Vlad Varanov and the Founding of Cerberus

The State of Cerberus was born from a refusal.

Antoine de Cerberus was a noble paladin of Archon. He opposed tyranny and chose freedom, an act remembered as the Great Refusal. Conviction alone could not found a country capable of standing against a god. Antoine made a pact with the most dangerous creature in the world and Archon's most bitter enemy: Vlad Varanov, the first vampire.

The Ruin of the Varanov

The Varanov were merchants on Tyrena, rich, ambitious, and not satisfied. A censor's word could take money away; it could not take magic. Vlad meant to make his house a house of wizards, and the whole family worked the receptions of the island's wizards looking for a patron.

Commode Telus, second son of the censor Markus Telus, was brilliant at politics, at war, and at magic, and the youngest senator in the Ark's history. He was also rotten all the way through, and careful about it. He offered his patronage to Vlad's daughter Anastasia, the best of the family at that game, in exchange for a few merchant services. The Varanov thought they had found a son-in-law: elegant, powerful, and the censor's own son.

Anastasia became pregnant. Commode had never meant to marry a merchant's daughter, and a child would have made him. He killed her in her own house.

She did not die quietly. Knowing at last what he was, she laid a desperate curse on the child she was carrying: kill your father, and every Telus after him. The child came out of her already obeying. It should have been named Tiberius Telus. It had the head of a bull, and it went for the one man in the room it had been born to kill.

Commode very nearly died there. Every enchantment his father had bought him counted for nothing. He called for help, and a paladin came down out of the sky: Antoine de Cerberus, who healed him and fought the creature. The Minotaur was running on instinct, recognized an opponent it could not beat, and walked out through a wall. Anastasia's mother, Anna, found what was left of her daughter.

Commode had Vlad blamed for it. Vlad attacked him with everything he had, which amused him. Commode confessed the whole of it to his face, told him the family should have stayed merchants, had him arrested for the assault, and bribed the diviner assigned to the case. Vlad was condemned, and Anna took her own life.

The Censor's Silence

Antoine had seen the room: the mother torn open, the newborn going for one man and no other. He carried it to Markus Telus. Markus stopped trusting his own advisers and investigated the affair himself. What he found was his son.

He did not make it public. Overturning Vlad's sentence would have meant naming a Telus, so the sentence stood. Antoine watched the Ark's justice send an innocent man to the scaffold to keep a censor's name clean, and that is where the paladin's loyalty broke.

Once the scaffold had failed, Markus put Commode in the lighthouse prison, then banished him to Brazzant aboard the Victis Moralis—as much to keep him away from the vampire and from his own son as to see justice done.

Commode survived Brazzant, which says everything about him. He founded a clan, fathered a great many children, and discovered two things: that his manipulations meant nothing to barbarians, and that a clan chief was stronger than the Minotaur on a diet of meat and fighting. When word reached him that Vlad Varanov and Antoine de Cerberus had fled with the mage houses to settle the island of giants, he took the name Telix and began preparing a return.

He never made it. A man in a Cerberan robe came to the village to collect Brazzant turns of phrase for a book he was compiling. He could not cast a spell as far as anyone could tell, and after a few days Commode decided to strangle him. His hands turned to stone on the man's throat and the floor came up through his chest. Most of the clan died attacking afterward. The mage put the barbarians' children on his ship and sailed for Cerberus. Those children are where the Psychic Project got its raw material. The curse never reached its first target: the Minotaur's father died on Brazzant, at another man's hand.

The Scaffold

Vlad Varanov stopped eating and drinking in his cell, and a week later he was brought out to be beheaded in public. Asked to repent, he cursed himself instead. He had been doing an accountant's sums for a consul while his family was hunted through his own house.

A completely untrained person driven far enough past the end of hope can cast a desperate curse—a high-level spell, permanent, undoable only by a powerful Abjurer (see the section on becoming a wizard, below). Grief is the only training it requires, and Vlad Varanov had been taken further than most men are taken.

The axe came down and the head stayed on. It came down again, and again, to no effect. Vlad turned around to look at the man swinging it. He was hungry.

He killed without counting that day and drank what he killed. The censor ordered him hunted and learned that the thing his family had made was more than a censor could put down.

He did not return as a man. He returned as a predator and haunted the nights of those who had condemned him. That was when Antoine de Cerberus came looking for him. He had saved the man who destroyed the Varanov and watched his own order execute the one it had wronged. He saw an ally rather than a monster to destroy: two rebels fleeing the same tyranny to build a new world.

The first years were brutal. Mighty giants roamed the island and attacked without mercy; there could be no dialogue and no peace with them. The population survived in a refuge carved into Mount Cerberus while the powerful brought back food. Expanding the frontier took long years and everyone's effort. Only then came the cities, farms, and families.

Then Antoine de Cerberus disappeared, and Vlad Varanov was crowned king.

Archon had let the rebels go for a price, and the price was Antoine. You think these people can do better than the Ark? Then watch them. Do not intervene. You will see their true nature, and you will miss the Ark. The bargain has no term. It ends the day Antoine says he misses the Ark, and Archon has all the time in the world to wait for it. Archon's death does not end it either; a paladin keeps his word. The paladin kept his human form and the divine gifts that let him vanish or wear another face, and he has been watching ever since: present at everything Cerberus has done, forbidden to stop any of it.

His reign was long and sometimes bloody. Vlad was tall and thin, with white skin, red eyes, and fangs. He could kill a giant alone and move faster than a runic warrior could follow. The northern city bears his name. His castle dominates its hill. His knights and units protect the villages from ogres, while Psychics and elite units handle the giants. His adviser Gaspar collects taxes while chanting aloud: another five hundred coins for the master. His alchemist Vorac experiments in the castle dungeons, where prisoners are bled for the master.

One day, the mages rebelled. This was the Great War of the Mages. Vlad Varanov had allowed the great houses to live under his protection, and he saw only betrayal in their plot. He entered the Stoneheart home, broke their Barrier and their door, and killed their guards one by one. He tore the infant Lucius from the arms of the dwarf Kaskad, slashing Kaskad's throat for drawing a weapon in defiance of his caste's code, then bit the child. A red ring saved Lucius by raising a total Barrier and hurling the vampire through the walls of the house. Kaskad carried the child away and discarded the ring. The vampire found him and cursed the dwarf.

Vlad ruled through terror. He drank from his servants. For spectacle and pleasure, he devoured an entire crew of seventy dwarven sailors and soldiers in his castle courtyard.

Mages lived around him. Gérard Alois sat at his court. Marcin Sobiesansky prepared potions for Gaspar's interrogations. A younger generation—Christophe Leblanc, Lucius Stoneheart, and Daviau Morin, each twenty-five—planned his fall without the means to achieve it.

Those means arrived by sea. A dwarven trade mission from Kaz'Nakaram landed at Vlad to negotiate an agreement: the merchant Valin, the dwarf of Numbers Portin, and Prince Merenin disguised as a bodyguard. Varanov bit Valin in his own audience chamber, massacred their crew, and threw the three dwarves into the dungeon. They escaped. The young mages hid them, healed them, and shielded them from divination.

The resulting alliance decided the fate of the world. The dwarves delivered one hundred fifteen tons of gold and enough mithril for three suits of armor. The mages supplied magic and ships. Portin completed a Valerium cannon whose calculations he had never dared to finish. Merenin carved two runes into iron, and Portin forged it into a runic weapon and armor.

Six of them flew to the castle on two griffins. Christophe Leblanc died there, killed by the vampire's scream as he stepped between Vlad and the others. Valin finished Vlad Varanov with a Valerium shot to the head.

Gérard Alois entered the room afterward. He looked at the corpse and said, another ten years and it would have worked. The Valerium pendant worn by the vampire—the stone that slowly poisoned him and forced him to drink ever more blood—had been a gift. From Gérard. He reclaimed the stone from the dwarves with a Time Stop that no one in the room saw coming.

Where an exile from the Ark had obtained dwarven metal two and a half centuries before Cerberus and Askenon exchanged a single word is a question Gérard was asked more than once. His answer never changed. It was a gift, from someone. A man who spends three hundred years poisoning a vampire is entitled to one creditor he does not name. In exchange, he promised them an era of trade and friendship. Then he left to announce the news and create the Council of Mages of Cerberus.

The world that followed—the Council, dwarven gold, and the power of the great families— began in that room.

The bloodline did not end with Vlad. He had taken a human wife on Cerberus, Sofia, and fathered Alfred, the second vampire. Alfred cooperated with the mages and organized the transfer of power. The Varanovs have ruled the province of Vlad ever since: a vampire clan free from the taxes and restrictions imposed on other lords, locked in a tense relationship with the Stonehearts, and sending its children to the Academy like any other great house.