Episode 31: Nemesis
Written By Karl White
One of the great indicators of a true predator, is the ability to stay hidden, even in plain sight. Some wear the world as camouflage. Big cats striped and spotted to break their outline. Sharks shaded dark to light so the sea cannot read them. Polar bears with hollow hairs that scatter sun on snow. Raptors wear mottled plumage like bark, invisible on the branch.
But there’s a different kind of predator. One that walks among its prey. That if the right language, attire, and cultural norms are employed, there’s no way to discern them from anyone else. That’s what Ezath had become...
In France, in 1102, Ezath was now Elizabeth. Passing herself off as a skilled tactician of the mystic arts. She seduced the powerful into confidence and used her ability of Sight to bend them. By 1110, she’d installed herself as a spiritual advisor to King Louis VI and other select nobles, convincing them, by quiet pressure of mind, that she was a true seer.
Elizabeth posing as a mystic - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
She fed discreetly from the stream of royal concubines, taking only what she needed, clouding their minds so they were unaware of the siphon at their throats. If a death came by accident, she nudged memory and blamed elsewhere. She bled the treasury too, small diversions, well laundered, rebuilding her fortune for the long game. This time, however, she was not so brazen as to spend monies for immediate needs. Her roots in France were shallow, her exits stayed open.
As Elizabeth, Ezath proved so convincing, her counsel endured across the reigns of Louis VII, Philip II, and Louis VIII. She was buried so deep in the crown’s inner rooms that few even knew she existed, which solved the problem of an unchanging face. Her enigmatic origins only heightened the mystique.
In over 124 years at court she embezzled gold and quietly deeded lands to herself. On the night Louis VIII died in Paris in 1226, Elizabeth vanished, retreating with her fortune to private holdings near the Rhine, in the northern reaches of France.
There, she added a surname, Jovan, and donned the guise of an English dame whose family had “inherited” the lands via a debt from the Frankish crown in the Treaty of Meerssen. A grand estate rose...and every fifty years or so, a younger “Jovan” arrived from England to inherit, keeping the ruse alive.
“Dame” Elizabeth Jovan, 1307 - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
Not ready to build a Brood, Elizabeth employed Familiars, human servants bent by her growing telepathy. They guarded the property by day, and by night lured or abducted commoners from nearby Thionville for her to feed upon.
The masquerade as an English Dame, held for three and a half centuries, until a mysterious figure tore it down.
On a cold winter’s eve in 1589, Elizabeth awoke to a bad feeling. Waiting in the main living room of her estate, a caller...a familiar face, Otho, the con-man who had attempted to blackmail her, all those millennia ago in Greece.
That long night past...Learning of his con, she’d struck to silence him. He had wounded her, and some of her blood had turned him into an accidental Vampire.
A caller from her past, 1589 - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
In the change, fragments of her memory imprinted in his mind: the crash, the other two. He could see who she really was -- terror given shape. He fled, scared for his life, and half-mad with power he didn’t understand. She’d tried to Tune with the newly made Underling, but he was gone, the tether never set. Days later the faint trace of him in her mind vanished. She assumed he’d died, ill-equipped for the gift. And so she forgot him.
But he had not forgotten. He could feel her in the world, an anchor tugging at the edge of his Sight. Knowing how powerful she was, he needed to know more, to understand what he had become. So he followed her, kept a distance, learned her rhythms.
Lonely and unmoored, he wrote her into history, the poem, “Her Story”. It was a signal flare he hoped she’d recognize. But she didn’t. Silence read like rejection. It calcified into anger, then bitterness, then hate.
Like her, he shed his identity many times over. Letting Otho die, and reinventing himself as Royce. He was confident, exact, wielding the power her blood had given him to amass a fortune and a life that rivaled hers. And now, face-to-face with his maker at last, Royce didn’t know which hunger ran hotter -- revelation, hoping she would claim him...or revenge, for all the years she hadn’t.
ROYCE: Seeing you now, it’s as if no time has passed.
ELIZABETH: I wish I could say the same of you.
ROYCE: We’ve both done well for ourselves. Made fortunes many times over. Yet we’re forced to keep to ourselves.
ELIZABETH: There’s nothing wrong with independence. Or solitude.
ROYCE: Don’t you wish for more? I’ve seen some of your thoughts. Your life before you came here. Power is what you sought.
ELIZABETH: That was a different place and a different life. I’m simply making my way here.
ROYCE: It doesn’t have to be that way, we--
ELIZABETH: --You keep saying “we.” Why? You and I are not the same.
ROYCE: I am of your blood.
ELIZABETH: And you’ve skimmed my thoughts, shadowed me across continents. Yet you still know nothing of what I’ve endured.
ROYCE: We’ve both faced hardships.
ELIZABETH: What is it you want? Acceptance? For me to bring you into my fold? You seem to be doing fine on your own.
ROYCE: I came to propose a partnership. Together we could reach farther than either of us alone.
She had lived too long to trust easily. A thin, contemptuous look cut across Elizabeth’s face.
ELIZABETH: Your conception was a mistake. And you so brazenly expect a superior creature to bend to your will?
ROYCE: If you’re so superior, you’d know I didn’t come alone.
A snap of Royce’s fingers, and the room bloomed with teeth, Underlings stepping out from behind curtains and shadows. Elizabeth’s Familiars were already dead. She was next.
A fight ensued, a vicious battle. But Royce underestimated he was dealing with one of the greatest hunters to ever exist on this Earth. Elizabeth cut through his Brood like a storm.
But before she could dispatch Royce once and for all, he was gone. Outside, he had set fire to the estate. He wanted acceptance, but she made him choose revenge.
Elizabeth forced to watch her estate burn - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
Elizabeth may have won the fight, but was left bitterly defeated as she’d once again lost her protection and her safety. The estate, her sanctuary of centuries, burned until its bones folded. Again, she watched everything she’d built go to ash.
She retreated into the dark, carrying a new certainty that somewhere out there, she had an enemy.
TO BE CONTINUED…