Vlad Varanov

The Varanov were merchants until Hector Telus, youngest son of the censor Markus Telus, raped Vlad's daughter Olga. The censor ordered the marriage that repaired it, and the family woke up nobility: out of the Partage, enchanted, given money and a priest of their own, with Vlad made praetor—adviser to the consul on trade and the treasury.

The censor's other son, Commode Telus, wanted Vlad's wife Natalia. She refused him. He murdered their son Alfred, dressed it as bandits, offered to find the killers, hanged innocent men for it, and used her grief to get close enough to rape and kill her. Vlad attacked him and lost, was arrested for the assault, and was condemned on the word of a bribed diviner.

On the scaffold he was asked to repent and cursed himself instead—he had been doing a consul's accounts while his family was hunted through his own house. A desperate curse needs no training, only grief past the end of hope. The axe came down and the head stayed on. He turned around to look at the man swinging it, and he was hungry.

He killed without counting that day. A censor's hunt could not put him down, and by the time Antoine de Cerberus found him he was the Ark's most bitter enemy. He held the island against the giants, then ruled it. When the great houses conspired against him he entered the Stoneheart home, broke its barrier and door, and bit the heir in his cradle. A red ring hurled him through the walls.

He disappeared during the great war of mages. He is the only vampire in the world carrying a spell rather than a bloodline: every vampire since was born (see Vampire).