#vampires

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More assorted The Sisters of DorleyAU/Glow, Worm vampire stuff:

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I meant to mention this in my original outline for Annaliese but forgot: one of the reasons Annaliese likes Elle is Elle gives her tickets to the opera. Some of Annaliese’s past masters and mistresses used to take her to the opera, but it was always to work, to try to use her sense of smell to detect secret feelings in people they were dealing with while they hobnobbed with the aristocracy (human and vampire). Annaliese developed a taste for opera this way, and she likes that now, thanks to Elle, she can just sit back and enjoy the performance without distraction, she can go for her own pleasure instead of to work. Sometimes Elle even buys herself a ticket too and keeps Annaliese company.

Annaliese watches a lot of Great Performances type programs on TV too. And when she isn’t watching TV she sometimes has her radio playing and tuned to a classical music station. Annaliese’s tastes in music run very heavily toward the classical; the kind of things rich people in central and eastern Europe in the nineteenth century would have listened to.

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I think sensory-related “bullshit vampire powers” would be a relatively common result of transitioning autistic people. Autistic people often process sensory data in non-standard ways, so imagine what might happen when their brains get plugged into sensory data from vampire super-senses.

Annaliese’s super-sensitive sense of smell isn’t entirely the result of this, she has more olfactory receptors than a human or even a normal vampire, but it’s likely not pure coincidence that she started out as a non-verbal autistic.

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Readingthis post makes me think I might go with a drinks-through-the-fangs the fangs are like a blood donation needle model of vampirism here. Before I was modelling it as they just use the fangs to open a wound and then swallow the blood conventionally, but “drink blood in a very clean, kind of surgical fashion” feels appropriate for this story - it would feel of a piece with the thing where the Dorley girls are all pretty and super-passing and Dorley has very sanitized practices, like it’d be appropriate if we’re also getting a very sanitized, neat, mess-free, superficially gentle-looking version of vampirism. Plus, drinking through the fangs would be a weird experience; the blood goes up through the fangs and through a Y passage to a sort of specialized second vampire stomach they’ve grown during transition, and they’ve got taste buds inside their fangs and stuff, it’d be a very different experience from human eating and drinking. I like that; I want to make vampires weird. Though I’m thinking they can also swallow blood more conventionally, with a flap that closes off their regular esophagus while they do this so the blood goes to their vampire stomach instead of the digestive system they use to process normal food; that’s probably what they do when they drink blood from plastic bags.

I wonder if maybe they could also use the fangs to inject blood, for thrall and transitioning? I’ve been modelling it as a sort of extended phenotype of culture thing where they either cut themselves or, if the subjugated person is a vampire, get them to bite them, but there would be a certain elegance if they could use their fangs to inject their own blood into people to thrall them. I’m modelling thrall as a pretty important part of vampire sociality, so it would make sense if they had something like that. Though on a dramatic level I love the rolequeering aspect of, like, in vampire society the ultimate symbolic act of abject submission is biting the person who’s subjugating you, so I want to keep that. Maybe it’s more efficient that way.

Also, I’m definitely writing vampires as weirder. Glow, Worm does a good job of setting up standard enough to play with the common ideas but different enough to be interesting vampire rules, but Glow, Worm vampires aren’t weird enough for my taste. A lot of the fun of writing nonhuman characters for me is the idea that they have different senses and bodies and brains and they don’t experience the world the way we do.

And I want to make vampire culture weirder. They’ve got extreme longevity and abilities and needs humans don’t have and I feel like that should make their mindsets and culture more alien than what the story depicts.

Re: the stuff I’ve been posting lately: I feel like I’m definitely coming from a different place regarding the blood thrall thing than the original author is.

Like, on the one hand, I’m way amping up the nightmare fuel side of it. In actual Glow, Worm Cooper is treated as an anomalous tolerated abuser and actual Glow, Worm thrall mind control seems to kind of suck. We’re getting pretty strong hints that Cooper can’t even keep reliable control over his dragon after he’s had years or decades to work on her. Whereas I portray thrall-brainwashing as both much more effective and a very common form of social control in vampire society.

On the other hand, I feel like I have a less uniformly condemning attitude toward thrall?

Like, the general attitude I get toward thrall or anything like it (e.g. Helena’s “calming effect” mind power) in Glow, Worm is that it’s fundamentally unethical and the proper attitude toward it is to do your best to never, ever use it on anyone, and to certainly never use it in any personally or emotionally significant context (the experimentation Elanor’s kids do with it seems to kind of get a pass because the orders they give each other are trivial). It’s strongly associated with rape. There’s a very zero tolerance attitude toward it. I get the impression the author finds the idea of having your mind manipulated that way conceptually horrifying.

Whereas… For Annaliese blood thrall is adaptive tech, and one of the tragedies of her character is she’d actually be very well-suited to use it in positive ways and wants to use it in positive ways, but she mostly can’t because she’s enslaved by a person who uses it mostly as a tool of coercion.

Like, I’m thinking of some of the sections of The Sisters of Dorley where I’m like “these people are saying and doing absolutely horrific stuff but it feels like the narrative is presenting them as quirky and woke and appealing, this is really uncomfortable,” and I wonder if the author would have something like that emotional reaction to that part where Annaliese thralls a peasant family.

I think part of it is the original author and I make really different assumptions about what thrall actually is? In actual Glow, Worm, I think the idea is that it’s basically a drug that makes you positively inclined toward the person you drank from and suggestible. When we actually get a description of what a mild thrall state is like from the inside, when Viv drinks Gemma’s blood, it’s very consistent with that. Helena says it’s connection, but in the context that appears in I think we’re intended to read that as her romanticizing using a date-rape drug on somebody. Whereas I ran with the idea that blood thrall actually is connection, that it involves telepathy, because 1) that works better for the plot I want, 2) I think that’s more interesting.

Something I originally intended as part of my previous post but it was getting so long I decided to do it separately. It’s pretty tangential to the Dorley thing but does connect to some of my ideas. Have a literal 25,000 year old vampire OC! Also some nuancing of Elle; she’s such an obvious symbol of woke capitalism I initially gravitated toward writing her as super-evil and the sort of abuser who manipulates and uses marginalized people by pretending to be their friend, and I still kind of want that characterization for her, but lately I’ve been trying to nuance her somewhat.

Under read-more for length, and also content warnings for slavery, mind control, sexual/reproductive coercion, incest, child-killing, cannibalism, characters being approximately ‘60/'70s expected level of politically incorrect, and, uh, extremely long-term imprisonment is the best way I can think of to describe it. This was heavily inspired by me finding the idea of a 25,000 year old vampire fun and by the vague statements in Glow, Worm that vampires do age, just very slowly, but also by the rather awful thoughts “how do you make a 25,000 year old vampire relatable? You deprive them of the opportunity to have 25,000 years worth of experiences” and “What if: Dorley but instead of force-fem it’s about patriarchy and kingship and what James C. Scott talks about and taking the vampire thrall thing to its ultimate logical nightmare fuel conclusions, and it’s much worse because that’s appropriate because it’s more closely adjacent to the long terror in the gender as coercive political project room?”

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A little after she’d finished thrall-conditioning Annaliese, Elle found another vampire she thought might be useful in setting up her 'programme.’ Her name was Jarna, and she was a thrall-brainwashed vampire slave like Annaliese, and she was being sold by her previous master, who said he didn’t need her anymore. Jarna has a super-thrall “bullshit vampire power,” similar to Annaliese’s. Jarna’s blood is actually much more potent than Annaliese’s in terms of being able to thrall lots of people at once, but it keeps less well; Jarna’s thrall factor doesn’t survive her blood being frozen, and has a shorter shelf-life than Annaliese’s under refrigeration. For a while Elle had an idea that she might be able to use Jarna for the 'programme’ just like Annaliese, and/or that Jarna’s super-thrall might be useful to her elsewhere.

Jarna was… strange. She looked like an old woman. She was very tall; more than six feet tall. She had brown skin and a combination of features that didn’t really fit into any ethnic group Elle or Annaliese or anyone else could think of; she looked… different from anyone on Earth. Annaliese noticed she smelled different too. Jarna being a vampire was a big confounder there, of course, vampires and humans smell different, but… Jarna’s scent was noticeably unique in a way that went beyond the way almost everyone’s body odor is unique.

From Jarna’s descriptions of her earlier life, as near as they could tell, she’d been born into some primitive tribe, and then she’d been abducted and taken to a place ruled by her previous master, who Jarna called Tatasi(that was not the name Elle knew him by). Tatasi had transitioned and thrall-brainwashed Jarna and during the thrall-brainwashing process he’d discovered her super-thrall ability. With appropriate control techniques Jarna could control thousands of people at once through blood thrall, and that was what Tatasi used her for; he used her blood to mentally enslave the people who worked for him. Her ability made her very useful to Tatasi, and it didn’t seem to pass to childe vampires, so she’d been precious to him - not as a person, but as a tool. Frightened of the possibility that harm might come to her, he kept her confined to apartments in guarded compounds for a very long time. At first she’d spent a very long time mostly confined to three inner chambers in his house, and then later she’d been moved around more, but always she was kept inside and in seclusion. Elle thought Jarna’s lifestyle during her thralldom to Tatasi sounded a lot like the life of a woman in purdah. And then one day Tatasi told Jarna that he didn’t need her anymore, and Tatasi sold her to Elle.

Much as Jarna herself didn’t seem to fit into any race Elle or Annaliese knew, Jarna’s descriptions of her homeland didn’t seem to quite fit any place on Earth. At first they’d thought it might be somewhere in Africa: it was a savannah, or something that sounded like one, and Jarna made vague references to animals that sounded like they might be elephants. But Jarna didn’t look African, she looked more Indian than anything else, but that didn’t seem quite right either… And her homeland had very cold winters, winters of deep snow, winters when rivers and ponds and lakes froze over - the descriptions reminded Annaliese of her miserable two months of freedom in a Russian winter, but maybe worse; Jarna talked about powerful winter winds, there were few trees to get in their way so they would blow unimpeded across the open plains and they were so forceful and so cold and they would blow things around; she seemed to remember it vividly. They thought maybe the high Arctic or the Eurasian steppe, but Jarna didn’t look like an Inuit or a Mongolian or a Kazakh or a Turk. And Jarna’s description of her abduction suggested relatively close proximity to a sea to the west, and it didn’t sound like the Black Sea or the Caspian Sea, it was a cold and wild sea with crashing, pounding waves and icebergs, it sounded like the north Atlantic, and then they’d sailed through a straight that sounded like maybe Gibraltar but that couldn’t possibly be right… None of it fit together, none of it made sense! It was like she was describing an alien planet! No, more confusing than that - it felt like she was describing Earth but the picture just didn’t fit together right!

Elle had thralled Jarna almost as soon as she’d gotten her off the airplane, not even really for brainwashing at that point but simply so Jarna would obey Elle instead of being loyal to her old master. If Elle and Jarna had the sort of intimate thrall connection Annaliese tends to form while thralling people they would have been saved a lot of guessing; Elle getting access to a single memory-image of the 'elephants’ of Jarna’s homeland would have clarified everything. But thrall is idiosyncratic. It’s a relationship. A relationship of domination, but still, a relationship; its shape depends on the people involved and the circumstances. Elle and Jarna didn’t form the sort of mind-link through which they could easily share mental images. Their thrall connection mostly just made Jarna obedient. Elle could have looked directly into Jarna’s memories, but that would have required pushing in a way she didn’t want to do yet.

Jarna claimed that she’d been transitioned from human to vampire and put into seclusion by Tatasi as a young woman. And if that was true it was horrifying. Because Jarna looked like an old woman, and if she was transitioned young that could only mean that she became old as a vampire, and that was something theoretically possible, but it would require an immense span of time. Vampires do age, but it’s very slow. The very old vampires, the ones who’ve lived thousands of years, have just barely perceptibly aged; if they had solid jet black hair when they transitioned they might have some barely noticeable grey hairs around their temples now, or something like that. You need to look at the very oldest vampires, the ones almost as old as civilization, to really see it, and even then, they haven’t aged very much, assuming their recollections of their youth are reliable. If Jarna became old as a vampire, how old was Jarna?

The answer to that question came by accident. Elle had a large library in her mansion, and Jarna could not read English at this point (in fact, Jarna couldn’t read any language at this point; Tatasi had never bothered to teach her to read and write), but sometimes she liked to look at books with pictures, and sometimes she’d ask Annaliese what the pictures were of. And one day Jarna came to Annaliese and Elle very excited, holding a children’s illustrated book about the Ice Age.

Jarna showed Annaliese and Elle an illustration of a herd of woolly mammoths moving across the ice age tundra, with a single mammoth foregrounded. And Jarna pointed at the foregrounded mammoth and said, “I know this animal! We hunted them! My people hunted them!”

Jarna flipped excitedly through the picture book, and pointed to illustration after illustration of extinct animals that she knew, that she recognized. Oh, but she thought the artist hadn’t gotten them quite right! And at some point in her long boring captivity Jarna had taught herself to draw quite well, and she started making drawings of what those animals really looked like. And her drawings did indeed look a little different, and somehow more realandalive. As if she had seen living woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, cave lions, cave bears, and so on, and the artist who made the illustrations in the book only had bones to work with.

Elle said in quiet awe and horror, “Jarna, those animals have all been extinct for ten thousand years.”

Jarna smiled and said triumphantly, “I told you he kept me shut up in rooms for a long time!”

Elle started thinking about some things Jarna had said, about being marched to the shore of a cold and wild sea to the west and it not taking many days, about a cave, and about… And she started pulling books down from the shelf of her great library and showing Jarna pictures inside them, pictures of cave paintings and the entrances of some of the caves the paintings were found in, thinking just maybe

Eventually Jarna pressed her finger against one picture, a picture of a cave painting in a cave in France that Elle and Annaliese guessed depicted an auroch, and Jarna said, “I think this is my home!” After a few moments Jarna said, “It is! I know this painting! My mother and grandmother made this! They let me watch - they were teaching me… I watched this being made!”

Elle said in awe and quiet horror, “Jarna, that painting is over twenty-five thousand years old.”

Jarna had a big smile on her face and she tapped the photo again and said, “I watched this being made!” And then after a few moments she added, still cheerfully and still with a big smile on her face, “I told you he kept me shut up in rooms for a long time!”

There was a pregnant silence and Elle seemed to just sort of look at Jarna for a while, and then Elle reached out and caressed Jarna’s face and said softly, “That’s why I couldn’t figure out what race you belong to. You belong to a race that doesn’t exist anymore. You’re a Cro-Magnon woman.”

Of course! No wonder Jarna’s descriptions of her homeland and her enslavement sounded like descriptions of an alien planet, yet tantalizingly familiar! They were descriptions of an alien yet familiar planet! The world of the Ice Age! Jarna’s homeland was Europe! But not Europe as modern people knew it! The strange Serengeti-like but cold in winter homeland she described was the Europe of the Ice Age, a land of open grasslands full of Pleistocene megafauna! The cold and wild sea the slave-catchers had taken her across really was the Atlantic, specifically the Bay of Biscay! And the slave ship really had carried her through the Straight of Gibraltar!

Elle gathers around her… Lieutenants? Assistants? Thralls? Companions? The trans women she vampirized and then thrall-brainwashed as an experiment. She wasn’t satisfied with the way they turned out. They’d been too independent, being the kind of person who transitions in the '60s or '70s selects pretty strongly for that, and of course she’d been able to use the thrall brainwashing to break that, but in the process she’d had to break too much. Thus her exploration of other options for solving her bloodline problem. But they’re people she trusts. They have their uses.

Elle has Jarna tell her story again, and this time really go through it systematically and thoroughly while they pass bounce inferences off each other and her, and they all listen to it with new ears.

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Jarna’s people were not nomads. There were nomads in Jarna’s world, but Jarna’s people looked down on them a little and pitied them a little, the way agricultural people later would. Jarna’s people were fortunate to occupy a place that herds of animals funneled through on their spring and autumn migrations. Jarna’s people were not farmers, but they’d invested in their land; built structures that funneled the herds further, diverted them like water, funneled them into killing places. They used fire to shape the landscape too, improving its value as a hunting ground and encouraging the growth of edible and otherwise useful plants.

The diet of Jarna’s people was rich in meat and rather poor in just about everything else. When the herds migrated through their valley there were great hunts, slaughters, in which they killed many big animals. This was a time of feasting on fresh meat, but also a time of much work. The men - mostly the men - had the work of actually killing the animals, of course; it was almost like a military operation. And the women - mostly the women - had the work of smoking and otherwise preserving most of the meat of these animals. Jarna’s people had become so good at killing animals in these hunts that a primary driver of their cultural evolution had been managing all the meat the hunts yielded, finding ways to preserve and store it. The great hunts provided the bulk of the food Jarna’s tribe ate all year; they lived on preserved meat more than anything else.

Jarna’s people were fortunate in another way; they occupied a cave, which’s thermal mass insulated them in winter, and which provided them with perpetually cool, dry places where preserved meat stored well. The neighboring tribes to the south and southeast were similarly fortunate, and had their own caves. The neighboring tribes to the north, west, northwest, and northeast were not so fortunate; they had to winter in huts on open ground beneath open sky. And the nomads had to make do with tents that they could take apart and carry on their backs.

Jarna’s people lived in and around their cave, and it was like a village; hundreds of people lived there, there were hundreds of people in Jarna’s tribe. By the standards of Jarna’s world, this was a large settlement and a mighty people; Jarna’s tribe was the most numerous and therefore the strongest tribe in the area. Jarna had considered herself a fortunate person, to be born among such a tribe.

This was the rhythm of life for Jarna’s people: in spring and autumn the great hunts, and all the work of preserving the meat. In summer, groups of mostly men would fan out across the country to hunt still-abundant big game and bring fresh meat back to the main body of the tribe at the cave, and groups of mostly women and children would fan out across the country to gather edible plants and shellfish and bird eggs and useful non-food materials and catch fish and birds and small animals, and some of that was brought back to the tribe too; the edible plants the women gathered were important for nutrients if not for calories, and some of them were preserved for the winter in various ways. In winter the whole tribe would retreat back into the cave, and live on stored food, and wait out the cold. Second to food, acquiring and processing fuel for fires in the winter was the great pre-occupation; the cave, fortunately, had some openings near the tops of the biggest chambers that allowed some smoke to escape, prevented excessive accumulation of smoke; Jarna’s people had expanded them and even dug and carved out a few new ones over the generations.

Because Jarna was a girl, it had initially been expected that as an adult she’d preserve food, and she’d make and repair clothing and nets and carrier bags and baskets, and she’d go out with the gathering parties of mostly women and children to gather plants and catch small animals and gather wood and other things that could be fuel for fires, and she’d go into the deep part of the cave and paint things there. That was what most women in Jarna’s tribe did. By the time Jarna was pubescent her older female relatives were already regularly taking her with them on gathering expeditions. And they sometimes took her with them into a big, deep chamber of the cave that had no natural light, and let Jarna watch while they painted by lights of flickering lamps, and started to teach her how to do what they were doing. The making of images in this deep chamber of the cave was a responsibility and a privilege of a few matrilineages of the women of Jarna’s tribe, and Jarna understood that being taught how to do this was a responsibility and a privilege, was something special.

But Jarna was a… the best English translation of the word is tomboy. She seemed to relate better to boys than to girls, to prefer doing the things boys did, to more easily make friends with boys than with girls. And Jarna grew to be very tall and strong for a woman. So she joined the hunters, like a boy. At first she learned with the small boys from the old men who were too old and feeble to hunt themselves now but knew a lot about how to do it, and then as a teenager she started actually participating in big game hunts.

Many years after this conversation with Elle, Jarna sometimes visited the graduate school, the other institution, and that place being what it is, some of the girls there wondered if Jarna might be a trans man or at least kind of transmasculine. Jarna told them she doesn’t think so. She never had a problem with her female body, never had any desire to change it. She just seemed to… relate better to boys and men, somehow. It’s a bit hard to tell, though, because… would changing your body like that even be an idea that occurs to you if you live in a world where it’s totally impossible? Testosterone shots would have been an outside context concept to the young Jarna, like a jet engine! And after that… well, her cognitive binding enslavement to Tatasi didn’t leave much room for exploring her gender.

As a young woman Jarna fell in love with another woman. Her lover was a… regular woman? A woman who did women’s work and had a more female-typical for their society social life. It was normative for women in Jarna’s tribe to marry and have kids sooner or later, but lesbian relationships were accepted as long as they didn’t interfere with that; lots of women were openly poly (though it wasn’t called that) with a husband and a female lover; Jarna just openly had a romantic and sexual relationship with this woman and nobody had a problem with that. It felt like the relationship in Jarna’s life that was best described as romantic. At this age Jarna also pretty frequently had sex with some of her similar-age male friends, but that was more of a friends-with-benefits thing. She didn’t feel she was ready for marriage, and she didn’t let them have the kind of sex with her that might have gotten her pregnant. She thinks her human self had a pretty good deal sexually, in a sort of “she was kind of like a straight boy but also androphilic but also she had a woman’s body and was OK with that, it’s super-easy to get sex from boys and enjoy it if you’re like that” way. When she told the girls at the other institution heard this it sparked a discussion about how firmly this put her in the “yeah, definitely queer” category.

One of Elle’s trans women thralls was curious about whether Jarna’s people had anything like a social institution of transgenderism. They did! They had one of those transfeminine castrati shaman classes! Her tribe had four people like that! And there was the tomboy thing, and… that’s probably the best translation, but it distorts some of the nuances, it was understood as kind of… fourth gender-ish? Though it was pretty tangential to trans, people like that were understood as women, just… kind of masculine women?

One day, when Jarna was out hunting with a party of herself and four men, they were attacked. Two of the men were killed, and Jarna and two of the men, including her brother, were subdued and their arms bound and made to march.

Some of the neighboring tribes in Jarna’s region practiced something halfway between bride kidnapping and slavery. Jarna’s tribe didn’t do that, and were proud that they did not; they thought it an evil custom. If a captive woman escaped and made it to Jarna’s tribe, Jarna’s tribe would give her refuge, and some strong men to escort her back to her own tribe if she wished to return to them. This had provoked more than one war against a neighboring tribe (Jarna’s people and their neighboring sedentary hunter tribes did fight wars against each other, mostly over disputed hunting grounds or blood feuds - the battles could get quite bloody). Jarna’s tribe did not fear the wrath of their neighbors; Jarna’s tribe was the most numerous and strongest tribe in the region. This was the only reference Jarna had at this time for slavery. She thought it strange that her captors had taken some of the men as well; if they were doing the sort of slave raid that she was familiar with, they would have killed all the men, and taken only her.

The captors were strange. They were very tall, taller than Jarna, and heavily built, they looked strong - they were strong, she knew because she’d fought them! But their faces were strangely fine and child-like, like the faces of young pubescent boys who had not yet fully entered into manhood.

They tied her and the other two hunters of her tribe together, and they made them walk forward in a line, tied to each other with ropes. They made them walk to the west for more than a few days. Sometimes they gave Jarna and the other captives a little of some strange, hard food; it was the first time Jarna had tasted something a little like bread. They carried packs of this food; they didn’t give the captives much of it, mostly kept it for themselves, mostly Jarna and the other captives just got water, from waterskins refilled from whatever stream or river was convenient.

After some days of walking to the west, they came to the shore of what people in a much later age would call the Bay of Biscay.

Jarna had never seen the sea before, but she’d heard of it. She’d heard of the sea. And she’d heard of the mountains to the south of her homeland, and the lands of mild winters beyond them. And she’d heard of the steppe-tundra to the north and east of her homeland, where the winters were longer and colder than in her homeland, and where people lived in huts of mammoth skin and mammoth tusks and mammoth bones, because there was very little wood.

It was a frightening sea. This was the Ice Age, and it was a colder and wilder sea than the Bay of Biscay the humans of historic times knew; more like the North Atlantic. It was a sea of crashing, pounding waves, and a forceful icy wind blew from it, and Jarna suspected looking at it that she would not survive in it for long.

The captors set up a camp of sorts, in a place terribly exposed to the forceful cold wind from the sea. They tied Jarna and the others to the stump of an old dead tree, and tied their legs together, so they were quite helpless. Two of them remained with the captives while the others went away. Every once in a while they would untie one of the captives and let them walk a little way away and relieve themselves, and then they would tie them back up again. Only one at a time. And every once in a while they gave the captives some water, and less frequently a little of the strange, hard food.

A few days later, the others returned, bringing with them another marching line of captives; four captives on this one. And they untied Jarna and her brother and the other hunter from the tree stump, and untied their legs, and tied the two lines of captives together, and made them walk for a while, until they came to the ship.

Jarna at this time had no concept of a sailing ship, but she had some familiarity with small river boats, so she looked at the ship and correctly extrapolated its function. And now she looked at the sea with true fear. They were going to try to cross that in a boat? With her and her brother and her cousin stuck on it? That… that had to be dangerous!

Jarna wished she could hold her brother’s hand, but that was impossible; their hands were bound behind their backs.

The other four captives were from the shoreline people of this area, who often entered the ocean in boats, for fishing and whaling and trading. One of them knew the language of Jarna’s people, for the shoreline people sometimes sailed up the rivers to trade with the inland hunters, and that woman saw the fear on the faces of Jarna and the other hunters, and explained to them as best she could that her people often moved across the sea in boats, and… it wasn’t exactly safe, but it was no worse than the hunting the men of Jarna’s people did. Of course, the sea was rough today, her people would not put out to sea on a day like this, but that big boat was much bigger than anything her people built, and was probably more stable than anything her people built.

The captors walked Jarna and the other captives to near the ship, to where the icy waters were almost touching their shoes. There were more of the big but strangely child-faced men on the boat, and they lowered a long plank of wood to near where the captives were standing, and the captors made the captives walk up to the plank and onto the ship with them. The thing that had most struck Jarna about the sailing ship was the sail. She’d watched women weaving with fibers taken from wild plants as a child, even helped them and done a little herself, and she boggled at the work that must have gone in to making such a huge piece of cloth. By pantomime one of the captors indicated to the captives that they should relieve themselves over the side of the ship, which they did, knowing this probably meant they would be restrained for a long time now. And when that was done the captors gave the captives a little water and then marched the captives down into the hold of the ship and tied them down there.

The ship soon departed the shore and put out to sea. During the journey the captives were mostly kept tied down in the hold. Every few hours they were, one at a time, allowed up into the open air so they could relieve themselves over the side of the ship, so the waste went into the ocean. And twice a day food and water would be brought down into the hold and given to them, and when they had eaten the containers would be removed. A few of the big child-faced people would check on them frequently, to make sure they hadn’t begun to work their bindings loose.

The hold had some little windows up near the ceiling to let in air and light, and the rope arrangement Jarna was restrained with gave her enough freedom of movement to stand and look out one of those little windows. The hardest part staying on her feet while the ship rolled about in the waves. So when the ship put out to sea Jarna was able to see the coast recede, and then she was able to track its journey somewhat, or at least to watch the coast pass by. The slave ship rarely moved out of sight of the coast (“That makes sense,” Elle commented, “Ancient sailers usually stuck close to the coast, they were afraid of the open ocean”). Sometimes Jarna saw distant icebergs - she’d asked the shoreline people woman what they were, and the woman had known and explained it. The boat had gone south at first, then turned to the west (“Makes sense if they were going from France to Gibraltar by the Atlantic route and following the coast, they’d have to turn west to follow the Spanish coast!”). They stopped at a spot on what must have been the northern coast of Spain for some days, and then three more captives were loaded on and tied down in the hold - Jarna and the other hunters and shoreline folk couldn’t talk to these new ones at all, they had no language in common. And then the boat set out again, and it sailed a little more west, and then turned south, and then southeast, following the coast (“My God, I can just follow it on the map! She must have had a great sense of direction too! Of course she did, she was a hunter!”). And then it passed a mountain Jarna remembered, and Elle ordered her to draw the mountain to the best of her memory (“That’s the goddamn Rock of Gibraltar! That’s goddamn Tariq’s Mountain! It… looks a little different… It’s probably eroded a little in the last twenty-five thousand years! And the shoreline looks different… Of course it looks different, the sea level was a lot lower then! My God, that she remembers it so well after all this time! She must have an absolutely photographic memory! God, that whole trip must have really been burned into her mind!”).

Elle showed Jarna modern pictures of the Rock of Gibraltar, and yes, that is the mountain she saw, though it looks a little different now.

And having passed through what must have been the Straight of Gibraltar, the slave ship crossed what must have been the Mediterranean Sea, though it was a colder and wilder sea then. And it came to shore in a place where there was a…

An outpost! Jarna had no concept of such a thing at the time, but it’s obvious in retrospect. A satellite settlement, from which ships were built and launched, where expeditions could be resupplied. More of the strange child-faced people there, and the vampiric lieutenant who controlled them (apparent as that in retrospect, but Jarna recognized him as a man with a strange authority over the other child-faced people). And from there the captives were made to walk overland, tied together with rope in a line (in a coffle, though Jarna had no word for such a concept at the time). They were walked to what must have been a place in the inland reaches of the Euphrates, and on its banks there was another outpost, and a river boat waiting to take them down the river. And the boat took them far down the river, to a place that’s now somewhere under the waters of the Persian Gulf, to a place where…

To a place where there were fields.

Ten or fifteen thousand years before the known historic beginning of farming, there were cultivated fields of grain, and irrigation works, and thralls working the fields. Jarna had never seen cultivated fields before. Very few people in her world had.

And in the middle of the fields there was a town. A town! Not a big town. Maybe better described as a big village. It had maybe a thousand inhabitants, maybe not even that. But by the standards of Jarna’s world, this was a mighty city. It might even have been the biggest permanent human settlement in the world at the time. There were three to five times as many people here as at the cave of Jarna’s tribe when the whole tribe was gathered together, and Jarna thought of her tribe as a big tribe. And there were large buildings! Most of the people here lived in barracks of a sort. And there was something she in retrospect thinks of as Tatasi’s palace, though even he didn’t have that concept at the time; he called it his house. Jarna had never before seen or imagined such a thing as a settlement with large buildings constructed of bricks.

Most of the workers she saw toiling in the fields were the strange big child-faced people, but not all. Tatasi’s slave-catching expeditions ranged widely. To the south, they reached South Africa. To the east, they regularly reached India, and sometimes went as far afield as Indonesia, Australia, and East Asia. To the west, they reached Spain and Morocco and… well, Jarna’s journey gives a glimpse of how far they sometimes ranged. He even sent slave-catchers into inner Eurasia. Tatasi had reasons to be acquisitive of thralls from far-away lands who might have interesting new genes.

Jarna and the other new captives were offered water to drink and a kind of soup to eat. And they were hungry and thirsty, and the soup actually smelled kind of good. And when they ate it, it actually wasn’t bad. And then it did something to them.

Tatasi has a super-thrall ability, like Annaliese and Jarna. The soup was laced with Tatasi’s blood, and eating it put Jarna and the other captives under blood thrall to him, made them his slaves.

That day, Jarna and the other new captives met Tatasi. And Tatasi sent the rest of them to the barracks and the fields, to be new workers for him. But with Jarna, Tatasi decided to try a little experiment. Tatasi transitionedJarna.

————–

Jarna saw things in Tatasi’s mind through her thrall connection to him. Tatasi is old. From the hints that can be gathered second-hand through Jarna, it seems likely that Tatasi was born and transitioned during the early warm phase of the Eemian interglacial, the interglacial period before the present one. Which would mean Tatasi is around 125,000 years old. Which suggests he ages much more slowly than Jarna. Maybe because, if Jarna’s second-hand account of Tatasi’s life is to be believed, Tatasi was the first vampire.

Certain clues suggest Tatasi was born somewhere in the area that’s now Israel, Lebanon, or Syria, before the onset of the most recent Ice Age, before what he remembers as the great cooling and drying of the world. Embedded in Tatasi’s mind were images of the homeland he was born into. And it was a land with cultivated fields and towns.

Conventional human histories put the first emergence of agriculture in the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent around 10-15,000 years ago. Conventional vampire (mostly) oral histories roughly agree with and enrich this picture. According to ancient vampire legend, the first vampires started out as human witches and sorcerers who called something from the darkness between the spaces into them to live in them and give them power and unnaturally long life. Embedded in this origin story is an actually pretty historically interesting description of the society of the sedentary acorn-wheat proto-agricultural complex that existed in the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent during the global warming that preceded the Younger Dryas Cold Snap. According to the legend, it was from that society that the first vampires emerged. In that society agriculture was young enough that people remembered that it was women who’d begun to cultivate wheat, as an extension of their gathering activities, and that farming only gradually became the occupation of both genders as population increased and hunting became increasingly marginal as a food source.

If Jarna’s impressions of Tatasi’s memories were to be believed, 125,000 years ago Tatasi had been human, and something like a prince, and as he surveyed his father’s domains he walked through cultivated fields of wheat.

Jarna said there was no contradiction. She’d also seen in Tatasi’s memories that the civilization of his people had ultimately been a failure. It had endured for 25,000 years, but it hadn’t progressed much. It never invented moon rockets or guns or even iron-working. It never expanded beyond the western flank of the Fertile Crescent. It never achieved any unity; from its origins to its end it was a constellation of hundreds of tiny city-states (dwindling at the end to dozens and then to a few and then to just one), if you could call its major settlements cities. It never even created a real city. Its greatest settlements were tiny by modern standards; not much more than twenty thousand people (and a few thousand people was a more typical population for one of its “cities”). In truth many of its “cities” might be more accurately described as big agricultural villages; most of their residents were agricultural laborers who walked out to the fields each day and returned to the central settlement each evening. And when the Ice Age set in and the world cooled and dried, its people had abandoned their cities and their cultivated fields, and dispersed into the wilderness, and gone back to being hunter-gatherers. Its cultivated fields of wheat had become choked with wild grass, and its cultivated gardens had become choked with weeds, and over the hundred thousand year winter of the Ice Age its cultivars had thoroughly reverted to wild type, and it was left for the women of the same region a hundred thousand years later to re-invent agriculture all over again from scratch.

It seems… maybe not unbelievable. It’s the same region agriculture first emerged in immediately before the Holocene, so it probably has favorable conditions for it; if an agricultural society did arise in the Eemian, it would be a plausible place for it. And the Eemian had a nice climate, maybe nicer than the present interglacial, and agriculture got started multiple times independently during the present interglacial; if anything it seems weird if it never got started during any of the previous interglacials.

Tatasi wasn’t a name. It was a title. It literally translated as Grandfather. Among Tatasi’s people, it was the title of the ruler of a city-state, and thus the title of the most powerful people in the world Tatasi inhabited when he was a human. It was not a particularly grandiose title; the headman of a village or the leader of a minor clan or even just a literal grandfather was called the same thing. If Grandfather’s people had invented titles equivalent in grandiosity to lordorking, he would have called himself that. But his people had never done that. Grandfather was the most important-sounding thing he could think of to call himself, so that was what he called himself, and that was what he made his thralls call him.

If Jarna was to be believed, Grandfather had no sire. Nor had he been born from a vampire mother. He was a younger son of his city-state’s previous human Tatasi, and his older brothers were the ones being groomed for the title and the power, and he was jealous of his older brothers, so he sought and found a witch, and he persuaded her to teach him magic. And using the knowledge she taught him, he called something from the darkness between the spaces to live in him and give him power.

Elle was skeptical. That’s just mythology! Vampirism isn’t some spiritual possession! Vampirism is an infection! They’re called Vand symbiotes. You can see them in a microscope! They invade your cells and take up residence in the cytoplasm. They function a little like a second set of mitochondria, but interacting with the host in much more complex ways. Your vampire bloodline is just the genetic profile of your Vand symbiotes; it’s like your mitochondrial DNA lineage except you don’t necessarily get all your Vand symbiotes from one sire. Sure, there’s some weird thaumativory stuff going on in them, but it’s basically a physical infection, no more mystical than the common cold! He probably fried his own brain with all that time he spent stroking his own ego! It happens sometimes to really old vampires! Memories can be notoriously unreliable even over just a human lifetime, now imagine what can happen to the brain of a narcissist who spends thousands of years surrounding himself with thralls and making them validate his grandiosity!

Using the powers the thing he’d called into him had given him, Grandfather defeated his father and his brothers and took control of his city-state. He killed his father and his brothers. And he put the people of his city-state under blood thrall to him and enslaved them that way. All of them. Grandfather has a powerful super-thrall ability; when he was a young vampire, with the right control techniques he could use it to control more than ten thousand people at once.

After that he… mostly didn’t seem to do very much. He simply ruled his city-state, for the next 15,000 years, until the world began to dry and cool and the civilization that produced him began to die around him. If she were in his place, Elle would have tried to create a bigger empire, but Grandfather was apparently uninterested in that. Perhaps he simply lacked the imagination to conceive of such a thing. His civilization had never produced an empire, and Grandfather was… strangely unimaginative in some ways.

110,000 years ago, the great cooling and drying of the world began. The cold itself was not much of a problem for the civilization of Grandfather’s time, even in the Ice Age their land stayed warm, but as the world cooled it was also mostly becoming drier, and that was a big problem for them. There was less rain to water the fields, so food production shrank, so the people became hungrier and the population of the towns shrank.

What usually finished off the process was not direct starvation but a one-two punch of malnutrition and infectious disease. Disease had always been a big problem for the civilization of Grandfather’s age, the dense and sedentary populations of their villages and towns was an environment where infectious diseases could easily spread, and they were less well-adapted to living in dense populations than even the humans of the early Holocene (let alone of the humans of the modern age, who are mostly the products of thousands of years of brutal selection pressure for resistance to crowd diseases). It was probably one of the reasons they never got very far; epidemics and endemic infectious diseases greatly sapped the vitality of their society. Malnourished people are vulnerable to infectious diseases. As the food supply contracted and malnutrition increased, the death rate from infectious disease increased; people would die, and the proximate cause was some endemic disease, but the ultimate cause was the malnutrition that weakened them enough for the disease to finish them off. In a way worse, the increasingly malnourished populations of the towns and villages were increasingly vulnerable to epidemic diseases, to plagues. Terrible plagues swept through the land and, Grandfather’s people being smart enough to recognize the correlation between plagues and crowding, people tended to react by fleeing the towns and villages and dispersing into the wilderness. As the subject populations under their control declined, both by death and by flight, the rulers of the city-states tried to compensate by squeezing their remaining subjects harder, increasing taxes and labor duties, which provoked more of their subjects to flee and created a failure cycle. Sometimes there were even revolutions in which a city-state’s subjects would kill their rulers, demolish their own city, and disperse into the wilderness, into freedom (the technology of the civilization of Grandfather’s time never got good enough to make being a typical subject of their society unambiguously better than being a hunter-gatherer). Sometimes a weakened and vulnerable city-state would be targeted by the rulers of neighboring city-states, who would raze it and march its population back to their own city-states to now be workers for their own city-states, in an inevitably negative-sum process that killed many and destroyed much and weakened the society as a whole. Sometimes tax collectors would come to a village and find it had simply been abandoned at some point, that its inhabitants had simply all fled into the wilderness, into freedom. Sometimes a town or a village would simply be slowly and quietly abandoned over time, its population shrinking and shrinking until there was nothing left but empty collapsing ruins being slowly reclaimed by nature.

As the fimbulwinter of the Ice Age deepened, the towns and villages of Grandfather’s civilization were destroyed or abandoned one by one, like lights being turned off at night. At the beginning of the process there were hundreds of city-states. Then there were dozens. Then only a few. And then, finally, there was only one: Grandfather’s city. Grandfather’s blood protected his thralls from the diseases. And Grandfather’s people alone did not abandon him; they could not; the blood thrall he kept them all under from childhood to death insured that.

Grandfather had to shrink the population of his little kingdom, to fit it within the tightening limits imposed by the drying climate. That was easy for him. He had almost total control over how many children his thralls made; abstinence-only birth control works fine if you’re dealing with people who basically literally can’t disobey you. And if he wanted to thin the numbers of his thralls in a hurry, he simply killed some pre-pubescent girls by drinking up their blood.

His more usual predilection was to drink to death pre-pubescent boys. For the same reason farmers often slaughter male animals young but keep the female ones. Women were necessary to replenish the stock, but now that he didn’t need armies to defend his kingdom from rival lords all those boys were a bit surplus to requirements; reproductively, he only really needed a handful of males around to serve as studs. Oh, he kept a lot of them around for heavy labor on the farms and irrigation canals and construction and building repair projects and for genetic diversity (Grandfather didn’t know about genes, but he knew inbreeding could kill small communities), but… he really didn’t need all of them. Which left food for himself and his vampiric lieutenants as the obvious use for the surplus. When Jarna saw Grandfather’s city, she noticed that she saw more women than men there. And no really old people. He drank to death all the thralls who were too old or too maimed or too disabled to work, too. Technically he didn’t need to drink anyone to death, the ratio of human thralls to vampires he maintained was plenty to allow Grandfather and his lieutenants to live entirely by donations small enough to not permanently harm the donor and that was how they got most of the blood they drank, but the normal patterns of human life inevitably generated people who Grandfather saw as more-or-less useless to him, and drinking them up seemed to him the obvious efficient method of disposing of them.

One of the reasons the Eemian civilization never got very far might be that, compared to Holocene civilizations, it suffered from a cruel disadvantage: it had no domestic animals. When Grandfather was born, even the domestication of the dog was tens of thousands of years in the future. Maybe that was why: between the Eemian and the Holocene humans had made friends with the dog, and that might have served as a template to allow them to make friends or slaves (depending on how you looked at it) of the goat and the auroch. To Grandfather’s people, an animal as a partner was an alien concept. Their agriculture was entirely about the production of plant-derived foods. All their meat had to come from hunting, fishing, whaling, and the gathering of shellfish, insects, and other small animals. And no domestic animals meant no milk (aside from the human breast milk drunk by babies and small children), no cheese, no reliable access to eggs. It may have greatly restrained the size of their population, with all the downstream effects of that (fewer people to come up with new ideas, fewer workers, less dense social networks…). At the very least, it no doubt made them less well-nourished, less healthy, less resilient against infectious diseases… Grandfather came up with his own ghastly solution for that. When he killed a human thrall who wasn’t useful to him, after he or his vampiric lieutenants drank the blood, he ordered other human thralls to eat the flesh. He considered it efficient, and his blood protected them from prion diseases and other infectious diseases associated with cannibalism.

Grandfather’s city was able to endure through the Ice Age because he could impose conditions of survival and community continuity on his thralls that free humans would never have accepted. He got his little kingdom through the Toba Catastrophe by making his thralls kill and cannibalize every one of their own under the age of seventeen, and every one of their own over the age of forty, and nine out of ten of the men of their own remaining after that. After the supervolcano winter ended, he got his kingdom back to something close to its pre-Catastrophe population within two generations.

A few centuries after Toba, Grandfather decided it was time for a big move. Grandfather was, for all his power, a fearful creature. Grandfather didn’t understand the Ice Age, he only knew that the world was cooling and drying and the process was continuing, unevenly and with reverses but in the grand scale consistently, for thousands and thousands of years. He was worried that the world was dying, that eventually the oceans would freeze and all the land would become a desert. And that frightened him, because if the world died Grandfather would die. How old was the world? How long would the world last? Grandfather didn’t know! And that scared him, because it meant that perhaps it was old in the way a seventy year old human is old, perhaps it was dying, and he did not know if it was possible to escape it before it died. And Toba shook him up, scared him. So Grandfather sent out scouts to survey the world a little. And then he abandoned the city he had ruled for so long, and moved his thralls in a great trek to the south, to a place on the banks of the great river that flowed through the valley that had become dry land as the Persian Gulf receded, and there his thralls built a new city, and they lived in the new city and he dwelled in it and ruled it. He hoped that if the cooling and drying of the world continued, this new city far to the south would remain viable for some time after his original homeland had become uninhabitable. And if the cooling and drying of the world in time threatened even this new city, from this new city it would be easy to move his people again, by boat this time, to somewhere on the coast of Africa, where it was warmer.

Then the other problem started. Not the decay of the world. The decay of Grandfather’s own body. It seemed that he did age, very slowly, and specifically as he aged his super-thrall ability was losing its potency.

Grandfather had the ability to sire new vampires, and he had sired some; in the age when human kingdoms still existed they had been useful as superweapons against his rival human “Grandfathers,” and he’d since killed most of those because he didn’t need them anymore but he still kept a few vampire lieutenants around and even made a new one every once in a while when one of the old ones got killed by something or died of old age (he’d lived long enough that this was starting to happen to his oldest vampire lieutenants). But the new vampires he sired always turned out much weaker than him. And none of them inherited his super-thrall ability. He figured that was probably because he was the first, the original host, and that gave him a special relationship with the thing that lived inside vampires and made them vampires. So a hierarchy of thralldom (some of his humans thralled to his lieutenants who were thralled to him) wasn’t going to fix this problem.

There was thrall-brainwashing, of course. He used it on his vampire lieutenants, and on humans who performed duties for them that made it impractical to supply them regularly with his blood. The slave-catchers Jarna encountered were thrall-brainwashed, and so were the personnel at the outposts she passed through, and so were the loggers he sent out to lands with an abundance of trees to bring wood back to his city by boat, and so were the traders he sent out on trading expeditions, and so were the foraging parties and fishermen he sent out to bring fish and meat back to his city to provide some supplementary meat and fish for his thralls and rich food for his own table. But thrall-brainwashing isn’t perfectly reliable. See what seems to be happening to Harriet in Glow, Worm. Oh, done well it’s mostly pretty reliable, but when a person lives as long as Grandfather they start to worry about even low-probability events. Grandfather didn’t completely trust thrall-brainwashing. He preferred the certainty of the blood thrall, which bound his slaves directly to his will.

The most straightforward solution was to shrink the population of his kingdom to fit into the new limits of his thrall ability. And he did that. As Grandfather’s thrall ability gradually weakened his city gradually shrank and shrank. By Jarna’s time, Grandfather’s city was a fraction of the size it had been when he first set up shop in the low valley that’s now the Persian Gulf.

He pursued another mitigation strategy too. He started selectively breeding his thralls for susceptibility to blood thrall. Much of this was simply breeding them to be docile and submissive and weak-willed. Much of what he did with them was actually an artificial acceleration of trends that had already been playing themselves out in human evolution for millions of years. There was a lot of overlap between the traits that would make a person compliant to the social order of a place like an ancient Sumerian royal cloth-manufacture workshop or a Medieval manorial estate or a modern public school and the traits that would make a person compliant to the social order of Grandfather’s city. A lot of Grandfather’s breeding program was accelerating the self-domestication humans were doing to themselves. The strange big but child-faced people Jarna was captured by were humans with extreme domestication syndrome, more extreme than that of modern people. Grandfather also started to breed his thralls for increased size and strength and reduced sexual dimorphism; since the population limit of his city was the limit of his thrall ability rather than food production, the increased value big strong people had as workers for him was worth the increase in the amount of food they needed. The big child-faced people Jarna saw were the result of tens of thousands of years of Grandfather’s breeding program; bred to have strong backs but weak minds. The slave-catching expeditions were partially about giving Grandfather interesting new genes to work with for his breeding program (Grandfather didn’t know about genes, but he knew about heredity).

Still, Grandfather was not satisfied with these solutions. Grandfather was a fearful and paranoid person, he worried about even small risks, perhaps because he lived so long; over tens of thousands of years even small risks added up. Grandfather knew the dangers associated with having a small and isolated community: Tasmania syndrome, genetic homogeneity creating vulnerability to disease, inbreeding, the fragility inherent to having all your eggs in one basket. The more his city shrank, the less safe Grandfather felt. A big community is a safe community, and a safe community would have meant a safe Grandfather. But the blood thrall was the only method of social control Grandfather really trusted. By Jarna’s time Grandfather had stripped the social hierarchy of his city down to a dreadfully simplified form. Grandfather’s city had no bureaucrats, no priests, no propagandists. Grandfather’s city had only one form of social control: thrall. And that meant the size of Grandfather’s city was strictly bounded by the limits of his thrall ability. Grandfather’s city could not grow.

Grandfather was tantalized by the idea of somehow siring a vampire who inherited his super-thrall ability. That was perhaps the central point of his slave-catching expeditions; he’d discovered the “bullshit vampire powers” effect and was hopeful that if he started with the right kind of human he might be able to sire a vampire with a super-thrall ability. He had diverse potential subjects to choose from. This was after the final out-of-Africa migration, but not that long after it, and before farmers spent ten thousand years displacing and assimilating everyone else; humans were considerably more physically diverse in this period than they are now. Many of the captives Grandfather’s slave-catching expeditions brought back weren’t Homo sapiens sapiens. Some of them weren’t even Homo sapiens. Until Jarna, all those experiments were failures. He almost always killed the vampires produced in these failed experiments (while they were under blood thrall to him, so they didn’t fight back). Grandfather was a fearful and paranoid person; even with blood thrall and thrall-brainwashing to control them, Grandfather didn’t like having too many other vampires around.

With Jarna, Grandfather finally hit the jackpot. When Jarna transitioned, she developed a super-thrall ability, similar to Grandfather’s but three times stronger than the one he had at the time. Grandfather thrall-brainwashed Jarna, resculpted her into a person who would be completely obedient to him, and then used her to control the rest of his thralls, and Grandfather kept Jarna secluded inside his house and near him, partly to keep her safe, but also partly so he could monitor her intensely to make sure the thrall-brainwashing wasn’t decaying and reinforce it if it was.

One of the first things Grandfather did when he felt secure in the new arrangement was to send many slave-takers out to bring captives to his city in much larger than usual numbers. With Jarna’s super-thrall, Grandfather would be able to triple the size of his kingdom, and he wanted to make that happen faster than natural increase of his existing thralls would allow. To capture more thralls, Grandfather sent out men with weapons, but he also sent out boats full of cloth woven by the women thralls in his workshops, and parties carrying big packs full of cloth and jewelry: trade goods. There were places in Jarna’s world where nature was rich enough that even without agriculture there could be societies with villages and chiefs and slaves, where slaves could simply be bought. Grandfather ordered the slave-takers to, as much as possible, bring back mostly fertile women. Fertile women were the new thralls he was particularly desirous of acquiring now: he planned to bind them with Jarna’s blood thrall and then make her order them to make many children with the men of the big child-faced people, and by doing so rapidly increase the numbers of his thralls without diluting the results of all the hard work that went into his breeding program too much. And when the slave-takers returned, bringing back mostly young women captives, that was what he did.

It took a generation or two to triple the size of Grandfather’s kingdom, bringing its size toward the limit of what Jarna could control with her super-thrall. Grandfather was pleased with the result. A big community was a safe community, and a safe community meant a safe Grandfather.

After that, Grandfather didn’t do very much for the next ten thousand years or so. He simply dwelled in his city, and gave orders, and existed, and his city did not change much. For the next ten thousand years or so life for Jarna mostly continued in a long-running routine, day after day, year after year, century after century, millennia after millennia.

In truth, Grandfather’s “city” was really more of a big agricultural village. Most of his thralls worked the fields; walked out to them in the morning and walked back from them in the evening. Long before, there had been satellite villages, with arrangements for regular deliveries of Grandfather’s blood to them, but they’d been abandoned as Grandfather’s super-thrall ability waned and he shrunk his kingdom to conform to its tightening limits. After agriculture, the next biggest pre-occupations of Grandfather’s city were textile manufacture and firewood acquisition. He had a huge workshop in his house where hundreds of thralled human women made cloth and clothing and rope; it was almost like a factory. It produced clothing for his thralls, and cloth for the sails of his ships, and so on, but it also produced cloth for trade. Cloth was the primary export of Grandfather’s city; Grandfather used it to buy things from human communities. More than anything else, the resource Grandfather had in abundance was labor, and his trading practices reflected that.

Jarna’s job was simple. Every morning and every evening most of Grandfather’s thralls would eat together in a huge communal dining hall. And during the evening meal Jarna would be there. And Jarna would be bled by a few of Grandfather’s thralls, using a technique similar to the one the Maasai use to bleed cattle. And there would be a huge pot of soup, and Jarna’s blood would be added to the soup and mixed into it, and then the soup would be served out to the thralls, and the thralls would eat it. And Jarna’s blood would put them in blood thrall to her until their next dose the next evening, which would be given to them the same way. It wasn’t a very intimate kind of thrall; Jarna’s brain wouldn’t have been able to handle all the input if it was. It mostly manifested as the thralls simply being obedient. While most of the humans ate, Jarna was given a series of humans to drink from to restore the blood and strength she’d lost (her donors got a special dose of her blood beforehand). After the meal Jarna would give the thralls broad instructions for the rest of the night and the next day, and tell them to obey Grandfather and his lieutenants and the humans Grandfather had selected as supervisors. And while she did that she’d press into their minds certain attitudes and ideas; Grandfather was their god, they existed to be instruments of his will and to satisfy his desires, other authority figures were legitimate insofar as they were extensions of his will and sought to satisfy his desires, and so on.

A petty reason Grandfather was pleased to have Jarna was it meant he wouldn’t have to be bled regularly. He disliked being bled regularly, and he was happy that now being bled regularly was outsourced to Jarna. Jarna understood why he disliked it. She disliked it too. She could feel that losing all that blood every day

Re:The Sisters of Dorley/Glow, Worm crossover idea: I wanted to do something with the gender dysphoria tester vampire, and I ended up creating a whole Tragic Backstory for her and getting Emotions about her, like actually literally crying in places! Enjoy! BTW @in-servo-necessitas, I ended up making “the social stuff is the first to go” and this one being an exception a bit of a plot point. Edit: oh, and if some of the references to a stove in the part where she’s staying with a Russian peasant family are confusing, they’re talking about a Russian stove, a kind of masonry heater.

Write up under read-more for length, and also content warnings for ableism, slavery, coercion based on mind control, violence/injury, sexuality, something that isn’t technically a rape but is very unsubtly written to remind you of one, and some gross/unsanitary stuff referencing excretory functions. BTW the piss-themed body horror when tries to satisfy her bloodthirst from a cow was loosely inspired by how actual vampire bats work.

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Annaliese has the superficial appearance of a fairly short and small twenty-something girl. People’s impressions of her tend to be either “creepy” or “terminally shy,” depending on how charitable they’re being. She doesn’t talk much, mostly speaks only when spoken to, and speaks mostly in short utilitarian statements. She’s very much an “alone in a crowd” type; tends to not interact much with other people even when she’s in close physical proximity to them; her default state seems to be introversion. She’ll sometimes smile and show a “politely restrainedly cheerful girl” persona, especially when talking to people she’s familiar with and gets along with, but otherwise she tends to not show much emotion, and to come across as a little sad; people often suspect she has depression.

In her ordinary daily life, she never wears make-up, and the only jewelry she wears is a simple necklace on which she’s hung three dented bullets from a Russian Civil War era Mosin-Nagant (she’s drilled holes in them for the necklace string to go through). Her hairstyle is low-effort; she just secures her hair back in a bun behind her head. She usually wears skirts that end just above her knees; she wears pants only in cold weather, usually under the skirt, and she’s almost never seen in anything short. She favors drab colors, mostly black and brown. The only thing colorful that she wears with any regularity is pieces of pride flag knit-wear she got as gifts from some of the Dorley girls and from some of the girls at the other institution,the graduate school; mostly shawls, caps, and round beret caps that remind her a little of the tops of round mushrooms. She wears sunglasses a lot; bright sunlight hurts her eyes and gives her a headache; it’s a mix of a vampire thing and an autism thing.

She fidgets a lot. She spends a lot of time twirling and playing with a pencil or pen or making small fidgety hand motions and occasionally picking up random objects and toying with them a little. In recent years she’s started often being seen playing with a fidget spinner.

She carries around a large thermos that she occasionally slurps from throughout the day. It’s full of Coca Cola spiked with blood. She has a noticeable sweet tooth, especially for ice cream.

She often smells a little unwashed, like she could use a shower. It’s not a very strong smell, she doesn’t reek, but it’s noticeable when you’re close to her, and it can be… a little off-putting. She tries to shower and brush her teeth often enough to keep herself publicly presentable, but she has sensory sensitivities that make showering, bathing, brushing her teeth, and using mouthwash unpleasant experiences for her, and her hygiene routine reflects that.

Most of the time she lives in a small and rather austere flat near St. Almsworthy. She spends a lot of time watching TV; sports and soap operas, mostly. Her main routine pleasures are simple and solitary ones: TV, food, blood, masturbation, and some walking in the fresh air, ideally when the sun isn’t too high. She gets her blood supply from Elle’s franchise. She’s been assured it’s ethically sourced. It’s dropped off at her flat. It’s delivered in a van with a refrigerated compartment, and there’s an appointment schedule so she can meet the van and transfer the blood straight to her fridge. The blood comes in plastic bags that come in a box. It’s similar to getting milk from a milkman (she’s old enough to remember when that was a thing people did).

She goes to Dorley mostly to give her blood. Useful substance, vampire blood. Especially hers. It’s got multiple uses to them. It’s the secret ingredient that explains how their brainwashing works so well, and it’s the secret ingredient that explains how they’re so beautiful and pass so well. Most of the women there don’t know what she is or what she does. Bea and Maria do.

When there’s a new person in the basement she does one full-strength thrall session with them. It’s done a little room in the basement; Maria injects the new first year with a little of Annaliese’s blood, and then Annaliese and that person are left alone together for the thrall session. One session is all Annaliese needs to set up pressures that will subtly but powerfully press on that person’s mind for the next year. During the session she talks to that person. She defaults to old vampire ways of speaking during these sessions. She sounds more than a little like Cooper. “I only want to help you, dear one.”

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When Annaliese was human, she was someone who today would probably be diagnosed as a non-verbal autistic. If you asked her about her life as a human, she would say that mostly what she remembers is that she couldn’t talk, and her stomach hurt a lot, and everything was loud.

Annaliese was twenty-three when her parents gave her to her first master. They gave her to him because he said he could help her, he could fix her, he could heal her, he could teach her to talk, he could make her healthy and strong, and with him she’d live a long life.

In her head, Annaliese thinks of her vampirization interchangeably as her transition and her elevation. When she speaks, she will default to the preferred terminology of whoever she’s dealing with, which nowadays usually means transition. Elle told her elevation implies a hierarchy, vampires above humans, but transition implies simply change, one thing to another, and thus transition is better and more politically correct. Annaliese isn’t well-attuned to these sorts of dynamics. Annaliese spent the first two decades of her life without language; Annaliese learned human language after her transition, when her first master used thrall to reshape her into a person capable of understanding human language and speaking. For her, words are a second language, words are hard, words are not very emotionally alive. And… Annaliese would never tell anyone this under her own initiative, but for Annaliese words are associated with a traumatic experience of neural network re-shaping; Annaliese is bad at language in something a little like the way a lot of people are bad at math because they associate it with memories of boredom and coercion and humiliation in school. Annaliese mostly thinks in pictures, sense impressions, sensations, and emotions; the conceptual language of the mind she had when she was human.

Annaliese would never discuss her transition with anyone on her own initiative, but if you asked her about it, she would say that it was hard, because at the time she did not understand language, and she knew very little about the world, and she didn’t know what was happening to her. Her first master lay on top of her, and sank his fangs into her neck, and at first it hurt and she screamed and cried, and then she started to feel strangely good and the pain faded, and then when she was dazed and weak he pulled his fangs out of her, and opened his wrist with a knife, and pulled her mouth open, and pressed his wound into her mouth, so his blood went into her mouth. And it tasted bad, but she did not have the strength or, somehow, the motivation to reject it, to try to spit it out.

Annaliese did not complete her transition that first night, but it got her a good part of the way there, it got her far enough that, by the time her body had finished the first round of changes three days later, she had fangs. Not fully grown ones, but enough to drink more like a proper vampire. And her first master spoke to her mind to mind, not in words but in terms that she would understand. He sent her an image of herself biting him and drinking from him, and he made her feel the sensations of working her jaws to do this, and through a series of images and sensations and emotions he communicated to her what she should and should not do, and that this would be a part of her food now. And she drank from him, and changed more.

She didn’t know what was happening to her. She knew only that her perceptions and abilities and appetites were changing. Darkness stopped being darkness, and when night fell she gasped in wonder at what the world of the night had become to her; a place of silver light, colorless but in which the shapes of objects could be distinguished clearly, as if it had been filled with moonlight that was somehow almost as brilliant as sunlight but still essentially moonlight (she would much later become acquainted with the vampire cliche that to them unlighted night is like a black and white movie, but her life at this point had not given her access to such a concept, and at any rate she thinks the analogy is misleading; it’s a delicate crisp white light, the sort humans think of when they call something as white as the moon). Her stomach stopped hurting. Sounds became somehow simultaneously louder and quieter, in a good way; sounds were louder, but also clearer, less of a fuzzy confusion. She could move faster and with more precision, and she was less clumsy. She tired much less easily. She slept less, and her rhythms of activity and inactivity drifted away from their old synchronization with the rising and setting of the sun, and sleep became… a different experience. Foods started to seem strangely unsatisfying, as if they were missing something important. What she tasted when she drank from her first master became the best thing she had ever tasted, ambrosia, wonderful, and she craved it more and more. And it wasn’t just the taste, she… felt better after drinking from him and started to feel bad if she didn’t drink from him for too long; she seemed to need it in the way she needed water, though not as frequently.

Vampires can go out in the day, but bright sun irritates them. Annaliese didn’t notice this, because for her it was nothing new. Bright sun had always hurt her eyes. It was only later that she learned that humans often experience sunny days as uplifting and beautiful and that the complication of that experience, the new hostility of the sun, is often a source of sorrow for the newly transitioned.

A new world of scents opened to her, richer than the world of sound. Scents were no longer things she experienced here and there, in short flashes; she increasingly lived in a scentscape. The smells of the forest outside her window became part of its forestness, like its greenness, and just as it was impossible to not see its greenness if she looked out the window, it was impossible to not smell it, the forest was around her for miles and miles and its scent was a sea she moved through. The smells of the fire in the fireplace became part of its fireness, like its light and its warmth, and its scents defined the experience of being in a room with it as much as its light did at night and its warmth did in cold. She began to perceive that people’s body odors were as distinctive, as uniquely individual, as their faces, and her body odor became as much a part of her self-image as her face in a mirror, and the body odor of her first master became as much a part of how her concept of him and how she recognized him as his face. At the time this seemed just another of the changes. When she learned the broad outlines of what was happening to her, she at first assumed that this was a normal part of transition (or, as she thought of it then, elevation), that all vampires experienced the world like this. It took a while for her and her first master to realize that in her transition her sense of smell had somehow become enhanced to something far superior to vampire norm, that her sense of smell was special, that it was something that made her special.

Her first master had a woman with him, a human, and one day her first master put into Annaliese’s mind an image of her biting and drinking from this woman, and communicated to her through a series of images and sensations and emotions that blood from this woman would make her strength increase faster and would nourish her after she was finished changing and this, too, would be part of her food now. And Annaliese began to drink from the woman regularly.

Drinking her first master’s blood put Annaliese in thrall to him, and thrall is not just suggestibility or obedience but also connection, and a day came when through that connection her first master explained to Annaliese what he was doing to her and what she was becoming. He explained it to her in a language she could understand, by putting pictures and sensations and emotions directly into her mind.

He showed Annaliese her parents, and he showed Annaliese her own birth. And then he showed her twenty-three summers and winters, and as he did so he walked her through her own memories, so she would understand that he was showing her the length of her life. As he did so, he showed her the birth of her siblings; her brother and sister who had lived, and her two siblings who had died of disease as infants. And he paused on a picture of Annaliese and her parents and her brother and sister as they were in the present year of her life. And then he showed her more summers and winters passing. He showed her her brother and sister getting married and making children of their own. He showed her her parents becoming old. He showed her her parents dying, and he showed her them being buried, funerals like the ones of her grandparents in her memories, her brother and sister and their children weeping. And then he showed her her brother and sister getting old, and her brother and sister dying and being buried by their children. And through it all he showed Annaliese an image of herself unchanging, still looking like a young woman, staying beautiful and strong and healthy while her parents and then her younger siblings became old and bent and weak and sick and then died and were buried.

A person with no language, Annaliese did not know how long humans lived. But she had lived long enough for observation and inference to tell her that people were born, and then if they were lucky enough to not die of a childhood disease they grew up, and then they became old, and then they died. She understood that she was being shown the length of a human lifetime, and that she was being shown that through it she would stay unchanging, she would stay healthy and strong and beautiful while her brother and sister lived out their whole lives, and after they died she would still be alive and healthy and strong and beautiful and have more future ahead of her.

And then he showed her more summers and winters passing. And then he showed her a sort of thinking-in-pictures conceptual hieroglyph he had prepared for her. He showed her herself unchanged, in her village’s cemetery, kneeling before an old and weathered headstone. And on the headstone, worn but still legible, was the name of her brother, and below it the numbers 1822-1898. And through a series of images and sensations and emotions he made her able to look at the letters and numbers and understand. And in the image she touched the headstone and felt how worn it was, and he showed her the slowness of the decay of stone, and she understood that this was old stone, that in this image her brother had been dead for a very long time, and that by implication the version of herself in this image must be very, very old, must have lived a very, very long time, must be much older than her brother was in the last year of his life, and yet she was still unchanged, still looked like a young woman, still was as healthy and strong and beautiful as she was now.

And then he showed her some of his own memories. He showed his memories of his life as a human (they were sketchy and fuzzy, because it was so long ago), and then he showed her his own elevation, and then he showed her enough of his memories to give her a sense of the vastness of them, of how small her own experience was compared to his; enough to make her understand that he had lived a very long time. And as he did so he drew her attention to how his body had not degraded in all that time, how he was as healthy and strong and handsome now as when he was elevated.

And then he showed her a vastness of time passing, summer and winter upon summer and winter. Annaliese didn’t have a concept of thousands, but she understood that she was being shown a vast immensity of time. And through it all he showed her herself unchanging. Annaliese understood that she was being told that she might live as long as he had lived, perhaps longer; that one day her memories might be as vast as his, or perhaps vaster.

Annaliese’s first master kept her under thrall for years, and reshaped her into his willing slave, so that after he removed the thrall she was still almost totally obedient to him. And while he reshaped her mind, he taught her to talk. Or, rather, he used thrall to reshape her brain into a brain that could understand human language and speak; cultivated the growth of new neural networks while pruning them into the shapes he wanted, destroyed old networks that got in the way and repurposed pieces of them, shaped her brain like a bonsai tree. He wasn’t particularly careful or delicate about it, and he destroyed and mangled much of her old human self in the process. Like I said, part of the reason Annaliese doesn’t talk much is that for her human language is associated with a traumatic experience of neural network reshaping; it has unpleasant associations in her brain.

If you asked Annaliese’s first master why he elevated her, he would say that she made an almost perfect thrall, because her human self was almost an empty shell, little more than an animal, close to being a feral child, and he could move almost anything he wanted into the austere and echoing chambers of her almost empty but roomy brain.

————–

When Annaliese’s first master really looked into her mind and saw what her perceptual world was like, he was overjoyed. He showed her what his perceptual world was like, that his sense of smell was better than a human’s, but much weaker than hers, and he told her that his perceptual world was typical for vampires, and her superior sense of smell made her special, and valuable. He kept for a time and used her, and then he sold her on to a more powerful vampire lord who paid him handsomely for her. Annaliese spent the next three quarters of a century or so as a thrall of one powerful vampire or another, being traded around among them, passing from hand to hand, master or mistress to master or mistress. She was a thrall of six different vampires in that time. Every time she was sold, she was thralled to her new master or mistress and re-conditioned for loyalty to her new master or mistress. It… didn’t leave her much of a stable self. Her masters and mistresses found various uses for her nose.

She could detect in people’s body odors secret feelings that they were keeping out of their faces and voices and body language. Not perfectly, only a few simple emotions could be detected in body odor (excitement, fear, stress, sexual arousal…), but it was enough for it to be an ability worth exploiting to most of her masters and mistresses. They’d often have her be in a room with people they were dealing with, and have her report to them later any secret feelings she detected in their body odors. This was what her masters and mistresses most often used her for.

Sometimes they’d use her as a kind of bloodhound. Not as a direct combatant; Annaliese is physically feeble by vampire standards. Oh, by mere human standards, she is strong; she could win a wrestling match against the blacksmith in the village of her childhood, whose strength awed her when she was a little girl. But by vampire standards, she is feeble. But she could lead the real hunters to what they were seeking, she could go with the real warriors and sniff out hidden enemies, sniff out a hidden escape tunnel by the smell of water and earth and forest wafting up from it, sniff out certain traps, follow the scent of escaped enemies and guide the chase.

One of her masters had a charitable streak, and would lend her to a human doctor, who would discretely use her to diagnose diseases in his patients.

One of her mistresses would lend her to her rich human women friends as, basically, a birth control device. Annaliese can smell what stage of her ovulation/menstrual cycle a woman is on, when she’s ovulating and when she’s nearing ovulation. It’s very easy! It’s one of the most dramatically obvious parts of a reproductive age woman’s scent profile! It took her a little trial and error to work out the six day sperm viability window around ovulation, but once she did she could pretty reliably tell these women when it was and wasn’t safe for them to have sex with men if they wanted to avoid pregnancy. These women were… happy about what she was doing for them and grateful to her, in a way she enjoyed. Vampire lords and ladies rarely showed that sort of gratitude to a thrall. One of the women Annaliese helped in this way a few times talked wistfully about how much better she thought the world would be if only all women had Annaliese’s sense of smell.

Of course, one of the things Annaliese’s masters and mistresses often did with her was try to make more like her. Annaliese was made to sire a considerable number of new vampires. Her superior sense of smell didn’t always pass on the childe, but more often than not it did. For some reason it seems to pass more reliably to women than to men; once that was noticed it was exploited to produce more vampires like her with more reliability. Annaliese has no idea what’s become of the dozens of vampires she was made to sire before 1917; sometimes she wonders about them; what sort of people they are now, what their lives are like now, if they’re even still alive.

In 1917, Annaliese and the vampire who was her master then were caught in the Russian revolution. The great Russian vampire clans had a good blood farm going under the Tsar, so they mostly sided with the Whites. They would have a reconciliation with the new regime and a resurgence later, but for now, as the new Soviet Union waged war against the Whites, it also waged a secret war against Russian vampirekind. Her master lost just about everything, and was reduced to trying to make it to the German border on foot, Annaliese in tow, with the two of them carrying all the worldly goods he had left on their persons. In Germany there was another branch of his clan who he hoped would take him in and give him a place of honor and authority among them. They moved slowly and carefully through the countryside, avoiding Red Army patrols, resting by day and moving by night as much as possible, a few times pausing to drink dry some unlucky peasant or Red Army soldier. Her master complained bitterly about how the Revolution had ruined everything. One day they attacked two isolated Red Army soldiers, thinking to score a bigger than usual blood meal, and ran into an unexpected difficulty.

Ordinarily crosses and other sacred symbols don’t harm vampires, but sometimes, in the hands of a special kind of person, they can. Annaliese had a few times had the experience of her and her master or mistress having trouble with some priest or pious villager who could hold them off with a cross, burn them with holy water, make a house with an icon corner a place they could not enter, drive them back with a prayer. Her master thought targeting Red Army soldiers would minimize the risks of this; the communists were atheists, after all. Imagine his surprise when they encountered a Red Army soldier who could hold her master off and drive him back with a Red Star as if it were a cross, and who could make her master’s ears and eyes and nose and mouth bleed and send him screaming to his knees covering his ears with his hands by quoting Marx and Lenin at him.

Anti-vampire powers of this sort are… tricky. It’s an interaction, between the sort of person the human is and the sort of person the vampire is. Annaliese was not surprised the first time a man was able to drive her back with a cross; she understood the logic by which crosses, holy water, prayers, icons, and so on might hurt vampires. It was comprehensible to her as simple purity logic; they were sacred (clean), and she was unholy (dirty). Her life had not primed her to think of it in terms of the vampire as a living symbol of abuse and exploitation which could be harmed by directing at it a sufficiently passionate and heartfelt symbolic rejection of what it represented. To Annaliese the Red Star was simply an army symbol, like any other, and the things the soldier was saying were simply some strange words she didn’t understand very well. She didn’t see and hear them and recognize a threat to her way of life and a rejection of her way of being. And therefore they caused her no pain, and they did not harm her at all. And it simply confused and frightened her that they were able to make her master scream and bleed and drive her master to his knees. And with her master on his knees, too weakened and in too much pain to fight or run, the soldier shot her master point-blank in the cranium with his rifle, and it was a certain and instant death blow even to a vampire, and her master died. Her master was now dead, and for the first time in more than three quarters of a century, Annaliese was free.

It didn’t really occur to her at the time. She was mostly just confused and frightened, and she ran away, and as she ran the soldiers shot after her and shot her three times. She managed to run away from them, and found shelter in a barn.

If Annaliese had been a strong vampire, like Elle or Gemma, her gunshot wounds would have healed in minutes. But Annaliese is a feeble vampire. It took Annaliese three days to heal. Three days in which Annaliese lay in the barn crying in pain and fear and confusion like a hurt child. It hurt so much, and she was so cold, and she had a dreadful appreciation for how alone she was now, and she had no clear idea of what to do now, and she could feel herself getting thirstier as the healing drained her metabolic reserves.

When her healing was basically finished the young man of the peasant family who kept the barn came in and found Annaliese, and he had a rifle and he pointed it at her, and Annaliese burst into tears at the idea that he might shoot her and fill her belly with lead and then she’d have to go through the misery of the last three days all over again, and she begged, “Please sir, don’t hurt me!”

The young man looked over Annaliese’s clothes and said, “Are you rich?”

Annaliese smiled a little and said, “I used to be. Not anymore.”

The young man took pity on her, and led her to the little izba where he lived with his parents and his wife and his children, and the family took pity on her and gave her some soup. It was just human food, and not even hearty human food, not a bite of meat in it, mostly just potatoes and water, but it was better than starvation. And she could smell the malnutrition on them, and she suspected from the furtively envious way they sometimes looked at her as she ate that they’d given her more than they usually allowed themselves to eat in one meal. She supposed they must have recognized that she was even more wretched and vulnerable than them. And after she ate she thanked them and left their house and wandered away.

Three days later, Annaliese went into a forest and there she expelled some small unabsorbed remnant of that meal from the other end of her digestive system. And as she looked down at what had come out of her, she noticed that there were three bullets in it. She supposed it was a logical way for her body to rid itself of them. Shivering with revulsion at digging her fingers into that, she nonetheless dug them out and examined them, intrigued by these foreign things that had entered her and caused her so much pain. She examined the damage on them, the scratches and deformations where she supposed they must have struck bone. She wondered if she’d be able to smell blood or gunpowder on them, but they mostly just reeked of shit. She restored her clothing to walking-around order and carried the bullets to a thickly ice-lidded stream, and she punched her way through the ice and washed her hands and the bullets in the finger-numbing cold water beneath it. The water was the sort of cold that made her hands ache when immersed in it. When the bullets were clean she dried them out with a scrap of cloth she kept on her for drying her hands after washing them, and she put them in one of her pockets. She wanted to keep them. They meant survival.

For Annaliese, her next month of freedom was the most miserable of her life. She spent it almost feral, wandering through the forests and fields, resting a little while in a barn or a ruined house or something if she was lucky, usually with no shelter at all. She was so cold and so alone and so thirsty. It was the beginning of winter, Russian winter, and Annaliese is a feeble vampire, she felt the cold, almost like a human would. Feeding was… a problem. She’d participated in the fatal exsanguination of many humans, under the command of one master or mistress or another, but now, in freedom, she found that something in her mind recoiled from the idea of drinking up all the blood in a child or an old person (those would be the easiest prey) and leaving their bloodless corpse to freeze in the snow, to be found by some passer-by, or worse, by their family.

She tried drinking from cows under cover of night, but for her cow blood was clearly vastly inferior food to human blood; she was thirsty again in a day or two. Once she sneaked up to some poor bony cow under cover of night, and in the darkness she sank her fangs into its reeking neck and drank and drank and drank, drank to the limits of her capacity, drank until her belly was distended like she was a great bloated leech, until she sensed another swallow would trigger vomiting and she was in pain from how swollen her stomach was. She must have swallowed gallons of its blood; she’d pushed the superhuman distension capacity of her vampire stomach to its very limit. And then she ran away with the great weight and pressure in her belly, and beneath the stars, in a patch of forest, she squatted down and exposed her middle parts to the icy night air and slowly urinated out all the excess water, and as that happened she was crying, sobbing from the pain of her stomach being so swollen. It hurt so much, and it had tasted awful too, and her legs and hips and whole body became uncomfortable with the effort of staying in a squatting position for so long while she slowly pissed out gallons of excess water. And it… it felt wrong going into her, it was from a creature too unlike her, it was full of cowness, there was something in it like… food that couldn’t be digested and passed in one end and out the other, but it was energy, energy she was rejecting and sending back out of her because she had to, like she was rejecting so much of the water she’d taken from it.

Blood is lousy food in conventional chemical terms; whatever lets a vampire keep going for weeks on a few liters of human blood, it clearly isn’t conventional chemistry. Prevailing theory is that vampires are actually thaumatovores, that the blood is just a transfer medium by which they ingest their true food, which is some sort of less tangible life essence…

She was thirsty again in four days.

There wasn’t much human food around either. The humans were hungry too.

So she ambushed and took blood from two humans; from a boy child and an old woman. But she left both of them alive, made sure to leave enough blood in them for them to survive and fully recover. Even though their blood was thin, and she couldn’t take very much without risking real harm to them, because they were hungry too, and the child just didn’t have very much blood in him, because he was so small. Annaliese never killed anyone in the months that she was free, and she’s a little proud of that. Still, she was miserable; cold and thirsty and lonely and afraid. And then she got an idea.

She went back to the family whose barn she’d stayed in while her gunshot wounds healed. And she knocked on the door, and when the young man of the house answered she said, “Please, you were kind to me once, I’m very hungry, can I just have one more meal, and one night in your home, out of the cold, and maybe breakfast tomorrow too?”

And the young man called his mother and father over, and they looked over Annaliese, and saw how she was wearing the same clothes she’d worn when they last saw her, and how her clothing had deteriorated, and they saw the thirst on her and thought it was hunger, and they took pity on her, and let her in. And when the old woman and her daughter-in-law cooked soup for that night, Annaliese offered to help them, and when the soup was almost finished while they weren’t looking she aligned herself so her body hid what her arms were doing from others, and she…

If Annaliese had been properly taught how vampires usually work, she’d never have tried this. With typical vampire blood thrall doesn’t work with stored blood; the social stuff is the first to go; it needs to be taken direct from the vein! But Annaliese had never been told this. Annaliese didn’t know this. So Annaliese had the idea that if she cut her wrist and bled into the soup, when the family ate the soup her blood would make them her thralls.

So Annaliese bled into the soup, and nobody noticed, and that night the family and Annaliese ate together and talked, and Annaliese slowly ate her soup and black bread and waited anxiously, her stomach a little queasy with uncertainty, waited for…

It worked! They were thralled! She could feel it! It involves connection and she’d experienced it many times, she knew the sensation. Of course, she’d always experienced it as the thrall before, this was her first time experiencing it as the mistress; it was recognizable but different; she was at the other end of the gradient this time; before motivation had flowed from the other to her, now it was flowing from hertothem. Annaliese being Annaliese, the metaphor that suggested itself to her was a visual one: she was a mountain glacier in the time of spring snowmelt, sparkling and softening in the bright spring sun, and they were endorheic lakes at the mountain’s base, and the thrall was at once the mountain that raised her above them, and the spring sun that warmed the edges of her and sent them flowing downward, and the cold clear streams of meltwater that flowed down the mountain and brought the waters of her into those lakes, so that they could be changed by the waters of her.

Time to test her control, to give her first command!

She sent an image into their minds of the old man fetching his old balalaika and starting to play it and sing one of the songs she found in his memories, and the young man jumping on top of the table and dancing to the tune on the table, and the others clapping their hands in synchrony again and again for accompaniment and singing the song with the old man. And in the image she made them all happy, having forgotten their worries and cares while they danced and played and sang, and she showed them enough of her own feelings about this image to make them understand that she wanted them to truly be happy, very happy, not just to act happy.

And she watched in a kind of wonder as the family acted out the scene she had shown them. And she could feel through her connection to them that they really were happy, very happy. Though in some of them there was a little anxiety bubbling under the surface, because it was strange that they’d gotten so happy so suddenly, and they didn’t trust that. And she reached out to them and soothed down that anxiety, made it disappear, so that they were simply happy.

Now she sent an image of the young man’s wife jumping up onto the table with him, and the two of them dancing on the table together. And again, the family acted out the scene she had shown them. And they were all very happy, and she was happy that she’d made them happy, and she smiled, a smile that showed her teeth (fangs retracted, of course! she didn’t want to frighten them!) and started to clap her hands together in synchrony with them. Then she noticed an anxiety bubbling at the back of some of their minds that the table might break, so she sent an image of the dancers dismounting from the table and returning to their seats, and they obeyed.

And then she explained to the family what she needed from them. She showed them her thirst, and she sent images of herself drinking from them. And through images and emotions and sensations she explained that she would only take enough from them to keep herself alive and healthy, and with the burden of feeding her divided among the eight of them this would not seriously harm them. She showed them what being drunk from by a vampire felt like and what the after-effects of being not very heavily drunk from were, so they’d know what to expect and not be too scared. She showed them images of what they could expect their near-term future to be like; very much like before, the work of the farm would continue, she would not eat very much of their human food because she had their blood, the grandparents would still get to lie in their comfortable place on top of the great masonry stove at night and have their bones warmed. She showed them herself doing women’s tasks, and then she showed them her strength, which was like that of a very strong man, and she showed them herself doing the work of a strong man while the neighbors weren’t watching, so they would understand that she would contribute. And then she showed them an image of the young man of the family as he was in that moment, and she showed them an image of herself going up to him and drinking from him, and through images and sensations and emotions she reassured them that what she would do would not seriously harm him, that he would only need some time to rest and recover afterward and then he would be fine. And then she went up to the young man of the family, and he lifted his head so she could bite his neck more easily, and she drank from him. She tried to do it in such a way that the blood high factor would hit his brain quickly, so her fangs would not cause him too much pain. And when she had taken what she needed from him, she helped him drink some water and relieve himself and climb into bed, and she sent feelings of sleepiness and contentment and safety into his mind, so he fell asleep quickly. And Annaliese felt full, and safe, and content.

A month passed. One cold but sunny day Annaliese sent the young man of the family (Alexei, his name was Alexei) to a nearby town to buy some needful things. And he came back earlier than she expected, and carrying a large pack she hadn’t sent him with, and with a woman walking behind him. They stopped at the door, and the woman knocked, and Annaliese opened it. And Annaliese breathed in the woman’s scent, and the woman’s scent was the scent of a vampire. And Annaliese could see the woman’s nostrils flare a little, and hear her sharp deep intakes of breath, and knew the woman was sampling Annaliese’s scent too. The ordinary vampire sense of smell isn’t anywhere near as good as Annaliese’s, but it’s good enough for them to distinguish their own kind from humans by body odor.

And the woman said, “Hail, Sister and Mistress! I found your thrall in the marketplace, and I took the liberty of taking control of him, so he would lead me back to you, and I also took the liberty of refreshing myself from him, for I was thirsty. May I, your Sister, enter your demesne?”

Her demesne!

Annaliese let the woman come inside, and they told each other who they were, their stories. The woman was a prominent member of one of the great Russian vampire clans, but many of her clan had been killed by the Reds and the rest scattered. There was a branch of her clan in England who had promised her refuge and a place of prominence and honor among them, if she could make it to the border, so now she was fleeing west, by herself, with only what she could carry (so that was what the big pack was). She seemed to pity Annaliese a little when she heard Annaliese’s story, and admire her a little; she congratulated Annaliese on her survival and her resourcefulness, and on how thoroughly she’d subjugated Alexei. She said when she’d looked into Alexei’s mind she’d seen that Alexei actually kind of genuinely liked Annaliese and pitied her and might almost have willingly given his blood to her even without the thrall; really remarkably good job considering how little experience Annaliese had in subjugating and managing blood cows!

Annaliese gestured at Alexei and asked, “Can I have him back, please? He is mine, after all.” And Annaliese’s guest assented. Annaliese went outside, to where she kept a pot of her blood that she had allowed to freeze in the cold of deep winter. And she came back inside with some chunks of her frozen blood in a bowl. And she filled another bowl with left-over soup from last night, and dropped her frozen blood into it, and made a small fire, and heated the soup so that her blood melted into it. Her guest smelled the blood, and asked Annaliese what she was doing, and Annaliese said she was preparing the dose of her own blood that she’d use to re-establish her control over Alexei. Her guest asked how old that blood was, and Annaliese said she’d last had her thralls bleed her sixteen days ago.

Her guest laughed at her and said with some pity and some anger that Annaliese thought might be on Annaliese’s behalf rather than directed at her, “You poor, silly girl! Didn’t your sire teach you anything? It doesn’t work like that! Blood’s no good for thrall after it’s been frozen or stored! For thrall, the blood needs to be straight from your body, still warm from the heat of your body!”

Annaliese was confused. But this was how she’d always done it! It had always worked before! She’d been keeping her humans thralled this way for a month now! They didn’t like drinking her blood directly, it was less unpleasant for them to take her blood mixed into their food, and they didn’t have fangs to drink properly with and she didn’t want to have to cut herself every day.

And now her guest began to look at Annaliese with a kind of wonder and a kind of acquisitiveness. That really works for you? You can do that?

Annaliese assured her that it did, and suggested she just watch. And when the blood soup was a good temperature, Annaliese held it out to Alexei along with a spoon, and asked her guest to order him to drink it, to re-establish Annaliese’s control over him. Her guest ordered Alexei to consume the blood soup, and Alexei drank up the liquid and handed the bowl back to Annaliese with the few bits of potato and vegetable uneaten, and Annaliese handed the bowl and the spoon over to one of Alexei’s daughters take care of them. And her guest looked between Annaliese and Alexei in a kind of wonder as she felt Alexei become Annaliese’s thrall instead of hers…

Annaliese was quietly horrified when she looked into Alexei’s mind through the thrall connection and saw how callously her guest had treated him. She’d drunk far too much from him! And then she’d driven him like a cruel man drives a tired horse with the whip, made him walk mile after mile back to the farm from town even though he was weak from blood loss, overridden the limiters that ordinarily kept a human from hurting themselves through over-exertion, filled his limbs with hysterical strength so he would keep walking. She’d even made him carry a heavy pack of her things the whole way! He was in agony! His head felt at once hollow from light-headedness and filled with molten pain, and his mouth and throat burned with a need for water, and all the muscles he used to hold himself up and walk were aflame with muscle soreness. She immediately put an image of him lying on the bed and relaxing in his mind, and as he did that she put images in his mind and in the minds of the rest of his family of him resting in the bed while the others tended to him and she made them understand that something had happened to him that had weakened him severely and that he would need time to recover from and that he would not be doing any work, would not be doing anything but lying down and eating and drinking and unburdening himself of his wastes, for at least a few days. She also put some images in their minds of them talking to him and comforting him, so they’d know it was alright with her if they did that, and he wouldn’t be too bored or too lonely while he recovered.

That evening her guest ate dinner with Annaliese and her thralls; it was just human food, and the food of a poor family, but it would have to do, and Anneliese apologized pre-emptively to her guest that, as she could see, Annaliese’s demesne was poor. Her guest was displeased that the meal had no meat in it, and wanted Annaliese to order her thralls to slaughter the cow she’d seen in their pen, and Annaliese let just a little pleading come into her voice as she said, “Sister, it’s their only cow.” Her guest didn’t press the issue, and together they finished their soup and black bread. Annaliese didn’t feel too guilty or embarrassed; her guest couldn’t be very hungry so soon after taking all that blood from Alexei! After dinner they had a little of the grandfather’s precious vodka, which Annaliese spared a little of so she could give something nice to her guest, who was, after all, an important person, and used to wealth. That night her guest assumed, with the reflexive entitlement of a person used to privilege, that she and Annaliese would take the nice warm place on top of the stove, and Annaliese said, “Sister, I don’t mean to be inhospitable, but please, let the old humans have it, they need it more than we do.” For a few moments Annaliese feared her guest might make a dispute of the matter, but her guest acceded to Annaliese’s right as a Sister and a Lady to manage her demesne as she saw fit (it was the most pathetic demesne her guest had ever seen, but Annaliese was free and had thralls and a demesne, and her guest was for the moment a homeless wandering refugee without followers; under the circumstances not treating Annaliese with respect seemed to her guest like throwing stones from a glass house).

Annaliese’s guest stayed with Annaliese for a while, curious to learn more about Annaliese’s atypically long-lasting thrall factor by watching how Annaliese used it.

Annaliese was happy to show her guest the blood extraction and storage methods she’d figured out. She was a little proud of her own cleverness! The extraction method was a modified version of a procedure some of her previous masters and mistresses had used to extract blood from humans for adding to food served at boss vampire banquets. It was a little like the technique the Maasai use for extracting blood from cattle (though Annaliese did not have that reference at the time). The old man of the family had some practice doing something similar to cattle, so with her guest watching she had him do the cutting and closing of the wound, while Alexei’s wife held the pot to collect the blood. She’d had Alexei do the cutting and wound-care the previous times, because he’d bled cattle too and his eyes were better and his hands were steadier, but Alexei was still in bed-rest that day, so Alexei’s father had to do. Alexei’s father had done this with cattle more than a few times but found it more than a little disturbing to do it to a person, and Alexei’s wife found it more than a little scary to watch the blood gush from Annaliese’s neck like that, so while they were doing the procedure Annaliese reached out into their minds through the thrall connection and soothed down their discomforts and anxieties. The wound the procedure made on Annaliese was small and healed in less than a day, and the procedure yielded enough blood to keep the family in thrall for weeks. After Alexei’s father finished closing and bandaging her wound, Annaliese covered the pot, took it outside, and put it in a secure place where animals couldn’t get to it. There she left it to freeze in the cold of deep winter; frozen so, her blood would last and last, remain effective for putting and keeping people in thrall for… she didn’t know how long, she hadn’t discovered a limit, it took around eighteen days for the stored blood to be used up so at least that long. Annaliese winced a little looking forward to spring, when this wouldn’t be an option anymore, and she’d have to bleed herself in smaller amounts every day or three; some experimentation had shown that was about the limit for how long her blood stayed useful for keeping people in thrall if it was stored where the heat of the stove kept it warm.

Afterward she drank from Alexei’s mother and his wife and his thirteen year old daughter (his oldest child), to restore what she’d just lost. Being bled like that did take a lot out of her! She didn’t drink from Alexei’s father because she wanted his brain and hands as steady as possible if her wound re-opened - with her very fast-clotting and hard-clotting vampire blood it probably wasn’t a big danger, but better safe than sorry! And she didn’t drink from Alexei because, well, he was still recovering from how much her guest took out of him!

Annaliese’s guest stayed with her for a couple of weeks, and then made a proposition. She said Annaliese’s nose and long shelf-life thrall factor would make Annaliese valuable to her and valuable to the surviving intact branch of her clan in England. She proposed that Annaliese become her thrall, and come with her to England. The English branch of her clan had promised her a place of importance and wealth and honor among them, and if Annaliese would be her thrall, in England she’d keep Annaliese in comfort; in England, as her thrall, Annaliese would live well, and have all the blood she wanted. She promised she’d be a kind mistress to Annaliese.

Annaliese’s experience of freedom was not one that inclined her to value it much. After a month of being cold and lonely and afraid and thirsty and living like an animal and another month and a half of living like an early twentieth century Russian peasant, the idea of being kept in the household of a rich woman, of being warm and comfortable and well-fed and cared for, was quite appealing to Annaliese. And so Annaliese breathed, “Thank you, Mistress,” and drank from her guest’s neck, and became her thrall.

—————

Annaliese takes some comfort from the probability that the family she thralled was, in the end, not much harmed by her encounter with them. Annaliese and her new mistress left them two days after her new mistress thralled Annaliese. Before leaving, her new mistress had Annaliese alter their memories, make them forget about the blood-drinking and the thrall and remember Annaliese only as an ordinary unfortunate wandering young woman they had taken pity on and taken in for a while. And then Annaliese and her new mistress began walking to the west, and they left the family behind in their little house, to wait for the thrall to fade from them. Annaliese felt the thrall connections thin and weaken and break, the little rivulets carrying the waters of her down into them dry up. Good. They had their free will back now. They could make lives of their own. In freedom Annaliese had not killed anyone and had not permanently harmed anyone. She could say that truthfully.

Annaliese supposes somebody must have taught her something like human morality at some point between her transition and 1917, but she doesn’t remember who, or how. That’s not surprising. She often loses memories during the thrall brainwashing. Sometimes her new master or mistress will deliberately erase some of her memories, as part of resculpting her personality. Sometimes memories are lost as a side effect of reshaping other neural networks. The human brain - and the vampire brain - is a messily interconnected thing. A memory is a knotty, fractal tangle suspended inside a dense root network of associations and other memories, and the knotty fractal tangle-nodes that are memories grow around and through each other like the roots and branches of neighboring trees. The brain, like the body in general, isn’t plug-and-play, isn’t designed for easy modification. Thrall brainwashing is like taking knives and pruning shears and a chainsaw and strategic local applications of fertilizer to those fantastically interconnected and complicated and delicate neural networks; cutting here and there, creating a bloom of rapid chaotic growth here and there and shaping them like a bonsai trees. Even done with the greatest delicacy, there is inevitably disruption beyond the desired personality changes themselves. And Annaliese’s masters and mistresses were often… not delicate. She knows much has been lost. She can perceive many places of cutting in her mind, like the stumps on a tree where branches have grown and then been cut or broken away.

Annaliese wonders, sometimes, about what sort of lives the people in that family had after she left them. The youngest child might have lived until around the turn of the twenty-first century, given normal human lifetimes.

Annaliese and her new mistress began their journey to the west together in the early morning, but they did most of their travelling in the dark. The day belonged to the Reds. The night belonged to them.

Before long they were in England, and settled down in an estate of the English branch of her new mistress’s clan, and her new mistress got seriously down to the business of reshaping Annaliese into her willing slave. That was by now a familiar experience to Annaliese; this was the seventh time she was reshaped so.

Annaliese’s new mistress kept her promises to Annaliese. Annaliese was valuable to her, for her nose, and for her long shelf-life super-thrall. Annaliese’s new mistress found a number of uses for Annaliese’s superior sense of smell and superior long shelf-life thrall factor. Annaliese was valuable to her new mistress, so Annaliese was kept in comfort. Of course, as with most of her past masters and mistresses, one of the things Annaliese’s new mistress wanted to do with her was to make more like her. Annaliese’s new mistress made Annaliese participate in the siring of more than a few new vampires, a few times as a sole direct sire, but more often as a co-sire with her mistress, the two of them mixing their blood in the new vampire and thereby creating a vampire with a mix of both of their traits and a direct bloodline claim on belonging to her mistress’s clan. Many of the childe vampires Annaliese was made to produce in this period inherited her superior sense of smell and superior thrall factor, so soon Annaliese was not so valuable to her mistress anymore. But Annaliese’s new mistress was not amoral; she had some definite ideas about right and wrong; they were different from mainstream human morality and some of them would have horrified most humans, but she had them; she’d made Annaliese promises, and she kept those promises.

Annaliese stayed with this mistress in England longer than she stayed with any other master or mistress except Elle; stayed with her almost fifty years, from around the beginning of the 1920s to some time in the 1960s. But eventually, when Annaliese was no longer so indispensable to her mistress, a time came when her mistress decided the greatest remaining benefit she could get out of Annaliese was the price she might fetch if she was sold to another boss vampire. And so, some time in the 1960s, Annaliese was introduced to somebody who looked like a young woman, and told that this woman was called Elle, and this woman would be Annaliese’s new mistress.

Elle looked like a twenty-something woman, but Annaliese could smell that she was a vampire, and that she was much older. Vampire old doesn’t smell like human old, it’s not a rotting, but there is a real change and Annaliese can smell it, it’s a… complexification, like the difference between a new growth forest and an old growth forest; the older a vampire is the more time they’ve had to accumulate a diverse ecosystem of microscopic parasites and symbiotes and commensals inside them, and that changes their scent. It’s not a reliable clock, because it also depends on how much the vampire has travelled and who they interact with and what they’ve been eating and how much time they’ve spent in bacteria-rich environments and so on, but Annaliese can often smell when a vampire has gotten older than any human ever gets, and when they’ve gotten truly ancient, giant redwood tree old. Elle wasn’t ancient, wasn’t thousand year old vampire old, but Annaliese could smell that she was older than any human ever gets, she guessed she was at least similar to Annaliese’s own age, maybe older.

And soon enough the day came when the transfer of loyalty was to happen, when Annaliese was to be thralled to her new mistress. And she was brought into a room with Elle, and Elle opened a couple of the top buttons on her shirt and moved the fabric aside a little to expose her smooth pale skin, so Annaliese could bite and drink more easily.

It was a familiar process to Annaliese by then; she’d gone through it six times before by then. Her mistress had ordered her to submit to it, and Annaliese was incapable of rebelling against that; the thrall brainwashing didn’t leave room for significant rebellion against her mistress, and once she was thralled to Elle the thrall wouldn’t leave room for significant rebellion against her reshaping. But by now Annaliese had developed a strong “Oh, I hate this part…” attitude toward being resculpted for loyalty to her latest master or mistress. It always destroyed pieces of her personality, and she didn’t like that. She’d learned how to preserve as much of herself as she could through the process, to cling to and protect cherished memories and attitudes and thoughts; she’d gotten rather good at that by the time she was thralled to Elle, because by that point she had a lot of practice at it (preserving as much continuity of self as possible through thrall brainwashing is to Annaliese what falling is to Viv).

But, of course, that was the only rebellion Annaliese could do at this point. So when Elle opened her shirt and leaned to give Annaliese easier access to her smooth pale neck, Annaliese obediently bit her and began to drink. And as she did that Elle held the back of Annaliese’s head, to support it a little, help her drink more easily, and as she did that Elle said, “You’re very docile,” and strangely, Elle sounded sad.

—————–

Elle is… not exactly young for a vampire. Older than Annaliese. Born and transitioned some time in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Vampires functionally don’t age on human historic timescales, but vampire society is violent, and was more violent a century or two ago; four or five centuries is a respectable age for a vampire, it means you’re a survivor, one way or another you’ve managed to avoid being killed longer than most. But Elle spent most of the time since her transition as a thrall; by the 1960s she’d only been free, been her own person, for a little over a century. And vampire longevity is very much a superstar economy; the powerful and influential vampires tend to be old, with the feedback loop running both ways; power and influence gets you relative safety and therefore longevity, and if you’ve managed to survive more than a few centuries you’ve probably got some kind of advantage going for you, whether it’s unusual abilities or sheer strength or social intelligence or connections or something else or some combination of things. By big boss vampire standards, Elle is young, and has the will to change things that young people tend to have. Boss vampires tend to be conservative in the way that old and privileged people often are; they’ve got things more-or-less the way they like them, and they’re not hugely motivated to change things, and they’re aware that they could easily lose much more than they gain from change. Oh, of course they almost all want more power, money, status, and followers, and jockey with each other for those things, they almost all have grandiose plans in the back of their minds in approximately the way a lot of humans have “maybe one day I’ll win the lottery” or “some day I’ll figure out a way to get rich” in the back of their minds (part plan, part daydream), but… the vampire world tends toward a sort of violent stasis; lots of violent jockeying between the various boss vampires in which lots of thralls and low-level minions get killed, but serious cha

summercurial:

dorley new chapter thoughts

hmm. aaronstef good. because im still mostly straight and the dorley girls arent allowed to be butch anyway theres still a little part of me hoping cis!aaron/stef is endgame. i mean, this has been pretty damn fluffy so far, idk how shes gonna pull off the genuine transing of aaron, who we dont really hate, and was clearly pretty easy to reform. i think she might do it by just making them all basically cis-by-default rather than actually cis and therefore unusually okay with it, but it SHOULD be ridiculously horrific and traumatizing. speaking of stefships, is she supposed to be like…asexual? i feel like she hasnt internally expressed attraction to *anyone*, which is like, kind of weird

i feel like the intended emotion w/ the christian sections is like…being happy for her? but like. everyone there is terrible. i do not like them. idk, maybe the intended goal is to make it clear to us *why* nobody destroys dorley, its really really nice being post-dorley if youre the right kind of person. i really like that stef is, at least so far, totaly un brainwashed, like, her option is help dorley or *die* and she still feels like maybe she shouldnt help dorley. i cant tell how uncomfortable were supposed to be. every time they laugh or make a little joke about what theyre doing to the boys in the basement my skin crawls

ANYWAY the feminist framing of dorley is a really funny bit. like. surely all of the graduates are aware that dorley in no way advances the goals of feminism

oh also do we think declan really isnt dead? i was surprised and annoyed when we didnt see what happened to him last chapter. i guess it makes sense, its one of the only open questions the story still has, but like. i wanna know!

also ok, this is like, my own weird issues, but i find the constant talk about how conventionally beautiful and passing they are kind of annoying. idk, transness is like…okay, your statistically average trans girl looks different from your statistically average cis girl, and that doesnt have to be a bad thing, yknow? like whatever i dont wanna psychoanalyze the author or whatever but it FEELS like this fixation on amabs achieving normative cis beauty comes from a place of idk…not self hate exactly, but a lack of self love. especially cuz like, ive looked at a lot of FFS pics and the results…usually arent that drastic?

final note: i mean. everyone has their own experiences but t blockers generally dont make it so you cant get an erection at ALL, at least not ime. are we supposed to understand that its like. some other cocktail? is it a goserelin thing? i still very much get erections

“idk how shes gonna pull off the genuine transing of aaron, who we dont really hate”

See, this is why I think The Sisters of Dorley works better if you assume it takes place in the same world as Glow, Worm (the same author’s vampire story) and Dorley’s secret sauce is they’ve got a cooperative vampire who can literally smell the trans-adjacency on people and they use a weak version of vampire blood thrall to do the brainwashing. I’m totally transitioning (heh) my fanfic idea to being mostly about this premise and developing elaborate ideas for it, love the idea of really pulling on the trans/vampire parallel and the “being a vampire can be either an analogy for being a trans/queer/neurodivergent person or being a privileged person depending on how you approach it and you can mix both approaches in interesting ways in the same narrative” angle and the fucked up force-fem stuff/fucked up vampire cognitive binding thrall feudalism intersection. Am totally writing up a couple of absurdly long posts outlining vampire OCs for this.

Having vampire blood as their secret sauce might also explain the “they’re all ridiculously gorgeous/pass really well” thing. Like, if they use small doses of vampire blood to help them heal after the surgeries they might be able to get considerably more radical and aggressive with facial feminization, moving tissue around, etc. than ordinary surgeons can. And I’m definitely writing vampires as weirder and more low-key magical than the author does, so maybe there’s even some funky magic process where HRT + vampire blood + identity destabilization synergizes, like it’s subtly but powerfully enhancing what the HRT and surgeries are doing to the body just like the low-level blood thrall is subtly but powerfully enhancing what the cult brainwashing is doing to the mind.

“speaking of stefships, is she supposed to be like…asexual? i feel like she hasnt internally expressed attraction to *anyone*, which is like, kind of weird”

The way Stef coos over how pretty and cool and super-passing people like Christine are definitely reads like attraction to me.

The way I read it… We know that a major component of Stef’s dysphoria is feeling ugly, and also I think they have, like… internalized misandry. Probably ultimately downstream from the dysphoria. It would explain so much about who they instinctively sympathize with and want to have solidarity with! And I could totally see that as things that would synergize, like they don’t want to be the gross ugly bro who inflicts his gross lusts on women and they kind of alieve that being attracted to women at all makes them that guy. So I see Stef as a person who’s attracted to women but has a lot of inhibitions against articulating that attraction in terms of “I want to rail that person.” Like, I think they’re much more comfortable keeping it in terms that would read relatively safe and nonthreatening to a woman who’s uncomfortable with the idea of a (apparent) man feeling open lust toward her. I suspect they might become a lot more comfortable being openly sexual when they’re more-or-less physically post-everything and have an easier time seeing themselves as a woman at the alief level (though even then they’d probably spend years being kind of inhibited and reserved and lesbian sheep syndrome).

“i feel like the intended emotion w/ the christian sections is like…being happy for her? but like. everyone there is terrible. i do not like them.”

Validating to hear I’m not the only one who has something like this reaction.

Yeah, there’s a reason my interpretation of “why would vampires be helping these people?” is “Elle needs the unique hormonal and epigenetic profiles of post-transition trans women to stabilize her powerful but unstable bloodline and produce the cognitively bound vampire thrall army (more like platoon, but, y'know) she needs, but actual trans women aren’t good recruits cause transitioning selects for independent spirit and just full brute force personality reshaping with the thrall breaks things she’d prefer to keep, she values the Dorley experience as a sort of… pre-tenderizing before she goes at them with full-strength thrall, pre-installing features that will be useful to her like a tolerance for cognitive dissonance and moral injury and a capacity for an us-against-the-world ride-or-die relationship with a small cult-like social world and doing it in a slow and more socially integrated way that integrates these features more thoroughly into the original self, allowing her to resculpt them with less force and more control, as far as Elle is concerned Dorley exists so every couple of years Elle can take a particularly promising girl from it and subject her to vampirization and thrall-based cognitive binding, Dorley has a dark(er) companion institution full of Elle’s mind-slaved vampire thralls and both institutions have the same vibe of being a queasy ambiguous mix of a quirky queer women commune and a thing out of a horror story.”

“ANYWAY the feminist framing of dorley is a really funny bit. like. surely all of the graduates are aware that dorley in no way advances the goals of feminism”

It totally makes sense though! Womanhood as simultaneously an embodiment and a political, moral, and aesthetic project! Femininity as redemptive! Transitioning as an act of radical empathy with women and social, political, and emotional re-alignment toward solidarity with women; taking a shitty boy and making him drink his respect women juice by making him a girl! Feminization as a way to take a dangerous man and make him safe for women and other vulnerable people to be around! Probable incredibly fucked up shit at the intersection of “women are naturally nicer and kinder and more peaceful and less rapey” sexist gender essentialism and castration as a technique used by farmers to control aggression in animals and the basement as a carceralist reformatory! The thing I talked about here but instead of the TERF route of they go a trans-accepting radical feminist route where transition is the pathway into true deep sympathy and solidarity with the folk of women! I can totally imagine the kind of shitty feminists who’d think Dorley is a great idea!

“final note: i mean. everyone has their own experiences but t blockers generally dont make it so you cant get an erection at ALL, at least not ime. are we supposed to understand that its like. some other cocktail? is it a goserelin thing? i still very much get erections”

I mentioned this to @in-servo-necessitas in a reply, I felt like it was a much more viscerally effective way of show-not-telling how actually scary and violating being put through something like that might be than the informed attribute mentions of how traumatic the orchi is. Like, if that part of me just mysteriously stopped working that would be a really scary experience for me! And then when he gets some sexual function back it’s in a way that seems likely to be a very discomforting “WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY DOING TO ME?!?” moment if you don’t know or endorse what’s happening to you, like your body has been radically rewired without your consent.

Definitely feels like one point where there’s potential for pulling on the vampire parallel, like I feel like if a vampire was being gradually transitioned (that’s the author’s humor, that’s what vampires call vampirization in their world!) without knowing what was happening to them they might have a similar experience with appetite, as in food. Like, they’d notice that food didn’t taste as good anymore and was somehow unsatisfying and they’d feel like they were starving to death and yet somehow food would increasingly be a thing they’d have to choke down without appetite, and it might be really scary, and then they’d taste some blood…

And I was just yesterday working on a longpost for a vampire OC whose backstory would totally lend itself to this experience. Like, I wanted to do something with the dysphoria tester vampire thrall and I was like “OK, she’s creepy and doesn’t talk much… what if she was originally a non-verbal autistic and her sire used thrall-based neural reshaping to make her able to understand human language and speak as part of cognitively binding her to him but words are still kind of a second language to her, she’s very thinking in pictures, and also she associates words with a traumatic process of nonconsensual radical neural reshaping so she kind of doesn’t like talking? Also since she has unusual abilities maybe another reason she comes off as kind of off is she’s been sold around from one vampire master/mistress to another a bunch of times and re-conditioned each time and her mind is kind of like the face of one of those people who’s had too much cosmetic surgery?” and then I started getting Emotions about her and coming up with a whole tragic backstory for her. And, like, she had an experience of having a gradual human-to-vampire transition while having no idea what was happening to her, so that would have been a perfect place to put in a detail like that, so I kind of wish I’d read this chapter before I wrote about that but I’m too lazy to go back and change it now.

ukulelekatie:

ukulelekatie:

In 2008 I was obsessed with Twilight

In 2015 I was obsessed with Carmilla

In 2022 I’m obsessed with Dracula

Every 7 years like clockwork I go through a vampire phase and I’m not sure what to do with this information

So I wasn’t gonna include 2001 in this post because I was only 4 but then I did some thinking and I decided The Count from Sesame Street should count (haha) as the official vampire blorbo of 2001

!Happy Halloween !* Havent posted in a while.these are my Characters :D Alejandro and Catrina :3 Boo

!Happy Halloween !

* Havent posted in a while.

these are my Characters :D Alejandro and Catrina :3 

Boop


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couples that slay together stay together ⚰️couples that slay together stay together ⚰️

couples that slay together stay together ⚰️


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hypokeimena:

ducktoothcollection:

hypokeimena:

hypokeimena:

i always think it’s so fun to be like ~okay well what keeps a vampire away if you’re not christian :3 would a magen david do it for a jew haha*~ but i do also frankly think it’s like. like… moderately deep sigh. we all KNOW why it’s jsut christianity that keeps the blood-sucking fiends away, right? like we’re all on the same page about what the bottom line here is, right? we all get it? before we have fun and get silly… do we all… like… does everyone actually know why we’re here?

#*it would not bc that’s not how cultural differences work. cannot simply copy-paste jewish necklace over xtian necklace & get same result.

and i have said a lot in the replies of this post that i just want to consolidate but essentially: this is not just that (as in the tag) you can’t just copy paste one symbol with very specific cultural connotations to replace another one with very different ones, this has to do with e g what cultural anxieties vampires embody. so like the vampire is a very literal amalgamation of literal beliefs about jews (that they drink the blood of christians, that they are attempting to infiltrate the upper class or that they are in fact already dispersed invisibly throughout it and thence forth exert undue influence, etc) in addition to other cultural anxieties around (in the case of dracula, eg) reverse colonization and concerns around immigration and xenophobia (…in this case: towards eastern european jews), as well as cultural anxieties around sex and sexuality (…not for nothing but this is often a component of antisemitism from medieval times well into the present day)

so like i think it’s fine to be doing this kind of fun thought exercise it just really feels like it’s missing the point to sit down and be like how would a jew fend off a vampire when a vampire Is a jew, in the sense that a vampire is an embodiment Of antisemitic stereotypes and canards and so forth and so on. the horror of a vampire is “jews exist and are out there, invisibly preying on good christians and trying to infiltrate the echelons of power”; that IS the thing that is overpowered by the crucifix (a sign that christianity Is the true religion). the crucifix is “solving” that cultural anxiety around the jewish by positing the supremacy of the christian. that’s its function in this mythology, which makes it doubly ineffectual to simply replace it 1:1 with a jewish religious symbol - the vampire is inherently an interfaith monster in many ways, it is about (among other things) the interplay between differing religious groups, and any kind of Take has to at least partially take that into effect or at least think about these things.

what does it mean that (for example) willow rosenberg, a jew, put a crucifix on her wall to keep out vampires? there’s something to be said there about assimilation, so like i do Get why it’s more fun to be like, well what if she could just use a magen david instead, right? but that doesn’t in any way grapple with what the Source of the horror of vampires is (i.e. the sexual and religious other who preys on the faithful and can be overpowered by christian religious authority).

imo a more interesting Take is, like, the vampire existing In the social space Of antisemitism; the horror of vampires from a jewish perspective being for example the looming threat of violence and retaliation and antisemitism; being forcibly identified As a monster against your will; seeing the living (un-living) stereotype as what it is and being unable to communicate that. something more in that space.

like, this is not to say that jewish folklore doesn’t have these kinds of undead spirits and monsters - obviously, it does, and i am also interested in vampire Takes that draw more on a jewish worldview and existing folklore. but part of the Fun or Impact of the vampire Is its cultural omnipresence and legibility as an extremely Recognizable kind of monster, and playing with the … underpinnings and understandings Of that very specific cultural, like, milieu… is part of. the fun. so i like a jewish take on vampires i am jsut… less compelled by trying to figure out what the 1:1 jewish equivalent of holy water is than i am by trying to actually tweak on Themes and Resonances

have you read the story “Blood Libel” by Leigh Ann Hussey? I think you would like it. Read it once and now I think about it all the time.

“"As I see it,” [Rabbi] Simcha was saying, “your problem is not that you are nosferatu, but that you are a man alone.”

THIS ROCKS THANK YOU

osatokun:Started to draw both npc and pc characters from our game! Hope to draw more :,3Veronica belosatokun:Started to draw both npc and pc characters from our game! Hope to draw more :,3Veronica belosatokun:Started to draw both npc and pc characters from our game! Hope to draw more :,3Veronica belosatokun:Started to draw both npc and pc characters from our game! Hope to draw more :,3Veronica belosatokun:Started to draw both npc and pc characters from our game! Hope to draw more :,3Veronica belosatokun:Started to draw both npc and pc characters from our game! Hope to draw more :,3Veronica bel

osatokun:

Started to draw both npc and pc characters from our game! 

Hope to draw more :,3
Veronica belongs to @maria-ruta!


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Making pack-specific townies to populate my neighborhoods.  Del Sol Valley || Chloe hair (V1) / @areMaking pack-specific townies to populate my neighborhoods.  Del Sol Valley || Chloe hair (V1) / @are

Making pack-specific townies to populate my neighborhoods. 

Del Sol Valley||Chloe hair (V1)/@arethabee​ 

Mt. Komorebi || Garçon hair/@wistfulpoltergeist

Forgotten Hollow || Andrew hair/@sunivaa​ 

♻️ Evergreen Harbor|| Rachel Amber hair/@thesimsservice​ 


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I paused from working on commissions just to draw Her and I have no regrets

marlynnofmany:

bramstokersdracula:

bramstokersdracula:

bramstokersdracula:

vampire hunter? no i said vampire HAUNTER. this jerk sucked all my blood out so now i spend my afterlife knocking over shelves and scaring off potential victims and just making the castle generally pretty cold

it’s always ‘bleh why are the plates floating’, 'gah who knocked over my blood goblet’ and never 'sorry for killing you’ ok starve then!

and what are you going to do about it? have a priest exorcise the place? yeah good luck with all the crosses and holy water you piece of shit

It’s a lovely morning in the gothic castle, and you are a horrible ghost.

CINEMATIC PAINTINGS:

What We Do in the Shadows (2014), Dir. Taika Waititi & Jemaine Clement

• Cinematography By: Richard Bluck

[8/08/20]

No one except novice wizards, bitch ‍♀️‍♂️

No one except novice wizards, bitch ‍♀️‍♂️


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over the course of a couple nights I just kept getting sidetracked and doodling these (not what I me

over the course of a couple nights I just kept getting sidetracked and doodling these (not what I meant to draw, but there it is)


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