Episode 50: Provocation

With their pawns in motion, the game was set for Victor and Royce. Not necessarily allies, but opposing players sharing a single goal, to remove the queen from the board, or tilt the illusion of order in their favor...and in their conquest, blood would be the only checkmate that mattered.

In 1909, a decree reached Elizabeth, as vampires everywhere unanimously wanted her to lead them into the future. She accepted, astonished by how far her importance had spread throughout the vampire culture. It was enough to distract her from what was really going on. And her coronation would serve as bait, laid by two unseen hands.

The ceremony was set for 1910, in the neutral site of Detroit, Michigan. With vampires far and wide, promising to attend. With her popularity surging, it would be the perfect stage for a coordinated strike. The impetus in Royce and Victor’s master plan.

Elizabeth arrives for her coronation - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

Elizabeth, Seamus, and their entourage arrived in the Motor City, attending parties, meeting hopeful constituents beneath the noise of a booming metropolis of humans. She was welcomed, revered, admired by all of the vampires who had been told she was the last of her kind. The final remnant of an age no one else remembered.

Rah, long dead, was still honored and thought of fondly by those he created. Anu, unknown to most, was confirmed killed, but little information was known as to how or why. All that remained of the original vampires was the youngest, that set out on her own so long ago, now elevated above the masses, about to be crowned the Queen of her kind.  

Both Victor and Royce stayed hidden, waiting for their chance to spring. As the ceremony began, applause filled the hall. Elizabeth entered, a beam of torchlight across the dark. After the crown was placed on her head, Victor, blade drawn, emerged from the crowd ready to kill.

VICTOR: Death to the old guard! Death to Ezath!

Victor emerges from the crowd - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

Seamus stepped in the way. Steel pierced flesh, straight to his heart…Chaos erupted. Victor and Royce, with enough loyal plants in the audience, vanished into the shadows before the hall could be locked down. With her esteemed husband dead, Elizabeth sent her Brood to scour Detroit.

But Victor and Royce had soldiers secretly in place, ready. Battles broke out all over the city. To the outside observer it would appear as a cause and effect. But to the trained eye, it seemed too well coordinated. That is when Elizabeth began to piece together the coronation had been a trap. Woven from decades of rooted lies, forged allegiances, and hidden spies. Underlings of her foes had infiltrated nearly every vampire community, and were more than willing to shed blood to draw her into a fight they expected to win.

Vampires battle in the streets of Detroit, 1910 - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

Mind’s were read, traitor’s exposed, plans of war spilled. Elizabeth knew what she had to do...she hit the streets, leading the charge straight into combat. Hacking and slashing her way to victory in the darkened street battles. Those who witnessed her fight could not question her strength or power. Spoiling Victor and Royce’s attempt at tarnishing her shine.  

When daybreak came, it was clear to Elizabeth, her enemies had successfully escaped. But she had staved off what was thrown at her. As a consolation her soldiers brought her Noah, Victor’s most trusted Underling. For days he was tortured. Dragged into sunlight. Held beneath flowing water until his skin split. 

When his will finally broke, Noah spilled every secret he knew, their meeting in Charleston, the long con to elevate Elizabeth, and the plan to crush her at the height of her glory. The only thing Noah could not reveal was where Victor and Royce had fled. He was quickly put to death. Elizabeth had her justification for all-out-war...but she knew she had to outfox her enemies.

The human cost of the war between the vampires - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

The Great Vampire War would begin. A conflict that would escalate quickly, and last decades. Factions of vampires fighting one another for supremacy. Bloody clashes, night after night, with humans caught in the middle as collateral damage. We were needed to feed their soldiers, used as bait, or shields to impede battles, kidnapped and turned to resupply the front-lines. The rise in missing person cases spiked. Murder rates in towns big and small skyrocketed as the twentieth century unfolded...and the war among the bloodsuckers was the main cause.

But in the shadows of this spreading chaos, there were a few who stood between mankind and annihilation. Protectors bound by oath, carrying an old trade forward like a sacred torch.  Silent sentinels between our world and the dark, watching out for the living, there to make sure dawn would still come.

To find where it all began, you have to go back to 1791, in Charleston, when troubles with feral vampires had spilled over into the public. Slaves on the Ashley Plantation rebelled against their master, desperate for protection from a creature that stalked them nightly. An angry mob ascended on the house to quell the uprising. History recorded the event as a crushed rebellion, but what wasn’t known, is a handful of slaves escaped mere moments before Jackson Bouche and the mob arrived to dispense their form of justice.

Heading North to freedom - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

One of the escapees was a young boy by the name of Robert Watkins. He and the others secretly headed north, where rumor had it, blacks could live free, without question. Unable to move by day, the group would vigilantly travel at night, using creeks, streams, brooks, and rivers, guided by the whispered belief that vampires feared running water. 968 miles later, they reached Boston.

By 1801, Robert and the other runaways had assimilated into free society, mostly working menial jobs and hard labor, but surviving without the bonds of Slavery. Robert was gainfully employed as a wagon driver for a transport company. One night while driving good from Boston to Concord, a man flagged him down, claiming his family was in danger. Always one to help, Robert followed the man down an embankment -- straight into a vampire’s trap, meant to make a meal of him.

But Robert had faced monsters before, and he’d be damned if he was gonna let the vampire take his blood without a fight. He killed the creature, just as a group of well-armed men and women hurried onto the scene. They had been tracking the vampire, intending to kill it. Instead, they witnessed Robert fearlessly finish the job. This was Robert’s introduction to The Nightwardens, a clandestine association sworn to defend mankind from creatures that stalk the night.

The Nightwarden’s origins were tied to the most unlikely source. After Renmaru Okayama’s transformation, he remained dedicated to his samurai’s “credo”, using his vampire powers to shield humans from things that lurked in the shadows. In 1797, Ren, Aya, and Ichiro saved a British privateer named Edwin Hawkes from a vampire attack in the Japanese city of Osaka. 

Edwin Hawkes - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

Hawkes was a young sailor, born to the sea, raised on stories of the strange. He’d encountered Lymnades, or Fish-Men, in the Caribbean. He’d met a race of men and women with tails in New Guinea. He saw with his own eyes the Rakta Mandir, also known as the “Temple of Blood”, a secret fighting syndicate in Nepal, where a menagerie of enslaved creatures fought in secret arenas. There he watched a Lycanthrope brutally fight a Yeti to the death.

But Hawkes’ fascination had always been with vampires, having seen one caught and slaughtered as a child. He was utterly shocked, discovering Ren and his group, true predators, who chose to protect life from their own kind. Hawkes promised Ren, for saving his life, he’d carry the samurai’s work overseas, spreading the doctrine of protecting others from the shadows. 

By 1799, after collecting a motley crew of others wanting to hunt monsters, Hawkes sailed to America following vampire migrations along Africa and Europe. Upon arriving in the New World, Hawkes and his crew established themselves as a force to be reckoned with, successfully hunting vampires through the colonies. 

His group of Nightwardens were nearly a hundred strong by the turn of the century, positioned throughout most of the larger cities in the newly formed United States. Hawkes was among the group that found Robert Watkins on the road to Concord. Witnessing Robert’s bravery, hearing his background, they invited him to join their ranks.

Robert Watkins and Harriett Clark, 1803 - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

Watkins happily accepted, assisting in the Nightwardens efforts in Massachusetts and New York. Robert would eventually marry another member of the group, another former Slave named Harriett Clark. Their lineage would become one of the most important in the history of The Nightwardens, Spawning some of the greatest Vampire-hunters ever known, and playing a pivotal role as The Great Vampire War ignited and burned through decades of long nights.

As for Edwin Hawkes, he died in 1853, at the age of 85, shortly after passing the intel that set Ren on the path to Anu’s death. Hawkes’ name would never be widely celebrated, nor his deeds sung, yet his echo would alter the course of the history of the night far more than he, or anyone else could have ever believed.

TO BE CONTINUED…