Vampire Counts

Sylvania was a haunted land long before it had masters to match. A bleak province clinging to the eastern edge of Stirland, its soil is salted with the dust of a fallen warpstone star, and it has always buried more than it harvested: nowhere in the Old World do the dead lie so shallow or rest so poorly. For generations its mortal lords, the mad counts von Drak, bled the province white from the halls of Castle Drakenhof. Then, on the night the last von Drak lay dying, a pale stranger named Vlad von Carstein arrived to claim the county and the count's daughter in a single evening, and Sylvania's true nobility took its throne.

What separates the Vampire Counts from every other horror that preys upon the Empire is that they do not consider themselves horrors at all. They are aristocrats. They hold title and land, keep courts and courtesies, and observe the forms of feudal law with a rigor no living noble matches, for what is a vampire, in the end, but rank made permanent? The living of Sylvania are tenants; the dead are subjects called up to service; and the counts see no cruelty in either arrangement, only sound governance. The grave, in Sylvania, is not a discharge from one's obligations. It is a change of regiment.

Thrice the von Carsteins have marched on the Empire in the calamities remembered as the Wars of the Vampire Counts. Vlad, first and greatest, brought Altdorf itself to the brink of surrender before treachery and a Grand Theogonist's sacrifice cast him from its walls. Of his heirs, the savage Konrad drowned Stirland in blood until his own madness unmade him, and the necromancer Mannfred, subtlest and most patient of the line, carried the dynasty's ambition onward until the blades of men and dwarfs finally ran him down in the mists of Hel Fenn. Each war has ended with the Empire bloodied but standing. Each peace has been merely an interval, for the other party to the truce does not age.

Nor is Sylvania the whole of the threat, for the vampire curse runs in many bloodlines, and the Counts' wars draw them all. Lahmian queens spin webs of influence through the Empire's own courts; Blood Dragon knights ride out of legend to test themselves against the finest warriors the living can field; withered Necrarchs dream in their tower-tombs of a world gone silent. Behind them all stretches the long shadow of Nagash, whose dark arts begat the first vampires and whose crown haunts their ambitions still. The Empire has learned to dread the quiet years most of all, for a vampire's ambition does not die with defeat. Like everything else in Sylvania, it merely lies down for a time.