Vlad von Carstein

No one knows what Vlad von Carstein was before he was Sylvania's master, and Vlad never told. He arrived at Castle Drakenhof on the storm-wracked night Count Otto von Drak lay dying, wed the count's daughter Isabella before her father was cold, and settled into rule as though the province had been made for him, which, in its warpstone-cursed, grave-riddled way, it had. For two centuries he governed with a cold justice Sylvania had never known from its living lords, and if the count never aged, never dined, and never appeared before dusk, his subjects had learned that some questions in Sylvania answer themselves, and the wise do not ask them aloud.

When Vlad at last cast off the pretense, he did it as he did everything: formally. On a Geheimnisnacht when the winds of death blew strong, he raised every graveyard in Sylvania into an army and declared the Empire's fractured throne his own by right of superior claim: he was, after all, its most experienced statesman. So began the first and most terrible of the Wars of the Vampire Counts. The Empire killed him more than once (staked, burned, blessed), and each time he returned whole, for the ring he wore knitted death itself back together. Yet what made Vlad singular was not the ring but the offer that followed every victory: swear fealty, keep your lands, keep your lives. He did not want the Empire destroyed. He wanted it ruled: properly, permanently, by a sovereign who would never die and never need an heir. The most frightening thing about the first Vampire Count is how many, in the despair of those years, were tempted to accept.

It ended at the Siege of Altdorf. With the city starving behind its walls, the Grand Theogonist Wilhelm III gambled everything on a thief: the von Carstein ring was stolen from the count's own pavilion as he rested, and when Vlad led the final assault, the old priest hurled himself from the battlements and carried the vampire down onto the stakes below, trading his life for a death that would finally hold. The dynasty survived its founder (Konrad's butchery and Mannfred's long, cold cunning would each bring new wars), but neither heir ever matched him, and both knew it. Sylvania remembers Vlad as the Empire refuses to: not as its most terrible monster, but as its almost-emperor: the tyrant who might have been just, and who loved his wife, his land, and his subjects, living and dead alike. That is precisely what made him so hard to stop.