Prologue: Under Uncertain Stars
Were I a pagan bard, I would invoke a muse of fire to fill me with passion for the task ahead. I would beg a god to put his words in me, to blow his wisdom through me like a trumpet, to make me resound with truth for the people.
I am no pagan bard. My enemy is fire, and I am more likely to rebuke my passions than to bid them spill forth.
What am I? I have been a tyrant, a warrior, and one of the fallen on battle’s field. I have been a Christian and a wanderer and an enemy of God. I have begged and murdered, tortured and rescued, pledged loyalty and given treachery.
I have died and returned and I drink hot blood.
My name is Vladislaus, onetime Prince of Wallachia, onetime commander of armies. Called Tepes, called Kaziglu Bey, called Dracula, I am now much more than once I was. Perhaps much less, as well.
I write this in Rome, far from my ancestral seat, far from my adopted home. Here I rest, sated by my beloved as she hunts on my behalf, luring men to their doom upon my table. Men only, for she is a jealous creature. She believes I have sent the others away for love of her, and that is the truth. It is not, however, the entire truth.
I put them aside from fear. I fear their jealousy of her. I fear the fate of all I have dragged down into my doom. All things alter, as she knows as well as any. She fights against this change, foolishly, and her struggles may but speed it. I have learned, to my sorrow, that nothing I can do endures. She will be lost to me, and it is my damnation to choose if I lose her swiftly or by inches and decades, but inevitably she will slip my grasp.
How can she think she will remain, when all is flux and chaos? In Paris, in the icy North, in the heated East, the watchers of the sky are amazed, chapfallen, at the prodigy in Cassiopeia these recent years past. The holy aether, untouched and immutable, is now shown to be fickle as the love of man. A new star flares, unseen and uncharted—no bearded vagabond, like the shaggy star of 1456 which shone on my first, brief reign, but a fixed light! As if the angels of the spheres had untimely coupled, birthing a celestial bastard. If even the stately constant tread of stars is vulnerable to change, how can any earthly thing be fixed?
I study the heavens. I study the words of ancients. I study the signs I see, and those I taste in the flesh of those around me. I know the time draws near.
Soon I will sleep, and it is good that I will sleep. Too much strength is overpowering for us. My beloved weeps, she wipes her crimson tears with golden tresses, but I am not sad. Those around me fear the great slumber, shy away from the nightmares and visions, but not I. They see a prison, another torment, another cage forged by God for their worthless souls.
They are blind.
I see opportunity. I see a road before me, a new world to explore and conquer. The elders tell me in chastened tones about the madness of their resting visions, but I saw, beyond their fears—the loss of self, the loss of sense, the loss of memory—tools of surpassing potential, if only the hand that grasps them is strong.
I shall sleep but not rest. I gird myself for battle, not of the body, but of the mind. As I lie in torpor I shall duel my weaker selves, I shall kill any memory that makes me less than I ought to be, less than I need to be, less than the greatest of my kind.
The visions of the elders were oracular, though in their terror they kenned not what they saw. When I triumph in this new combat, this unseen and still place beyond reason and closed eyes, what wonders of knowledge will be my plunder?
Even now the stillness creeps upon me. Even now my bones are weary, my muscles groan with the stiffness that is their deathly due. Each day is a greater weight, every sleep harder to batter back. Soon it will crush me, and like a young bride who yearns for the harsh strength of her lover’s arms, I shall revel in being crushed.
Before my slumber war, however, a task remains. Like any good scholar, I must put my books in order.
It is typical of my kind to keep a book of memories, as if mere ink on paper could contradict a Reason bent on torpor’s lathe. My books have a different purpose. They are no fruitless attempt to taste again air once breathed, to be again the youth I was. No, their role is to trace the changes worked in, through and upon me. I am not the angry and ignorant monster whose home was stolen. I am not the sorrowing scholar who lurked in his ruin. I am not even the temperate teacher who set forth to bring new knowledge. I am none of those things but was all. I change, I am remade, I am both the sword and the smith who forges it. Who is to say that I, as I am now, cannot learn from the brute, the student, the prophet? Every season has its lesson, and every lesson has its price. He is a fool indeed who scorns that which he has already bought at dear cost.
I turn my musty pages and recopy each word in my own hand. The temptation is there to change them—all things change, do they not? Is this not my credo? Yet I refrain. I will not sand away one bleat of self-pity, I will not soften any stark cruelty or brassy foolishness. Through changes without ceasing, something still and permanent can remain. I cannot see clearly ahead, but I can keep a grasp of what has gone before, even when my new self, new vision, sees through the shades that then held me blind.
This is my cause, my hope. That I can pierce the shadows of hate, and even the bright glister of love, and find beyond them something greater than either.
Let us end. Let us begin.