Chapter 105: Chapter 103: The red serpent’s scales are made of threads

Vampiris Sanguis

The tales of vampires as creatures that lurk in the darkness of nightfall are as old as we can trace back all of our forefather’s written records of the world. Vampires are undead monstrosities that sustain themselves from the blood of the living. Vampires, as vulgar animals, are not picky about the source of the blood that they desire.

A person is turned into a vampire if they are cut, bitten, or otherwise infected with the spit or bodily fluids of another vampire. Within seventy-hours, the victim will succumb to their symptoms, devolving into a monster, which we colloquially call ‘ghouls’.

Ghouls are the lowest stage of a vampire’s existence, maintaining their human form in the same way that a zombie might. Ghouls are mindless, incredibly agile beasts that only exist for the hunt. They primarily sustain themselves on the flesh and blood of the living.

During this time, the entity will slowly devolve, its body essentially melting down into itself as the muscles sag and the bones rot from the inside out, until the ghoul is nothing more than a strange, shambling heap of meat that cannot hold itself upright any longer.

It is during this phase, that the ghoul will then begin to cocoon, as it were, laying as an rotting, feted clump of meat that rearranges itself, growing new limbs and extending old ones outward into the horrific monstrosities that are vampires in their most common life stage.

Vampires are anything but human, existing as masses of shapeless flesh with dozens of arms for legs and a neck as long as a full man’s height. They have no eyes, but teeth in the hundreds instead. They become incredibly potent, highly deceptive, yet still heartless killing machines that exist only for the purposes of hunting, though with much more cunning than in their previous stage.

It is only after an uncertain time that this stage then too falls into a new cocoon cycle, to later emerge as the higher vampires, who walk amongst us in the night, dressed in the skin of men and women.

It is assumed that out of every thousand victims of the ghoul sickness, only one survives long enough in its mindless hunt to reach the adult stage of an elder vampire, but even then, their numbers are thin, as vampire society is highly contentious, killing just as many of their own if not more than the church’s hunters ever might.