Damian Van Łowca

[ José Ramón Barreto, cis male, bisexual, twenty-eight/five hundred and thirty four, he/him ] in novigrad, names have a way of reaching the wrong ears, and DAMIAN VAN ŁOWCA is one spoken more often than most. the HIGHER VAMPIRE has lingered in the city for TWO WEEKS, as a COUNT. depending on who you ask they’re either CLEVER or MANIPULATIVE. the eternal fire has yet to decide which. their presence is steeped in TAR BLACK BLOOD, WOLF-RULED FORESTS, and BLUE FLAMES, the kind that draws attention… and not always the right kind. speak carefully. the pyres are always hungry.  // Emma, 23, she/her, GMT -3. 

(Starter for Corrand @forgctmenct)

Damian took a deep breath as he broke the surface, water streaming down his face in shimmering rivulets. He dragged both hands through his soaked hair, pushing the dark strands back from his eyes. For a moment he simply floated there, letting the warmth cradle him.

He had always loved being underwater. If he had to explain it, it was the stillness. It didn't matter whether it was the ocean, a river, or one of the hot springs Zhorvak had once been known for. Beneath the surface, the endless blue bled into green, swallowing him whole in a silence that demanded nothing. No expectations. No conversation. No company. In deep water, no one else had to exist.

If he were being completely honest, it was the closest thing he could imagine death feeling like.

The moment the pressure surrendered him back to the surface and he filled his lungs with air again was the most human he ever allowed himself to feel. There had been a healer in Zhorvak centuries ago who used to scold him for diving too deep and staying under too long. “You laugh in death’s face,” he’d say. Damian had laughed right back. “Death would never take me. The Grim Reaper is far too possessive a lover to let me stray.”

Novigrad, unfortunately, lacked any water worth drowning in. Its gray-blue waters reminded him of storm clouds gathering on the horizon, heavy with the promise of catastrophe. The ocean always looked moments away from swallowing the city whole.

Which was why he found himself spending more and more time at the Serpentine Bathhouse. At least until his house was finished. Not that he minded, The new manor would still be close to both the bathhouse and Passiflora. He could swim whenever he pleased and, more importantly, continue pestering Dorian.

A perfect arrangement.

The bathhouse pool stretched wide and quiet around him. Lanterns burned behind carved screens, casting golden reflections that danced across the water’s surface. Steam drifted lazily through the chamber, softening the edges of marble columns and painted walls. At this hour, the place was deserted, exactly how Damian liked it.

He sank lower into the water until only his nose and eyes remained above the surface. Peace. Then, with a lazy flick of his hand beneath the water, he focused as warmth gathered in his palm, magic answered immediately, curling through his veins like liquid sunlight. The water around his hand began to heat, warmth spread outward in gentle waves. Fire powers had easily been the most practical gift he’d ever received. The necklace that had bestowed them remained infuriatingly missing, but at least its absence hadn’t robbed him of the magic entirely.

A useful consolation, almost enough to stop him from being angry about it.

Almost.

Damian reached for a small ceramic bottle resting beside the pool and poured a measure of herbal tonic into his palm. The scent of rosemary, mint, and lavender drifted upward, closing his eyes, he worked it into his hair.

He was preparing to disappear beneath the surface again when a sound to his right caught his attention.

Another late-night visitor, the water moved and he looked away by reflex. Damian had been glad to notice that humans had become considerably less prudish over the last three centuries, even bathhouses no longer guaranteed privacy. Higher vampires, by contrast, had never been particularly burdened by shame. They tended to concern themselves with simpler matters—comfort, pleasure, hunger.

When one possessed all the time in the world, what purpose did shame serve? Why compare oneself to the standards of creatures who barely survived a century when the body itself offered so many delights?

Still, he averted his gaze, not wanting to make the other uncomfortable. For all he knew, he could be bathing beside a bishop.

Human etiquette remained one of life’s great mysteries.

"Excuse me, you're—" Damian glanced up. Recognition struck him so suddenly that he nearly laughed. The bard of the festival! "The bard!"

Of all the people he expected to encounter tonight, this person ranked somewhere below a dragon and slightly above a tax collector.

"I've seen your performance, the romance, the star-crossed lovers!" His grin widened. "You were marvelous!"

For all his frequent disdain toward humanity, Damian had always adored a good performance. Bards, jesters, actors, mimics—humans became fascinating whenever they threw themselves wholeheartedly into living.

With effortless ease, he dipped beneath the water and resurfaced moments later beside the newcomer, droplets running down his shoulders.

"Truly wonderful work," he said, giving the bard a pat on the back. “There was a moment during the second act where I was absolutely convinced one of them was going to throw themselves from the balcony.”

(starter for @gutterlight)

Before Amala, Damian had never questioned what it meant to be a vampire. Why should he? Did a wolf question its own howl, or a vulture its hunger for carrion? Their nature simply was. It existed beyond morality, beyond reason, beyond the fragile concerns of mortals who spent their short lives searching for purpose. And what purpose could there be beneath a moonlit sky that promised the same endless night, over and over again?

His family had lived and lived and lived.

Years dissolved into decades, decades collapsed into centuries, seasons passed like the turning of pages in a forgotten book. Wealth accumulated faster than it could be spent, until the castle vaults groaned beneath mountains of gold no one truly cared about anymore. Grudges that would have ruined mortal dynasties faded into dull memories. Lovers died, as did enemies. Kingdoms rose and crumbled into dust.

The higher vampires remained.

When boredom became unbearable, Damian would empty the castle’s cellars and celebrate the full moon with reckless extravagance. He and his kin would descend upon nearby villages like hungry gods, leaving behind emptied wine barrels, shattered doors, and puncture wounds that soon evolved into ripped flesh. They drank blood until their senses blurred and laughter echoed through the forests until dawn chased them back into stone walls and velvet curtains.

It was existence stripped of meaning, a simple, dull, bottomless thing.

Then he met Amala.

From the first ball where their paths crossed, she gifted him the burden of knowledge disguised as suffering. Saint and sinner in equal measure, she infected him with questions he had never thought to ask. Why did the sun rise each morning? Why had death abandoned his kind? Why were vampires forced to linger between life and oblivion, unwelcome in both?

He remembered hunting once with his late brother, Amadeo—may the flames keep him. Blood had still been cooling on Damian's tongue when he asked, almost absentmindedly, whether Amadeo, reluctant heir to Zhorvak's throne and wholly unsuited for it, ever felt like an animal.

Amadeo had laughed. What were they if not animals? Beasts rejected by both heaven and hell.

Like frightened creatures cornered by their own reflection, they hid behind uncertainty and excuses. They built castles to disguise cages, hoping no one would notice the innocence stolen from their victims or the hunger lurking behind every smile.

And like starving animals, they fed endlessly, not merely on blood, but on longing, on the desperate hope that something might change.

They scavenged meaning from every fleeting distraction, every vice, every obsession, tearing at their own flaws as though they could carve something better from ruined flesh and unbreakable bones.

Yet no matter how much they consumed, the hunger remained. Damian understood that now, perhaps Amadeo had understood it too.

The difference was that Damian could no longer accept it. Now, he caught himself wanting to be someone Amala could admire, a count, her husband, a man.

However, he felt nothing but the taste of blood in his mouth as he dumped the guard’s body into the canal. The corpse hit the water with a muted splash and immediately began to sink, swallowed by the dark current, crimson unfurled behind it in delicate ribbons, drifting through the black water like watercolor spilled across a painter’s canvas. For a moment, Damian waited for it to disappear beneath the surface, watching the red dissolve into darkness until there was nothing left to see.

He looked down at himself and grimaced. His shirt was ruined. He brushed at the wrinkles, attempting to straighten the expensive silk, but all he accomplished was smearing blood across the fabric. Fresh scarlet bloomed beneath his fingertips.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Blood wasn’t so different from alcohol; both loosened people, both revealed truths they spent their lives trying to hide. The only real difference was that alcohol usually took longer.

Damian had spent most of his life cataloging drunks. There were the cheerful ones who laughed at jokes nobody else could hear, their grins growing wider with every bottle. There were the mournful souls who became trapped in endless loops of regret, retelling the same tragedies over and over as though repetition might somehow change the ending. Some slowed down so dramatically that they simply folded onto the nearest table, bed, or unfortunate companion and remained there until morning. The angry drunks. The affectionate drunks. The ones who got so desperate with desire they practically needed to be hosed down.

Damian had always liked to think he belonged among the cheerful drunks, the charming ones, the sort who bought rounds for strangers and laughed too loudly. Tonight, however, the hollow ache in his chest left him feeling closer to the mournful variety.

He stumbled from the alleyway and into the street, wiping blood from the sleeve of his coat. The gesture accomplished little. The stains remained stubbornly visible, dark against the fabric. Novigrad was beautiful at night. The sun had slipped behind the distant groves faster than he'd realized, leaving the city bathed in the warm glow of lanterns and hearthfires. Gold shimmered across cobblestones still slick from the day's rain, and for a fleeting moment the city looked almost gentle.

Zhorvak had once been this beautiful. One step. One stumble. Damian's shoulder collided with the wall of some establishment whose name he couldn't have cared less about. A rough laugh escaped him as his fangs finally receded. Another step followed, feet dragging against the cobblestones.

Then he looked up.

And the world stopped.

Dreaming felt too gentle a word for what seized him. Hallucinating, perhaps.

Because Amala stood before him, flesh and blood, looking more alive than she had in centuries. The curve of her cheek, the dark cascade of her hair, the shape of her eyes that he had committed to memory so long ago that even death itself couldn’t steal it from him.

What a cruelly sweet dream.

Damian ignored the tremor spreading through his hands, the chatter beginning in his teeth. This wasn't real. It couldn't be. Amala belonged to the past, to memory, to grief, to all the places he could never reach again. But dreams were kinder than reality. Inside them, he could still find her.

"Amala," the name left him as a breath before becoming a call. If it was a dream, then for once he wouldn’t fight it, for once he would be selfish. "I've been looking everywhere for you!"

He was moving before reason caught up, the distance between them vanishing in seconds. "You must be freezing," without waiting for an answer, he unclasped his cape and draped it around her shoulders, he had done this countless times before on winter nights, during long journeys, whenever she insisted she wasn’t cold despite the visible shiver running through her.

“There,” he murmured, adjusting the fabric. “Better now?”

What a punishment it had been to survive the distance between them and call it faith! But now she was here, close enough to hear, close enough to—

His smile faltered. Her heartbeat was strong and steady. The rush of blood through living veins was a sound he was extremely familiar with.

Alive.

The thought struck him like a slap across the face.

Alive.

No dream had ever sounded so real.

Slowly, his hands rose toward her face, stopping just short of touching. Fear rooted them there, fear of contact, fear of certainty, fear to prove to himself she wasn't real.

"You're..." his head shook before the words could form. No. No, she wasn't. She was alive and breathing.

And she was not his Amala.

"...not her, are you?"

Every instinct screamed at him to bare his fangs, to tear apart whatever cruel thing wore such a beloved face. Had the mages of Aretuza found him again? Was this another trick? Another punishment?

What are you if not an animal? The familiar voice echoed through his mind.

More. I'd like to believe I'm more.

Damian forced himself to breathe. One step back, then another. His gaze dropped to the blood soaking his sleeves, absurdly hoping none of it had stained her.

"Who are you?" he murmured, voice rough, restrained only by effort. "Who sent you here?" How fragile was the hope that perhaps fate had not finished tormenting him. "Are you from Aretuza?"

The town sang and danced with all the force of whatever celebration was underway by the time Damian crossed into Novigrad.

Time had long since become a meaningless thing to him, he couldn’t have said whether he had spent days or weeks stumbling through forests and muddy roads to reach the city. Too deprived of blood to run, too weak to surrender himself to the wind and trust a bat’s wings to carry him the rest of the way.

At the heart of the town, between a broad fountain and a church of pristine white stone, a great bonfire clawed at the midnight sky. Flames crackled through stacked cherrywood logs, casting molten gold across the square and filling the air with the scent of smoke and sweet sap. The structure towered nearly halfway up the church itself, a massive triangular skeleton of stripped tree trunks and heavy branches.

The streets teemed with people, young and old alike spilled from taverns and doorways, laughing with wine-flushed faces. Barrels stood open along the square, their contents flowing freely into wooden goblets and eager hands. Some lingered in tight embraces, while others danced around the bonfire in dizzy circles, moving in time with the music drifting through the night.

A troupe of troubadours occupied a makeshift stage near the fountain. The platform looked as though it had been assembled from whatever scraps of wood could be found and held together by little more than optimism. A length of maroon fabric hung across the front, decorated with garlands of leaves, strings of berries, and deep violet flowers that swayed gently whenever the dancers thundered past.

Midsummer was near. 

Mortals were forever abandoning old gods, old customs, old promises. Entire kingdoms rose and collapsed in less time than it took vampires to become bored. Yet somehow, after centuries of wars, plagues, kings, priests, and revolutions, people still gathered beneath bonfires to celebrate the longest days of the year.

A strange sort of persistence, a stubbornness he could almost admire.

Finding Dorian, on the other hand, had required considerably less effort than expected.

The bastard may as well have walked around with a glowing target painted on his back. Every fresh-faced local seemed delighted to speak of dear Salazar and his beautiful flowers. They laughed behind open palms and exchanged knowing looks, as though privy to a joke Damian alone had been excluded from.

He simply wanted answers, however, what he found was Passiflora.

If the heavens concealed Eden somewhere among the clouds, Novigrad flaunted its own earthly paradise openly. The establishment was lavishly adorned with flowers spilling from balconies and curling around carved railings. Damian’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline when he discovered Dorian wasn’t, in fact, selling rare blooms.

Well… that certainly explained the laughter.

“Tell your… employer Damian Van Łowca is here,” he told the girl stationed at the entrance, keeping his gaze fixed on the flowers braided through her hair rather than the flimsy scraps of fabric she wore. “I shall be waiting for him.“

The girl dipped into a graceful curtsy and disappeared through the doors before he could demand an explanation.

Was he truly surprised to find out his friend owned a brothel? Not particularly.

Dorian had always worshipped excess and, more often than not, surpassed even his own devotion to it. Damian suspected the other vampire found mortals endlessly fascinating for that reason alone: how effortlessly they surrendered themselves to vice. 

Humans rarely sought to resemble their gods, their appetites were far better suited to vampires.

Mortals spent their brief lives chasing sensations they could never hold onto. They drank too much, loved too hard, gambled fortunes away, ruined themselves for beauty, power, desire. For creatures who lived less than a century, they possessed an astonishing talent for self-destruction.

The suite was little short of a greenhouse. Damian traced the gilded ridges of the wallpaper with absent fingers, feeling foreign in the gesture. Everything felt overwhelmingly alive. Three hundred years ago he would have considered the room gaudy, now it simply hurt to look at. After centuries trapped in deathlike slumber, every color seemed sharpened beyond reason; reds bled into crimsons, gold gleamed like captured sunlight, even the green of the leaves felt aggressive, blooming behind his eyes until a dull ache settled beneath his skull.

He needed to feed.

Soon.

"I thought you might leave your dear friend waiting," Damian mused as the door swung open and clicked shut behind its occupant. Time settled differently upon immortals; some became brittle, others became monstrous. Dorian seemed to have become expensive. "Three centuries have passed. I could hardly hold it against you."

Already rummaging through the suite's cabinets, Damian procured a bottle of liquor. It did nothing for their kind, of course, but friendship was built upon a thousand shared pretenses.

A drink for your troubles.

A hand that will not harm you.

A back I shall never stab.

Two crystal glasses dangled between Dorian's fingers before finding the center table with a soft click.

“I shall not offend you with empty pleasantries,” his voice emerged rougher than intended. The hunger again, always the hunger. He hooked two fingers beneath the collar of his shirt and tugged it loose, the fabric suddenly felt restrictive around his throat. “I need your help.”

Damian lowered himself into one of the armchairs, noting its luxurious softness for future commentary. Trust Dorian to lavish equal care upon his patrons and his flowers, Damian had known long ago that he would make an exceptional coven leader.

"I need to catch a thief. The little vermin responsible for waking me."

The words tasted strange, humiliating. He had survived wars, religious purges, entire centuries dragging by, only to be robbed by some insolent creature whose name he didn’t even know.

His thoughts wandered, unbidden, to the crypt from which he had clawed his way back into the world. The place where he had chosen to die beside Amala.

The earth had claimed her. Time, however, had spared him.

"They have Amala's necklace…" Damian murmured, staring into the untouched liquor in his glass. Three centuries had passed, and he remained exactly as he had been. That, perhaps, was the true curse of immortality: endless stagnation.