I was born, I think, to human parents. I cannot recall their names, nor the name they gave me. I cannot recall their faces. I cannot recall my own. When I reach up I can feel the way my horns rise up in elegant spirals seven or eight inches over the top of my skull, like an antelope’s; my hair, which is long and straight and a dirty, dull shade of blonde, often gets caught on my horns, and it drives me mad, but I’m afraid to cut it off in case it never grows back, or else does immediately like the hand one of my cousins lost when Uncle Cazador caught him squirreling away a bit of coin.
Uncle Cazador always hated to hear me call his spawn ‘cousins’, even though he himself called them his sons and daughters. “They have not earned the Szarr name, they have not drunk of my blood, they have not completed the Family Rites,” he ranted once, but I have rejected the Szarr name and though the supposed honor was granted me, I refused for many years to complete the Family Rites without suffering disownment, so to me, I do not see why they should not be cousins.
Strictly speaking, ‘Uncle’ Cazador was a cousin himself—his sire, Vellioth the Martinet, was my granddam Fistula’s eldest brother—but he disliked Blovart and I calling him that almost as much as he disliked us using the word for his children. Blovart, who is my great-aunt Dralia’s grandson and only about half a century older than me, always called Cazador “dear cousin” precisely because he knew he disliked it, but he was always Uncle Cazador to me. Being an elf, he was ancient even before he became a vampire, and to my mind the word ‘cousin’ conjures up a generational peer. Cazador the Avid, though a Szarr by that accursed blood, had already begun his fourth century when our line began.
The man is dead now, ash swept—quite literally—into the streets. For this, the vulnerable of Baldur’s Gate have my cousin Astarion to thank (the very same whose hand my uncle once took for thieving), alongside the rest of that band of adventurers now known as the Unlikely Heroes, for along with a vampire spawn among their number were a mad archmage, a great-granddaughter of Yvonnel the Eternal, a githyanki raider, the champion of the archdevil Zariel, the mysterious Chosen of Shar, and finally the son of Grand Duke Ulder Ravengard, who in his youth was exiled from the city and returned as a devil. Little needs to be said of this group and their other exploits, for at the time of writing this author is assured one might walk into any tavern on the Sword Coast to hear a bard’s rendition of their fight against the Netherbrain, and by the time of publication I am certain several expert treatises shall have been penned on the Cult of the Absolute and its defeat. I am no scholar of divinities, nor illithid, nor the magic of fallen Netheril. In truth, I am no scholar at all. I am only a vampire seeking to put the histories of my kind to paper.
***
This is a tale perhaps best told beginning with its ending. Late in the Year of Three Ships Sailing, 1492 DR, Cazador Szarr ‘the Avid’, master vampire of Baldur’s Gate for some two hundred and twenty-five years, was killed in the process of his attempted Ascension.
To become the Vampire Ascendant is to bind oneself to an infernal pact with the archdevil Mephistopheles and sacrifice to him seven thousand of one’s own spawn, each marked for the purpose afore their turning with a fragment of the ritual text. In exchange: a sort of false life. All of the powers and preternatural resilience of the vampire retained or even strengthened, but with them a heart that beats, skin that abides the warmth of the sun, arousals that rise as they do in the living, and one’s own face—stolen away by the curse of our blood—returning one’s gaze in the mirror. All this does not even cost one’s own soul, for the vampire, the true vampire, lost their soul the moment they drank their sire’s blood.
Despite this, no vampire has become Ascendant. One reason for this is the unpleasant truth of our nature: where once was a soul, the true vampire is an empty thing, affection and interest and empathy beyond her. In their place grow crueler ties. What a mortal or even spawn might have loved, a true vampire covets jealously. What she once found to be an interesting diversion becomes all-consuming obsession, anything to fill the void inside her. For my part, I am lucky my interests lay in books.
My uncle called his spawn his children, but in truth the relationship between vampire and spawn is that of owner and object, and the vampire is a universally possessive, paranoid collector where her spawn are concerned. One’s own soul is not at risk in this pact, but the thought of sacrificing even a single spawn is like to turn the stomach of most vampires, never mind seven thousand. A spawn is yours. You are its creator, its god. To give it up, then, is to give away your own power—is to give away naught less than godhood. This is such a fundamental truth to the vampire that, even knowing logically that any power lost in sacrificing your spawn in this case will be paid back twofold, the thought is repellent.
The second reason there has never been—and with any luck, never shall be—a Vampire Ascendant is due to the particulars of the pact which creates one. Writ initially in an arrangement between Mephistopheles and Kas the Bloody-Handed, the vampiric master of Tovag—one of the so-called ‘demiplanes of dread’—the Rite of Profane Ascension requires the complex infernal seals upon the spawn’s flesh be carved with a blade of infernal iron quenched in the River of Blood that winds through the Hells, and the Rite itself—upon the collection of the seven thousand spawn—requires a ritual focus with peculiar characteristics I shall not describe in any detail, lest some enterprising vampire think to use my little book as an instruction manual rather than a simple history. For the same reason, I have chosen not to reproduce the infernal text of the pact nor any of the seals, in whole or in part.
Kas the Bloody-Handed attempted to complete the Rite of Profane Ascension in the year 4565 as counted by the Olven Chronicon, which to the best of this author’s knowledge corresponds to the Year of the Giant’s Oath, 883 DR. He was foiled in his task by a party of vampire-hunters, all of whom served as clerics or paladins of Sehanine Moonbow and Lathander, whether in his traditional form, that of Amaunator the Yellow God, or that of Pelor, his aspect as it is worshiped in the city of Greyhawk. Though Kas the Bloody-Handed survived this encounter, the ritual blade and focus and the pact-scroll itself were all spirited away by the party who defeated him, and for long centuries the Rite of Profane Ascension faded into obscurity… a myth to vampires and those who fear them alike.
Cazador the Avid began working towards his Ascension in the Year of Flowers, 1265 DR, while his sire still lived. When I asked him how this was permitted (Vellioth the Martinet, as his sobriquet may suggest, having been well known in vampiric circles for a particularly controlling nature), my uncle told me, “I am given to understand he found my boldness charming. There is a lesson to be learned here, girl. We may be beyond death, and beyond that shackle called ‘guilt’ which restrains the living, but we are not beyond the living’s… affections.” When he said this, he cupped the jaw of my cousin Astarion in his palm; Astarion, knelt at his feet like a pet and just as shameless of his nudity, looked anywhere but at me.
“Do not allow fondness to make you soft,” said Cazador Szarr. “You will find, as Vellioth did, that it proves your downfall.”
Cazador’s hardness proved his own, for some eighty years after that conversation Astarion and his siblings stabbed the man so many times his body was unrecognizable before he was finally dragged up out of the Tourmaline Depths to burn up beneath the sun. Despite the fact I was not a spawn like them, and had stood by and watched my uncle enact all manner of cruelty without lifting a finger in their defense or aid, my cousins spared me.
They did not all have the same reasons, to be sure. The youngest, so newly-sired I had never met him, said, “I will not kill a child,” spat at my feet, and stalked away. (“News to me,” one of his siblings sneered. “Has standards now, does he?” Aurelia, a pretty girl of Asmodeus’ bloodline hissed back: “Violet, please, not now.”) Dalyria, a physician who had been turned some quarter-century before I began my attic hermitage and who had come to me more than once in those years with questions about the vampiric curse, argued to her remaining brothers and sisters on my behalf. Stepping in front of me with her arms half-spread, she pled: “If a cure for this condition can be found, her knowledge will prove an invaluable resource.” And then, half-desperate: “Astarion. Don’t.”
Astarion was blood-drenched and had strapped on a chest plate and vambraces over the clothes he donned after Cazador’s defeat. In each hand he held an enchanted dagger. The air around him was unnaturally cold, a hallmark of the necromantic power he held ready at his fingertips, the sickly green of the magic gathering like fog in his eyes. “Stand down, Dal,” he said, voice flat. “I won’t kill her.” The other spawn did not argue—could not, faced with their brother’s newfound power, and allies just as strong or stronger.
“Are you sure?” a black-haired woman said dubiously. I know her now to be the Chosen of Shar, foremost amongst the Dark Justiciars. “It’s a true vampire, not a spawn. Leaving it alive is asking for trouble down the line.”
The archmage interjected: “Or, by sparing her, we’re planting the seeds for a fruitful alliance! A true vampire is a dangerous enemy, yes, but an equally useful ally… and may I say, having read much of the lady’s previous work, I don’t believe she will prove a threat to us. Or to anyone! For a vampire, she seems downright reasonable. Ah, no offense meant, Astarion.”
My cousin ignored both of them. “Lady Szarr,” he said. “May we speak privately?”
Zariel’s champion, whose large hand rested on Astarion’s shoulder, bent down to whisper something in his ear; he sheathed his blades. “Quite all right, darling,” he assured, and pressed a chaste kiss to her lips.
He and I went into Cazador’s study, and he closed the door behind us. I wasn’t certain what to expect. He took one glass from my uncle’s wine service, and from the leather wine skin on his belt poured himself a glass. The blood smelt cloyingly sweet, the way a dead man’s blood always did. Vampires feed on life force as much as they do blood: bleeding a corpse is much like a mortal eating a slice of cake. It grants energy in the moment, satisfies a craving, but lacks much-needed nutrition, so that attempting to live on cake alone would be a miserable endeavor indeed.
From the smell of it, it was also clear the blood was a man’s, not a beast’s. I offered my cousin a weak smile, pouring myself a glass from one of Cazador’s many bottles: these, tapped from the yet-living and intended to be served hot. I had no appetite, and even if I had, I would not choose to drink lukewarm blood straight from a bottle, but I needed something with which to occupy my hands. “A toast,” I said, and my voice shook. “To your first taste of human blood.”
My uncle forbade his spawn from drinking the blood of what he called ‘thinking creatures’—a category slightly but importantly distinct from what certain scholars of philosophy call the Spoken. The most common definition of the Spoken races is “those beings living and ensouled which are capable of abstract planning and reasoning and, given means to do so, communicating these to others.” Planning, in the study of cognition, is presently defined as “the process of deciding in advance what actions to take to achieve a desired goal”; reasoning is defined as “the process of drawing new conclusions from existing knowledge”.
These definitions are neither perfect nor without their detractors: a cat is not understood to be Spoken, but should a mage cast Speak With Animals, she could certainly discuss with a cat his intention to meow at his owner so that he will receive pets, or to wait until his owner has gone to sleep before jumping on a forbidden cabinet; a lich is not understood to be Spoken because he is not living. The scholar says the cat is aware of replicable causal relationships, but is not reasoning—that he does not know the counter is ‘forbidden’ as such, but that he has learned every time he jumps upon it while his owner is present and awake, he is removed. The scholar says the undead and like creatures are absent from the Spoken because the Spoken are comprised of the so-called ‘natural’ races. No one is born illithid, the scholar argues.
It is the opinion of this author that the Spoken races are defined so not because it is particularly useful to differentiate the ‘living and ensouled’ for the study of cognition—a lich seems to think no differently after her transformation than before. Rather, the Spoken seem to be a useful legal fiction: a way to designate the living and ensouled sapients above their undead and soulless fellows, so as to forbid the latter the same rights and freedoms. But I am editorializing. In any case, the vampire is not Spoken—the true vampire twice-over, and the spawn once. And so my uncle defines the ‘thinking creature’, which includes all those which qualify as Spoken as well as the soulless and the higher forms of undead. A thinking creature, he says, is one which thinks for itself: a simple definition, but chilling when considered at any length.
A beast acts on instinct, to fulfill a need, or on impulse, guided by simple emotions (and to some extent, these drives can be said to be one and the same). It does not think—it is not reasoning. A spawn has the capacity for thought: it was once a Spoken being, and it retains its faculties and even its soul in the vile transformation we call ‘birth’. However, the magical compulsions, or ‘rules’, put in place by the true vampire which sired it are all-consuming. It does not think, it only obeys. A spawn free of compulsion is a thinking creature, but the only spawn free of compulsion is the spawn whose sire is dead or else soon dead, fool that he must be.
The first rule my uncle gives his children is this: you shall not drink of the blood of thinking creatures. (Astarion recounted this rule saying instead ‘thou shalt not’, but my younger cousins—that is, the more recently turned—report the modern grammar.) It is first, even before the order to obey him in all things, because it is a known weakness of the vampire to develop an unhealthy attachment to certain of her spawn, and this attachment can be her downfall. So it was for Blaiseuse the Coryphee, who in the Year of the Fearful Harper, 997 DR, offered her throat to her spawn in a bacchanal, and who in the Year of Much Iron, not eight months later, was found skeletonized in a stone sarcophagus at the bottom of the Chionthar River with a stake embedded in her rib cage and a silver garrote around her throat.
My uncle’s rules, then, make it so that a flight of fancy in the bedroom does not see him giving his children the supposed gift of true vampirism unearned. I once saw it in action, these two compulsions in conflict: a demonstration for my own benefit. “Which of you should like to volunteer?” he’d asked of his children, three in those days: Astarion, Violet, and Yousen. All three stood frozen, eyes on the floor. “None of you, then? Ought I summon Godey?” His voice was all mild interest.
“I would!” burst Violet. “I would like to demonstrate your brilliant thinking for Lady Szarr very much, Father.” Godey was my uncle’s valet and torturer, a vile little man who served him in life and afterwards in undeath, not as a vampire spawn but instead an animated skeleton.
Cazador made Violet kneel at his feet, almost prayerful with her hands cupped, palm-upward, on her thighs. She tilted her head back, eyes closed, mouth open, tongue protruding. I was fifteen years old at the time and still a maiden, so the subtext of this image was lost on me, watching my uncle pour a trickle of blood from his cup onto his daughter’s tongue. “Drink,” he ordered. Her mouth snapped closed; her throat worked like a cat threatening to be sick. Blood and saliva dripped down her chin, unable to swallow but forced to try. In a few minutes’ time, she was shaking uncontrollably, tears in her eyes. Cazador’s gaze devoured her, his pupils blown.
More than a century later, Astarion tipped back his glass and swallowed. “A toast,” he repeated, blank-faced and absent. I watched his free hand drop to his side, slow and graceful as featherfall. The fey talent my uncle always so appreciated him for disguised monstrous claws as well-manicured nails. My gaze jumped to the enchanted dagger sheathed on his belt, and I waited for him to kill me—if he had tried, I do not know if I would have put up a fight. “Gale said you revealed yourself to him?”
Gale Dekarios of Waterdeep is a name with which the reader is no doubt already at least passingly familiar. Once one of Mystra’s Chosen—and, allegedly, her lover—the archmage was a leading expert in the Art as it was practiced in long-gone Netheril, Empire of Magic. His research into the so-called ‘heavy magic’ of that age led him dangerous places, contact with the half-formed abomination he calls the Karsite Weave leaving him near-dead with but a fraction of his former power… but he is well-read in the scholarship of more than just the works of the Momentary God.
“He was familiar with my work,” I admitted, embarrassed. I have been putting quill to parchment for as long as I can remember, and in the past whenever I’ve completed one of my little histories or other tracts, I’ve made a dozen or so copies (all done out by hand and illustrated to the best of my—admittedly middling—ability) and sent them along to the other vampire covens along the Sword Coast (and a single copy to a printing-house in Waterdeep, though never expecting anything to come of it). “I hadn’t honestly thought anyone living knew of me, but Mr Dekarios says that Blackstaff Academy holds a number of chap-books attributed to Lady Incognita! Chap-books! From a real printing press! He says that the House of Sharp Quills in Castle Ward has even produced an anthology!”
Seeming taken aback, Astarion murmured, “So that’s how he knew of him.” He shook his head. “And if the wizard hadn’t decided to go digging around in the attic for reading material? What would you have done then?”
“I don’t know. I hadn’t realized Uncle Cazador was ready to complete the Rite of Profane Ascension, nor that you and your new friends were here. If Mr Dekarios hadn’t gone upstairs, I expect in a few days I would have come down looking for a meal?” As it was, I’d been woken from a nap by the great clatter of a famed archwizard knocking over a bookcase and the most foul blood I’ve ever had the misfortune to smell, and summarily hid in the rafters as a bat. I would likely have remained there, had the intruder not had the habit of talking to himself as he read. (By the by, Mr Dekarios, should you read this—pray do not be offended! I assure you, you are no longer a walking assault upon the vampiric senses. You smell quite pleasant, actually.)
“You hadn’t realized he was ready,” my cousin echoed. “You knew, then? About the ritual? The pact?”
This, I realized all at once, had been the wrong thing to say.
***
Donnela Morigak was born in 942 DR, the Year of the Circling Vulture. She was the second of four children born to Enni and Ulythrr Morigak. The family was not wealthy, but they were comfortable. Her father, a stonemason and multi-talented tradesman besides, built their three-bedroom home with his own two hands, and the beautifully constructed brownstone still stands today near Insight Park in Brampton, Lower City. He owned a construction company—Morigak and Sons, it was called—and was successful enough that her mother could focus on raising Donnela and her brothers. They even had a maid-of-all-work.
At the age of forty and four, in the Year of the Dusken Ride, 986 DR, a young Donnela married her sweetheart, Rangrim Szarr, the son of a merchant who made his money in limestone. There was evidently some tension in the family: Mam used to love Rangrim like one of her own sons, Donnela wrote in an undated diary entry from late in that year. She’s angry with him right now because of the baby, but she’ll forget that with time—and grandchildren. By dwarven standards, the couple were little more than children, but Rangrim was nearly a decade older, and the Morigaks thought him irresponsible: a boy who thought himself a man, and who’d gotten his girl pregnant while still woefully unprepared to be either a father or a husband. The pair rushed to wed, receiving an empty plot of land from Rangrim’s father as a wedding gift, upon which Morigak and Sons built them their first home, a humble four-room bungalow.
Sadly, it would be a long while before Donnela Szarr gave her mother grandchildren. Her first child lived only a few minutes, and was buried without a name: his was the first grave dug in what would one day become Cliffside Cemetery. It took the pair fifteen years to try for a child again, though by all accounts they were happy together despite the grief that visited them so early in their marriage. Their second child, a girl they named Moria, was born in 1002 DR, the Year of the Heavenly Rock. She was simple—half-strangled by the umbilical cord during the birth—and her early childhood was plagued by frequent illness, but she was the light of her parents’ lives. Until her second death in the Year of the Private Tears, 1204 DR, Donnela’s diaries were littered with sketches of little Moria Szarr picking flowers or smiling a great, gap-toothed smile on nearly every page. A third pregnancy in 1011 DR, the Year of the Defiant Mountain, ended quickly but tragically with a miscarriage in the second trimester. Donnela and Rangrim were on their fourth try in the Year of the Sure Quarrel, 1019 DR, when Donnela was killed.
Of Donnela Szarr’s first death, we know frustratingly little. The making of a vampire is an ordeal the mortal mind does not like to recall. She recounted the event only once across her many diaries and letters.
Nightmare tonight. Same as ever. The vampire is this looming thing in the dark, taller and longer-limbed than anything has the right to be. The moon does not seem to touch it. No light does, though the night is uncommonly clear. Its hands are curled like a beast’s, but when it catches me, they are just human hands—not the monstrous, taloned things I feel they ought to be. They tear at my flesh all the same. Everything hurts, but my stomach most of all. My hands are slick with blood, and they, too, are just hands. Just hands. There is flesh beneath my fingernails, and in the logic of the dream I can tell from the taste when I lick my palms and fingers clean that it belongs to him. I can hear the babe’s heartbeat in my womb, but when I pull her out, the rot has already set in.
I myself never met Great-Granddam Donnela—she passed decades before I was born—but Granddam Fistula and Great-Aunt Dralia told stories about her when I was a girl, and, best I can tell (piecing everything together from Donnela’s diary, my granddam, great-aunt, and uncle’s recollections, and what little I can find in the histories), the sad tale goes like this:
In the Year of the Sure Quarrel, a mad and ravenous vampire called Faibleur—possibly a victim of Hideous Gathwycke, to whom we shall return later, though my uncle insists this is not possible—was set loose upon Baldur’s Gate. Whatever his origins, for three months he terrorized the city, leaving hundreds of vampire spawn in his wake, and then one day he simply disappeared. This earned him the title Faibleur the Fleeting.
It is impossible to know for certain if Donnela Szarr was Faibleur’s last victim, nor what precisely happened that night. There is an old burial on the land with a headstone that reads only ‘MOTHER & CHILD’, suggesting that Rangrim and young Moria survived the night, and Faibleur did not butcher them all in their beds. Perhaps Rangrim Szarr hired a vampire hunter. Perhaps Donnela, the only confirmed true vampire to be borne of Faibleur’s rampage, took him with her. Whatever happened, Donnela awoke in her grave a monster, and though my granddam was blessed with a great many siblings, no dhampir—as a babe who survived her mother’s transformation into a vampire would have necessarily been born—was among their number. Neither was a gap-toothed dwarven girl called Moria.
(Nearly all those killed by the bite of a true vampire rise again as vampire spawn, but ‘nearly’ is not ‘none’. Those few who do not, do not because in the attack they were so greatly disfigured that the curse cannot take root in the corpse. The most common of these disfigurements is the partial or even full beheading, typically caused by a overzealous bite, attempting to bare the neck of her prey, or a combination of both.)
As I said before, the true vampire does not feel love, not truly. Love becomes obsession— becomes possessiveness— becomes covetousness. She may have had a love before, but once the ‘gift’ has consumed her, all she wants is to consume him in turn: to own, to control, perhaps even to break. It is a passion like none other, but a dangerous one. This passion is what drives the true vampire, whatever she desires—and a vampire is insatiable in this, too—her driving force in the long eternity ahead of her. What this author wanted was to understand this secret world of vampires she was raised in. What Donnela Szarr wanted was to be a mother.
For some hundred years, Donnela Szarr lived at her house in Tumbledown on the outskirts of the city with her growing brood of children. She had dozens of them, taking in all sorts: dwarves, humans, tieflings, gnomes—even a little slip of a wood elf girl. “Poor Manna,” my great-aunt Dralia sighed. “I’m sure she was really fifty years old or something mad, but she was just a little thing, you know? The little ones don’t take the gift well. They don’t understand, no matter how hard you try and explain. They’re a lost cause.” Manna Summerdew, gone missing in her fourteenth year (which for elves is so young they often haven’t begun to learn their letters), burned herself alive because she did not understand the sun would hurt her.
This author has had a great many hard conversations in her years, many in the researching of this very book, but one of the very hardest was that with Manna’s living mother, Yllatris, a potion-maker from a nearby druid’s enclave who had brought her daughter along on a trip to sell her wares in the Wide because the little girl did not believe buildings could grow as tall as trees and begged to see them. Elves are not mortal in the way the other races of the Prime Material Plane are: to hear them tell it, each elven soul is a drop of Corellon Larethian’s blood that spilled in battle, and upon one elf’s death another is born, carrying on the same soul for as long as Corellon will have them. (Scholars of other races have speculated less mythologically that the elves sprang up as Feywild-wrought ‘echoes’ of humankind in the Days of Thunder, but the contemptuous disregard of this theory by the elves themselves is impossible to know for simple pride or something with a factual basis, as there is a taboo against speaking of their first memories to outsiders and even adult elves.)
For all these years, Yllatris told me, she has been praying her daughter had suffered only briefly at her abductor’s hands and then been killed, so that she could live again and know happiness. Though Donnela Szarr never so much as raised a hand against her children once she gave them the ‘gift’, she made each and every one a true vampire, and in so doing utterly destroyed a soul that according to the traditions of her people had persisted for more than thirty thousand years. I have seen terrible things in the Szarr palace—tortures that do not bear repeating, abject misery of the like that leads to the sufferer begging for death. I have never seen anyone weep as Yllatris Summerdew wept when I told her of her daughter’s fate.
The youngest children who successfully adjusted to Donnela’s gift were around five years of age, or the equivalent age in non-humans; the oldest she turned were something like fourteen. My granddam does not remember how old she was, and for all my efforts I’ve failed to track down any trace of her past—it’s much easier to find an elven child gone missing in Baldur’s Gate after two centuries than a human one, for a variety of undoubtedly obvious reasons—but at a glance I think she must have been around ten. Great-Aunt Dralia was a scrawny fifteen, and she says she knows so because she has an engraved locket that was a gift for the occasion. Their elder brother, Vellioth, I never met, but I have seen him, both in painted portraits and in the illusory flesh (Cousin Astarion has a peculiar fey talent for borrowing faces, and Uncle Cazador often had him borrow Vellioth’s). He seemed about my age, twelve or thirteen at his transition to undeath.
Those three are—were—the only surviving members of Donnela’s brood, the beginnings of the Szarr family. In the early days, her stolen children were put up in individual bedrooms in the ever-expanding complex of that once-humble home turned sprawling manse. But of course, a vampire is never satisfied. Ever she hungers for blood, and so too does she hunger for that object of her dark desires. A family of three became five became two dozen became hundreds, and hundreds of children do not disappear off the street without the neighbors taking notice—nor do their victims. Hundreds of true vampires (Donnela gave all of her children the gift: Why should I not? she wrote once in her diary. Others may criticize, but I am a mother, not a slave-master. I do not seek to control my children. I seek to raise them.) left to their own impulses kill thousands, and raise them each and all as vampire spawn.
Donnela was not unaware of these concerns: she taught her children good table-manners, is the way Granddam Fistula always said it. What these good table-manners amount to is the slaughter of a victim before dinnertime, strung up by their ankles and bled at the carotid. Dinner, then, is served in glasses, and because your prey never had your teeth in its throat, it will not rise as a spawn. Donnela dug catacombs beneath her land to contain the growing mass of victims, though the word implies perhaps more care than that which these unfortunates were disposed of. Even today, should one climb down into the tunnels dug beneath the Szarr mausoleum on the grounds of Cliffside Cemetery, what one will find is not the carefully-excavated rows of burial niches of the mountain dwarves which the word conjures, but ‘rooms’ more like naturally-occurring caves, each of them filled with the commingled bones of hundreds of corpses tossed inside.
One might also find the glint of green tourmaline. This discovery led Donnela down something of a rabbit-hole in the late 12th century, researching old dwarven mineral resource maps of the Sword Coast, and from there falling into conspiracies around a forgotten hill dwarf house fleeing the fall of Bhaerynden to the drow near the end of the Fourth Crown War.
It is well known that far below Baldur’s Gate lies the chasm known as the Shrieking Abyss (also called Throrgar by the dwarves), but the mouth of the Shrieking Abyss lies in the Lowerdark, some fifteen miles beneath the earth. There are no mapped caverns in the Upperdark which rest beneath the Gate—even the Netherese Caverns, as fallen Philock and its surrounds are often called, end several miles west of the outskirts—and it stands to reason that there are no Upperdark caverns beneath the city which remain unmapped, for surely if the people of the Gate had not excavated them, the drow would have long since done so and invaded the city through the sewers and the Undercellar. And yet, stories continued to be told of caverns so deep a rock enchanted with Daylight simply falls and falls and falls, of things crawling up out of the sewers that were not meant to live in light. Had this author not seen the cavernous expanse of the Tourmaline Depths herself, she would have said the latter rumors were surely sightings of vampire spawn, or perhaps Bhaalists—both have haunted this city for centuries, after all.
But I have seen the miles-deep halls buried beneath the city uncovered by my great-grandmother, and I have no better explanation than she did. She did not speculate in too great detail on the history of the site, for though she was a mountain dwarf herself, and proud of her heritage judging from her diaries and the beautifully groomed and braided beard she sports in the family portraits, Donnela Szarr was a Baldurian through and through, and no expert in ancient dwarven history. And it is ancient history indeed, if these halls—it feels disingenuous to call them ‘ruins’—were in fact carved by an exiled clan from Bhaerynden. That kingdom fell around 9600 years afore the Standing Stone was raised in Cormanthor.
Donnela’s diaries do not put forward any theories as to which clan might have raised these halls. They were “certainly more of an outpost than a city,” she wrote, “though if [the Tourmaline Depths were] established as a facility over a mine—what were the dwarves mining here?” Certainly not tourmaline, which is shined to a polish in the hewn walls.
For my part, I cannot help but wonder how these abandoned depths went undiscovered for so long under a great city like Baldur’s Gate. Were they deliberately hidden by some kind of persistent glamour that finally wore off? In the coming years, I hope to fund some manner of expedition deeper into the depths: perhaps we may be able to answer some or all of these questions. It seems of some import for the continued safety of the Gate to explore if (and if, then how) the Tourmaline Depths connect to the Underdark in some way: whether to Upperdark and so vulnerable to an invasion force from one of the drow cities, or to Lowerdark and whatever lives in the dark of the Shrieking Abyss. Donnela meant to undertake such an investigation herself, but her murder in 1204 DR, the Year of the Private Tears, put an end to these plans, and her successors were far less interested in the history of the Tourmaline Depths than in how they themselves might put them to use.
This is not to say Donnela the Architect’s intentions were wholly philanthropic. Indeed, she built the Szarrs’ city palace as a cover for her excavation of the Tourmaline Depths, and her interest in excavating the Tourmaline Depths began because her family had long outgrown the home she built on the cliff-side: the children’s individual bedrooms had over time become shared, and then dormitories, and the city outskirts could no longer sustain the great numbers of victims her children needed to fill their bellies (though truly, neither could the Gate proper). The ancient halls, she hoped, would become a sprawling city of a home, with room for her ever-young children to grow.
Of course, this never came to pass. The horde of children who haunted the foggy nights in Tumbledown brought the Szarrs to the attention of a vampire hunter. This man’s name was Cazador Seedwatcher.
***
My uncle liked to talk about himself. Most people do, I suppose. This is, after all, an autobiography. But it was strange and fascinating in equal measure to hear him speak of his life before undeath. Cazador Szarr, master vampire of Baldur’s Gate and patriarch of our family, had lived six centuries before his sire, my Great-Uncle Vellioth, gave him the gift.
He was born, he said, in the year 4289 of the Olven Chronicon (which on the Roll of Years is that of the Crystal Vambrace or Failed Daggers, 607–08 DR) in the now-fallen elven kingdom of Eaerlann in the Delimbiyr Vale. His child-name I do not know, nor even if he had one, but his house was called Niffiwylint’ess, or Seedwatcher in the common tongue. I say I do not know if he had a child-name because Cousin Dalyria, herself many centuries old before she was made a vampire spawn, told me she suspected her sire had some small portion of human blood, accounting for both his prodigious height and his visible signs of aging—neither strictly impossible for a pure-bred elf but very rare indeed, and indicative of some anomaly of the blood. “Most high elves that still live in Faerun have some percentage of blood from other races,” she explained, “so it doesn’t look odd to you to see an elf with age-lines or who has gone gray.” Elven naming traditions are as mysterious and opaque to this author as they surely are to any reader who is N-tel-quess, or ‘not of the People’, but according to my elven cousins it is possible in the most traditional communities for a child of mixed heritage to be called simply ‘child’, ‘sweetling’, and the like until they take their own name—something again likely to do with their ties to Corellon.
This theory, that Uncle Cazador had a human ancestor back somewhere in the age of Netheril (the Eaerlanni elves having been close allies with the Netherese), may explain why he spurned the worship of the Seldarine in his youth. He was one of the faithful of Lathander, or rather of Amaunator, whom his sect believed had been reborn after the fall of Netheril as Lathander but was destined to re-take his former form. This distinction may seem purely academic, but in order to understand my uncle, it is important to understand his faith.
Lathander is seen as a god of all things good: he upholds life and new birth, inspiration and creative endeavors, the upheaval of old, stagnant order and change for the better. Amaunator, however, is a god of law. To the Amaunatori, the sun’s daily course is symbolic of the need for order, and all things which threaten order are to be curbed, lest the eclipse swallow the sun. A Lathanderite cleric who catches an urchin in the act of stealing a meat pie will take the child to his temple, offer her a bunk and a hot meal and lessons in his letters, for he sees her crime as an indication of her need. An Amaunatori cleric in the same situation will call for the guard to see her hand cut off: if theft is not punished unfailingly and unflinchingly, he says, without consideration for circ*mstance, it promotes a belief in ‘righteous crime’, and such things are how society falls to ruin. To the Amaunatori, man is inherently wicked, and the law exists to keep his natural inclinations in check.
When Cazador was a young man, he found an elven child’s mutilated corpse strung up in a tree, stripped utterly bare and bloodless too, so that their wounds did not weep and their feet had not gone bruise-colored in death, even though they hung there from bound wrists. Their killer had carved a poem into their belly, not in the Elvish tongue but Chondathan. My uncle recited it to me, and I remember it well, but the words come to me in nightmares, and I do not see enough reason to repeat it here. This sight awoke something monstrous, I think, in the man who would become Cazador Szarr—he spoke of it in awe, for all that he said that at the time he thought it terrible. Perhaps one can find something both terrible and beautiful.
For our own purposes, the primary significance of the poem (and we shall get to the secondary significance in time) is that it seems to show the child was killed by a human, or someone who had once been of that race. This author cannot help but think of Artor Morlin, who is now master vampire of Waterdeep, but for nearly a millennium ‘ruled’ over a stretch of the Delimbiyr Vale. He did not respond to my request for a comment, and may in fact be dead.
Cazador did not become a vampire hunter when he found that child’s corpse, exsanguinated and left out to burn. That happened only after his exile from Eaerlann, which took place in the late 8th century DR, and is the only thing in his past Cazador is utterly unwilling to speak of. What might see one exiled from an elven kingdom is difficult to ascertain, and the legal scholars this author has consulted made a point of a few complications which forestall attempts to logick the matter out. Firstly is the fickleness of the elven courts: while in most mortal societies, judges seek to fit their judgments to an established precedent, among the elves the same crime may be punished one day with exile, the next with the imposition of a light fine, the next waived altogether depending on the judge’s present disposition and other unknowable factors. Secondly is the morality that comes naturally to elves, but is quite alien to natives to the Prime Material Plane: as the wizard Mordenkainen recently and so aptly put it, “The surface elves’ attitude toward murder…some races see as bordering on blasé…but someone who steals a dried flower presented to an elf by her long-gone sister would be seen as a monster and likely exiled from the community.” Perhaps what Cazador Seedwatcher did was nothing we would find particularly abhorrent; perhaps we would not even consider it a moral ill. But this author finds it difficult to banish the memory of the awe and longing in his voice when he spoke of that mutilated child.
In any case, Cazador was exiled from Eaerlann a little less than a century before it fell to demons, and it was at that time his affinity for the dead god Amaunator blossomed into duty—as did the full impact of the frightful murder he witnessed in his youth. He joined the Brotherhood of the Glorious Sun, a clerical order of Lathander-Amaunator, and took as his mission the destruction of the undead, which in Amaunatori belief undermine the rule of natural law. Cazador reviled the undead, and especially vampires, even—I believe—to the day of his final death, for I was the only true vampire he ever created, he forced his spawn to live in utterly heinous conditions and subjected them to the worst sorts of torture, and the staff he deemed irreplaceable he raised as animated skeletons.
As a member of the Brotherhood of the Glorious Sun, the newly-minted cleric was quick to make a name for himself as a vicious and wrathful hand of his dead god, and early in the 9th century DR he was bid by the clergy to join a planes-faring party of paladins and clerics all, whose joint purpose was to rid the Sea of Night and the crystal spheres beyond of particularly vile or powerful undead. It was in this company he met the adventurers Hideous Gathwycke and Mei Lao, and with them he did battle in Tovag, Demiplane of Dread, when its ruler, Kas the Bloody-Handed, made a pact with Mephistopheles to become the Vampire Ascendant. As earlier described, this bid for infernal power was ultimately thwarted (though at no small cost), and the tools of the ritual were claimed by Cazador Seedwatcher, called Cazador the Avid for his zeal.
Five years later, in the Year of Twelve Teeth, the remaining members of this party of divine heroes defeated Madame Tallon the Well-Preserved, who was then master vampire of Baldur’ Gate, and had earned her name because she had used a peculiar necromantic ritual to turn herself into something like a lich, cutting out her own heart and storing it in a pseudo-phylactery filled with her grave-dirt, so that no ‘death’ she suffered at the hands of enterprising adventurers would prove permanent. Unlike Kas the Bloody-Handed, Madame Tallon did not survive her battle against the combined force of so many sun gods’ holy knights, but neither did the unfortunately-named Hideous Gathwycke, a tiefling who was in life a Favored Soul of Pelor and lifelong wanderer amidst the stars, fittingly for one beloved of the Sun.
Gathwycke’s transformation into a true vampire appears to have been wholly accidental on the part of both vampire and slayer: Madame Tallon had been badly injured when she fed from her, and when she crouched above her to take her fill, some of the vampire’s blood dripped into the dying woman’s mouth. Cazador should have killed her when she rose, or burned her corpse before she ever had a chance to, and seemingly this is what he told the other survivors he had done, but in truth he stole away with her body and for the next three hundred and sixteen years remained at her side, loyal even when she had become that which he swore to destroy.
He must have truly loved her.
“Those were the only times he ever kissed me,” Cousin Astarion told me. “When he had me look like her. Not even Vellioth shared that honor.” Hideous Gathwycke hardly lived up to her name: she was lavender-skinned and black-haired, with horns that had been sawed off just above the skull so that they tended to disappear beneath the mop of curls, and apart from a bisected tongue and a slim, catlike tail, she had a rather human look about her.
What she most certainly did live up to was her sobriquet, ‘She Who Knew Not Satiety’. Grounded by her condition, for of course there is no true night on a spelljammer, they remained in Baldur’s Gate. Cazador estimated that he acquired her prey every two or three days—two by preference, as by the third she would be weeping and begging him to either feed her or kill her. Over the years, this amounts to an absolutely staggering number of victims: nearly sixty thousand people, each chained up and Silenced to meet the dawn in a many-windowed room in their unassuming Lower City row house. “Of course, in those days I didn’t know how well a vampire could tolerate starvation. If I could do it over, I doubt I would have let her eat at all,” he told me, and then he addressed my cousin, who was kneeling between his thighs with a mouthful of co*ck and vitreous humor dripping tear-like down his cheeks: “You see now how good I am to you, boy? I said, do you see?”
Astarion was quick to nod. I watched this with a mild distaste, and quickly addressed my uncle with another question so I would not see my cousin made to beg. It was crass, I remember thinking, to act as Uncle Cazador did with his spawn. What I was not was horrified; I grew out of horror in the first decade in the city palace, as surely as Cazador must have grown out of his in those early years tending to the monster his love had become.
The span of 888–955 DR is widely referred to as ‘the Baldurian Interregnum’ by the vampire covens of the Sword Coast, for after the defeat of Madame Tallon the Well-Preserved, any vampire who sought to take the city for his or herself was summarily put down with the divine light of Lathander—or rather, of Lathander-Amaunator. This is not untrue: it is simply not the whole story. In those years there was a coven-of-one ruling the city with the Power and an iron fist, and when in 955 DR, the Year of the Telltale Candle, Blaiseuse the Coryphee wrested control of the city for herself, Hideous Gathwycke and her leal hound Cazador the Avid picked away at the base of her power, slaughtering her spawn whenever they were able.
One must pity them. Gathwycke had devoted herself in life to destroying the undead, and this surely grew into obsession when she herself was taken by the curse, but it is also the nature of the vampire to ever act in her own self-preservation; Cazador, for his part, seems to have been overcome by the dark impulses that dogged his heart all his life, and love must have made it all seem nobler. I imagine their dynamic to be a strange and volatile one. I cannot guess which of them held the other’s leash. Gathwycke had the natural allure of the vampire at her command, but as an elf Cazador was well-suited to shrugging off magical charm, and as a sun god’s cleric he was hardly some defenseless victim. Perhaps they controlled each other. Whatever the case, they made for a fearsome pair, her insatiable hunger and his devotion leaving so many spawn in their wake, his violent desires and her self-hatred leading them to brutalize the very same before granting them the cold comfort of a second, final death.
In the end, Lathander withdrew His blessing, and in the absence of the Power Cazador found himself forced to reach instead for the Art. Blaiseuse the Coryphee was laid low by her own spawn, and afterwards came Dyckson Nightbinder, then the crazed Faibleur, whose several hundred spawn kept Gathwycke and Cazador occupied for a long while. Even after the balance of power in the city shifted undeniably to Donnela the Architect, there was the matter of a Calish*te lich-lord’s attack on the Gate to attend to in the Year of the Seven Kings Horde, 1131 DR, though by that point the fallen clerics’ inaction surely had more to do with the matter they were two against more than a hundred, not simply spawn but true vampires all, and children, most of them, besides. Anyone who has met a child knows their fearlessness, and can imagine how, then, a child vampire might fight.
Eventually, though, the matter could be put off for no longer, and war was waged by light of day.
The first tenday of Mirtul in the Year of the Private Tears, 1204 DR, saw the destruction of Donnela Szarr and Hideous Gathwycke both, as well as more than eighty of Donnela’s children. On 6 Mirtul, the Szarrs’ cliff-side home was razed in a clear act of arson, one which the broadsheets would later suggest was the work of business rivals—a euphemistic way to conjure the Zhentarim—and Donnela herself was drowned, or perhaps the better word is ‘boiled’, in holy water while she slept in her sarcophagus. This particular detail was not reported in the broadsheets.
The Zhentarim did indeed supply the explosives that began the blaze, but their involvement began and ended with the coin used to secure the smokepowder. The true culprit—Cazador Seedwatcher, also called Cazador the Avid—had his throat torn out by Donnela Szarr’s eldest child, a boy called Vellioth, who was at once something like twelve and something like two hundred. When night fell, he rose again as a vampire spawn in the catacombs beneath the Szarr mausoleum, and took his sire home. Three days later, Hideous Gathwycke was no more. What happened in the interim we need not dwell upon.
***
Vellioth Szarr, who preferred to be called Vellioth the Martinet, was by all accounts a monster. His date of birth and original family name I was unsuccessful in tracking down; as best I can tell, he would have been born in the Gate some time between 1006–1012 DR to human parents of Calish*te stock. He was brown-skinned with lazy curls red as his eyes. On the few instances I saw Cousin Astarion wearing Vellioth’s face and momentarily out of character I could see he was pretty beneath the ever-present sneer marring his features in his portraits. Great-Aunt Dralia thought him well-to-do, for he was haughty and utterly useless at chores, like a boy who’d been brought up with servants.
It will not come as a shock that an already privileged and unpleasant boy, once divested of all human feeling by the curse of the vampire, became something altogether more terrible. He mistreated his younger siblings and terrorized his victims, and that he was the eldest survivor of the Szarr massacre was, to quote my granddam, “a cruel joke”.
After he became the Szarr patriarch and made his mother’s killer his spawn, he began play-acting, say my granddam and great-aunt, at filial and fraternal piety. He was no more unkillable than their mother, after all, and it was unwise to foster too many enemies in one’s own home. He arranged for his few remaining younger siblings to leave the city nominally for their own safety, financing the construction of a country estate in Anga Vled, which is long-gone now thanks to the shadowy curse that so long clung to that plaguechanged land, but in those days was a majority gnomish village some five miles south and west of Reithwin. This conveniently gave him free run of Baldur’s Gate, and he was quick to institute himself as the city’s master vampire. With Hideous Gathwycke dead and her attack dog enslaved, few would stand to argue his claim to the title.
He gave the land upon which the razed estate was built to the Gate on the condition it would be used as a cemetery for the indigent of Outer and Lower Cities. This, he reasoned, would obfuscate the source of the many remains already on the grounds, and by tying the Szarr name to death and undeath particularly (in the coming decades, he had thralls of his spread rumors the old Szarr estate was haunted or ghoul infested) it would discredit any claims of vampirism. Oh, you heard the Szarr patriarch is a vampire, did you? Last I heard, he was supposed to be a lich, and afore that an intelligent ghost doing all his business through an intermediary! Don’t believe everything some drunkard tells you in the Blushing Mermaid.
Vellioth the Martinet kept a staff all of mortals, and he did indeed do all his business through an intermediary, a dwarven gentleman named Durgan Annys who was not really much of a gentleman, being a con man chased out of Hundlestone up in the Spine of the World years earlier for passing off gemstones fashioned with alchemy as true black diamonds—a crime that was victimless until his ‘diamonds’ were used in a True Resurrection. Mr Annys posed in society as late Donnela’s son and heir Vellioth Szarr on the vampire lord’s behalf, providing daytime public appearances and avoiding the awkward questions that came about when a dwarven woman’s son was a human boy of twelve or thirteen and had been so young for decades. He took to living in the city palace above the Tourmaline Depths his mother so loved, though he himself had little use for them, and it was there in the very heart of Baldur’s Gate that he raised his son, Cazador Szarr.
Donnela the Architect, when she brought a new child into the world, fed them her blood at once to make them a true vampire. I have also never heard an accusation of mistreatment leveled against her—apart, I suppose, from the matter of the adoption process. Vellioth the Martinet took a different approach to child rearing, and to hear Granddam Fistula and Great-Aunt Dralia tell it, they did not see Cazador once in fifty years, but when they finally met him in the Year of Silent Steel, 1254 DR, he had been broken down and made to love his ‘father’ in every way it is possible to love.
They and Uncle Cazador tell the same story of that day: Vellioth had his son summoned to the ballroom, where Vellioth sat flanked on one side by his younger siblings and on the other by their children, and there Cazador was told he had proven himself ready for the gift (how he proved himself I shall return to momentarily). He was offered, to Granddam Fistula and Great-Aunt Dralia’s mutual horror, Vellioth’s own throat. They, and their children after them, and their own children after them, had all been given their mother or father’s blood in a chalice.
Cazador was ordered to drink, and drink he did. They watched the uncanny glow of a vampire spawn’s eyes fade to deep red on a field of white and bestial claws recede. Vellioth’s blood, thick and dark and cold, dripped down onto his collar, his throat half torn out by Cazador’s teeth. He spoke: “Though thou now possesseth a will, my son, I am thy father and master yet, and I demand obedience in all things. Dost thou understand?”
“I understand, Master.”
“Then it is time for thee to complete the family rites.”
What Vellioth the Martinet called the family rites and presented as some grand and profane ritual, Donnela the Architect before him called something of a right of passage, I suppose. She was a firm believer in the importance of self-sufficiency, and taught all her children, when she thought them ready, how to open a man’s veins with a blade and drain him of his blood. The arteries made a mess, heavily pressurized as they were, and fangs bred spawn.
Vellioth gave Cazador Rhapsody, his ornamental dagger, and nodded to a servant to have a charm-laden man brought in. Another carried in a crystalline amphora and a collection bowl. In ritualizing the murder, Vellioth made it wasteful, where Donnela’s matter-of-fact rite of passage was a thing undertaken in the kitchens, the body strung up for gravity to do its work—but what his interpretation lacked in function, it made up for in form. Vellioth was very concerned with appearances, lacking an imposing one naturally. He was the master vampire of Baldur’s Gate, and so master vampire he would be, taking upon himself all the trappings that seemed proper to him for such a title. He used the name Szarr as little as possible in vampiric life, lest his peers think him a little boy riding his mother’s coattails. He had a coat-of-arms drawn up for the family that depicted a rat king, because that seemed the sort of coat-of-arms a vampire lord would have; he decorated the city palace with rich brocades and hellish landscapes; he performed bloody nonsense rituals and fostered a reputation as a cruel and capricious lord indeed. He tortured his enemies until they loved him.
Why Vellioth chose to give Cazador the gift and make him a true vampire, we may never know. Many of his actions as master vampire of the Gate were calculated, but some of his choices were made on impulse, the product of an immortal’s boredom or simply an urge to make someone suffer. He may have thought Cazador broken: giving one’s old enemy the power to usurp you, if they truly are too well-trained to use it, would make for a message to any who would stand against him. He may have become obsessed. I am given to understand he found my boldness charming, Cazador had said of him, after all.
Whatever the case may be, after fifty years of slavery, Vellioth had given him a test: had starved him utterly for six long months, forbidding him even water, even insects, and then put him in a cell with an enthralled mortal and his compulsions against slaking his thirst all lifted… but he had not given Cazador permission to. For days, Cazador waited, tortured by his hunger. Vellioth, when he returned, was pleased by what he found, and said drain him dry, if that be thy wish.
“And what is your wish, Master?” Cazador asked in reply, and this is how his test was passed. It was this same man who was ushered into the ballroom, weak with a hunger of his own.
“Kill him,” Vellioth ordered, and Cazador obeyed.
But Cazador the Avid was not wholly broken in, at least not yet. Only a few tendays after Vellioth made Cazador a true vampire, Cazador attempted to kill him.
“What didst thou do wrong?” Vellioth asked him, perfectly calm (as Cazador retold it) despite the stake on the floor between them.
“I failed.” He had taken the very first opportunity to rid himself of his master. He thought he knew suffering. Vellioth taught him otherwise: taught him what true hunger was, true powerlessness. Taught him patience. Eleven years Cazador spent speared on an iron pike, made to rest kneeling on the marble to which the wretched instrument had been affixed so the pressure wore away the skin and leave the bone exposed. In all that time, he said, Vellioth allowed him one sip of blood—after which he spilt the rest of the glass on the ground, just out of reach. The pike having been fed through Cazador’s pelvis and ribcage, he could not tear himself free to lick up the stain, much as he tried.
In 1265 DR, the Year of Flowers, Cazador Szarr was pulled off the pike; washed, fed, and allowed to heal. He had learned his lesson. Another eleven years later, Vellioth the Martinet would die; in the intervening years, Cazador began the process of undergoing the same profane ritual he had once put a stop to.
The first vampire spawn he created was a gnomish diabolist named Yousen Nafflebock. Cousin Yousen was born in the Year of the Slain Mountain, 993 DR, in the village of Anga Vled, and it was his great misfortune to have been hired by a would-be Vampire Ascendant to magically bind that old contract between the archdevil Mephistopheles and Kas the Bloody-Handed to a new candidate. Though many would find his choice of careers a questionable one, Cousin Yousen is not a bad man by any means. “As I see it,” he told me, “those folks who’re going to make a deal with a devil will do it with or without someone representing their interests. I lost a sister to a bad deal—a cambion says to you, I’ll give you this power, or I’ll save this person’s life, or whatever it is you want so badly, and in exchange all I ask for is that ten years from now you give me your most treasured possession. And you, because you are a fool, think of an heirloom necklace or a buggy, when in reality that devil will come back in ten years and turn your wife or child into a lemure before your very eyes. I studied infernal contracts for years and years, and I learned to recognize all the ways devils build in loopholes to better serve themselves and their interests.”
He’d put up advertisem*nts for his services—anonymity guaranteed—on the notice boards of every pub twenty miles around, and the one in Reithwin town caught my uncle’s eye. A skilled diabolist is hard to come by, much less a self-admitted one. Of course, the very minute Cousin Yousen read the contract he was meant to look over, he was a dead man walking. He recounted his own ritual mutilation and murder to me as mildly as another man might discuss the last harvest, but wept when he told me how Uncle Cazador compelled him to kill his own husband, after he rose from the grave.
The next several dozen spawn were those my uncle did not claim as his children. He kept them for a while in the kennels, but soon their howling saw them banished to the Tourmaline Depths. It was three years after Cousin Yousen, in the Year of Daystars, 1268 DR, that Cazador deigned to rear a second child. This was Cousin Astarion, of whose history several enterprising scholars have already written extensively (this author would most readily recommend Mordenkainen’s treatment).
I am uncertain what led my uncle to rear the few spawn he chose: of seven thousand spawn, only seven were ever brought into the family. The reader may look at those numbers, and—perhaps knowing something of my cousin Astarion already, given his newfound fame—presume a ritual element, seven spawn each to claim nine hundred ninety-nine victims in turn. Having seen the full text of the contract, however, I can assure you this is not the case. In fact, Cousin Dalyria brought my uncle no prey at all.
There are only so many spawn a single vampire can keep enslaved by her will at a given time, but a master vampire should effortlessly be able to control a few hundred spawn—a far cry from seven, and in the first century of his tenure as master vampire of the Gate, as far as I am aware Uncle Cazador only imposed his will upon three: Cousins Yousen and Astarion in his first few years, as has already been mentioned, and then Cousin Violet came decades later. I used to think he must have seen potential in each of them, and he was fostering that potential so they might earn the gift and access to the family rites, as he once had. Of course, that was before I learned of the Rite of Profane Ascension. Now I do not know.
Perhaps he saw something in each of them—reflections of himself, or reflections of Vellioth—that made it so subjecting them to all manner of abuse was particularly appealing to him. Perhaps these seven did not break under torture, or instead broke in particularly beautiful fashion. He called the mutilated corpse of a child art, after all. Perhaps they were each descendants of someone who had been important to my uncle in his early life, or perhaps they were particularly useful. Yousen was a diabolist, Astarion skilled in crafting magical disguises, Dalyria a physician, and so forth—though what use Cousin Petras might have served, I cannot fathom. Perhaps there was no pattern or common thread to find.
***
While he was moving in me, I asked my uncle, “How did Vellioth die?”
“Oh,” he said, low in his throat, and it was the first time in the whole event he sounded as though he was enjoying himself. Vampires are hollow, cold creatures. Very little grants us even temporary satisfaction. “Too quickly. It takes a long while to drain a heart that does not beat of all its blood, but it was still too quickly. I think it was always going to be.”
His fingernails, carefully shaped with files, dug into my bare shoulder hard enough to make stolen blood bloom in half-moon marks. “Tell me about it,” I gasped, rolling my hips to meet his thrust.
“He laughed when he saw the stake. He was still laughing when I thrust it in his heart, and I laughed with him.” Cazador’s hand slipped between our bodies, working to bring me off. I recognized a reward when I’d earned one. “He felt heavy, once he was paralyzed. I took my time. I only had the one chance—I needed it to be perfect.
“His eyes could still move, even with the stake in his heart. He watched me tear the laces from the collar of his shirt and set my knife to his throat. As much blood spilled as I swallowed. I took everything from him. It was—ah!—only right. What he took from me could not be given back, but this was a start. His blood. His body. His suffering, eternal.”
Like that, he spent himself.
***
I was born on 22 Marpenoth in the Year of Wild Magic, 1372 DR, and of my early childhood—that is, before I became a Szarr—I remember almost nothing. Fragmented memories, or maybe just imaginings, surface sometimes in my dreams: a room with cheerful yellow walls, the sound of clucking chickens, a woman’s rosy-fair skin and long blonde hair. I think she must have been my mother.
If my memories of later childhood, after my adoption, were any clearer, I would place the blame for these broken memories on the effect of the vampiric charm Granddam Fistula used to make me forget that the Szarr country estate was not my home, that Lykanthus Szarr was not my true father, that granddams were not supposed to look like little girls. The sharpest memory I do have from before I was given the gift is the terror of that charm falling away when Uncle Cazador’s fangs pierced my throat, the sudden, sure sense that the whole world was wrong. But that’s all I remember. What I know of my childhood is what I can glean from my own diaries, and reading them is like reading about a stranger.
I think it’s something to do with the way the curse of the vampire afflicts the young, because Uncle Cazador can recount his whole life in exacting detail, and Cousin Blovart, who was human and just shy of thirty years old when his mother, my Aunt Halimma, ushered him into undeath, claims he, too, has no difficulty with his memory, but Granddam Fistula and Great-Aunt Dralia, both made vampires in their youth as I was, always brush aside my questions. “I don’t need to think of those days,” Granddam Fistula told me, “and neither do you.”
The pattern carries to the spawn as well, not simply the true vampires: some of the unfortunates penned in the Tourmaline Depths for my uncle’s failed Ascension were only children, and true children at that, locked away for a month at most, yet Mr Dekarios was quite disturbed to say that when the Unlikely Heroes reunited the girls with their father, they knew him not. Many of my cousins, as well, were grown and retain much of pasts—at least, those who were willing to speak to me—but not Cousin Astarion, who still bears his child-name. One wonders what it is about the memories of youth, that make them slip away so very easily.
I seem to have been adopted (an overly kind word) at the age of six or seven: it’s around then my diaries begin, undated and not at first daily, and I was a terribly confused child. I wandered the labyrinthine halls of the country estate my Granddam and her sister kept near the Moonrise Tower and Anga Vled, losing my way to my own bedroom or pointing up at portraits on the wall and asking the servants who was in them. “That’s your father, silly girl,” one told me, though I was certain I’d never seen the man in my life. I woke myself often crying, and did not remember why.
Over the years I settled into my life, accepting certain truths. Adults drank wine at dinner, rather than eat as children did. Adults sometimes looked no different from children. Windows could never be open in the daytime, except in my bedroom, for light would bleach the fine carpets and paintings, and they hurt adults’ eyes. I did not know my family were vampires, though were I not charmed, I might have.
On 29 Tarsakh in the Year of Blue Fire, 1385 DR, when I was twelve years old, my ‘father’, Lykanthus Szarr died. I had been bothering him, bursting into his workshop several times in the course of an hour to tell him some new fact I’d gleaned from the book he’d given me to read, and finally he had enough, and cast an arcane lock upon the door.
I would leave it at that, but part of me hopes this book will still be read so far in the future that a reader may not recognize that date at once and so know what must have happened. Perhaps that is conceited, but it is true. You see, far-future saer, 29 Tarsakh in the Year of Blue Fire was the day that Mystra met her end at the hands of Cyric and Shar, and with her death came the death of the Weave, for the Mother of Magic is the Weave. It was a violent, gurgling sort of death, and when practitioners of the Art went that day to manipulate the Weave, a great surplus of power washed over them from the fabric of reality having been—if you will pardon the overwrought metaphor—cut suddenly off the loom and losing the tension that once held it. Lykanthus Szarr, like many wizards, was ripped apart that day by an uncanny blue fire. Of those who survived, many were disfigured or went mad.
I blamed myself. Any child would, I expect. Had I not been bothering him so, I reasoned, he would not have needed to lock the door. Of course, any cantrip might have been his undoing that day—a prestidigitation or a mage hand—but it was not any cantrip. Perhaps he would not have called upon the Art at all, and would have lived.
If he had, my life might’ve turned out rather differently indeed.
As it was, orphaned perhaps for the second time, I was summoned on my thirteenth birthday by Uncle Cazador to the city palace in the heart of Baldur’s Gate. I had visited it before, though rarely, and always hated it: it was cold and dark and stunk of decay, the paintings on the walls all these awful scenes of hellfire or debauchery, and it simply felt… evil. I have no better word for it. Old Drossel, the coachman, hitched the team to the best carriage and drove me to Black Dragon Gate, where I was met by porters and a litter to carry me through the Upper City to Szarr Palace. The chamberlain was waiting to conduct me to the ballroom, a chamber mysterious to me, as I'd never been allowed to enter it before.
The whole family was waiting for me, every living Szarr: Uncle Cazador, Granddam Fistula, Great-Aunt Dralia, and even Cousin Blovart, whom I rarely saw—he lived with a few spawn in a pretty house on the Coast Way, halfway between Baldur’s Gate and Candlekeep. They—the spawn—stood at attention against the wall with my uncle’s own children, so still they could have been statues. There was a gilded clavichord on a dais that was playing without anyone sitting at the keyboard. My four elder relatives were sitting on armchairs in a semicircle facing me. Uncle commanded me to approach him and look him in the eye. I did.
“I have a gift for thee,” he said. At that time, it was out of fashion to say ‘thee’ rather than ‘you’. Even Granddam Fistula had done away with the habit, mostly, but Uncle Cazador was an old man and set in his ways; for my part, I only had to keep from laughing at it.
“Thank you, Uncle.”
This pleased him, the corner of his mouth twitching upwards. “Come here,” he said. “Come to me.” I did as he bid; he grabbed me, suddenly and roughly, by the hair, and pulled me almost into his lap. His fangs found my throat. I felt very afraid, and then very tired and very cold.
“Cazador,” Granddam Fistula snapped; I heard her as if underwater. “She is not your child. Let her drink.”
Something was pressed to my lips, cool and with the give of flesh. A corpse’s wound. A viscous fluid dripped onto my tongue, sour and copper. I swallowed. I slept.
***
I awoke cold and dead—both in body, and in heart. I awoke hungry. It clawed at my throat. Everything was too loud, too bright. I could sense every rat in the walls, every house spider in the corners, these little flashes of life, and I wanted—no, needed—to devour them. I think Uncle Cazador must have been speaking, but all I could hear was a human heartbeat, slow and even. Something was pressed into my hands, and when I looked down, I saw I was holding Uncle Cazador’s ritual blade, Rhapsody. It is a work of art wrought in magicked steel more than it is a weapon, two wickedly sharp, serrated blades with a delicately carved length of pale birch perched between them so the wood is exposed and all three parts remain apart from its fellows except at the very tip: a stake always at hand to drive into an enemy’s heart and so leave him paralyzed and helpless awaiting dawn. By some new sixth sense, I knew in my bones this was a blade that could do me harm. It was disquieting; I did not want to be touching it.
A woman, human and fair-faced, was kneeling at my feet. Hers was that steady heartbeat, too calm to not be under my uncle’s domination. I looked between the blade in my hand and the woman who so serenely smiled as she bared her throat for me to slit. My cousin Violet knelt before me too, her gaze lowered and a bowl of pale green crystal in her upraised hands, ready to catch the spill.
Hunger gnawed at my belly—and yet I could not possibly eat.
I will not do you the disservice, reader, of pretending at moral rectitude, for the curse of the vampire did away with that. Obviously I know that murder is wrong, but that is something I know, not that I feel; every instinct within me urges me to the slaughter, says that it is natural and necessary. Is an owlbear evil because she must eat the flesh of men to live? I am a predator, and the living are my prey. No, the truth—the bare, unpleasant truth that even in my earlier drafts of this work I shied from for fear of losing your respect—is that as a little girl I was always skittish at the sight of blood, and the thought of spilling it turned my stomach. The thought of drinking it moreso. For all that instinct drove me to it, some childhood memory of making myself sick from trying my father’s ‘wine’ at dinner still lived in my body, if not my mind.
I refused to complete the family rites. Uncle Cazador killed the woman himself and pressed the bowl to my lips, but I would not drink. My family took my refusal as spite or misplaced pride. “You’re only hurting yourself, girl,” Great-Aunt Dralia told me. “Soon enough you’ll go mad with the hunger anyroad, and young as you are you’ll drain anything put in front of you dry when that day comes. Stubbornness won’t serve you here.”
It is easy to become accustomed to distasteful things. Once, long ago, I would have claimed I would never kill, and in that moment, I would not have been lying. For all my instincts crow for blood, I am not my instincts—I am, as my uncle would say, a ‘thinking creature’. A vampire cannot starve, and I reasoned that I had restrained myself already, so I could simply continue to do so indefinitely, redirecting the hunger into a less distasteful drive; I could devour books instead of blood, and I would stop noticing the hunger pangs. I was wrong.
I thought I knew hunger before, but in the attic I learned her like a lover. I could barely think for desire. They sent up human blood in glass bottles, and eventually I drank it. Then they stopped sending anything. For a year, maybe longer, I clawed at the walls. I drained every mouse and bat and pigeon I could catch, and when those ran out I learned to catch flies.
Then they sent up a bound captive. After I drained him, he did not rise again; I’d nearly beheaded him in my fervor. I watched his body slowly decay over the coming weeks. When the hunger grew too great and stole my mind once more, I sucked the marrow from his bones.
I felt regretful about killing him, but not because of guilt. If I had controlled myself, if I had left him alive, I would not be going hungry. The human body can survive sometimes in excess of two months with only water. If I fed him insects, he might have lasted even longer.
The next time my uncle sent up a meal, it was a dwarven girl, and I tried to pace myself. I really did try. I failed, but this time I was not so vicious. She rose again as a spawn. I had to pick a name to call her because I had not the energy for introductions before my teeth were in her throat, and afterwards she could not recall it. But my Prudence was pleasant enough company for the long two months before Uncle Cazador deigned to visit me.
“Hast thou learnt thy lesson, child?” he asked.
“Yes, Uncle,” I said.
“Good.” He let me out of the attic, then. It was the Year of the Tanarukka, 1388 DR, and I would have been fifteen years old if I were not a corpse.
***
It is easy to become accustomed to distasteful things. I do not say this to excuse myself, but to explain. For almost ninety years I lived with Cazador Szarr as a wife, ordering about my cousins, his children; not blinking at what he made them do. I was better, I told myself, because I did not compel them. They obeyed me just the same, for fear of their father’s wrath; hated me as an extension of him, or else as a should-have-been compeer. I would have hated me too. I was only mundanely subject to his will—he could not compel my obedience—and in all that time he never again starved me, never forced me, never tortured me. Not how he did his children, with holy water and enchanted blades.
I convinced myself I loved my uncle. I didn’t, of course—I was incapable of that. But I needed him, and those are similar enough. He let me out of the attic, gave me all the books I could have wanted, tutored me in languages: he had a gift for them. When my Prudence met her end at a Harper’s blade on an errand for me in the Lower City, Cazador consoled me. As I grew older and grew to hate my eternally girlish body, he told me I was beautiful.
My tempers refused to settle in my age, so I would find myself unduly upset at all manner of things, recognizing my own feelings and actions as childish and yet never quite capable of settling myself. Uncle Cazador never begrudged me this foible and only ever raised a hand to me if I shamed him in company. I thought, back then, I knew him. But then, in the Year of the Purloined Statue, 1477 DR, he took me down into the Tourmaline Depths for the first time—ninety years sharing his bed, and I hadn’t even known that cavernous expanse laid beneath my feet—and showed me his little project. His work was nearly complete, he told me.
Though Amaunator had spurned him centuries earlier and well before he became a vampire, more than anything, Cazador Szarr missed the sun. There are ways powerful vampires have previously found to mitigate the harm of sunlight, but all come at a high cost. Most famously, perhaps, is the cloak the Thayan necromancer Zulann Fass crafted for Dragomir the Red, who for generations was master vampire of Athkatla, City of Coin, before his daughter Hexxat the Sleeper in the Year of the Gauntlet, 1369 DR, led the famed Bhaalspawn known by the odd moniker of ‘Charname’ to his crypt. What later became of this cloak, and Hexxat herself, is uncertain. Zulann Fass—who was turned into a vampire spawn by Dragomir as punishment for crafting him such an ‘imperfect’ artifact as the cloak, which diminished the wearer’s preternatural strength—made a second cloak for herself after his death, and went into seclusion. None yet have convinced her to part ways with either the cloak or her head along with it, and no amount of offered gold has seen her open commissions.
Icannot imagine my uncle accepting the cost the cloak of Dragomir, nor any other half-mythic cloak or amulet, regardless. “Act not in haste,” Uncle Cazador told me countless times, so I could mouth the words along with him. “A near-immortal has time to plan, time to act only when others will pay the price of action.” This was the third lesson of Vellioth the Martinet.
Accordingly, Cazador the Avid sought Ascension. He gave me a walking tour of the Tourmaline Depths while he told me of his plan, eyes agleam with fervor. He would not offer me Ascension in turn—for the first lesson of Vellioth was to allow none other to be your equal—but I would have a place at his side, of course, he assured me. We could build a new family together, if I wished it.
“A new family?” I asked him, brow furrowing. “What of the children you already have?” He explained to me that the scars etched deep into his children’s backs were not, as he had always told us, poetry, but that they marked the spawn’s souls for consumption in his profane rite. “All they ever were was fuel,” he claimed.
“Oh,” I said, for there was nothing else to say. I let him tell me about the glories of Ascension and his plan, which more than two centuries in the making was now finally going to come to fruition. I looked anywhere but at him.
There were thousands of spawn locked up in the endless hallways, some of them crammed five or ten to a single cell. They were skeletal things bedecked in rags, never once fed except on each other’s marrow, and some of the most miserable creatures I have ever set eyes on. Everything down there was mired in despair—even the faintly glowing green crystal vases which bracketed the entryways cried out to me as I passed them, begging for death.
(These, Uncle Cazador informed me, contained vestiges of Vellioth the Martinet, trapped within the crystal by some esoteric Art during the Rite of Perfect Slaughter. In the present day, the vases all lie shattered, and still he begs let me go, let me go, let me go…)
Standing there at my uncle’s side, I looked upon this wretched inheritance, and I saw myself as if in a mirror. I did not recognize who I had become. I closed myself up in the attic, now by choice, and there I remained.
***
For fifteen years I sequestered myself and did aught but write my little histories. I rejected my name and my birthright; I wished I could reject my ‘gift’ as well. Uncle Cazador was angry with me, but taken up with his preparations for the Rite of Profane Ascension, he mainly left me alone. A servant girl brought me up bottles of blood on occasion, and I charmed her into putting my manuscripts in the post to Waterdeep, where it is said anything can be published and nothing is censored.
I did not know if readers thought my work fact or fiction; I doubted the publishing house bothered printing the little chap-books penned by ‘Lady Incognita’ at all. When I learned after my uncle’s demise that they were being collected in libraries as prestigious as Blackstaff’s, that scholars found them useful, I was overjoyed.
Since the death of Cazador Szarr, much has changed and yet nothing has. When I began my attic hermitage, I had six cousins by Uncle Cazador: Yousen, Astarion, Violet, Petras, Aurelia, and Dalyria. When I came out, I had seven. Leon, the youngest, had a mortal daughter nine years of age, but scant hours before the foiled ritual Cousin Dalyria (a highly respected physician in life) made a last-ditch attempt at a cure for her affliction by way of bleeding herself dry and infusing herself with youthful blood. They were going to die anyway if she’d failed, she argued; her siblings were good as dead regardless, and curing herself of vampirism was no guarantee her soul would be spared from the ritual. Wasn’t it better to leave Cazador with a corpse than a vulnerable little girl?
She was likely right, but against all odds, my uncle was defeated in the final hour and his children were spared—all seven thousand. The Unlikely Heroes had a cleric in their company, so Leon begged her aid, but she served the Lady of Loss. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you,” the woman said after she laid hands upon little Victoria’s bloodless body to no avail. “I hope in time you will learn to recognize this as a blessing. The Dark Lady smiles upon you.”
Come sunrise, there were six again. Yousen, Astarion, Violet, Petras, Aurelia, and Dalyria.
Some of my cousins left the city palace; others left the city entirely, whether to travel into the Underdark with their unwanted siblings, as Yousen and Aurelia did, or to flee the whole affair as did Cousin Astarion, who now calls the very hells his home. I cannot say I do not understand the desire to wash one’s hands of this wretched family—after all, I locked myself away in the attic to escape it. But I have thought long and hard these last years, and it does a disservice to the nameless, faceless denizens of the mass grave my life is built upon to pretend I am not my uncle’s niece, my father’s daughter. I am a monster, and I am damned.
My name is Amanita Szarr, and until I am laid low, I am the master vampire of Baldur’s Gate.
