NAME. Alucard "The Drakul" AGE & BIRTH DATE. 139 & Unknown GENDER & PRONOUNS. Cis Male & He/Him NATIONALITY. Lysaran SPECIES. Dhampir FACTION. Legion of the Dead OCCUPATION. Legionnaire FACE CLAIM. Gavin Leatherwoood

biography

i. CHILDHOOD

Born under a blood moon in Veilcrest, nestled in the heart of the Deadlands, the son of Vlad Drakul was silent as he came into this world. In the years that followed, Vlad would boast to his fellows and those who flocked under his banner about the son who’d never cried but instead stared at the world with infernal, contemptuous eyes. Where Vlad saw a child filled with conflict, Diana saw a son with a particularly sensitive soul - one that had been born with the blight in his veins but was inherently different from the world that lay at his feet. 

Vlad Drakul was an enigma, a warlord of significant renown who was a steadfast general alongside Queen Lavinia Noctis in the age of the Old Gods, serving at the hand of Lusacan himself. The Dragon of the Night rewarded his followers with the gift of the dark, with eternal life, and power well beyond those of the living world. In the years that followed Lusacan’s destruction, Lavinia took the opportunity to lead their people - while Vlad became a recluse whose military reputation hinged upon former glory. Engineer, scientist, and military genius best known for his casual cruelty and enigmatic nature, Vlad was unpredictable and made his decisions on a whim. 

Veilcrest stood at the height of scientific innovation, with practices of engineering, medicine, and scientific advancement that were leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the world, Diana Voltair had originally come to Veilcrest in search of a cure for the blight that ran through the veins of her brother after he’d become infected by the taint. The exchange was a fair one, Vlad cured Diana’s brother, but the cost was that she would remain in Veilcrest for one year. Not one to be taken prisoner, if she was to remain in Veilcrest, then Diana would be instructed in the physician’s arts so that she could take what she learned from within Veilcrest, and bring it to the rest of Lysara. 

Despite the odds, Diana came to fall in love with Vlad, and by the time the year was through, the raven-haired dhampir, Alucard was born. His early, formative years were spent watching with curious eyes as Diana tinkered over medical devices under the watchful eye of Vlad. One year, rolled into another, and as the dhampir grew he was his father’s pupil and his mother’s assistant, but by the boyhood age of nine years old, Diana chose to make a pilgrimage of everything that she had learned. It was her mission to cure the blight and find those who’d been tainted by it to help them wherever possible, save ghouls and perhaps even the darkspawn who’d been considered monsters for so long. The latter was beyond even Vlad’s abilities, but Diana was resolved to help all that she could.

Alucard would always remember the night she left, how chill had left the castle with an eerie silence, the mist that hung over the cold mire - freezing breath with every battered sigh. Vlad had not wanted Diana to go, that much Alucard knew, but his father did not stop her from going. That was something that the dhampir would always blame him for, Alucard had begged, but that hadn’t kept her - perhaps if they had both humbled themselves in front of her then perhaps his mother would have chosen to stay. 

News of Diana’s death came before the year’s end. In Astoria, they had burnt her for being a witch in a rural village long before the process became widespread. Her ashes were returned to Veilcrest and neither Vlad nor Alucard were ever the same. 

ii. DHAMPIR

In the years that followed Vlad Drakul retreated from the affairs of state, instead of a feared advisor to Queen Lavinia, he became a well-known playboy. Outrageous parties, uncommon bedfellows, and more “husbands” and “wives” over the years that most cared to count. Famous beyond the borders of the Deadlands for turning those willing to make their way into the home of the handsome, gregarious vampires, people flocked for the chance to bend their necks to the budding flock of the former warlord. 

Alucard was disinterested, ashamed in a way that he didn’t know how quite to manage it. He blamed his father for his mother’s death, and he blamed himself simultaneously. If Alucard had tried harder, if he’d pleaded more, or maybe even gone with her then maybe things would have gone differently. Fate didn’t care for maybes or should haves, the reality was that Alucard’s mother was gone and his father’s castle was defined by outrageous parties and boundless self-indulgence. Alucard himself remained in the observatory, mapping the stars, or in his mother’s old lab, tinkering and experimenting with the works she left behind. In his father’s library reading manuscripts and looking over blueprints from an age long gone. 

A descendant from the first order of Lusacan, Alucard’s formative years were defined by the zeal of the loyalists who still awaited the return of the Old Gods and the reverence of the blight that entangled the Deadlands. Dark, entropic vines coiled about the frigid land, creeping vines that crawled over the old stones of the ancient homes, and over the mountains that were both an easy source of food and natural protection. In his youth, Alucard was a fervent loyalist of these lands, Queen Lavinia Noctis, and those of Lusacan’s faithful - his aspirations saw him in the temple to the Old God, scrubbing stones despite his status, polishing surfaces, and speaking the old draconic tongue of reverence and devotion. 

Impressionable and young, beyond the Deadlands Alucard had not seen the extent of the blight - in particular, the darkspawn that lurked at the peripheries of the world, waiting for their time to return to the banner of the Old Gods. He only heard of the Dragon of the Night, Lusacan’s glory, and the promise to someday return to Avalon and claim the golden light of the Laurelin in the name of the dark. This was the fervency that Alucard took, to be a knight in the vampiric army, to train under the tutelage of the finest warriors that Noctis could offer. Malleable and eager to stand under the glorious light of the dragons of their past, Alucard and others of his make were an easy mark for Valerius Noctis to bring into his covenant. A world reclaimed in the name of Lusacan, the Elysian Throne, and the people of Lysara subjected to the whims of the vampires.  Alucard pledged his sword in the uprising of Valerius Noctis when he called to arms those who wished to rise against the tide of Eterna. 

iii. UNDEAD

A young knight in the army of the undead, with Lusacan’s sigil - a dragon before a sea of stars - emblazoned upon his black armor, Alucard marched against the people of Lysara. With the green-blooded forces subjugated under their banner, they descended from the Deadlands and swept over Northreach, into the Queenlands, and to the gates of Eterna where they used sophisticated forms of weaponry to lay siege against Queen Damodred and her people. 

War and death weren’t the romantic notions that Alucard had once believed, these people that his mother had been killed for had also been the people that she had died for. Their misery wrought something violent in him and casual cruelty defined the son of Vlad Drakul as he cleaved his way through fields of blood. Standing ankle-deep in temples of ichor, saturated by contemptuous rot - the scores of undead, wrights, revenants, and their subjugated green-blooded servants marauders and butchered at every turn. This was the beginning of a new age of the Drakul, the great legacy of his father would be carved with the new initials of Alucard The Drakul. 

Along the road, Alucard came to learn the truth of war, the propriety of sorrow, and the misery that followed the blighted forces. Most shrieked at the sight of the undead, they spat on the memory of the Old Gods and cursed the incursion of the damned as Lysara moved to conspire with Taravell to put down the force of vampires that had cropped up. Olympians stood in stark defiance of the tide of the dead, their allies joined them, and as the vampires’s siege engines breached the walls of Eterna, the fighting spilled into the streets, and war engulfed the forces of both light and night.  

A lost battle saw Valerius captured by the enemy, the undead conspired to see him liberated but as reinforcements swelled around Eterna, and without the rallying cry and power of the vampire commander, the war was lost. Battered and wounded, Alucard made it as far as a raft before he drifted into unconsciousness while the legions of the undead burned behind him. There he drifted amid the carnage of the Queenset Isles, flecked by water that burned at the edges of his fascia as seafoam sprayed over the sides. There the dhampir should have perished, an enemy of the Queendom, a scourge of Veilcrest - the Drakul, the son of Vlad The Impaler, but when next Alucard opened his eyes it was to the skies over Sicillia. 

iv. BLIGHTED

The goddess Proserpina was sacred on the isle of Sicillia, under the shadow of the Tower of Olympia, the dead had long been revered as conduits on a rite of passage. It wasn’t the undead they worshipped or the blight, but the water that turned the wheel and pushed the pattern forward. On Sicillia, nobody knew who he was, he wasn’t Alucard, son of Vlad Drakul, but instead, he gave them a different name - Dane. A strigoi from the rural regions of the Wildlands was conscripted into an army to fight for a force that he had pretended not to understand. 

On Siciliia he saw how the nation had been wounded, his injuries tended to as fresh blood warmed the infernal power within and righted his bones and injuries. Alucard could have remained there for a time, gazing down at the misery that permeated the scars marred by the war left behind. It was here that he heard the tales of old told from a different lens, how Andoral had devastated these shores following the Cataclysm, how the mad dragon Lusacan had charged against the elvhen of Avalon - how the rot of these Old Gods was still seen in the remote parts of this world. Darkspawn and all manner of blighted creatures. 

Alucard could have returned to Veilcrest, back to his Queen, and back to the draconic priesthood and followers of Lusacan. Valerius’s forces were scattered, the vampire imprisoned, and his dogma dispelled under the crushing weight of his defeat. Vlad would be there in his castle, undoubtedly oblivious beyond the expanse of his leisurely pleasure. Instead, he went to see with unclouded, curious eyes, what was at the truth of the blight. 

The calling steered him towards a village in the hills of Astoria that was under darkspawn attack, creatures spilled out from the mines, mindless and depraved. Alucard cut through them as he was joined by a legionnaire, Serral, wandering through the region, piling the dead once the darkspawn were slain and putting them to the torch. The land had been cursed, the farmers’ crops turned foul, and for a fortnight the legionnaire remained, so Alucard stayed with him. The Legion of the Dead was not without the stories of their past, histories from Ankhuria, and the legacy of the Old Gods. 

Many farmers fell ill, and those who did not perish from the taint turned into something else entirely. The ghouls that rose were met by the sword of the dhampir, Alucard, and Serral, who’d insisted they remain. Darkspawn blood had seeped into the soil, but fire purged the ground and left it barren - but clean. 

v. REBEL

Questions answered, Alucard chose not to return to the Deadlands but continued to travel alongside Serral instead. He said that he would in time, back to his home in Veilcrest, and the castle that had raised him; truthfully the thought of living once more under Vlad’s dominion of debauchery churned his stomach almost as bad as the thought of once more bending his knee to Lusacan’s priesthood, and Queen Lavinia Noctis. 

Darkspawn still appeared in small pockets, largely in rural areas, dragging those that they could back underground before disappearing once more. Stories permeated the region but Alucard didn’t understand what for until he saw it with his own eyes; together Serral and Alucard followed one such raid before they came across the broodmother and her infernal horde. Intelligent and formerly human, the creature was an abomination of the light and the legacy of the Old Gods. 

They managed to save those that they could but at the cost of Serral’s life. With his dying breath, beneath Alucard’s tears of blood, Serral gifted his sigil to the dhampir and charged him to bring it to Amon Sûl, the the Commander of the Legion would know what to do with it. Some that were taken from the mines managed to escape without a trace of the blight in their veins, others were not so fortunate. Just as before, Alucard waited, and those who did not perish on their own were put down quickly and humanely. 

vi. LEGIONNAIRE

Amon Sûl, the hill of the wind, used to be a stop for every scholar in the nation. By the time Alucard arrived, it was a fortified relic that existed in the most barren wasteland in Taravell; amid the sands of Ankhuria, it was here that he met the Legion Commander and the forces of the Legion of the Dead. Alucard retold the story of Serral, the legionnaire’s demise, and the dhampir’s promise to see his sigil here and in return, the Commander offered the Drakul the opportunity to undertake the Joining. 

Madness would be the curse, but for a creature like him, the blight already flowed through his veins, but the Joining was still deadly to any without the significant resolve that it would take to take up the fight against the darkspawn. When Alucard rose it was with an appointment, one he perceived to be a noble one: Nornwatch Tower, the bastion in the northernmost region of Iskaldrik. 

At last, Alucard returned to the Deadlands to visit his father, detouring along the lengthy journey from Ankhuria to Iskladrik. In Veilcrest, Vlad’s menagerie had grown, he and many others believed Alucard The Drakul to have perished a decade ago in Valerius’s last battle for Eterna. In so many ways the young, devout warrior had perished, washed up on the shores of Sicillia as someone else entirely. Alucard looked at the former warlord with increased disdain, the violent criminal who was a shell of all that he had been, and could be. They exchanged words, and then Alucard put Veilcrest behind him, landing in Nornwatch Keep. 

In Iskaldrik Alucard had expected a lively Keep, a bastion of noble strength, but instead, he found a crumbling ruin. Tinkering and engineering were in his blood though, and under the eccentric Archivist, Alucard took to learning what he could and to offer what the knowledge of mechanics he’d developed in his youth. 

personality

+ intelligent, devoted, disciplined – reserved, dogmatic, inconsiderate

THE TORN ~

NAME. UTP AGE & BIRTH DATE. UTP SPECIES. Dhampir FACTION. Legion of the Dead OCCUPATION. Legionnaire

Vlad and his many wives. The Drakul was once a warlord, a creature from the Age of Enlightenment who’s undeath persisted into the modern age. You, child of one of his human brides, were another in a litany of spawn that were kept for the privilege of propping up a man whose ambition began and ended with only himself. There was a chance that the love he’d felt for her was genuine and that some shadow of what he’d felt for her was cast in your direction, but you could never be sure. Beneath the sheer veneer of debauchery was a blood-addled but brilliant mind, but again, you’d never know, because as the world broke and put itself back together, Vlad lavished in his own power and horded all that he’d gathered from the ages before. You were called to more. The Deadlands did nothing for you but feed an innate desire to be more than what this world was carving you out to be, the Blight thrived in Veilcrest, it fed the people and it fed the growing armies of Queen Lavinia Noctis. A power in her own right, the dark would swell, and it would come, but centuries ago your mother raised you on the romanticized stories of the Legion of the Dead. Your father wanted you to be a soldier, a warrior, and someday a general. You trained to fight and you pledged yourself to your blade, but you’d never be what he wanted you to be. A monster flowed through your veins but you spat at the inheritance left at your feet and walked the path of the Joining instead. You pictured grandeur and griffons, instead you landed at Nornwatch Tower, a frozen bastion against the Blight, where you stood as a sentinel before Iskaldrik came to it for refuge. 

CONNECTS

THE OATHSWORN: Fellow Legionnaire

NOTES

TQH: Troupe 1 - Refugee

Mostly nonverbal though I do occasionally allow a verbal to front with me around people we're close with, but everyone else is getting shut out.