#aboutd

As the Evil Queen’s firstborn, Derek was given everything, within reason on the isle of course. Therefore, as far as the other islanders, or especially himself, was concerned, he was practically a prince and lived up to it. In addition to having the name, Derek quickly established a reputation for himself as both a ladies’ man and a man of power. Derek had the skills to get girls to fight over him, and after he and his buddies organized the Wild Wendigos, he felt unstoppable. 

His world was flipped upside down when he found out he’d be among the few going to Auradon Prep. He was determined to show those heroic freaks what a real man looked like. He’d show the boys how little they knew and the girls what they’ve been missing out on. He took the entire summer before hand to talk to his mother about all of her experiences on the mainland, and, just in case, he began to read several of her spell books, smuggling a few along with him.

Born to a woman named Ilona and Vlad Dracula in the 1400’s, Adrian grows up in a household that, while non-traditional, is, for all intents and purposes, loving. And old battle companion and friend of the dragon lord’s is part of this strange household and has the privilege of aiding the young dhampir in his growth and conquest of battle prowess and knowledge. The magic of Castlevania is, in another timeline, a manifestation of every scientific advancement and magical augmentation Dracula has ever accumulated. While the castle they occupy, in the bordering mountains between the former voivode’s native Wallachia and the land of his birth, Transylvania, they are largely undisturbed.

A fever takes Ilona from them and the family mourns, the three remaining—one a very old man by this point—drawing closer together. It is then that Carmilla makes her move, arriving at nightfall, with full entourage at Dracula’s castle and daring to harm his best friend, the old man Jan (he has shed his old patronymic in service to his friend), in order to get to Dracula, who has stepped out to fly his hawk in honor of his darling Ilona. Carmilla advances upon the young Adrian, who, though dhampir, hasn’t the strength to fight her off. She feeds from him, intent on draining the boy, turning him, and making him her thrall. The world has never seen a dhampir, and she knows not that her venom has no effect. The boy collapses and Jan attacks her.

Carmilla does not suffer human fools and injures Jan just as Dracula returns to his home. He is enraged at her presence and her audacity. He drives his dragon sword, passed down the line to leader after leader of their order, through her heart, trapping her in her own coffin and sending her entourage, carriages, gifts and all, packing down the rocky, mountainous trail. Adrian has fainted, but is otherwise seemingly intact, but Jan is another matter. The man lays dying, broken and bleeding, swearing up and down that he tried, that he would never betray Dracula, that he tried to defend the boy. He dies in Dracula’s arms and thus begins the vampire king’s true descent into madness.

Adrian recovers in a few days’ time, but is much quieter then he used to be and far less inquisitive. He stays close to his father and utters very little, watching the man work, learning from him, but rarely speaking. Dracula knows something must’ve happened, but of course the puncture wounds upon the boy’s body have faded. His psychological wounds persist, even to this day, but the man now called D is loath to share the story of his childhood. Watching one’s wise, thoughtful father descend a spiral staircase of insanity is not a memory worth treasuring.

Over the years, Dracula takes wives from various villages or seduces them in forays into the city. Three wives remain to him when Jonathan Harker makes his fateful trip to the mountains of Transylvania in the late 1800s. They terrorize Jonathan, while Adrian hides, not permitted to have contact with the strange man. “Foreigners carry diseases,” Dracula warns his son as he locks the boy (man, at this point, but Dracula sees only the sweet little Adrian) away. Adrian knows it for what it is, another sign of his father’s expanding madness. No more, the thoughtful, if eccentric warlord, Dracula has descended into his baser instincts, his lust and gluttony overcoming caution.

At the final showdown, sunlight holds Dracula back, but Adrian, who rides among the band of gypsies, unbeknownst to his father, is the first to reach the coffin alongside Quincy Morris. He slays the man and then recedes, seeing that the deed has been done and that his father lies dead. It is VanHelsing who notes the young man’s similarity to Dracula, but makes no move to pursue as Adrian flees alongside his “brethren”. The castle is his, not that he wants it, and the wives are all gone. It is a lonely existence, but it is his.

He lives in seclusion for hundreds of years. Other Nobility, the Seven Kings in particular, have arisen to christen him the prince of vampires, a title he neither wants nor desires, but the shelter beneath his father’s castle certainly aids in his survival of the Calamity in the year 1999. The area around it, Wallachia on one side, Transylvania on the other, survives the blasts, which are hardly directed toward such a remote area, but the land suffers. When the Nobility rise from their shelters and coffins a little less than a century later, they’re created with a blasted world, ripe for the conquering. They have not been idle.

Many of the shelters contain highly advanced laboratories, where various experiments have been taking place for hundreds of years. Foremost among these experiments is, of course, the cure to sunlight death and weakness. Other things include psychological manipulation of the human race, cyborg horses, resting houses and various sun-proof shelters, and more. The Nobility comes as saviors, but also as slavers, shackling humanity to their power and humanity’s dire need for climate control, transportation, roads, and civilization in general. Both groups flourish, with the Nobility at the top and Adrian, now calling himself D in his father’s honor, at the tip of it all, much to his chagrin.