Episode 36: Fact vs Fiction
Written By Karl White
Before we go further, a correction to the record. The twentieth century, through religion and popular culture, has painted Vampires in colors that don’t hold. Here’s what’s true.
Sunlight...Vampires are extremely photosensitive, and direct sunlight hurts like hell. Their bodies instinctually resist it at all costs. And while bloodsuckers don’t burst into flames, sun exposure quickly blisters and cracks skin. And even though vampires heal rapidly, exposure long enough can kill them.
The effects of sunlight on a vampire - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
Being Undead...That’s a loose turn-of-phrase. They aren’t zombies or corpses animated by curse. They’re undying, so cellular regeneration never tapers, hormones never tilt towards age, there is no cumulative environmental wear...Think, extreme renewal on a loop. Diet modulates that edge. Blood fuels the constant rebuild and powers rapid cicatrization, wounds knitting in moments. Inferior blood, from an anemic, or sick victim, weakens them. They can fast for long stretches, but will grow feebler until they feed.
Crosses and Holy Water...Total myth, neither has any effect. No rite, symbol, or sacrament harms a Vampire. That’s theater.
Reflections...They cast them. The mirror myth has no basis, unless they don’t wish to be seen. Concealment is an art and if a Vampire chooses to vanish in a crowded room, you’ll swear there was nothing there.
Mind control...Vampires do possess heightened faculties including the mind arts. Reading - listening to thoughts. Sight - the telepathic channel itself. Tuning - the bond that locks a Brood to its maker and lets orders move like instinct. Degree varies by Vampire. Some can also sense “blood treason”, which is the ability to know if you’ve killed another Vampire in their own bloodline.
Entering the mind - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
How to Kill One...A stake through the heart is folklore shorthand for “destroy the engine”. They can be killed by ordinary means, but they heal so fast that permanence requires certainty -- remove the heart or the head. Fire and full-body ruin work, too.
Garlic and Silver...Vampires are hypersensitive to strong odors. Pungent compounds in garlic and the metallic tang of silver are overwhelming to an overdeveloped olfactory system.
Coffins...Vampires don’t sleep in caskets. Historically, coffins made discreet long-distance travel possible and fed the association. In truth, they sleep wherever feels safest.
Moving Water...Legend says “running water drains a vampire’s earth-born powers.” But that's a myth. Living wholly on blood, vampires don’t require water, so it's believed the fiction of aversion was born from that. The fear persists as superstition among vampires, self-perpetuated and rarely challenged. It can come in handy if you ever run into a bloodsucker on a dark night. Cross moving water, and chances are, the vampire will hesitate to follow.
Avoiding moving water - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
Ability of Flight...No vampire can fly. But their heightened strength allows them to jump absurd distances, which reads as flight from the ground.
Shape-Shifting...No. They don’t turn into bats, wolves, mist, or anything else. The bat tie-in likely traces to Suus Fābula, the earliest Vampire text, and its later inclusion in the 1701 French Histoires des Morts, whose cover bore a winged skeleton. But it was the theater that proliferated the myth. Bela Lugosi, famously playing Dracula, used his cape as a way to hide his face, in a way similar to how a bat folds its arms while resting.
Change in Age...The consuming of blood changes the appearance of a Vampire. Right after a meal, skin flushes and smooths, pupils dilate, fangs retract. With long abstinence from sucking blood, they look depleted...paler, sometimes with fine folds or ridges in the skin, an effect akin to human dehydration. One drink, and vitality floods back.
Ghouls...Being familiar with Familiars, humans under mind control by a Vampire, forced to run errands in daylight. But there’s a harsher bondage, more permanent, that of a Ghoul. While a healthy dose of Vampire blood re-engineers a human into an Underling, a single drop leaves them in painful limbo, trapped between dying and undying. A Ghoul falls under its master’s total control, gnawed by a hunger that never quiets, and remains that way forever unless more Vampire blood completes the change, or they’re destroyed.
A vampire and his ghoul - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
The inverse among Vampires carries its own peril as well, consuming another Vampire’s blood gives the drinker a powerful surge of speed, strength, and sharpened abilities -- a brief cannibal high. But it usually fades and has been known to harm the drinker's abilities afterwards...Though once on record, a lesser Vampire kept the gain after taking blood from a far older one, as if the blood itself obeyed a hierarchy.
With the myths sorted and rules laid bare, the living story narrows again. We’ve walked beside Ezath in shadow, and Rah in mercy. One of the first three remains -- The one who chose death over patience, Anu. His march through history would bend darker, toward something more prophetic.
Anu - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
On his home planet, Anu was a cocky, brash, over-reactive soldier on his way to becoming a Commander. Privileged blood, son of a general, commissioned young and groomed to inherit the rank. But arrogance slowed his rise. Promotions stalled. “Live up to your destiny or die trying” they warned. His father believed leadership would come with time, but Anu’s narcissism kept it from arriving.
On the battlefield he led with ego and impulse. In victories, the brass praised his audacity, but in private, they wrote him off. Then came the cost. A string of hasty, self-serving calls during a crucial campaign led a column of soldiers to their needless slaughter. It was the final straw, marring his future, and as punishment he was assigned to the exploratory mission that crashed on Earth.
After their Long Sleep, the three survivors accepted there was no chance for rescue, but no one took it harder than Anu. Still holding onto his conceit, he felt as though he was bred to be someone. To create a legacy, like his father before him. He couldn’t achieve that trapped on a boring planet in a distant galaxy.
He’d lash out, blaming Rah and Ezath under his breath, though it was his navigation that drew them into a black hole’s pull, spitting them out in the far reaches of the space, and damaging their ship. But Anu wouldn’t admit fault. He stomped ideas flat, talking over the others. Ezath felt the echo of controlling parents, Rah found him impossible. When they finally parted ways around 10,000 BCE, Anu felt jilted and rejected, blind to the fact they were simply done with his borrowed authority.
Hardheaded, Anu stayed where he was, in the planes of what would become Africa, refusing to concede, clinging to the fantasy of rescue, and scorning the value of living among humans or sharing his blood. His anger needed a throat, and he found it in humankind. He bullied them with a conqueror’s contempt, fed with rage, showed no remorse. Fear rose among the gathered tribes, but so did a warped admiration. An awe for the power and the shadow that hunted them.
So began Anu’s strange and winding road. His long journey of death and destruction...one that would play into the hands of Dark Forces and their march towards the Processions and the Absolution...Even if it took eons to unfold.
TO BE CONTINUED…