Our story begins in Hungary in 1466. Vlad III Dracula is a captive in the court of his supposed ally, Matthias Corvinus. Like his father before him, Vlad II Dracul, he is a sworn brother of the Order of the Dragon and he had dedicated his life to driving the enemies of Christendom from his beloved Wallachia. He is not an evil man, but he is a driven one. He knows that victory rarely comes to the merciful, and there is no foe less deserving of mercy than Mehmed II, Sultan of the hated Ottoman Turks. To keep Wallachia free from Turkish rule, no sin weighs too heavily on Vlad’s soul. He answers their demands for tribute by nailing their envoys’ turbans to their skulls. Disguised as a Turkish horseman, he infiltrates their camps in the night and slaughters their commanders in their tents. Even Mehmed II himself returns to Constantinople rather than march through a forest of his own impaled dead. It is only when his own traitorous brother Radu the Handsome leads an army of elite Ottoman slave-soldiers against him that Vlad is forced to turn to Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, for assistance. But Matthias has been embezzling the money meant to fund just such a war, so he has Vlad imprisoned under charges of treason.
After a lifetime shaped by betrayal, this is the final straw. After all that he has given for his country, his people, his God, it seems he has been defeated. Dracula screams into the darkness in rage and desperation, and from the darkness, something answers him back. From that cursed compact, the Linea Dracula is born, transforming Vlad and his descendants into undead vampires. For a time, the Linea encompasses only the House of Drăculeşti, the true sons of the dragon, but it is not to remain that way for long…
Ten years later, in 1476, a newly-freed Dracula returns to Wallachia to reclaim his throne. It is at this time that he encounters Stephen V Báthory, prince of Transylvania, the two having first met while fighting a war in Bosnia at Corvinus’ behest. In the catacombs of the Wallachian capitol of Târgoviște, Dracula and Báthory swear an eternal alliance in blood, an oath which obviously carries more weight for the former than the latter. Before the year is up, Dracula is assassinated and his severed head taken to Constantinople as a trophy (his body mysteriously vanishes from its grave, replaced by the bones of a horse), but we are still only beginning the history of the Linea Dracula. It seems that a small part of whatever taint Dracula carried in his blood must have passed to Stephen; when he returns to Transylvania, he is as cruel to his own people as Dracula was to his enemies.
This streak of infernal cruelty follows the Ecsed branch of the House of Báthory. Is it mere coincidence that in 1610, Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed is found to have had over 300 young women brutally tortured to death, but not before she bit chucks of flesh from their bodies and drained them of their blood? Was her belief that bathing in still-warm human blood would sustain her vitality the delusion of a sadistic proto-serial killer, or was she being groomed for a place within the Linea Dracula by undead mentors still honoring their alliance with her ancestor? It is believed that she died in 1614, but in truth, such refined cruelty could not go to perish; she drank deep from the veins of Mircea III Dracul (the most brutal of Vlad III’s grandsons), enough to extinguish any remaining spark of humanity and raise her as a full-blooded Linea vampire. This is how the Wallachian House of Drăculeşti and the Transylvanian House of Báthory, the Dragon and the Wolf, were joined. If you doubt such a connection, then why is it that when Emperor Ferdinand I awarded the Hungarian John Dracula a title of nobility in 1535, the coat of arms he received was that of the Báthory family?
But there is a third branch to unholy trinity that is the Linea Dracula: the Bird. In life, Dracula had sought to undermine the authority of Wallachia’s hereditary nobility and in doing so, he brutally persecuted the Transylvanian Saxons, settlers of German descent. Graf Orlok is believed to have been one of these Saxons, turned by Dracula himself in anticipation of a day when his plans would lead him north to the Germanies. But Dracula’s hatred cursed the Saxon, transforming him into a monstrous thing that spread plague and death with its very presence: the Nosferatu, the Bird of Death.
To full understand the secret history of Europe, we must now look to Austria, to the accursed House of Karnstein that ruled the region known as Styria. Like Dracula, the Karnsteins were afflicted by a dark curse that transformed those of their line into vampires. But where the Linea Dracula was a line of warriors and conquerors, the scions of House of Karnstein were the embodiment of parasitic nobility that drained the very lifeblood from their subjects. To the Linea, lordship required cruelty; to the Karnsteins, cruelty was one of its perks. As the histories of Austria and Hungary became increasingly intertwined, it was inevitable that the two great vampire dynasties would be forced into conflict. That “vampire panics” spiked throughout Central Europe during the mid-18th Century was not mere chance, coinciding with the apex of the vampiric shadow war. Evidently, the House of Karnstein was ruthlessly hunted down and exterminated by the Linea; by 1872, the relatively-young Mircalla (embraced in 1698) was the last remaining Countess Karnstein. Forced to rely on petty subterfuge and trickery to drain the blood from common girls, she was ultimately beheaded by occult investigators (perhaps acting on a tip from one of Dracula’s catspaws) and her remains confiscated by the Hapsburg Monarchy. But as so often happens with these sort of affairs, it would be a mistake to consider her permanently dealt with…
It is unclear at what point Vlad III (now known by history as Vlad Tepes, “The Impaler”) made his return, for he went to great lengths to ensure that it remained a secret. What is known is that by the turn of the 19th Century, the Linea Dracula had set their sights on the rising British Empire. The first indication that a vampiric plot was in motion was the sudden appearance of a mysterious gentleman going by the pseudonym of Lord Ruthven, who attempted to infiltrate the upper echelons of British high society. After a string of prospective fiancés are found dead (only for their bodies to mysteriously vanish), the British Secret Service manages to uncover Ruthven’s vampiric nature, but he vanishes before they can establish any further connections. In 1888, the appearance of an enigmatic Romanian Count unleashes a fresh storm of mysterious deaths across London, the most grisly taking place in the Whitechapel District. By the time British intelligence identifies the vampire king attempting to establish a foothold on their island more than two years later, Dracula is already back in Romania, having been alerted to their plans to assassinate him by assets planted within the government by Ruthven decades prior. He eludes their operatives for another three years; it is only in 1983 that a team of agents manage to infiltrate his Wallachian estate and terminate him, supposedly for good. British intelligence breathes an entirely-undeserved sigh of relief.
[To be continued!]
You took that premise and ran with it hardcore. Bravo.
Holy cow! It lives! You are awesome in so many ways
Cool!