Darane Svatura
Mulengi Dori
Vladislav Taltos lay just inside the necromanteon, his wounds were many and in and of themselves could not kill him. But, since his entrance into Varvara Kale, Vladislav had been plagued by a slowly growing weakness that slowly, but surely relieved him of his strength the way he would liberate a wallet from a Gadjo. Worse still, his luck had turned sour, worse than bad, he knew as one of the People, that he labored beneath a potent curse. His decision to plunder the Tzimisce's fortress in Gabrovo Grad had been ill conceived. Although he had been warned by the Roma who skirted the place that it was a place of death, he had never imagined that the tall tales told around the Kumpania's fire, might actually be true. The fortress had been a work in progress for some time, over five years, and it was hardly a ancient ruin.
At the time, he had thought it simply a monument raised to the ego of a particularly rich and demented fiend, but now, he realized he had been wrong, dead wrong. Beyond the archway that led into the central room of the necromanteon, less than a foot from where Vladislav lay crouched in slowly growing agony, dozens, perhaps hundreds of animated corpses silently waited. In the still, cold air of the tomb beneath the castle, their stink was omnipresent and reminded Vladislav of the fate that awaited him soon. Like so many of the devices he had brought into Varvara Kale, his favorite silver pocket-watch had stopped and he could only guess the time, but his vampiric instincts told him it wasn't long before dawn, no more than an hour. After all these centuries, with less than an hour of unlife still available to him, Vladislav considered his very long life. Most of all, he missed his sire. But there were many who he longed to see again, when he crossed over into the land of the dead. Over the centuries how many friends and family had he lost? Vladislav could no longer count or enumerate them all. A growing part of him was coming into acceptance of his upcoming death, and in ways normal to mortals at least, that part was relishing the possibility of rest, final rest and reuniting with lost loves.
But, the beast inside him would not relent, anger grew from a spark of rage at the injustice of his plight. He was centuries old, gifted in numerous skills, well educated after a fashion, cunning in the extreme and potent in his vampiric disciplines and he was dying. The reanimated corpses had attacked as soon as he had entered the subterranean portion of the castle in search of the Tzimisce's resting place, not to do it harm of course, for the fiendish baron of Gabrovo Grad had been gone several nights, but to acquire the source of wealth that the castle must protect. After all, Tzimisce were like the dragons of old stories, often sleeping upon their wealth.
