Vlad Varanov

The Varanov were merchants on Tyrena who meant to become a house of wizards. The censor's second son, Commode Telus, offered his patronage to Vlad's daughter Anastasia, and the family believed it had found a son-in-law. He got her with child and killed her in her own house; her dying curse made the child the Minotaur.

Commode had Vlad blamed. Vlad attacked him and lost, was arrested for the assault, and was condemned on the word of a bribed diviner. The censor learned the truth from Antoine de Cerberus and let the sentence stand rather than name his son. Vlad's wife Anna took her own life.

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.

An alliance of dwarves and young mages killed him at the end of 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).