt, and
  kept a crossbow nearby, loaded. Yet when I flew past him as a
  bat, he peered at me with great suspicion, and even drew forth a
  small and polished mirror with which to inspect me. I believe I
  flew off before he could sight me.
  The midnight shift saw the rise of a woman of middle age,
  perhaps twenty or so, heavyset and with a complexion that spoke
  of a racial miscegenation. She carried a sword with strange deco-
  rations—a straight edge but with a tassel on the pommel and
  oddly curved letters inscribed upon the blade. He clothes were
  of Eastern silk. Among her possessions was a spiked buckler,
  which she kept close to hand.
  The third is a Saxon, of the same stripe who so plagued me
  from their tidy, industrious towns during my reign. Barely of
  age, he was a strapping youth with a mane of blonde hair and a
  fuzzy wisp of beard already decorating his chin. He wore a
  chain shirt and carried a sword with a confidence that told me he
  himself had put the notches upon its metal.
  
  
  
  How pleasant I would have once found it, to arise from sleep
  to the sound of screams.
  Before repose last night, I gave serious thought to the enter-
  tainment of my guests (who did not, at that time, understand
  that they had that honor). While a strike by night appealed to
  my Animal Soul, and to Mara, I felt compelled to give them a
  better chance. How can I ever transcend what I am, if I succumb
  to any fleeting thirst for viciousness? I therefore decided this
  evening to greet them in a style befitting my station.
  One who knows me only by the written boasts of decades
  past, recorded in these frail pages, would think I meant a ban-
  quet meant to thrill and impress—or else a feast of blood meant
  to repel and terrify them. No, now I am not as I was. I am a
  philosopher now. I have a simple existence fit for one who seeks
  treasures that are grasped with the mind, not held in the hand. I
  sent Mara to the village to procure some victuals last night (she
  is a marvel of pragmatism on such missions), while I took mea-
  sures to defend those treasures I do possess—my writings, my
  thoughts and the records of my studies.
  From the bellows I heard upon waking, I was forced to con-
  clude that our guests had attempted to enter my library. A pity,
  yet not unexpected. I asked Mara to watch unseen, while I went
  out through the old postern and crept around, that I might present
  the appearance of a traveler at journey’s end.
  
  
  
  The shouts were those of the Scholar, with the Woman set-
  ting his broken leg. The Saxon aided the endeavor by sitting
  upon the patient’s shoulders, lest his thrashing undo the
  Woman’s work.
  Entering, I steeled myself, that the scent of blood would not
  arouse me. “Good evening,” I said.
  The two whole of limb looked up at me.
  “You seem to have fallen upon some mischance,” I said.
  The youth spoke in German. “The stairs gave way be-
  neath him.”
  “How unfortunate! I was told this old place was unsafe…”
  “And I, that it was abandoned.” The Scholar had, with
  impressive effort, composed himself. “Might I ask your name,
  stranger?”
  “I am Paolo Jaroslavic,” I said. “I have been awarded this
  property for recent service to the crown.”
  “I am Hermes,” he said, pronouncing it in the French
  fashion. “These are my associates Anoushka and Ivor.” Ivor
  was the Saxon.
  “I am grieved that my first guests should be in such strait-
  ened need, but I can, at the least, offer you the rude hospital-
  ity of a meal, with perhaps some wine to dull the pain of
  your leg.”
  “We would not be beholden,” Ivor said in rough Latin.
  “Nor would I hold you indebted,” I said. “My country has
  a tradition of hospitality. It is a matter of honor.”
  “We prefer to see to our own needs.”
  “Do you not trust my taste and my table?”
  He shrugged. “It is you who say so.”
  
  
  
  “You damnable whelp! I find you squatting like bandits
  upon my property, I offer you the grace of my hospitality in
  your time of need and I am repaid with the uppity bleating of a
  stiff-necked child? I’m not sure if I should demand satisfaction
  or look for your father to have him cuff your ears!”
  Ivor was stung and growled, verily growled like a beast,
  as he reached for his weapon, but the woman Anoushka re-
  strained him.
  “Please forgive my comrade,” she said. “I am sure you meant
  us no harm, even as he meant you no disrespect. We would be
  delighted to share your meal.”
  “You would be wise to heed your elders,” I told Ivor. He
  muttered something in his native tongue, something I didn’t
  catch. I am trying, truly trying, to resist my more violent im-
  pulses, but this lad seemed determined to tempt them.
  I claimed the simple meal that Mara, hidden, prepared for
  them. They, with some trepidation and suspicious sniffing,
  consumed it. I demurred, saying that I had eaten earlier, in the
  village, and was merely bringing back supplies for my own later
  meals. I caught Hermes peeping at me in his mirror several times,
  but with some effort I made firm my reflection.
  
  
  
  I begged them to regale me with tales of their travels, and
  was met in turn with questions about myself and how I had
  come to possess the fortress. I spun them a plausibly dull
  fabric of lies—my knowledge of courtly life has rusted over
  the decades, but surely it cannot change much and is still the
  usual swamp of treason and selfishness. I presented myself as a
  loyal warrior whose honesty was inconvenient at court, and
  who was therefore “rewarded” with an obscure and run-down
  fiefdom. I said my escort had abandoned me after a dispute in
  a brothel, and mentioned in passing that a squad of soldiers
  was soon to follow, with builders after them.
  The trio exchanged glances at that.
  With my tale told, I again asked them what business
  brought them so far off the major trade routes, and how so
  varied a group had come to travel together.
  With a shrug, Hermes the scholar replied.
  “We call ourselves the Circle of Three Sides,” he said,
  “And we are seekers after esoteric truth.”
  “That sounds fascinating,” I replied, pouring more
  wine. “Pray, tell me more.”
  “Are you aware of the history of this castle?”
  “It was built by the great crusader Dracula, was it not?” I
  could not resist the temptation.
  “By his ancestors, but it is the Impaler’s involvement
  that interests us. Many years ago, at Easter, he ambushed
  some rival Boyars, clapped them in chains and worked them
  to death at sword point, thickening the walls here to resist
  Turkish cannon.”
  “I believe I’ve heard the tale.”
  
  
  
  “Have you heard more recent tales of a haunting spirit? They say it
  takes the form of a bat, or a wolf, or a ravenous black shadow. The
  villages nearby live in terror, saying it flies and hunts by night.”
  “Hunts for what?”
  “For blood,” Ivor said.
  There was a pause before I replied, “By merciful heaven. Surely this
  is just a peasant superstition?”
  “We mean to find out. Blood can call to blood. Unholy shades may
  uneasy lie.” Hermes was keeping his counsel guarded, but Anoushka
  had become loquacious. I had noticed her tendency to blush and look
  away every time I met her gaze, yes, look away and sip at her wine. I
  made sure to look often.
  “How can such a thing happen in a Christian nation?”
  “It can happen anywhere. When the shape of the land, and the tears
  of the dead, and the stories of the people all lie in a proper configura-
  tion… that is where the dragons nest, that is where…” She said some-
  thing in a strange language, and then Hermes made sharp reply in the
  same tongue. She flushed again, this time I think with shame.
  Interesting.
  “Dragons? The Prince of whom you spoke, ‘Dracula’—his name
  means ‘Son of the Dragon’ does it not?”
  
  
  
  “Or ‘Son of the Devil’,” said Ivor.
  “The Dracula I know is a patriot, a loyal de-
  fender who protected Christendom at great cost.”
  “At the cost of murdering twenty thousand
  helpless prisoners and nearly a like number of his
  own people!”
  “Those stories are spread by the Germans,” I
  said. “He taxed the Saxons as he did the Wallachians
  and they hated him for it, so they spread tales that he
  committed many atrocities.” I shrugged. “It is all
  in the past, is it not?”
  “If an evil is deep enough,” Hermes said, “It
  can echo on through time, repeating until it is
  stopped.” He looked me right in the eye as he spoke
  thus, and I found myself unnerved. Yet it would be
  a poor Prince who let any fanciful worry show.
  “How would you go about purifying my land,
  if it is haunted by sorrow as you say?”
  Hermes shook his head. “Too early to tell.”
  • • •
  
  
  
  It is the first time in several days that I have been able to sit,
  write, and gather my scattered thoughts.
  I was unimpressed but unsurprised by the repayment of my hos-
  pitality. The next nightfall, they were suspicious of me, as I had
  known they would be. They had forced entry into my library dur-
  ing the day, and were braced for siege. Bright torches lay in each
  stone windowsill, while a roaring fire sent smoke up the chimney.
  They had smashed down the door after getting to the top of the
  broken stairs somehow, but as a replacement they leaned a sturdy
  table in the empty doorway. I’m sure it was well braced.
  They couldn’t hold me at bay forever, but neither did they need
  to. By dawn, the sun would oppress me and they would be able to
  flee. I could pursue them at night, but such a chase would be fraught
  with perils and uncertainty.
  No, it was clearly time to parlay. My only
  fear was that they had harmed my works.
  
  
  
  “What knavery is this?” I demanded. “I serve you food from
  my table and grant leave to sleep ‘neath my roof, and as reward you
  burgle my home? For shame!”
  “You have no position from which to decry us, you wampir fiend!”
  Ivor, of course.
  “Ah. You’ve read my papers and added spying to your list
  of offenses. Tell me, if those same documents had proven me
  harmless, would you be so cavalier about your transgressions?”
  “What does it matter?”
  “It matters because an action is right or wrong when it is
  taken, not when a selfish guess proves right.”
  “Selfish? We have come here at great peril to confront
  you! We have come here to free the countryside of your curse,
  to untwist the cruel knot you have tied upon the nature of
  the land!”
  “Bold words from a stripling hiding behind barricades. Is
  your plan to bruise me by cowering, or to wound me with self-
  righteous language?”
  He howled, by all Heaven! My anger had called to his and touched
  him quick. I heard the sounds of struggle within the library and,
  though it grieves me to confess it now, I rejoiced at the thought of
  hurting him.
  
  
  
  What a splendid show he made, flinging aside the barri-
  cade and leaping like a spring buck the gap in the staircase. He
  charged clattering down the steps at me, sword raised, eyes
  mad, and I met him steel on steel.
  He was stronger and quicker, as I’d guessed,
  but his skill surprised me. I did not expect him
  to have the discipline that expertise requires,
  yet he had leashed his fury with study. I fought
  defensively and immediately began giving
  ground. From the doorway, Anoushka was
  shouting at him to cease but he
  was battle-mad and would
  not have heeded
  God Himself.
  I know that madness well.
  Why did I not give in to my own
  unreason, spending each last drop of
  strength to overcome him? Is it because
  I have recovered some greater measure
  of that which makes me Man? Or is it
  because I simply did not think I could best him?
  It matters not. I had a plan.
  I made a good show of fierceness but gave way, gave way, luring him in
  even as I once lured the Sultan’s army to disaster. We turned a corner at last,
  each using the stone edge as a shield around which to strike, then a few steps
  further and no one from the library could see us.
  
  
  Mara flew above him as a bat and fell upon him as a woman, but a
  woman bedecked with claws fit for a tiger. She has the skill of rapid change.
  She tore his flesh and bit his neck and that rich crimson scent filled the air.
  The lust for murder filled me and I wanted nothing in the world so
  much as to drink the whelp dry, but I did not. Perhaps only to prove to
  myself that I could resist, but that is something, is it not?
  I disarmed him and reined in Mara. She obeyed, albeit grudgingly.
  “You crave my blood?” I asked him. “Taste, then, that which you
  longed to shed.”
  He resisted, but Mara wrenched open his mouth that I might poison
  him with love of me. Then I seized him by the ear and hauled him back to
  where his comrades might see him.
  “Were I the fiend you think me,” I said, “Would I have left unspilled
  one drop of this odious Saxon’s blood?”
  Anoushka had her buckler and sword ready, and Hermes aimed his
  crossbow from the doorway’s edge, but they did not fire.
  “I am trying to escape my curse! I am trying to become more than I
  am! I am trying to earn God’s forgiveness for my transgressions—yea,
  and if you but read the papers you have stolen, you will see that I speak
  the truth!”
  “Let him go!” cried Hermes. “Release him or we will burn your work!”
  I was relieved that they had not already done so, but concealed it. “Is
  this how you carry out your noble quest for knowledge? By ruining it
  like the Muslims at the library of Alexandria? I have documented my
  great labor of atonement, and you would have that be all for naught?
  Your hypocrisy disgusts me. Whether you claim to love knowledge or
  hate destruction, you are a liar to me and I think to yourself.”
  
  
  
  There was a pause.
  “I fear I have misjudged you,” Hermes said at last, and from her
  hiding place Mara laughed—the first I’ve heard her laugh in decades,
  since she saw a pregnant woman get her legs broken by a runaway car-
  riage. I hushed her.
  “I fear you have,” I said. “I cannot abide the abuses you have shown
  my hospitality. Get out, leave immediately, and do not return under
  pain of death.”
  “You have little right to demand…”
  “I have every right! This is my land, my home, and if you care little
  for that, I have all the power I need to halt, enslave or destroy you. Oh
  broken limbed scholar, how will you descend from your lofty retreat?
  Ivor here is now too weak, too battered to lift you, though I suppose your
  Anoushka might be able to lower you by rope. Did you bring rope?”
  “We did!”
  “Splendid! Now you can hang yourselves, and be spared such punish-
  ment as I would design. For if you would hold out, how long can you last
  without provisions? If you would flee by day, how far do you think you
  would get by next nightfall? One lame man, one direly injured, on ru-
  ined trails, without horses… oh, did you carry your horses up into the
  library with you? No? Such a pity.”
  
  
  
  “Your papers…”
  “Burn my papers and be damned! What I have discovered once in
  twenty years I can recreate in ten, or five. You, however, can only carry
  out that threat once before its protection is denied you.”
  “Let them go,” said Anoushka, and there was aught in her tone
  that gave me pause. No bravado, no force, no diplomat’s hauteur, just…
  resignation.
  With, mayhap, a breath of desire underneath it?
  “You say ‘them,’ let ‘them’ go and not ‘let us.’ I am intrigued,
  most intrigued, by that ‘them’.”
  “I will stay. I will be a hostage to their behavior.”
  I narrowed my eyes. “Clasp a viper to my bosom? Invite an assassin
  to my very chamber? You must think me no end a fool.”
  “How dare you speak of her that way!” cried Hermes, and I then
  knew who loved whom. “She is the best of us, the highest and most
  noble, her honesty is without equal!”
  “Ah, the first among thieves, liars and traitors. You’ll forgive me
  if I do not rush to accept her.”
  She cast her shield and weapon down unto the cobblestones beneath
  the stairs.
  
  
  
  “Surely the great Dracula can secure one woman. If all three
  of us were no threat to you, what can one be?”
  “You would remain here, my prisoner, to protect this brag-
  gart and that sneak?”
  “They are not those things to me,” she said.
  I narrowed my eyes. “Do you not fear that I will slake my
  blasphemous thirst upon your lovely throat?”
  “I…” Yes, that ‘lovely’ made her words uneasy, it made her
  blood rise, I knew. “Of course I do. But I believe in you.”
  “You…?”
  “I understand what you want, what you’re trying to do,
  and I believe in it. I believe it’s possible, that you can do it. I
  want to help you defeat your curse. I want to help you heal.”
  “You extend your aid to one befouled by God?”
  “Universal mercy is unbounded,” she said. “If you truly
  repent, if you truly want to step off your evil path, I believe
  you can.”
  “Will you pledge your life upon the good behavior of your
  companions?”
  The scholar would have spoken, but her gesture silenced him.
  “If it should come to that, my life will be forfeit. But it
  will not. They are good men. They will keep their word.”
  I narrowed my eyes and she beseeched me yet again.
  “I know how much you desire this. It is clear in every line
  you have written.”
  Perhaps, until that moment, I did not know myself how
  much I dared hope for redemption.
  
  
  
  That was three nights ago. Two days past, Ivor and Hermes set off stumbling
  and, I expect, cursing my name and weeping for the lost side of their circle.
  As for Anoushka, I have had two nights to become increasingly fascinated.
  She is a half-caste from far India, the byblow of a snake-charmer and a temple
  dancer who was orphaned by shipwreck at age twelve, rescued by an Italian trade
  vessel, and raised to the age of twenty in a Venetian nunnery. She fled the convent
  after wounding the local prelate when he came to hear the nun’s confessions and
  made amorous advances to her. She left Venice for Padua and there met Hermes,
  who recognized a previously hidden talent for comprehending the occult.
  Hermes’ eye was sharp, I happily grant him that. Anoushka readily grasped my
  theory of Coils and has suggested my progress to date is partially due to Castle
  Dracula. She has explained to me, with great clarity, the means by which the shape
  of the land sculpts the lives of those who dwell upon it. Not merely in the rude sense
  of affecting military events or influencing the growth of crops, but in an unseen
  and magical dimension as well. When the land is wholesome, the people prosper.
  I asked her what the effect was if the land belonged to something undead,
  and she could not meet my eyes.
  
  
  Is this some new level to God’s depravity? That my curse
  falls not only on me, but upon everyone nearby?
  No, I cannot blame the Lord for what my hands have
  wrought. It was not God who picked the freshest, youngest necks
  from which to feed, it was I. God did not give Mara the tools to
  avenge herself on mankind eternally—it was I, seeking a sister
  in carnage and creating something that has only become more
  depraved, more vicious, less human with each passing year.
  Anoushka believes that there is a reason for all, and that
  even the vilest of us can be redeemed.
  “Think of it,” she said. “What great fortress of good would
  this castle be, if it was here that you were saved? Here that you
  defeated your curse? I believe that the greatest evils are twisted
  virtues—the rape that takes the act of love and makes it an act of
  hate, or the priest who abuses the faith of his congregants to
  enrich and debase himself. So, too, can the greatest virtues arise
  from redeemed evil. What is the Christian story, if not the
  inversion of suffering, treachery, callousness and death into
  forgiveness, transcendence, acceptance and life? If you can save
  yourself, you who were so degraded as to merit judgment di-
  rectly from heaven, what mortal could despair?”
  Her words are a balm, soothing the fever of doubt which
  plagues my hopes.
  • • •
  
  Rites of the Dragon
  
  
  I nearly killed Mara.
  More, I nearly destroyed her, I nearly feasted upon her soul
  as I did so long before. I would have. I should. She is a cancer, a
  plague upon the land, a vexation to mankind.
  She is all that I wanted her to be and I regret the day I clapped
  eyes on her chain-clad, wretched body.
  I nearly killed Mara but she is too strong for me. While I
  delved into the secrets of the Crone’s circle and the Centurion’s
  believers, she bent her study to the more blatant strengths of
  the blood. At the time I felt no small contempt, thinking that
  she had chosen the easier path, a fit course for an unlettered
  female slave.
  Tonight my arrogance is my punishment. Mara dealt me
  to the ground with the ease of a parent cuffing an angry child.
  “I could never hurt you,” she said, “You who gave me all that
  I am. But neither will I humbly suffer your blows. You have
  forgotten what you are, have become drunk on sweet Chris-
  tian lies, but their liquor is not what you need. You are a crea-
  ture of blood.”
  
  
  
  Mara has put her ghul lips to Anoushka and made that poor gentle
  thinker into a creature like ourselves. When I demanded an explanation
  for this crime, her answers mocked me like an echo of my own words.
  “How could you do this?” I asked, and she showed her white teeth
  behind dark lips and said, “It is you who showed me the way.”
  “But why? What does it gain you?”
  “Yours was not the only interest roused by her words. She said the
  greatest evils are perversions of good.” She chuckled, low in her throat.
  “Consider her an experiment to prove it thus, great philosopher.”
  “I am trying to atone! She wished only to help me!”
  “Surely her urge to aid you in your atonement will be all the keener,
  now that she is your granddaughter in defilement.”
  That was when I struck her, and she struck me, and our exchange
  ended with her holding me down on a table and peering into my eyes.
  “My lord and Prince,” she whispered. “Either you are right or you
  are wrong. Either God can forgive you or you cannot be forgiven. If you
  are right, then your weak and sentimental new friend will be the first
  fruit of your efforts to heal us all. If you are wrong, then we are nothing
  but damnation made manifest, the First Sin made flesh and given reign to
  torment all sinners. If that is so, I can think of no act more apt for my
  station than to corrupt so well-meaning a soul.”
  With that, she leapt into the air and flitted away as a bat.
  
  
  
  Thirty years ago, I would have
  pursued her. I would have spared no
  least slim shaving of effort, existing
  solely to avenge her insult to me.
  Tonight, I comforted Anoushka
  instead.
  • • •
  It is several nights since
  Anoushka’s change and, while tears
  still frequently wrack her, I think
  there is a courage in her that will give
  her the strength to travel.
  For now, just as I have reclaimed
  my home, it is time to leave it.
  Anoushka insists that Hermes has the
  answers we seek, and that once he sees
  what was inflicted upon her he will
  be driven to help me find my cure.
  Therefore, we are off to the great uni-
  versity in Paris.
  It grieves me to leave my home,
  but I will be taking a part of it with
  me. By bearing my native soil with
  me, I hope to maintain a link to the
  lands of my birth.
  I find myself of two minds.
  While I feel an urge to remain in
  my den, feeding at leisure off the
  people I know, I fear that is the
  counsel of my static curse. The con-
  trary urge—to see great Paris, to
  delve into the secrets gleaned by the
  world’s  greatest scholars, to test
  myself against my curse in the
  very heart of Europe—that is
  my own courage speaking.
  That is my drive to become
  greater, to learn more, to over-
  whelm any difficulty.
  To be a man.
  
  
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  What a glorious shock it has been to return. To see the land,
  changed but the same. To see the familiar outlines of my home,
  now scratched and sculpted by age. To dig forth again the musty
  pages of my journal and read, with laugh and wince, the thoughts
  I felt were so profound, my worthy gift for the ages.
  “To be a man.” Hah!
  To be a man is to be false, quivering, cowardly and incon-
  stant. To be a man is to fear death and flee. All the greatness
  mankind has achieved has been accomplished despite his natural
  tendencies, not because of them. Humans have within them a
  soul, celestial spirit unchanging, and when that whelms their
  Animal impulses they can touch resplendence.
  How much greater am I, unalterable by nature? Yet still,
  my greatness must come from defying what I merely am, in
  pursuit of what I still might be. My challenge is to grow, change,
  set aside foolishness and embrace new ideas.
  To balance these things—the man, the monster, the angel,
  the animal—is to become greater than all of them.
  
  
  
  Anoushka was relieved to
  return here, poor pet. Paris
  taught her too much of
  herself—the intensity of flesh
  and abandon overwhelmed her.
  It is a pity she retains the
  goodness to agonize over her
  actions, but I am not sur-
  prised. Reading my old notes
  shows me that once I was the
  same, once I wailed and beat
  my breast, using remorse to
  justify cowardice and letting a
  fear of doing evil keep me
  from finding the very trea-
  sures of existence.
  Love. Yes, I have found
  love.
  
  
  I saw Lisette, a meek scholar’s daughter, peering over the
  wall of the convent school in Paris, her eyes ignorant but some-
  how not pure and her hair, ah! A touch of the noontime sun I
  am forever denied.
  How perfect that I first saw her on sanctified ground, try-
  ing so desperately to see what lay beyond it.
  Now she knows.
  Sweet Lisette, taught by her father to always wish to learn.
  What delights and terrors will we teach each other in the com-
  ing years, decades, centuries? A fruit plucked at the peak of
  ripeness, sixteen, the age at which a woman first spies the shad-
  ows cast by moral reality. Before Lisette learned even trepida-
  tion for them, she was plunged into the deepest darkness and has
  made her peace with it.
  It took me fifty years!
  
  
  
  While my darling was the most comely reward of my trip
  to great Paris, she was not the most illuminating. Fouchard,
  my friend, why must you slumber? Hideous, wise and power-
  ful, Fouchard had learned the fullest mysteries of the Lancea
  Sanctum. At first my enemy, his own wisdom was his undo-
  ing. I told him of the Coils—aye, under duress I told him all I
  knew. A lesser man would have destroyed me, destroyed the truth
  rather than hang his head at the edifice of lies he had so care-
  fully built and tended.
  Fouchard was stronger. He heard my words and saw the ideas
  behind them. He realized the emptiness of his faith and cast it
  off, the weight of a century’s belief, but he threw it aside like a
  paper ribbon when the real path opened before him.
  He studied with me, but taught me far more than he learned.
  Between him and Anoushka, I found myself lagging behind as
  often as I lunged ahead. Nourished by Fouchard’s knowledge,
  the Coils grew like spring ivy.
  
  
  
  Now, Fouchard has fallen into the slumber of madness—a
  curious thing, spoken of in Jerusalem but which I had hereto-
  fore not seen. Is it a trick of our stagnation, overwhelming even
  movement until the changefulness of the world can exhaust it?
  Or is it a dream of unreason, separating us from the most fun-
  damental knowledge of the world around us?
  It is most likely a collusion of the two, an entwining that
  plays to both weaknesses, as I play to both strengths with the
  Coils. This makes it unlikely to be overcome in that fashion,
  though who is to say what is possible or not? Before me, Fouchard
  saw dawn as an insurmountable obstacle.
  Fouchard slumbers in the catacombs of his homeland, too
  proud to take my offer of protection, and I cannot blame him.
  Even when flight is safer, who can abandon his home and hold
  his head high? Besides, if he were to leave Paris with me, the
  suspicions of his enemies—those who would wrest his authority
  within the Sanctified from him—would be more than confirmed.
  Sadly, while they could not move against him, nor against
  me while he could shield me, his absence necessitates my own.
  The Sanctified have no patience for apostates, and by demon-
  strating that the punishment they gladly accept can be miti-
  gated I have certainly been branded as such.
  Thus, my journey home becomes a honeymoon for Lisette,
  though we are closer than any mortal nuptials could bind us. It
  is a retreat from a crusade by backwards necro-theologians. Most
  importantly, it is a chance to survey my domain.
  Castle Dracula is losing the occult might it once had. I feel
  the tie waning, and I would know the reason.
  Both Lisette and Anoushka find the castle gloomy. Lisette
  plants bright flowers, which she can only see flickering by lamp-
  glow or faded by moonlight. Anoushka flings herself into sor-
  row unresisting, draped in mourning garb, conversing mainly
  with animals and feeding only on the lowliest of vermin.
  • • •
  
  
  It is dusk, and some troupe of wagons approaches—gypsies
  if I am fortunate, for they rightly fear my name and domain.
  But these carriages seem more sober than those of the Rom-
  ney—more like hearses.
  I write these notes and will conceal them before sallying
  out to spy upon them. Lisette is to stay in the fortress while I
  prowl them as a bat, and Anoushka asks the animals what
  they have seen.
  If they are coming here, why? Has the Inquisition finally
  turned its eyes east? Or is it warriors of the Spear, come from
  Paris to punish me? Surely neither is likely. The church has
  little care for Wallachian peasants, and the strigoi of Paris see
  no reason to depart their secure, sedate homes. Yet, if not them,
  who is it? There is little reason else to travel these obscure and
  treacherous roads.
  It fruits nothing to wonder. Soon, I shall know.
  • • •
  
  
  How strange is Fate? The caravan is a clique of five strigoi
  with their several aides and a herd of two dozen feed-slaves. Most
  amusingly, their leader is Mara.
  After transforming Anoushka and leaving me, she fled north
  to Germany and beyond, asserting a place as a wampir in Prague.
  Although they were hesitant to accept her initially, she persuaded
  them by destroying two rivals—using, I suspect, the rudimen-
  tary Coils I had taught her before her departure. Certainly that
  occult knowledge was essential when it came time to lead her
  little band of monsters. They came together under her domin-
  ion and she attempted to show them the Coils. Succeeding but
  indifferently in their studies, they set out to my castle, hoping
  that its occult inclining would reveal what she could not.
  In recounting her tale, Mara did not mention any notion
  that I might be in residence at my keep, nor did she refer to any
  persecution in Prague. Her journey was not kind, and her once
  immutable flesh is altered. Her beauty has coarsened somehow,
  and human expressions sit imperfectly on her visage. Still, I
  suspect both hope and fear contributed to their decision to travel.
  
  
  
  The question, however, is
  clear. What am I to do with
  Mara, her followers, Lisette,
  and Anoushka? A passel of
  twenty-some humans to bleed is
  all very well, but the eight of us
  cannot feed on a thin two-dozen
  for long. The folk of the villages
  are now afraid of the monsters
  in the keep, frightened still and
  motionless. If our predation be-
  comes worse, they will be
  frightened into action, most
  likely flight, which only leaves
  the hunting poorer and the situ-
  ation more dire.
  Lisette is young enough to
  feed solely on animals, but I would
  not inflict that privation on my
  dearest. For that matter, both
  Anoushka and I possess the Coil
  to survive without human
  blood, but doing so is a fierce
  stress and strain upon any ghul
  of our stripe. No, there are too
  many of us here, and some will
  have to go.
  
  
  
  I doubt I could eject
  Mara and her compan-
  ions by force, even if she
  remains unwilling to
  harm me. Too, there is
  the matter of the Coil
  scraps they have learned.
   They are eager for the
  deeper teaching I can offer,
  and it would be good to be
  once more in command.
  I shall have to discuss this
  matter with the three of them.
  Lisette, my love; Anoushka,
  my conscience; and Mara, the
  mirror of my deadly ambitions.
  
  
  
  (What follows was recorded by scholarly Anoushka, but the
  others of us have looked upon it and agreed that it contains the
  proper substance of our speech.)
  VLAD: I must confess to some surprise that you would re-
  turn here, Mara.
  MARA: Where can a child turn, if not to her father?
  VLAD: I am only your father in damnation, and I am noth-
  ing of any sort to those wretches you have dragged in your wake.
  MARA: You could be. You could be everything to them.
  ANOUSHKA: Why would he want to?
  MARA: Why would he keep you by his side, puling and
  weak and mewling of good and evil? Why would he bring some
  honey-haired infant who lacks even the wit to snivel?
  LISETTE: Damn you for a…
  VLAD: That will do, Mara. You do your arguments no fa-
  vor by insulting those you ought persuade. Anoushka is a mind
  of the highest caliber, despite her sex. She has done more with
  the Coils than you could do if you labored at them from the Fall
  of Adam through the Judgment Day. As for Lisette, she is be-
  loved to me in a way you cannot know. For that alone, she de-
  serves your respect.
  MARA: You do your arguments no favor by belittling me!
  VLAD: This is my home, and I shall entertain who pleases
  me. You, Mara, violated my hospitality when you laid vio-
  lent hands upon Anoushka, my guest. Why should I shelter
  you again?
  MARA: Perhaps because you lack the strength to enforce my
  exile. I’ve struck you to the floor once. I don’t want to do it
  again, but I will if I must.
  ANOUSHKA: Bold words for one outnumbered!
  MARA: At a word, my followers would sunder that door and
  slay you all.
  VLAD: No, they would begin to sunder that door, and
  you would not survive to see whether they won victory or
  slaked our thirst. I will not be threatened, and I will not have
  my people be threatened.
  • • •
  With that, I seized a brand from the fire and held it before
  her. She flinched back while the skin of my hand sizzled and
  spat. That cowed her, the fire, and her fear of it, and my cour-
  age. But I knew in my heart that her threat was genuine, and all
  my bluster hollow.
  • • •
  
  
  
  MARA: What I did, I did because it is my nature, my purpose.
  ANOUSHKA: That is no excuse, and barely an explanation!
  You take as your purpose the harm of others, to bring them low
  and make them as vile as yourself—an impossible task you can
  never achieve, you nadir of abomination!
  MARA: Mind your…
  ANOUSHKA: You blame your nature for what you freely
  choose, in your spite, in your weakness. Bare no fangs at me,
  foul Ethiope! What will you do, kill me? Drink down my heart?
  You have soiled me already, dirtied me to the utmost, and any-
  thing else you can offer me is only release from torment!
  MARA: Then we are both thirsting for an end to you! Bare
  your throat and let us be done with it!
  LISETTE: Vlad, stop them!
  VLAD: Mara, Anoushka, cease this chattering! One more
  threat, one more taunt, and I shall cry ‘be damned’ to both and
  cast you out together! Anoushka, you hope for a release from
  your curse, and I will work with you toward it! Mara, you too
  desire to exceed your present state? You would learn the deeper
  Coils that have cleansed my fear of fire? Then by all hell and
  heaven, you will respect Anoushka for her role in their creation!
  LISETTE: Why teach her anything? What has she done to
  deserve the powers you command?
  MARA: Let Anoushka answer that. The follower of virtue.
  Are the Coils truly a means to step from under God’s curse? To
  be redeemed, forgiven, purified? If so, what manner of creature
  would withhold them from any supplicant? You, Anoushka,
  genius of these liberating magics: Are they not meant for all of
  us afflicted?
   ANOUSHKA: They are meant to make you human once more!
  To free those who deserve it! I will not stand by and see my work
  abused to make a monster more monstrous—to erode the few
  checks that remain on your hostility and vice!
  LISETTE: Do we really want to be human?
  VLAD: What do you mean, my sweet?
  LISETTE: I mean that as one of the strigoi I am exempt from
  injury, I won’t crumple up into age and feebleness, I won’t die
  of plague, I’m not at the mercy of any heathen with a saber and
  a cannon. Should I go back? Suffer childbirth? Marry and be
  the meek wife of some ham-handed man? I’ve seen wider vistas,
  deeper truth. I would not retreat from them even if I could.
  ANOUSHKA: You speak with neophyte hubris. The urges,
  the violence…
  
  
  
  
  LISETTE: What are they to me? So I live by the harm of
  others. Who does not? The prince taxes his subjects, the church
  takes tithes from believers, the soldier takes bread from the peas-
  ant, the pig and the chicken die for all. Every man is a thief,
  every child and woman too. We just know what we are.
  MARA: Well spoken. We admit to ourselves what is at the
  bottom of our plates, and Anoushka? Tell me true if you have
  kept to your scruples, have refrained from the harm of those
  innocent mortals…
  VLAD: She is not on trial here…
  ANOUSHKA: No, I’ll answer. Have I fed on human blood?
  Yes. Taken dark delight in it? Yes, indeed. But innocent? Oh,
  those men were so far from innocence that they could almost see
  your level, Mara…
  MARA: That’s good, it is well, it is begun! Start by judg-
  ing! Start with the vicious and those who deserve it! You will
  end, oh mark my words, by seeing desert in all.
  VLAD: Enough! I had called you here to discuss the question
  of Mara’s disciples, but I find a larger question before us. What
  is the purpose of the Coils? No, stay your lips! Ponder. Con-
  template. Do not speak with rash fire, but prepare your argu-
  ments well, calculate their merits, present them with peaceable
  dignity. I find myself needing refreshment. When I return, we
  will make our separate arguments.
  (There followed a pause.)
  MARA: If I may? The purpose of the Coils is to free us of
  your God-imposed limitations. That is all that they do. This
  raises the question: Why are we to be freed? What purpose does
  this emancipation serve? Why do we desire liberation?
  We are despised by God and if He is all good, ought we not
  accept our punishment meekly? Yet none of us here would do
  so. I say that this is not because we are perverse by nature, but
  because our very situation is unjust. Why should one man who
  does evil—a slaver, a thief or a tyrant—live in comfort and
  luxury? At the same time, children and women who do no great
  wrong nor have the power to do so, they suffer at the hands of
  these evil men, often their very misery supports or is the entire
  substance of the oppressor’s delight.
  Anoushka, you were made a ghul against your will and you
  call it injustice, but did I will my slavery? Did Vlad will his
  captivity? Did any man dead of plague will it so?
  
  
  The world is unjust and cruel, our curse is unjust and
  cruel, and to excoriate me as unjust and cruel is merely to
  complain that a fish in the water is wet, or that a stone flung
  in mud has let itself be dirtied.
  All we are, all we can be, is what we make of ourselves.
  The Coils are a means to take freedom and power—no more
  than that, but that is no small thing. Like any power, be it
  wealth or position or strength of arms, it should be used for the
  betterment of those who possess it. If this means teaching it to
  others at cost, so be it. If it means using it upon enemies for
  advantage, so be that.
  ANOUSHKA: These arguments are those of the victim who
  craves license to torment others. All this logic yields is a world
  full of torturers, each trying to worsen the lot of others that
  his own might not be lowest. It is short sighted. It is sad. In
  the end, conflict of all on all leads only and inexorably to
  greater suffering all around.
  What if, instead of lording the Coils over our fellows, we
  use their power to improve the lot of each of us? Not only the
  strigoi, not only those who follow loyally some banner of the
  Dragon, but all who dare dream of kindness? Would not
  
  
  
  everyone benefit? By the Coils, the urge to rampage
  is reduced, which is a blessing both to us and to
  those around us. By the Coils, our need for blood,
  be it human or animal, is abridged. Surely that
  eases our predicament, even as it lessens the strain
  and abuse of the mortals we need.
  The Coils are the art of overcoming not only our
  weaknesses, but our indwelling evil. To say they are
  merely power wrested unjustly from an unjust God
  in an unjust world is to look with the eyes of a
  child. Their power emerges when we make peace
  with our punishment, accept it, and acknowl-
  edge our responsibility to mitigate it. The
  Coils should be taught to those who would
  reduce the strigoi scourge upon the world—
  not solely because it is good that we do
  so, but because only such penitent crea-
  tures can truly wit their meaning.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  VLAD: Lisette?
  LISETTE: I think both of you are being foolish.
  VLAD: Mara, Anoushka, please remain calm.
  LISETTE: Anyone who thinks he knows what God is doing
  or planning is a fool. Anyone who thinks he can outwit the
  divine plan, or even comprehend it, is a spitting, screaming
  child. I was raised by men who were absolutely certain that they
  knew everything God wanted or had done, and there was no
  place in their beliefs for creatures such as we are, let alone the
  Coils that allow us to be otherwise. Let us not, then, enlist God
  into our plans, either as ally or enemy.
  Our goal should be to find what is best for us, and let others
  take care of themselves. In this, I agree with Mara. Yet at the
  same time, to do evil as a joyless obligation is absurd. When
  you harm others for no reason you are, ultimately, permitting
  some vague notion of God to control your actions as much as if
  you help and protect others for no reason.
  I do not know what we should do with the Coils or with
  ourselves, but I feel with every fiber that discussions of God are
  irrelevant to the question.
  
  
   VLAD: Ha? Who is the witless kitten now, Mara? Who
  the vapid adornment, Anoushka?
  Lisette is right. God is irrelevant to us. I see that now,
  but not because I have resigned myself to being naught but
  beast or demon. I am not human, and the Savior of mankind
  is not mine, nor are the rules and laws of humanity fit for a
  thing of my type.
  Mara is right to say that hating ourselves for preying is con-
  temptible. To pine for different circumstances, impossible ones,
  is to deny our right and our need to deal with what we are, and
  what we face. Yet Anoushka is wise to say that hating our prey
  for what we must do to them is also foolhardy. To fall before us
  is no virtue, no punishment, no sign of God’s favor or wrath.
  It is simply the way of things.
  Our difference is that we may make of ourselves what we
  wish, through the freeing power of the Coils. To try and
  make ourselves angels is doomed to fail, and to make our-
  selves devils is to waste our better potential. We have emerged
  from the weakness and strength of human lives to become
  something entirely else. The challenge now is not to despise
  what we are or revel in it, but to emerge yet again. We are
  ageless, timeless, deathless… what wonders might we achieve
  with further transfiguration?
  
  
  
  Individually, you three had nothing but contention and spite
  for each other, but you have shown me a new path that you your-
  selves could not perceive. You deserve the light of my reflected
  illumination, for even in your ignorance you were its sparks.
  This, then, is what we shall do. We shall teach the Coils to
  all who deserve their knowledge, but the way is to be straight
  and charged with peril. We shall know the worthy thus.
  
  
  
  FIRST, that the student has no loyalty above his studies.
  His sole and ultimate duty is to seek the perfection of himself
  through the Coils, regardless of what his perfected nature is
  revealed to be.
  
  
  
  SECOND, the student must recog-
  nize the mutability of all things. If he
  does not trust change, he can never use
  the Coils to overcome the curse of
  stagnation. The power of change,
  fortune and even base fickle random-
  ness in this fallen world must be
  understood, acknowledged and em-
  braced, even as we stand against it by
  our immobile inclining.
  
  
  
  THIRD, the student must take responsibility for the path he
  walks, the changes he makes, the self he makes anew. We who
  are beyond Death cannot blame fear for our failings. We who
  are exempt from Age have no excuse for rash acts or foolish pas-
  sions. We who possess unbounded Time have the chance to un-
  derstand more fully, deeply and broadly than any mortal can.
  To ignore that opportunity is worse than murdering ten thou-
  sand souls, for it means murdering your own fullest future.
  
  
  
  These are the circumstances under which my wisdom can
  flourish. What say you? Are they acceptable?
  ANOUSHKA: One path cannot hold travelers to Hell and pil-
  grims on the path of salvation. There is no place for me that
  holds compromise with her.
  MARA: As for me, I can stomach no lies that would whiten
  our crimson path. Blood leads us down. What truth can arise
  from self-swallowed and willful lies?
  LISETTE: I will follow where my lord and lover leads me, but
  the grouping that rouses my passions is a pair, and not a multi-
  tude. What care I for grand conspiracies? Leave them, Vladislaus.
  Let them chew and worry upon each other while we delight in
  the raptures of desire. Leave wars against God, or for Him, to
  those who cannot merit love.
  • • •
  
  
  
  As the sun came up, I went to my
  discontented repose. Musing on my
  newfound appreciation for certain
  jests I’d heard among the polygamous
  Turks during my captivity, I fell into
  slumber.
  More, I fell into dream—but a
  dream that had no sickly patina of
  nightmare, nor cloudy haze of half
  hopes. It was not a dream as men
  dream, nor was it the usual voiceless
  beast rumblings of ghul rest. Nay,
  this was clear and valid, a revelation
  with profound impact, rivaled only by
  that vision I had when I was made
  anew as one of the strigoi.
  This, though, was no vista of crys-
  tal illumination. I found myself on a
  barren plain, with a veritable forest of
  the impaled surrounding me, stretch-
  ing out in every direction. I saw my fa-
  ther and brothers, my Turkish captors,
  my Hungarian allies and Saxon foes. I
  saw my mortal wife and sons, dead all,
  and more, the many ghuls I have
  known, Fouchard and Anoushka and
  the walking dead of Paris and Jerusa-
  lem, even sweet Lisette, all immobi-
  lized by the wooden blow.
  Surrounding me impaled was ev-
  ery person I had known, in my life
  or after.
  
  
  Then a great rumbling shook the desolate soil, and it cracked
  open in a surge of heat and hungry red light. From below surged
  a monstrous serpent, the wings of a bat spread like sails from
  his scaly back, glassy eyes the size of wagon wheels, unblink-
  ing. Nostrils smoked like fresh-fired cannon as his mouth gaped
  wide, ringed with fangs as long as my arm.
  It spoke as deafening thunder, each word accompanied by
  sulfurous smoke.
  IMPALER, WHAT BRING YOU TO THE WORLD?
  
  
  
   “Bring to the world? All that I owe it, which is nothing.
  Lest you ask, I take from it all I need, yea, and all else I desire.”
  YOU ARE BLIND. YOU BRING THE WORLD A
  PLAGUE OF MADNESS, A FLOOD OF EVIL VISIBLE IN
  THE FIRST TWO DROPS OF THREE. YET YOU SEE IT
  NOT, ENTRANCED BY WHAT YOU WISH AND OVER-
  LOOKING WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW.
  “Who are you, who dares insult me?”
  Its laughter was deafening.
  I AM YOU, IMPALER. I AM WHAT YOU COULD
  BECOME. IN THE FULLNESS OF TIME, YOUR FU-
  TURE SELF COULD BE THIS CREATURE OF FIRE AND
  HUNGER YOU BEHOLD.
  “I don’t believe you.”
  NOT EVEN IF I SPEAK THE FEAR YOU HIDE IN
  YOUR MOST SECRET HEART? THE FEAR THAT
  MARA IS DEGRADING, NIGHT BY PAINFUL NIGHT,
  INTO AN ARTLESS MONSTER UNWORTHY OF YOUR
  LINEAGE? 
  THAT 
  YOU 
  ALREADY 
  SEE, 
  IN
  ANOUSKHA’S PARIS WRATH, THE SAME DECLINE?
  THAT LISETTE’S DECAY, THOUGH INEVITABLE, IS
  INVISIBLE ONLY BY VIRTUE OF HER NEWNESS TO
  DEATH?
  That indeed gave me pause, for it had spoken a truth I had
  not durst think.
  “How come you to speak to me thus?”
  IN THE SLUMBER OF THE DEAD, TIME IS AS
  NOTHING. YOU HAVE A CHOICE TO MAKE, PRINCE
  OF THE NIGHT. A THREEFOLD PATH FORKS BEFORE
  YOU, WITH YOUR FOOT POISED TO TREAD IT. BE-
  HOLD, THAT WHICH YOU MAY ONE DAY FIND, IF
  THIS COMING NIGHT YOU SET YOUR COURSE
  ARIGHT.
  
  
  
  In an instant, I found myself in a strange and glorious for-
  tress. Towering walls surrounded me, and I stood among tall
  people, garishly dressed. They parted to make way for me, and
  as I strode forward I saw that I cast six shadows. Each shade was
  clear and sharp, with no candle flicker. I moved through light,
  but not wan and silver moon glow. Each object showed its bright,
  full colors.
  The crowd began to chant my name, flinging gems
  and blossoms before me. I walked forward into the sun and
  was consumed.
  
  
  
  Next, I found myself in more familiar darkness—the dark
  of a cloudy night, the only illumination red flickers in the dis-
  tance. I scented smoke on the wind and instinctively fled it. I
  wore the wolf’s shape by nature and could no longer recall the
  sensations of discourse and laughter and walking upright.
  I scented man-flesh and, hungry, prowled. Three mortals,
  carrying spears of strange manufacture, sat in a clearing. They
  had no fire. I lunged forward to strike, and then they turned on
  me with too-wide grins.
  “Far too easy,” said the leanest one as his weapon pierced
  my breast. “Surely this cannot be Dracula.”
  
  
  
  In the third vision, I was in
  a crowd of strigoi and we were
  all mad with hunger. We struck
  each other, biting and clawing,
  drinking and spending fero-
  ciously that we might drink fur-
  ther before we were, ourselves,
  drained. I was in a red haze of
  fury punctuated by flashes of
  love, the intense lie of love that
  comes from drinking our false se-
  ducer blood. I choked back the
  love, killed through it. It
  seemed to take hours, days
  to fight them all, murder
  them all, consume soul
  upon soul. When they were
  dust I saw that I was in a dense
  maze of narrow streets, walls
  impossibly tall. I took the shape
  of a bat and flew up, weaving
  through the air only to see that
  everyone as corrupted,
  everyone was a ghul,
  we were all entangled at
  war and no mortals survived
  to feed us.
  
  
  In the darkness, I awoke.
  What can these visions mean?
  Clearly I am in danger. My future is in danger. I am at risk
  of dying as a beast, at the tips of spears held by the contemptu-
  ous living. At the same time, the world is imperiled by a ghul
  plague, an overwhelming of the mortals by we who have sur-
  passed them.
  Less distant is the future I foresee, not with some faculty of
  the occult, but by dint of reason. Mara, the eldest of my blood,
  is not as she was. She has a beast’s heart and her body begins to
  conform to it. I had hoped that Anoushka’s uncharacteristic lapse
  in Paris was simply the cruelty of all our kind, but by the
  dragon’s words I fear it a worse viciousness, one unique to mine.
  This latter thought is particularly grim in light of the di-
  rection suggested by Anoushka’s recent work. Easing those bonds
  which stay us from making more of our breed is clearly an un-
  dertaking fraught with far-reaching consequences. What irony,
  if the very woman who opens the gates to a multitude of our
  kind is doomed to breed only monsters!
  Yet that first vision—my greatness recognized as I walk,
  feted, by pure light and into that light… what can that mean, if
  not the goal I seek? If not further transformation into some-
  thing as different from ghul as ghul is from man?
  The multitude cried out for me. I cannot deny my duty to them.
  • • •
  
  
  
  My father was honored by induction into the Order
  of the Dragon, and as his son I was a member as well.
  We were a sworn brotherhood, declared to the Turk’s
  downfall and the triumph of Christianity, but we were
  not a military order like the Templars, nor a religious
  one like the Benedictines. My father’s Ordo Dracul was
  a political order, subtle and discerning, admitting only
  men of good birth, high station and great potential. I
  still treasure the ring and the cup he won at that tourna-
  ment which marked their inception, but their greatness
  was not strength of arms. It was their ability to move
  men and nations.
  By the day of my death, the Order of the Dragon
  was a mockery of what it once had been, its members
  embattled with each other and more interested in prying
  power away from their Christian colleagues than from
  the Ottoman invaders.
  
  
  
  Now, in the darkness, the Order is reborn. Is it not meet
  that the son of the dragon should, in turn, give birth to others?
  The laws for the Coils are a start, but it is not enough to
  enjoy our esoteric advantages and hope that worthy students will,
  in time, seek us out. I have been shown that if my work does
  not grow and conquer, it will die out—or worse, be perverted
  into the tools of disaster.
  Mara’s loyalty lies on a knife-edge. She fears and covets my
  power, and I believe she loves and honors me as well as she is
  able. But the madness gnaws at her, and her followers threaten
  me and mine like the sword of Damocles.
  Anoushka’s infatuation with me died in Paris, alongside her
  hopes of what she might still be. What remains is a respect for
  my goals and abilities, but that is cold indeed next to passion.
  What heat remains within her is the white fear that madness
  and evil will overtake her… and perhaps a red glow of envy
  toward Lisette?
  Ah, Lisette, my best hope, my shield and portion against
  despair. Will you turn in my hand, becoming surrender’s ad-
  vocate? It is only my due, having betrayed you, all unknowing
  to the bestial curse that treads first on Mara, holds Anoushka in
  the shadow of its heel, and sets its path to you?
  
  
  
  Upon the fall of night, I came at once to Mara and spoke
  stern words to her—words I knew would be sweet to her harsh
  and wicked heart. I told her I would not stand to be dictated to
  nor threatened, that I would take my knowledge down to Hell
  before submitting to a woman’s demands.
  “You need me,” she said, and her voice was near to a growl.
  “You have locked yourself in towers of thought while the busi-
  ness of blood and claw has dominated the streets below you. But
  if you would be more than a hermit in a moldering castle, you
  need force of arms. I can win force with force and make you a
  mighty lord again, even if your heart is that of a… scholar.”
  “I do not deny you your place,” I told her. “You, my first-
  born and most perfect of monsters. But while you trumpet your
  strengths, admit your limits as well. Can you understand the
  Coils, or merely learn them?”
  She lowered her head and I knew then I had her.
  “The howls inside,” she whispered. “Your wisdom is the
  only medicine that can quiet them.” Then she looked up and
  her animal eyes were all envious hate. “You don’t have them.
  You don’t know what they’re like! I know. You, you hear only
  their whispers and squeaks, not the full-throated roar like a
  lion. You are spared the curse you gave me.”
  “Be strong,” I told her. “But temper your strength with
  submission. Only with your help, can I give you the cure you
  crave.”
  She nodded then, and for the first time since I saw her in the
  slaver’s market, I saw her bow in defeat. It made me sad, in some
  part, although it is a great triumph. Breaking her to heel was
  needed, though I take no joy in this victory.
  “What of Anoushka?” she asked. “She will not share her
  bounty with me but oh my Lord, I will not be her maid nor
  abase myself before her!”
  “If you are content to walk with her, she shall be content to
  walk with you. Do you believe her way is false?”
  “You know that I do.”
  “Then content yourself with our pledge to truth. In time,
  all falsehood will shrivel in the fires of our knowledge.”
  
  
  
  Anoushka I found in the forest, where she had called herself an
  unsuspecting feast—rabbits and squirrels blinked at unaccustomed night
  before she fell upon them.
  I moved away unseen and found her again, when she had cleansed
  her lips in a stream.
  “Anoushka,” I greeted her. “We must speak.”
  “There is nothing to discuss.”
  “Not even bringing Mara to heel?”
  She looked up at that. “You cannot train a serpent to harness,” she
  said, but her voice betrayed the hope in her heart.
  “Mara is no serpent. No, nor is she human. But she possesses Rea-
  son, and to that faculty I have made appeal. Do not roll your eyes! It is
  not Mara’s first or favored tool, but she will make a try of thought
  when all else has failed.”
  “By what deft syllogism have you snared her, oh great philosopher?”
  “Simply this: We have what she needs.”
  “The Coils.”
  “Anoushka, you see how the curse weighs on her, how she is at the
  edge of being a monster. Some part of her fights that still, and though
  she has wronged you—wronged you most direly!—you must surely wish
  to see the strength within her strike down the iniquity.”
  “Even if, as you say, her humanity is at war with her evil core I
  confess it: I would see them both dead, dust and damned.”
  “Can you not hope for her as you hoped for me? Have you cast aside
  all thought of renouncing our curse, of finding again the endless for-
  giveness of God?”
  “It is so hard,” she whispered. “The light within me dims nightly.”
  “Then take hope! The Coils have kept that wan fire lit, and in time
  may breathe it back to brilliance! Anoushka, you are the best hope of
  our kind! Yes, you have stumbled and have fallen, but when you rise
  you are still the swiftest mind among us! Married to your faith, there is
  no limit to what you can accomplish. Or would you give up, let Mara
  win by default, and confess that you are naught but evil?”
  “I believe that she is naught but evil, and I would not give my gifts
  to her.”
  “So? Then deny her.”
  That gave her pause.
  “What say you, my lord?”
  
  
  
  “Deny her your gifts. Find the answer you seek, the solace you crave,
  transform yourself into a higher being� and do it before Mara’s envious
  eyes. Do not argue your case with her, prove it, live it, yes, live again!
  Who could ask for a better revenge than to fling off the curse she gave
  you and leave her writhing within it?”
  Slowly, she smiled.
  “Your genius, lord Dracula, is your ability to turn the bitterest prob-
  lems into solutions.”
  “I have faith in you, Anoushka, even if you doubt yourself. I think
  your path of light is the true one, and that at its end you will have the
  strength to forgive even her. But whether you would have her be the pin-
  nacle of your grace, or crush her beneath your scorn, you will need her
  close, and you will need to seek. She can protect you, protect us all, as we
  find the answers all of us want. But in the end, she cannot force your
  knowledge from you. What say you?”
  “It seems that forgiveness and revenge walk the same path. If they can
  travel in peace, so can Mara and I… at least until the road divides.”
  “That is all I ask.”
  
  
  
  I spent the remainder of the time until dawn strengthening
  my position with both the disputants and, when I felt my pres-
  ence was beginning to wear upon them, planting seeds of thought
  and support among Lisette and even Mara’s brood.
  The next night’s discussion was held with less heat and was
  therefore far more illuminating.
  We all agreed that only a strict and solid hierarchy could
  contain creatures of our ilk, and to endure this hierarchy, needs
  must play to the strengths of its leaders. To this end, a three-fold
  rulership was devised, such that any crisis would be addressed
  by one with the skills to counter it. This tripartite structure
  would take the form of a triad of orders, each based upon dire
  and sober oaths, like a band of chivalrous knights. Together
  these three elite orders would guide and rule the larger Order of
  the Dragon, into which admission would be open to all strigoi.
  
  
  
  The ultimate authority is, of course, myself.
  Directly beneath me, as Boyars to a Prince, are the ranking
  members of those three oath-bound bands. To each is given a
  task, a sphere in which their word is supreme, and within that
  domain they can only be gainsaid by another of the same oath,
  whose rank is higher by virtue of deeper learning.
  For the resolution of conflict between members who are
  both oath-sworn, but in which neither has a clear right of
  domain, that member with the greater knowledge of Coils
  takes precedence.
  The oath-sworn shall have authority over all who have
  not pledged.
  When two who are unsworn disagree, the superior place
  shall go to him who has made greater study of the Coils. Lowest
  of all are those who have asked membership in the Order, but
  who have yet to master even a single Coil.
  
  
  
  The titles by which our number shall be known are as fol-
  lows: He who has learned no Coils shall be called Slave; he with
  one Coil is Supplicant; he with two Coils is Scribe; he with
  three is Scholar; he with four is Initiate; and he with five is
  Adept.  Any student who masters all six Coils shall be known
  by the title of Master.
  If, in fullness of time, we progress on our great work
  and discover further Coils, additional titles shall be awarded.
  He who masters seven Coils is to be deemed Philosopher; he
  with eight Illuminus; and he with nine Coils at his com-
  mand shall be called Architect.
  Those titles are to be elaborated on formal occasions with
  descriptions. One who has greatest mastery of the Coils of
  Blood shall be entitled “of Hunger”; one who has most stud-
  ied the Banes shall be entitled “of the Curse”; one whose deepest
  knowledge is of the Beast shall be entitled “of Terror”; one
  who has studied all Coils equally shall be entitled “of Equi-
  librium”.
  If even finer heraldry is desired, titles may be decorated to
  indicate secondary areas of study. Those who have partial knowl-
  edge of the Blood Coils may lengthen their title with “San-
  guine” or “Bloody”; those with partial knowledge of the Bane
  Coils may append “Burning” or “Fiery” to their title; and those
  who have partial knowledge of the Beast Coils may elaborate
  their title with “Wild” or “Untamed”.
  The proudest commendations to title, however, are to be
  claims of honored oaths. The three oaths are as follows.
  
  
  
  The first and most honored are to be the
  Sworn of the Axe, with Mara my honored
  daughter the first of their number. Their duty
  is the protection of the Order, the defense of its
  members, but above all the defense of our se-
  crets. The prostitution of the Coils to those un-
  worthy of them is a vile thought and one de-
  serving of most severe punishment. Any who
  teach the Coils to the unfit are to be bound by
  the passion of the blood, twice tasted for each
  secret divulged. He who wrongfully discloses
  one Coil is to drink two times from his own
  teacher, or his teacher’s teacher if he himself
  learned illicitly. If two Coils are taught, two
  generations within the Order may bind his
  heart. If three are taught, he shall know the
  conflict of triple devotion.
  Any who refuse this bondage may volunteer to
  be impaled and left for the judgment of the sun.
  
  
  
  In the tumult of battle and the
  chaos of peril, the Sworn of the Axe
  are supreme and their orders are to
  be obeyed without debate or hesita-
  tion. Let any who balk at their word
  in such circumstances be slain on the
  spot or bound for judgment.
  While those who defy the Axe
  are to suffer, those who merit ad-
  mission to it should rejoice. To
  them, let honor redound. As they
  shall be first to face peril for the
  Order, let the Order give them
  first pick of victims, lands and the
  rewards of honor.
  This lauded task is not to be held
  lightly. Only those of the utmost
  martial prowess, who have already
  risked destruction to defend the Or-
  der, its members, its secrets or its
  properties, shall be eligible for this
  oath. Further, let none be shunned
  who is invited and refrains. To de-
  fend unto death is a high calling, and
  it is better to pass the cup of valor
  untasted than to poison that chalice
  with unclean lips.
  
  
  
  Anoushka, the cross-breed chimera whose mind exceeds that
  of most men, shall take the first oath as the Sworn of the Dy-
  ing Light, those who strive to deepen the three Coils we possess
  and explore further the fourth she has promised. By their arts
  we within the Order will push at the frontiers of our existence,
  learning to conquer our fear and wrath, our hunger and hu-
  mility, our subjugation to the sun. She and hers will determine
  the course our unending studies should take, choosing those
  areas deemed fruitful.
  Those who delve into the profound mysteries of our kind
  are to be respected, and their judgment weighted accordingly.
  In all disputes of authority, the Dying Light shall take prece-
  dence. They are to be our judges and councilors, even as the
  Sworn of the Axe are our soldiers and generals.
  The Oath of the Dying Light is to be held out only to those
  who have gained for us some treasure of the occult previously
  unheld, be it secret knowledge stolen, arcane secrets discovered,
  or places of power seized and defended.
  
  
  
  If the need should arise, the
  Sworn of the Dying Light shall
  judge any studies accused of be-
  ing anathema to the Order or
  its goals. Already, I state here
  and for all time that THE PUR-
  SUIT OF ARTS WHICH SUBJU-
  GATE THE STUDENT TO AN-
  GELS, DEMONS, GHOSTS, OR
  ANY SPIRIT OTHER THAN
  THAT OF HIS OWN INDWELL-
  ING WILL, ARE FORBIDDEN AND
  DISGRACEFUL. Any follower of
  the Dragon who is caught in
  such self-abnegating idolatry
  is to be punished by that
  most final of fates: Death
  by drinking, and that his
  very soul be fed unto some
  worthy fellow student,
  that he might grow by
  the strength of it.
  Shudder not at
  this punishment.
  Though the de-
  vouring of fellow
  strigoi is degrading
  and a sin, it is better
  that a sold soul be sto-
  len for the Order
  than be a toy for
  demons below or
  an adornment
  for angels be-
  yond.
  
  
  Finally, my beloved Lisette is the first to be Sworn of
  the Mysteries. While the Dying Light is the center of our
  great work, and the Axe defends our very existence, the
  Mysteries are to give meaning to the course we take and the
  decisions we make. Each brother of the Order is to decide for
  himself who he is and must be, but the Order is greater than
  any single member. It is the duty of the Sworn of the Mys-
  teries to take the view of centuries, making decisions for the
  Order as a whole, though not for any member within it.
  Their duty is to choose our destiny. In matters of collective
  action and decision, they have the authority to decide, and
  their writ is our law.
  The Oath of the Mysteries is to be offered by acclama-
  tion. Only those who are vaunted by twenty of their fellows
  of the Dragon can be admitted, and only then if no single
  fellow, even the lowliest, speaks against their oath. Once
  sworn, the title to the Mysteries is permanent, regardless of
  action—save one.
  
  
  Those who are sworn to the Mysteries are forbidden to taste
  the blood of the strigoi under any circumstances. Should they
  be fed on false love by force, it is meet that they seek their own
  destruction in fire or the sun. If they are too weak to escape
  their shame in that fashion, let them be cast down and shunned
  for their dishonor.
  Worse, should they consume the blood and soul of a fellow
  ghul, they are to be punished by impalement and burning, at
  the hands of all who acclaimed them into their position.
  Let the upholders of Mystery be pure, both in heart
  and in judgment.
  
  
  These three divisions shall uphold the Ordo Dracul, as our three
  Coils set us apart from the lesser strigoi of the world. By these means,
  we shall spread our knowledge and will until it shades the world like
  the wings of the dragon.
  So it is sworn. So it shall be.
  By my hand, Vladislaus Dracul, Prince
  of Wallachia, Master of Equilibrium
  
  
  Credits
  Written by: Greg Stolze
  Vampire and the World of Darkness were created by Mark Rein•Hagen
  Developer: Mike Lee
  Editor: Ana Balka
  Art Director: Pauline Benney
  Layout & Typesetting: Colleen Denny
  Interior Art: Daren Bader, Mike Chaney, Matt Hughes, Jeff Laubenstein, Raven
  J Mimura  and Brad J Williams
  Front Cover Art: Pauline Benney
  Front & Back Cover Design: Colleen Denny
  © 2004 White Wolf Publishing, Inc. All rights re-
  served. Reproduction without the written permis-
  sion of the publisher is expressly forbidden, except
  for the purposes of reviews, and for blank character
  sheets, which may be reproduced for personal use
  only. White Wolf, Vampire and World of Darkness
  are registered trademarks of White Wolf Publishing,
  Inc. All rights reserved. Vampire the Requiem,
  Werewolf the Forsaken, Mage the Awakening,
  Storytelling System and Rites of the Dragon are trademarks of White Wolf Publishing, Inc.
  All rights reserved. All characters, names, places and text herein are copyrighted by White
  Wolf Publishing, Inc.
  The mention of or reference to any company or product in these pages is not a challenge to
  the trademark or copyright concerned.
  This book uses the supernatural for settings, characters and themes. All mystical and super-
  natural elements are fiction and intended for entertainment purposes only. This book con-
  tains mature content. Reader discretion is advised.
  For a free White Wolf catalog call 1-800-454-WOLF.
  Check out White Wolf online at
  http://www.white-wolf.com; alt.games.whitewolf and rec.games.frp.storyteller
  PRINTED IN CANADA.
  Author’s Note
  The historical Radu the Handsome only ruled Wallachia from
  the end of 1462 to 1473, when he was deposed by Basarab III
  Laiota. He died of syphilis in 1475. Liberties have been taken.
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Storyteller [multi]/World of Darkness (WoD) [multi]/CofD/Novels/[WW25300] VtR - Rites Of The Dragon.pdf