~History~
My name is David Louis Wilkham. I’m an attorney hired by one Ghislain Vogt-Ziegler to document his life on paper; I believe he intends to turn these notes into a novel at some point, but I’m not certain and I don’t wish to anger him by inquiring. Ghislain can be a dangerous, violent man; I have been in his mansion for only three days, but already I have seen the sadistic manner in which he treats his mortal slaves. I am using invisible ink for this introduction in the hope that it will not be immediately discovered by Ghislain, but his immortal eyes may see through the disguise; I don’t know. It must be known that, although I am writing this from an objective point of view, I am doing so out of fear for my life. I hope that whoever sees this will believe what has been written here to be fact (not fiction) and will find a way to destroy these undead monstrosities that now surround me. I write this at one in the morning because Ghislain has demanded it, but he does not yet know that I am ready; I will seek him out soon. What follows is the account of his life, death, and undeath from over three thousand years ago.
Little is know about the lands that Ghislain Vogt-Ziegler once called home around the time of his birth. Most historians refer to it as the Nordic Bronze Age. In truth, there was little bronze among the
dessen Ovesen (‘of Ovesen’). They were a tribe born of a man called Ove; legend said that he had fought a beast of immense power and escaped with his life, thus proving to his father that he had the strength to form his own clan – and so he had. But that had been almost a century earlier. No one remembered the true story anymore; only the legend remained, of which there were many variations among the fifty or so clansmen. Farms in those days bore no crops; instead, goats and sheep were the mainstay of the clan. Where wool was not stripped from the hide of an ewe and worked into wearable items, fish was traded for meat; where milk was not gleaned from goats, elk and moose were hunted to feed the clan. Now, historians call people like these tribes; but the people
dessen Ovesen knew themselves as a clan, not a tribe.
Life was simple for the men: hunt or fish to feed yourself and your family; tell stories to your children and barter with other men in the hope that you might get a better deal. Women did the cooking, cleaning, weaving, and so on; they had their own stories to tell, though their stories were almost always altered versions of the men’s’ stories and featured women who had made men think they were smart. The women’s’ stories always had the women in them getting the best of the men, though. Children were meant to be seen, but they were not meant to be heard. Modern humans saw such things as quaint and primitive, but that was the way things were back then; such lifestyles were as normal to the clan
dessen Ovesen as cell phones and cars are to those of the modern age. In that ancient clan, Ghislain Vogt-Ziegler was born a hunter.
His father had been a hunter for many years before Ghislain was born. Ghislain’s mother had been payment for a debt owed to his father in a wager, for another man had not wished to become his father’s slave; he had thus given up his sister. To the men in that clan, women were commodities and had no rights; the women accepted this, though their thoughts and stories were their own (at least in their minds). Ghislain seemed to have a talent for trading early on, a talent inherited from his father; he was always getting the upper hand in trades. Wagers, too, always seemed to favor him. He was a strong hunter and a stronger fighter; he always won wrestling matches with his two older brothers, Hans (named after their father) and Ostergard.
When Ostergard was fourteen, Hans was thirteen and Ghislain was eight. At that point, it was only small game that was hunted by the young man; the two older brothers did most of the hunting, guided by their father. The first time the two older brothers went out to hunt on their own, however, only one came back; it turned out that Hans had missed a shot with his short spear and had angrily gone off after the bull moose the brothers had been hunting. When Ostergard had found him, Hans was bleeding badly and near death; the moose was nowhere to be found. After his death, Ostergard took on his name and Ostergard became his surname. This was a common practice among sibling deaths. Angry and depressed at the loss of his younger brother, Hans Ostergard set out recklessly after the moose; he hoped to die so that he would be spared the agony of living without his brother. He almost stumbled over a clever trap set by Ghislain to trap the moose, however, and Ghislain had to stop him. Just as he was trying to explain himself, the moose came crashing through some nearby trees and felt into the hole that Ghislain had spent two days and nights digging; he’d concealed it over the course of a couple of hours and the trap had been perfect. It was then that his older brother struck with his spear and killed the moose. That was quite a tale told by the brothers around the fire that evening and one that became a favorite over the next several years.
Despite his brother’s death, or perhaps because of it, Ghislain grew into a strong young man of considerable skill with the spear. Even his brother admired him for his prowess and it was clear that he was quickly replacing the influx of meat that had been lost because of Hans’ death. His family was not the only one in his nomadic clan to notice him, though; another family offered him a beautiful young woman named Kaari in return for a hunt; it seemed a rather large elk had eluded them several times and had injured several people in other families as well. Ghislain hiked into some low hills to get to the elk and fought a courageous battle against the animal; when it was over, he emerged victorious – but not without scars. Indeed, several cuts and bruises covered his chest and arms when he returned; he was exhausted both from the battle and the weight of the massive beast, but he had earned his prize. He wed Kaari that very evening by way of a short ceremony and a few hours of passion. When dawn came, Kaari gathered her clothes and brought them to a tent fashioned for Ghislain by his father; it was a wedding gift meant to serve as a home for both Ghislain and his new wife, a purpose it served very well indeed.
With a wife to support him, Ghislain focused on getting more sheep and goats in his possession; having a wife meant that he would not have to rely on his mother any longer, but it also meant that any work he did would be cut in half. He no longer had to shear the sheep or milk the goats himself; Kaari would do it for him. His mother no longer had to wash his clothes or cook his meals; Kaari would do it for him. When he went hunting in the woods and hills, Kaari looked after his home and his animals. Life was good for Ghislain – far
too good, in his older brother’s opinion. Ghislain’s apparent good luck and had inspired Hans Ostergard’s jealousy. When their father came to have a friendly meal with Ghislain and Kaari one evening, Hans Ostergard attempted to secretly steal Ghislain’s goats; his intention was to trade them to another family in the clan
dessen Ovesen for three wives and a wheelbarrow. But Kaari spotted Hans Ostergard and in the shadows outside the tent when she went to fetch some more water from the spring; her start alerted Ghislain and his father, who went out at once to see what the commotion was. In the darkness, no one could see who the would-be thief was; the flying of Ghislain’s knife thus killed his older brother. In his grief, Hans decided that Ghislain was no longer his son and left promptly. Hans and his wives thus moved their property to another part of the lands owned by the clan
dessen Ovesen; neither Ghislain nor Kaari ever saw them again.
Unknown to the clan
dessen Ovesen, a stranger had been watching Ghislain and the other great hunters for some time. This stranger had been unseen, for he had watched the clan only at night, but he had seen far more than any mortal could have. He was, after all, a vampire. One night, he came to Ghislain and offered him immortality; in return, the stranger said that he would kill his father for him. Of course, that would mean that his father’s wives and property would become his. Ghislain said that he had no father, but he gladly accepted the gifts offered; in his mind, you see, his father had ceased to be such the night he had disowned Ghislain. The stranger drank his blood and fed Ghislain his own; Ghislain knew only a deep sleep for several nights as the stranger seemed to vanish and Kaari took care of his property. When he awoke, he was very thirsty and the stranger had returned; he had brought with him one of the wives that had belonged to Ghislain’s now-dead father. He fed Ghislain and explained what he was capable of – the strength, the speed, the immunity to illness or death, and so on. It wasn’t long before Ghislain had realized both his strengths and his weaknesses. In his zeal, he decided that he would take back what was his. He found the stranger in the hills and convinced his fledglings that their sire was plotting against them; the stranger tore them apart, but the distraction was enough for Ghislain to be able to slam a wooden tent stake through the elder vampire’s heart.
After he took his father’s two remaining wives, his father’s sheep and goats, and his father’s clothes and tent, Ghislain traded all of it away for fine bronze weaponry that the three remaining vampires had. A long, thick spear of bronze became his immediately, as did a shield and a breastplate; it was the first his people had seen of bronze and they were truly impressed. But Ghislain had also gained a bronze helmet and a large bronze statue of the vampires’ sire in return for his newly acquired property. Melting the statue down over a massive bonfire, Ghislain created many bronze spears that he traded to others. In this, he gained a small harem of wives and a large flock of ewes. The light from the fire had also made him appreciate the darkness, though, and he never made such a huge fire after that.
His immortality had inducted Ghislain into a world of eternal night. Once every four days, he fed from one of his wives until he realized that they were dwindling fast. It wasn’t long before he had only Kaari and two others. While they were only property, they were valuable nonetheless and he was finally beginning to understand his limits. He needed things he could not get, things he had to trade for – and that meant theft. While he did not fear fire, the other three vampires did; Ghislain knew this and he used it to his advantage. Striking hard one night, he trapped all three of the vampires in a ring of flames; when they tried to escape, he burned them with torches. One of the vampires perished on the wall of flame, but the others were killed by Ghislain himself. The three vampires’ harems thus became his and he traded everything they had for the largest harem and flock in the clan. Though the rest of the clan began to fear him because of his wealth, they did nothing to anger Ghislain; in fact, they did everything they could to help and appease him. When his harem again began to dip into the single digits, he traded away most of his flock for wives. Though he did not realize it at the time, the blood on which he fed could not last forever. He had begun to see this, but the immense power and wealth he had could not be denied and he began to believe that nothing could stop him.
When at last he had traded away the last of his sheep and goats, however, Ghislain finally realized that his supply of blood was not limitless. Kaari had always been the core of his family, providing him meals and work. He had not needed the meals in his newfound immortality, but the animals and property still required extensive upkeep. Finally, though, he fed from her as well. After her death, Ghislain used the others’ fear to his advantage just as he had previously used the other vampires’ weakness to fire. He demanded a sacrifice of one infant girl every night. This lasted only a couple of months, at which point he began demanding a sacrifice of one man’s wife every week. If the man he chose did not comply, he fed from (and killed) the man instead of the man’s wife. Some of the clansmen left to seek aid, but only a few escaped Ghislain’s tyrannical rule of the clan
dessen Ovesen. He renamed it the clan
dessen Ghislain in order to further assert his control over his people; drunk on power, Ghislain drained the clan dry. Though coastal in nature, the clan had been nomadic since its creation; under Ghislain’s rule, however, they moved inland and began to rely solely on hunting to feed themselves. For some time, this kept the other clans from discovering exactly where the clan
dessen Ghislain was. Because of this, no one seemed to be able to stop him.
The clan
dessen Ghislain began to show the results of Ghislain’s tyranny after just a few months. Only a dozen or so men and a few women remained in the clan when three smaller clans converged by accident. They had been searching for the ‘lost’ clan since it had first left the coastal regions, but they had finally found it. When the other clans discovered that Ghislain was some kind of supernatural monster, the word spread fast. Even Ghislain realized he could not fight a hundred and fifty men and fled in self-preservation from the army that had gathered to destroy him. Thinking him a demon, and rightfully so, they hunted him as though he were an animal. For months, he fed from wild animals; he found that he could easily wrestle great moose and elk to their deaths with his vampiric strength and he did, drinking their blood afterward to survive.
When at last he’d reached a point where there were few animals, however, he lashed out and took several people with him. He fled through underground caves with captive men, women, and children that he kept bound with wool. Finally, he reached his homeland once more. It was there that he sustained himself on the blood of his victims. When he resurfaced at last, he was chased away to the coastal regions; he swam to an island and buried himself there to avoid their canoes, covering his body with a thick boulder and several dozen pounds of dirt to keep them at bay. It was desperate act; he was exhausted from the lack of blood and needed a place to sleep without being touched by the sun. In his thirst and exhaustion, he never predicted how long he would sleep.
It was almost four hundred years later that he awoke. A bloody battle fought over control of the island on which Ghislain slept awoke him, but it wasn’t the noise that caused his return. Over the course of nearly four centuries, the three clans had united into a single large tribe and the waters surrounding the island had receded enough to shift the island inland. The island had merged with the mainland as a result, but only at its foundation. It seemed that internal conflicts had driven the clan
dessen Blumenthal, as it was now called, into a brutal civil war. Land was the prize of choice and one of the last battles in the war soaked blood deep into the ground. The boulder covering Ghislain’s ‘grave’ had long since vanished and the blood that touched his lips gave him what he needed. Weakened and disoriented, he awoke only slowly and clawed his way to the surface. When he reached it, he sank back down to avoid the burning rays of the sun; it was just setting. When at last the sun had set completely and the battle had ended, he rose from his grave; it wasn’t long before he found his first victim. She was only twelve years old, but she was filled with blood and gave Ghislain the strength to hunt down her father. He, too, was found easily within the small camp that had hidden itself in the woods nearby – a feeble attempt to escape the bloodshed not too far from the woods.
The woods were not like he remembered them at all, however; they were much sparser and set much further back from the waters of the vast ocean. The island, too, was different; it was closer to the mainland, he noticed. Ghislain thus wondered how much time had passed since he had fallen beneath that soft earth. Yet it hardly mattered; when he was finished with the father of the girl, he fed from the brother. His strength at last returned in full, he decided he would see what had changed; it was obvious to him by that time that he had slept long and deep, and he fully intended to see what awaited him in his reawakened state. It didn’t take him long to realize that he was also much stronger and faster than he had been. A chance encounter with a fox in the night led him to realize that even his own mind had changed – but perhaps that was for the best; perhaps he had new powers that his sire hadn’t told him about. Whether he did or not, though, one thing was for certain: this was not the land he had gone to sleep in.
Several nights passed in which he explored the island upon which he had slept for the last few centuries and the lands in which he had been raised. His discoveries only heightened his sense of alienation from his homeland. The vast tribe that had been formed remembered little of the tales that had once been told; the gods had been all but forgotten and ancient customs had changed dramatically. The only wood in existence had been used to build larger boats than he had seen as a mortal – nothing to the ships he would see in future centuries, but nevertheless larger than the canoes he knew – and the homes in which the clan
dessen Blumenthal now dwelt. Bronze was seen everywhere: jewelry; weapons and armor; decorative statues and other such works of art. Nothing was the same; even the dialect had changed into a mixture of different dialects. He saw that the faces of his people had changed and that there were many traders here from neighboring lands that had faces completely unlike those of his people. Who were these people that had invaded his home and stolen it away from him? Who were they to give and take what was not theirs to trade? These were strangers to him, but it seemed that even his own people were strangers to him now.
The combined population of the tribe gave him a more-than-adequate supply of blood. He began feeding once every three nights and watched his people closely. He began stealing from his victims, taking their clothes and their wealth. Then he began trading with people from other lands. He developed a slightly unique wardrobe, for never before had he seen men wear the robes that he now wore or the armor that he knew would protect him from spears. He would not be so easy to kill this time. This time, he would be the god that he had been transformed into so long ago – a time that seemed as though it were but the night before.
Few of the people he saw had more than one wife. Polygamy had apparently ended in the four hundred years that he had slept. That didn’t make sense; who did the work that women did if there was only one woman to do it? But Ghislain hardened himself by remembering that these people had hated him. Yes, it had been four hundred years, but his sleep had brought to him the sense that it had been only hours since he’d been chased off like some demon. These people did not believe in demons or gods anymore; perhaps that was for the best, but it was to Ghislain a perversion of his society. This was no longer the tribal people he had once known; they were his people no more. Instead, they were merely prey. He would treat them as such – and so he did. He secretly grew wealthy in comparison to most of the people around him by trading what he had stolen from the people he had fed from. He killed his own people and people from other lands as well, if only for a meal and the few objects they possessed that could be traded for something better. He traded bronze weaponry and works of art for lessons in how to build and sail a boat; he had seen canoes built and he had rowed them as a mortal, but he had been a hunter – not a fisherman. Thus, this was a new experience for him. But it was a new experience that provided him with a way to expand his wealth. With his boat, he found some vast underground caves hidden by cliffs and water; he transported all of his belongings there and created for himself a home away from the sun.
For over two centuries, he fed from, stole from, and traded with the people of the surface world. He took them for everything they were worth. Rumors began to spread about some kind of demon living in the water. At one point, a large party of Nordic hunters went looking for the demon – and fame for killing it. Instead, they found only death. They found Ghislain. The fact that the hunters never returned only publicized the fact that something was out on the sea. Scared, trade between the lands across the sea and the lands in which Ghislain had grown into what he was now slowed dramatically. When a large party of fishermen accidentally stumbled upon a large fleet of boats docked inside a massive underwater cave, they decided to explore it; they, too, were lost to the perils of the undead. With the disappearance of several more groups of traders and fishermen, seafaring trade stopped altogether.
It was at that point that Ghislain’s plan started to take shape. He brought in the massive wealth that he had acquired for two-and-a-half centuries. He sold boats, bronze weaponry and art, bronze jewelry, clothing, spices, and many other items to the mainlanders. He returned to his home with harvested wood and other building materials. He began the final stage of his plan at once. He had seen many boats of various sizes by now, so his idea had been to build an even larger boat – a boat that would dwarf all others. By building a massive boat, he would be able to go wherever he wanted; the sun would never touch him, for he would live
inside the vessel and come out at night. He would take entire large families with him on his voyages so that he would not sleep as he once had. What was more, he would be able to store anything he acquired on board – including smaller boats.
It took him almost a year to build it, for he had only an idea and no manpower save his own. The idea of creating a towering, tree-like pole from which he could put up a sail, however, was a brilliant one. It took him some time to figure out how to do it, but he finally managed to develop a system of ropes that would, he discovered, actually enable him to put up
several sails. With a final idea firm in his mind, he hastened his work. The cold season was just starting in when he completed it. Already, rumors had surfaced of some odd structure showing up in the distance – but it was too far out for anyone to see what it was and no one had dared to go into deep water since it had been proven dangerous. Quickly moving all his wealth on board on evening, Ghislain finally took one of the larger boats inland. He hid it among some bushes and moved in for the kill. He fed from three people, but he took eight others; he bound and gagged them, stole their wealth, and burned their homes to the ground so that it would look like they had perished in the flames. Then he departed to his ship, though he did not know that term at the time. Finally, his plans realized at last, he set sail for the open sea.
His ship never touched the shores of the lands across the sea from his own. Instead, he took boats inland to trade for slaves and other things. As the cultures shifted from era to era during the course of the next three centuries, Ghislain stalked his mortal prey with the efficiency of the deadliest of nocturnal predators. He developed his powers over the minds of mortals and had many women in his bed, their numbers too great to count. He developed for himself an entire crew of slaves that took care of his ship and his needs. His mortal slaves became food when he grew hungry and did not care to venture inland, but he always replaced them eventually. Through his trading (both with the people of his homeland and with the people of the surrounding lands), he developed his own unique dialect of German and learned a swiftly-developing language that would later come to be called Dutch. His own language, it seemed, was leaving his people and coming back as something else. He wondered thus how much of his home and his people he had lost. It seemed that he was nothing like what he had once been, nor was his home what it had once been; in the end, it hardened him. He became like ice, a glacier watching the passing of the seasons and the years. He trained himself to let go, for he was now outside mortal society.
In what is now England, Ghislain came into contact with others like him for the second time in his life. It happened when he discovered the erection of a number of stones. As he was examining them, a voice behind him called them the gathering of stones Stonehenge. He discovered that the vampire, whose name was Errol, had built placed them there with the aid of his brother some two thousand years previous. It seemed that there were others, then, who had seen the world through the eyes of an ancient being. Four hundred years was nothing compared to the kind of power that Errol or his brother, Atol, possessed. Errol told Ghislain that it was the death of his and Atol’s sire that had prompted the construction of the burial ground at that location, the place where his sire had apparently been born. At over eight thousand years of age, Errol’s sire had decided that he was through with living. He documented his entire life and undeath as best he could before ending his own undeath. Errol had buried the stone tablets into which his memoirs had been carved and his brother had helped him erect the stones as a grave marker. Apparently, disuse over the course of a thousand years had prompted a reconstruction of the circle roughly eleven hundred years previous.
Though by his sire’s death rather than his own existence, Errol had also been hardened. His brother had left after the first construction of the grave marker, for he had not wished Errol to see him weakened by emotion; apparently, the two had been very close to their sire. Ghislain had not had that weakness in him and so did not fully understand the emotional connection. Perhaps it was a fault; perhaps not. Either way, he and Errol came to be on semi-friendly terms after their initial meeting. Through Errol, Ghislain mastered Gaelic and English. Upon hearing of the idea of protection while he slept at the hands of wolves, Ghislain began to travel with a constant entourage of three or four (at minimum); though he did not truly need the protection, it was an excellent idea for the prevention of his untimely death and he took to it immediately.
Perhaps his greatest achievement to date, however, was mastering his new acquaintance’s ability to turn his mind inward; in this, he was able to further his mental abilities. He soon learned to ‘sense’ the minds of others and distinguish one from another. He found that he could not push his powers beyond this, but his most furious attempts eventually strengthened them enough to be able to enter the minds of vampires as well as mortals. In time, he began to learn how to shut others out of his mind just as Errol seemed to begin to do. Yet as the centuries passed, he would come to find that he could mentally overpower weaker vampires.
He also found a large deposit of iron ore on England. Errol had been mining another deposit for decades and taught Ghislain how to do the same in return for a quarter of the deposit. Ghislain quickly found out just how strong iron was and began to trade with the people in England. Eventually, he discovered a scribe who taught him how to write English; through his experiences in these lessons, he developed a written version of his own language. He carried it back with him and used it as a bartering tool. Eventually, he became quite wealthy simply by teaching others how to read and write in their native tongue (German). Errol did not go back with him, however. He stayed in England; he had a castle there and controlled a great deal of land. When Ghislain had completely tapped out the iron deposit, he left England for good. He didn’t like the English or their customs, though that was perhaps because they were too far different from the Germans. Errol’s final lesson to him was how to make stone bricks and use them to build a castle. As a result, he left England with a great deal more power, knowledge, and wealth than he’d had when he’d decided to stay there.
Then Augustus came. He was a ruler of some foreign nation that had decided to invade what later became Germany (thus naming Ghislain’s native tongue). When he could, he fought alongside his brethren until it was realized that he could not fight them all. Even with his immense power, he was no match for the growing threat of the Roman army. But he could hide. He was developing his new powers slowly, but they were already strong enough for him to be able to slip away from the public eye and watch things from a distance. It was at that point that the Roman Empire was born and events began to unfold that Ghislain had absolutely no control over. He could only watch as his homeland was taken over by those who cared nothing for the people that had dwelt there for millennia. He could only watch as the people that were no longer his nonetheless became his in heart, for their struggle became his own – and then he let them go. Errol had taught him something that had stuck with him when he left England: never get involved in the affairs of mortals; it always inevitably led to despair. Work with them, he had told Ghislain, but never become one of them. When Germany was subdued, Augustus declared that the Romans had defeated a god and his people; indeed, it must have seemed like that during the battle. Never before had Ghislain displayed his powers so openly until that moment, but it prompted others like him to begin watching him closely. They had heard the rumors and moved quickly to determine the truth of what was happening. A code of secrecy was already being put in place by other vampires who did not want to be hunted down and destroyed by overzealous fanatics of one religion or another. He was watched secretly for over a century before he was finally approached.
During that century, the Roman Empire developed. They heeded not the rumor that there was some kind of sickness among their slaves, for slaves were stupid in their eyes and did not deserve to be heard. They should have listened, for a sickness would have been infinitely better. The vampires that approached Ghislain had decided that exposing the vampires to the general public would only bring about mass armies in order to destroy them. Rome had become a powerful religious nation, after all, and the Catholic Church would not have let such monstrosities walk the Earth had they known what they were. But others had also heard and came to support Ghislain. Though they did not ‘follow’ him, they did ally themselves with him and a battle broke out. What had begun as an execution had become a secret war. Only three vampires were left when it was over: Ghislain and two of the offenders that had come to destroy him. They left peacefully, but they did not go quietly. They tried to burn his precious ship with oil and torches, thereby sinking it to the bottom of the sea; the failed, though they did destroy the mast and sails. They also greatly damaged he topside deck, the captain’s quarters, and the deck immediately below topside. It took a year to replace because of the materials required, for the ship was ancient in its origin.
When it was finally repaired, he decided it was time to seek out aid. His animal guards would only prove an annoyance to other vampires bent on hiding from those who dwelt under the light of the sun. Other vampires, however, would gain him quite a following. His first fledgling was a young woman who just happened to be the Roman Emperor’s youngest of three daughters. He manipulated her into his bed for many a night before he finally turned her. They were wed under the waxing crescent moon and Ghislain thus became a Roman heir. Through his new wife, Ghislain learned to read, write, and speak Italian and Latin fluently. When Emperor Domitian was murdered in A. D. 96, however, Ghislain and his wife were disowned and removed themselves from the Roman Emperor’s household in order to prevent being executed in turn. In truth, it wasn’t a problem due to their immortality; but the attempted assassinations would have prompted disturbing questions that neither Ghislain nor Claretta wanted to answer. When the records were shown, however, Ghislain was mistakenly thought to have been Domitian’s son instead of Claretta being his daughter; the historical records have never been changed. Aided in this was the rise of another that Domitia, Domitian’s wife, secretly adopted; this man, called Nerva, became the first of what is now known as the Five Good Emperors. Ghislain and Claretta, on the other hand, faded into the background of the Roman Empire and were left alone.
It became apparent not long after they had left the Roman Empire’s clutches that conquest and destruction were the most common societal tenets. The rulers of Rome spawned many enemies in their quest for absolute power, but that quest would eventually become its downfall. For almost a century, Ghislain and Claretta watched from afar as the Roman Empire asserted itself in the world. They aided the Germanic tribes in their raids and gathered enormous wealth unto themselves. When their ship was discovered and burned by the Roman Army in 194, they moved away from the control of the Roman Empire and into what is now Africa. In Chad, a landlocked country in central Africa, the vampire couple learned to read, write, and speak both French and Arabic fluently. This greatly aided them in acquiring property and trading with the various people that inhabited Chad. At the time, however, it was primarily the slave trade into which they delved and this carried them out of Africa. For the entire fourth century, they engaged heavily in the trading of slaves; they kept themselves hidden from the world at large except when their presence was necessary, as in the case of their trading practices. They used the slaves both for manual labor and for food. When at last they began to slowly migrate away from the harsh lands within the borders of Chad, they encountered a vampire-led Germanic tribe calling themselves
dessen Ekkehardt. The vampires leading the clan
dessen Ekkehardt, however, just happened to be the ones that had escaped annihilation at the hands of Ghislain a couple of centuries earlier. Forming a truce, they decided to join together in an attack on Gaul. The attack would have happened regardless of the vampires’ presence, but the vampires had sought to benefit from the raid and had thus manipulated the leaders of the tribe into serving them.
Before they’d even reached Gaul, however, another coup took place. Betraying the truce to which they’d agreed, Ghislain and Claretta manipulated the leaders into killing the other two vampires and then manipulated the people of the tribe to kill their leaders. They thus took over and reaped immense rewards from the raid conducted on Gaul. The tribe was successful in their raid, and in the next several raids they conducted, but the vampire couple finally abandoned them; they took the tribe’s wealth with them when they left.
Building a castle in France, they began to dwell there without being harassed. By this time, Ghislain’s mental powers had reached their peak. When they completed the construction of Castle Ghislain, he had already taught his wife to master her own mental abilities as he had mastered his. As Claretta studied her own powers, however, she discovered something new that Ghislain did not have: the ability to manipulate the fog that surrounded her. Apparently, Claretta had a deeper connection to the fog that surrounded her than Ghislain did. She had also developed some kind of limited ability to fly.
It was toward the end of the fifth century that Catholicism began to take a firm hold on France. It turned out that the Germanic tribe with which Ghislain and Claretta had traveled for a short time had begun to call themselves Franks after the vampires had robbed them of their ill-gotten gains; they converted to Catholicism as the Roman Empire fell apart, crumbling into ash much in the same fashion as a pyre log. With the growing number of religious fanatics in the country, Ghislain decided to turn someone who could act as the help. Jean was a young man who’d been raised in poverty, but he had fought in the French army for almost six years. He was well-versed in the art of war despite this limited experience, however, for he learned quickly and had excellent memory. In addition, he had married only a year previous into money. When his wife perished, he blamed the church – persuaded by Ghislain, of course; then Ghislain turned him with the promise of revenge. Jean was not at all disappointed. Over the course of the sixth century, countless Catholics fell to his immortal powers and thirst for blood. He grew wealthy by stealing from his victims, something encouraged by his sire and his sire’s wife, though he already had quite a bit of wealth from his dead wife.
Little is known about the half-century following the completion of Castle Ghislain in regards to Ghislain and Claretta Vogt-Ziegler. It is known that he influenced and acquired copies of
Historia Francorum, the writings of Gregory of Tour that were published in the latter half of the sixth century; those ten books still reside in Ghislain’s private library, to which only his wife has access. Unfortunately, another vampire stepped forward to discredit him. Apparently, his sire had been one of the vampires killed during the raid on Gaul; he didn’t much like Ghislain or Claretta as a result. In retaliation, Claretta killed the vampire as Ghislain drove the mortal mad. He eventually hung himself, but not before destroying many of the buildings whose architecture is now documented only in the books he wrote. Before his death, Gregory (who’d become a Pope by this time) managed to send off two letters arguing for the support of education by illustration; apparently, his efforts were effective post-mortem. Roughly a thousand years of artwork are now attributed to his designs and ideas. Unfortunately, his designs were never found; only the artwork showed up. A large number of paintings mysteriously signed G V-Z did show up over the next four hundred years, though all of them were eventually recovered by Claretta; it was a brilliant scheme that brought in the equivalent of what would be hundreds of millions of dollars in modern times, while the paintings themselves ended up back in the hands of those who’d sold them in the first place. All Ghislain and Claretta had to do was manipulate the people they sold them to; it was quite a profitable cycle while it lasted.
Until the early 730s, the vampire couple lived in relative peace. Then the Muslims tried to invade France; their incursions were pushed back, but not without aid from the tactical genius of Ghislain. In the end, he took over a dozen people for exploration in torture and interrogation; he did so out of curiosity, but he developed many of the techniques used throughout the world today. Three of them survived his ‘experiments’, but only one of them survived their next encounter with the vampire; he fed from one of the torture survivors while Claretta fed from the other one. The third was seen as strong enough to be worthy of immortality; he was thus turned. His full name is unknown, but it is known that he shortened it to Al Hafar after the incident.
After that incident, more and more people began to be tortured. Most chalked it up to musketeers lost in illegal duels. A few people realized that something odd was going on, but no one really brought anything up in their conversations – and why should they? It was not good fortune or practice to speak ill of the dead; that is something that has been true practically since the dawn of time. It is perhaps a practice that many modern citizens of the world have forgotten. In truth, the musketeers weren't dying at the hands of their opponents – not really; they were being given immortal life. But theirs was a hated existence, for they were considered mere slaves; they were the playthings of the eldest in what Ghislain and his wife had begun to call their Black Church of Ghislain. Ghislain had become their ‘family’ name by this time and was taken with all seriousness as a pact of blood. The fledglings that were supposed to be dead were fed only the bare minimum of what they needed to survive; they were tortured in ways modern government agencies of the world can only have nightmares about. The torture, from the sickening stories Ghislain recants with fondness, were long and excruciating at best. After months (years in some cases) of agony, the weakened vampires were left bound to poles buried deep in the ground; when the sun rose, they were burned alive. Even having never experienced immortality, I can imagine just how painful that must have been.
It is unknown (to me, at least) exactly how many vampires were sired. All of them, however, were murdered. I have been given a vague range of anywhere from fifty to a hundred fledglings, but the fact of the matter is that many modern torture techniques were taught by Ghislain and others like him to mortals. From those early experiments and those of other (equally sadistic) vampires came Chinese water torture, the rack, electroshock therapy, “fear” training (in which someone is forced to face their worst fears, only to be killed by them or scared to death in the end), and countless other methods of exacting sadistic pleasure from one’s victims. How large a part Ghislain in particular played in the evolution of torture is as unclear as the body count, but I do know that he was one of the first people in history to ram steel rods up underneath one’s fingernails. He was also one of the first people in history to remove said nails. Over thirty books have been written by Ghislain on the subject of torture, but they have never been published. Upon his recent awakening and orientation into the modern world, it was his wish that they be published as soon as possible; I have no intention of publishing them, but it seems that someone else has stepped up to the plate and is more than willing to do so. I don’t doubt the profits he’ll make; what I doubt is the sanity of his mind. The writing of this document is thus my first, last, and
only act I’ll perform for Ghislain.
Ghislain has refused to elaborate on his activities beyond what he has told me already. The next recollection he has shared with me is getting into the good graces of the king of France in the mid ninth century. He did so not by hypnosis, he says, but by using a very old technique: he took control of him by giving him something he wanted. He approached King Charles the Bald (a ridiculous name, but a valid one nonetheless) as a supposedly devout Roman Catholic. Ghislain and Claretta studied the holy texts of the Old and New Testaments (which had by this time been put into massive Bibles) in order to gain the king’s trust. The king taught him how to make the Bibles, just as he had been taught by a Priest. By making the Bibles, he gained an audience with the king on occasion; they had numerous brief conversations, usually regarding the state of the country and various cities throughout France, but the main thing they discussed was religion. A lot of philosophy was shared with Ghislain; at one point, he wrote a poem that he put into a Bible he was giving to the king as a gift. In the end, they became good friends and Ghislain was able to ‘pull strings’ in order to get what he wanted when he wanted. He used none of his vampiric charm. It was an experiment for him, something to toy with the idea of until he grew bored; Ghislain had many more such experiments over the centuries, but this was the first (and the most effective).
Ghislain did grow bored, however, and he wished his fledglings the good fortune he’d had in being able to hide in the ground. As a result, he spoke to them of his first time doing so; when he was finished, they all reluctantly left their estate to a mortal family that they had manipulated into the castle. They hid their wealth in countless secret passages stretching for dozens of miles deep underground; in this manner, it could not be stolen from them by the mortal family. Then the four of them chose a secluded spot in the woods north of their home and buried themselves deep in the ground. Over time, the family expanded a bit and forgot all about the vampires that owned it. But as with all things, their family came to an end when the vampires awoke.
The awakening occurred when Castle Ghislain was seized during the Hundred Years War. The year was 1409 and the war was in full swing; a rebellion of the mortal family living in the castle at the time resulted in a battle fought on the very ground beneath which the vampires slept. The blood soaked deep into the ground, for the battle was brutal; the arts of war and torture had been passed to the mortal family’s ancestors by the vampires, after all. Thus it was that the vampires were awakened – and they were not at all pleased. They struck quickly. No one escaped their return to the mortal world, though they left one alive just long enough to give them all a brief history of the war and its origins. Once the castle was reclaimed, the vampires discovered that roughly a third of their wealth had been lost in taxes over the last four hundred and some odd years. Despite this, they quickly moved to learn as much of they could of France’s present situation. Then they sought, as they always did, to benefit from the history that surrounded them.
In this particular case, Ghislain and his fledglings decided to aid France. It seemed that the war had slowed only slightly due to England’s own internal problems, but this was a very profitable time for the vampires. They quickly moved to manipulate events within the ruling households, turning family members against each other over simple things. Their historical interference led to a French civil war, during which they profited from the shadows. They conducted small, unimportant raids on English forces that were blamed on disgruntled Scots and sold the weapons and armor they stole to people on both sides of the French civil war. In so doing, they recovered much of the wealth they had lost; most of what they gained, however, was in land and livestock. The land they traded most (but not all) of away and the livestock they slaughtered for the meat and other byproducts. These, too, they sold to soldiers and civilians alike. In the end, they broke even. But the vampires had also grown more powerful in their sleep. This aided them in their pursuits.
In the long run, it could be said that the Ghislain family’s part in the Hundred Years War was small; yet by the time the last battle had been fought, they had nearly doubled their original wealth. Gold and silver coins from France and England, paintings, sculptures, jewelry, tapestries, some land and livestock, and other such things became their prized possessions and the key to their present fortunes. When all was said and done, the total sum of the accumulated wealth was divided equally among the six vampires. Yes, there were six now; two more had been sired during the course of the war (toward the end, actually). One was a French nobleman whose name was lost to the history books; he was called Jean-Pierre Borde. The other was an English noblewoman by the name of Elizabeth Mottershead. The woman was actually turned by Claretta, the first vampire of the Ghislain family that wasn’t actually turned by Ghislain himself. She turned her because of the connections that could be provided at the time; indeed, her wealth alone made an impressive addition to the family.
With the Hundred Years War at an end and new foundations formed in the Ghislain household, Ghislain and Claretta agreed that it was time to choose a new location from which to strike out at the mortal world. They thus commissioned the construction of a rather large ship christened the
Maroon Wave and loaded everything on board. They traded their castle for it, but none of the wealth held beneath it or the secrets of the rooms, passages, vaults, and so forth therein; as a result, many of its secrets are still being uncovered today by eager explorers and like-minded historians.
For the next hundred years or so, I have been told that nothing of any real note happened; they kept ship-bound, sending Elizabeth ashore for victims but otherwise living in a lap of luxury aboard their ship. Apparently, it was roughly the equivalent of the
Titanic – only the medieval version of it. I have been informed that a large number of slaves were bought, sold, and traded during this time and that many were kept as ‘pets’ intended for entertainment purposes. Other than that, I have been kept out of the loop about that particular period of the Ghislain family’s existence.
However, the Ghislain family’s next stop was Mexico. The vast desert and dense jungles therein provided excellent cover for the vampires. When one of the temples was abandoned due to the war against the Spaniards, the vampires readily (and secretly) transported all of their wealth into new chambers they built underneath the temple. Once that was done, they sold their ship to the Spanish; of greatest importance to them was the Spanish language, as it aided them in trading. They were taught this by a number of Spaniards with whom they traded over the next several decades and became quite fluent in it. They also learned how to read and write the language.
Once they had settled in, it wasn’t hard for them to find victims; the war the Spaniards had begun waging against the indigenous tribes of people in the early sixteenth century provided a great many victims that no one ever cared enough about to remember. This also provided a decent slave trade; wealth wasn’t increased much – it stayed in a steady range – but it provided something for the vampires to do that kept them connected and enabled them to gather news from the world around them. When France and Spain began competing for explorative opportunities and land north of Mexico, the vampires moved their wealth and influence in that direction. It didn’t take them long to blend into the deserts of what is now Arizona, where they hid in caves provided by nature. Those caves are remembered by few save for the vampires who dwelt in them; all that is known is that they are somewhere out in the middle of the desert. No one I know is fool enough to go out there looking for them.
The mortal slaves they had brought with them were used for labor and reproduction; they were treated like cattle and bred in much the same manner. This provided victims as well as leverage with the Spanish not too far south of them. The amount of distance that could be covered in a short span of time by one of these vampires is impressive to say the least, but even more remarkable is the fact that carrying two or three mortals apiece didn’t hinder them a bit. I know they found vast quantities of gold out in the desert, but that gold was mined by hypnotized mortals who’re long dead. Only the Ghislain family knows where the mines were, but their emptiness makes it clear just how successful their expeditions were. Once the mines were tapped out, they began moving north in search of more gold; the vampires’ greed eventually drove them into what is now called the Pacific Northwest United States.
The transport of their wealth must have been very difficult even with a couple of dozen slow-moving mortal slaves to aid them. In the end, though, they made it well enough and took many Native American slaves. By the time they reached what is now Washington state, they had over four dozen living slaves and had murdered over six hundred others for feeding purposes. History now points the finger to wars among the various tribes, but that’s only a group of assumptions and cover-ups based mostly on the judgments of non-native residents and slave traders. Those with power are those who write history. Naturally, most of what is written in textbooks is relatively accurate; however, there were just as many vampire-related deaths and disappearances back then as there were tribe-related ones.
By the seventh century, it was clear that settlers weren’t giving up any time soon. Seizing a small, forgotten trade ship off the coast of what’s now Oregon around the mid-1620s, the vampires’ wealth was again stored – only this ship was larger and thus much better a facility in which to store their wealth. By the eighteenth century, the ship had been all but forgotten; it was seen only occasionally and called a ghost ship by those few who saw it. The rare sightings prompted many stories by settlers, but there was also much skepticism to be had about whether the ship even existed due to the scarcity of the sightings. Nonetheless, the Russian settlers that began to slowly filter into the country around the middle of the eighteenth century provided new knowledge. Dane Vitus Bering himself taught Al Hafar how to read, write, and speak the Russian language; he taught the rest of his family the same thing. They had been trading here and there for some time, but now their clientele had increased slightly.
Spain’s exploits into the Olympic Peninsula in the late eighteenth century provided the first real information about the Ghislain family since they had reached Mexico. While most of the information in the last few paragraphs has been vague or general in nature, I have been given a lot of detail about the trading and exploration they did there. They learned no new languages, but they did wind up traveling into Canada. I’ll not bore you with their exploits; what I will do is tell you how they came to meet up with other vampires for the first time in many centuries.
The Ghislain family wasn’t there when the Ishak had first formed, but my understanding is that they met up with them not long afterward. The first group they met were extremely proud of their immortality and power; like Ghislain and his Black Church, they believed that mortals were little more than cattle. The family meshed well with them. When they learned of the ‘brotherhood’ the Ishak had formed, Ghislain allowed his Black Church to be absorbed into it. The Black Church of Ghislain was thus there when the Amman decided it was time to wipe them out. They had awakened upon that night to find that they were under attack; they had not yet fed for the evening and, though they could go for a week without blood, they were quite irritated. When the Tarepha showed up to aid the dwindling Ishak, the Black Church of Ghislain (among other ‘families’) were cursed by the holy power of the exorcism that had been attempted. This is why they can’t set foot inside a church. However, it was the Black Church of Ghislain that first helped to set up St. Anne’s Cemetery in Demaitre. When the city sprouted, it was only a small town set up near a trading post; but the cemetery provided protection for the Ishak and a way to hide among the mortals. The logic of creating a cemetery was irrefutable and Ghislain was only too happy to help.
Fortunately for the Ghislain family, much of their wealth was still on board their ship. When the Amman and their two allies had struck, their wealth had been spared. It was kept a secret from the rest of the Ishak at the time, but it was no secret that they conducted many trades with the French company that had set up Demaitre in the first place. Right from the start, though, they were clearly the wealthiest ones among the Ishak. It is not so in the modern age, where all of the oldest vampires seem to be the richest, but their wealth would have been legendary had it been known of back then. As it was, Ghislain himself had already lived for much longer than most of the other known vampires. When the Ishak turned their back on the Tarepha to follow their own path, the enmity that grew between the two covens was quickly forgotten as the Tarepha were forced to scrounge for victims under the watchful eyes of the Amman; meanwhile, the Ishak became a close-knit coven.
The nineteenth century brought many new people into the area. A number of mansions were built by the Ghislain family, some of which they lived in during that time. Several mansions build during the 1830s still stand, though they’re not in any kind of good condition. The problems of those outside Canada became others’ problems; they were all but ignored by Ghislain and his family. Instead, they focused on their own immortal lives. Like many in the early days of Demaitre, they invested heavily in the lumber mills that seemed to spring up in the area. When it looked like a mill was going to go bust, they poured money into it to prevent it from doing so; then they sold the lumber to people from other countries for outrageously low prices (yes, I’m aware that sounds like a corny Wal-Mart ad). In this manner, they greatly depleted the ‘rim’ of their wealth. Yet in the long run, things turned out all right. When the horse-and-buggy became popular, they wasted no time in getting a buggy for each of their members and two horses for each buggy. When the telegraph was invented, they used it constantly to organize large trades and business deals. Ghislain had grown up a businessman; now he was simply becoming what he had always been in the eyes of those who truly ruled Demaitre. I do not believe the mortals have ever truly had control of this place; I believe it’s always been the vampires who run things.
