Episode 52: Battlefronts

The Great Vampire War was never about single battles, but campaigns spanning decades, where ambition and vengeance set three sides on a collision course. Elizabeth Jovan rose with fury after the death of her husband. Determined to bring down the two conspirators who wanted to weaken her power and alter her place in vampire history.

Victor and Royce an unlikely union, built on shaky ground. Their commonality, a distain for Elizabeth, and their own quests for power. They’d planned for war. She hadn’t. They assumed their preparation would give them the upper-hand. It didn’t. Elizabeth came from a world etched by conquest, her strength forged, her cunning fire-tempered across centuries.

In 1910, immediately following their provocation, Victor Monfret fled to California. His fortune would see him through, as he hid among the growing contingent of eclectic and eccentric businessmen who would eventually create Hollywood and the motion picture industry. 

Victor observes on the set of “Phantom of the Opera”, 1924 - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

Victor invested heavily in the growing enterprise. With Elizabeth’s declaration of war against him, he knew whoever could bankroll the best defense, would emerge victorious. So he used the profits to build a fortified estate modeled after his South Carolina stronghold.

Across the growing city, he planted foot soldiers, operating under layers of human crime networks. By the 1930s, Victor had unintentionally built the largest supernatural crime syndicate in America. An empire of drugs, weapons, brothels, and blood. And every dollar fed his defenses.

Elizabeth couldn’t breach L.A. head-on. Instead, she hunted his Underlings, eating away at the layers of security he built out west. But Victor’s walls only grew thicker. His Brood swelled. He was no longer only a creature of the night -- he was a kingpin.

Royce in the wind - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

Royce, meanwhile, chose the opposite path. Where Victor dug in, his counterpart, vanished. He drifted like the wind, bouncing to a series of safe-houses he’d set up across the midwest. His Brood was smaller than Victor’s but far more disciplined. Soldiers he had turned over the centuries, including former military tacticians, who advised patience and resource conservation. Royce intended to let Elizabeth and Victor batter each other into weakness...and then strike when the time was right. And as years ticked by, each vampire entrenched, would see movements in battles, and face bitter defeats.

Every type of strategic advantage and warfare was employed. In 1947, Victor resorted to something supernatural he thought could turn the tide in his favor. Matthew Townsend, a washed-up actor and heroin addict owed a large sum of money to Victor’s syndicate. When faced with his life, Townsend didn’t beg for mercy, but instead offered a secret. A forbidden tome kept by a powerful Hollywood producer, who flaunted his occult library to private guests. Among his collection, was an opus of magic authored by Satan himself, The Book of Amar. 

For Victor, wielding a power like magic could alter the trajectory of the war in a dominating way. To erase his debt, Townsend stole the book. Impressed with the humans resourcefulness and ingenuity, but dismayed by his addiction to drugs, Victor offered to help Townsend cleanse his habit, by turning him into a vampire. He’d become one of Victor’s most trusted Underlings...But unlocking the book’s power required expertise Victor lacked, so Townsend began a long, wandering search for those who understood its dark magic.

Victor in possession of the Book of Amar - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

But seeking information about such a book in the hidden world of magic came at a cost. Whispers reached Broderick Zayne, rumors of a vampire digging for forbidden knowledge. Zayne saw the shape of the vampire’s intentions, and baited the bloodsucker into a trap. When the dust settled, the Underling was dead, and another copy of the dark text was removed from circulation.

A curious note to go along with the book...the name Ezath appeared in the tome, revealing itself to agents of the dark, as being part of a Procession. Orem Black scoured the world for any mention of the name. Finding it in the obscure poem, the Suus Fābula.  He knew it involved ancient vampire lore, but because she changed her name so long before to Elizabeth, her true identity was only known to a handful in the world...for Orem it was a dead end.

Elizabeth’s forces still hunted Victor relentlessly, but his fortress remained impenetrable. So she turned her attention to Royce. In 1955, her spies finally tracked him to a quiet compound outside of Cleveland. After days of surveillance, Elizabeth’s elite squad attacked -- and were killed in an explosion. Royce had set decoys, false versions of himself placed across properties to confuse her scouts. 

For decades, the pattern repeated. Elizabeth’s army carved at small pieces of his Brood, hurting, but never catching him. The war between the Queen and the Ghost became a long, brutal stalemate.

While Elizabeth, and even Victor didn’t know where Royce was, by the 1960s, he’d settled in Texas, with fallback routes to Mexico should the war shift against him. Ironically, he became the least visible of the three warlords, yet commanded the sharpest intelligence network. And quietly, behind Victor’s back, Royce began leaking certain details about his partners operation and stronghold to Elizabeth. She suspected deception, but information was information, and any crack in her enemies’ ramparts was fuel for the fire.

As the Great Vampire War bled into America’s cities, bodies piled in alleys and tenements. Police blamed gangs or narcotics. Newspapers recorded the carnage without ever seeing the shadow behind it...but Bernard Watkins did.

Bernard Watkins keeping the night safe - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

The great-grandson of prestigious Nightwarden bloodlines... Bernard inherited a different kind of instinct. He could read the raging war like a map. He built a network of street informants in Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, and New Orleans, watching crime patterns, body dumps, migration trails. He understood what authorities couldn’t see, the violence had a shape.

Bernard operated like a phantom, silent, surgical, lethal. By 1979, his personal kill-count was staggering. But Royce, his father’s “white whale” still remained elusive.

Vampire’s from each army were susceptible to becoming a statistic at the hands of Bernard. And while Victor and Royce found him a pest, Elizabeth considered him a threat...until she learned his life’s mission -- It was then, the human became an asset. 

Rather than eliminate him, Elizabeth began covertly sending Bernard clues. Subtle breadcrumbs, scraps of intel her Brood could glean from Royce’s shadowy movements. If a human could remove her most cunning foe for her, then the war might finally tip irrevocably in her favor.

Bernard on the trail for Royce - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

By 1980, at age fifty-one, Bernard lived as a man hollowed out by purpose. Royce was the only horizon he could still see, the last thread tying him to his father, and the family’s Nightwarden legacy. He had long accepted that his secret war would end with him. There’d be no heir, no child to inherit the burden. The world was too cruel of a place to bring new life into, and Bernard was too consumed to raise one. His objective was vengeance, pure and final.

But during a stop through Atlanta, everything changed. Flora Hopkins, a waitress he’d visited between hunts, told him she was pregnant. She knew who he was, what his life meant, and still she wanted to keep the child, and wanted him in their lives. For the first time in decades, Bernard allowed himself to imagine something different. A son, maybe. Someone to teach, to one day pass down the tools his father gave him. 

But unfortunately, during the birth, Flora died from complications, leaving Bernard alone, with a newborn daughter and no map forward. Flora had no family to take the child. Neither did he. And yet, when he held the tiny girl, he knew he couldn’t walk away. His mission shifted in a single breath.

Tender connection, Bernard meets Flora Mae - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

He named her Flora Mae Watkins, honoring both her mother and the aunt whose murder had defined his life. Raising her was something he stumbled through, clumsy and terrified. The only world he understood was the hunt, so that was the upbringing he gave her.

Father and daughter lived without roots, without rest, chasing Royce across the South. As she grew, Bernard taught Flora Mae everything he knew, the code carved into their bloodline.

But for all his strength, Bernard didn’t know how to simply be her father. He mimicked the man who raised him, stern, disciplined, rigid. A brutal inheritance for a child with no mother and no childhood. Flora Mae longed to be a kid, but Bernard’s obsession closed every door but one.

For better or worse, she’d grow up in the shadow of a single mission -- eliminating Royce, no matter the cost.

TO BE CONTINUED…