Vanysa walked through the library with an almost prancing step, her hands folded behind her back, supreme confidence welling up in contrast from her earlier discomfort. Briefly she turned her mind to the Draconic Queen, and a smidgen of pity rose up for the woman. 'Poor thing, always fearing my revenge, never really believing I've forgiven her because she hasn't even forgiven herself.' The aura of guilt that had once engulfed the Draconic Queen had diminished greatly over the years, and each of the few times the pair met, the Queen seemed more and more radiant as she came into her own.
'I just can't bring myself to hate her, she was just a struggling monarch with no real hope to be had… the guilty ones are gone, and it isn't as if she gave me to Astraka, even His Majesty didn't expect me to be taken.'* She thought, and then put that thought from her mind.
Instead she began to peruse the books, the leather bound copies were vast in number, but thanks to the reorganization using the Dewey system promoted by the Sorcerous Empire, the right section proved easy to find. Not history.
She went to Mythology. The myths of the founding ages of the Draconic Kingdom, long before it was a single political and cultural entity. The gathered stories of countless bards singing half remembered and thoroughly exaggerated stories of figures whose names were often distorted or even made up simply to fill the gap left by a name forgotten by time.
Vanysa reached up and pulled a thick book away from a shelf that was shoulder height to her. Emblazoned in golden ink, the title read, 'The Book of Many Kings'.
She hefted it under one arm and went to a nearby table and laid it down with the reverence her master imbued her with in the distant days of her first learning under him.**
She began to read the language of her birth country with speed that would have shocked a scholar, and as she read the words given to her by people who died centuries before she was even conceived, she longed to speak to them. To raise up the soul of the dead who spoke to her across the vanished years and tell them, 'thank you' for their work in preserving what would have otherwise been lost.
This remained true in her mind even though it wasn't a story she was reading now, but a mere record of events. The earliest recorded appearance of a vampire, but one with curious habits. The story of a vampire that consumed the blood of a family… but left the eldest daughter alone.
The story of a vampire who preyed on bandits, hammered them into unity, and established himself as a noble… largely to spare the Kingdom from a conflict… but then he simply 'vanished' after his chosen mate perished. Walking away and not returning… only to emerge again a hundred years later in another record.
Rising, wedding, and vanishing… and in between, preying on those who crossed his path.
Sometimes there was no name. Only a vague description.
She got up and went to another book, 'The First Wars of Men'.
A record of stories set before the Six Great Gods…
She flipped from musty page to musty page. 'Technically vampires are immortal… but most die off, either killed by mortals, or they kill themselves when they get tired of living. Until now, the oldest vampire I knew of was Keeno Fasris Inberun… but this one? Inta has to be many… many… many times older than she is.' The truth tickled at Vansya's brain while she explored the records.
A story of a masked Lord who gathered humans into a small army and slaughtered a host of beastmen… he married and ruled for sixty-two years… never removing his mask, only to walk away from the throne after the death of a mate… This one had the name at least. 'Inta'. She read it to herself several times.
Fifty years, a hundred years, forty years… the records went on and on, giving numbers for the rule of a minor lord or mercenary turned lord before again he vanished… book after book within the library offered variation after variation.
For a moment she leaned back in her chair and took a breath, staring up at the orange sky that was the dying of the day. "How did nobody ever put this together…?" She wondered.
But in her heart, she knew the truth. 'A lord just walking away from power was unthinkable, especially over something as trivial as the death of a spouse. Living secretly as a vampire, then going into hiding as a predator, then settling into life again… it's so bizarre that no storyteller would create it… and nobody was looking either. Nobody was ever searching for this, and the stories, so spread out across books and regions… if anyone ever spotted it they would just assume one was a retelling of the other. Who would ever think…'
The constant childlessness of the man in those stories was a definitive clue, vampires could not reproduce with humans, even with heteromorphs it was rare and required some help from magic.
Book to book she went until half a shelf was empty and a stack of their former contents rose higher than Vanysa's head while she was seated.
'If these numbers in these various pages are right, and he became a vampire roughly when I think he did, then he is thousands of years old…' The thought brought a long silence to the demoness. She could only stare upward into the endless sky and try, and fail, to understand what it must have been like to live through so many days.
'Curete did it trapped in a cave… but still, Furies are different than vampires. Vampires retain more of their humanity… sort of.' Vanysa thought that over, but realized something else.
'I should meet him at least, finish all this off by direct questioning… he preyed on my country as much as anything else… so what does that say about him?' She asked herself the question knowing full well it had no real answer.
'The sea of blood down there… if vampiric sanguimancy depends on how much blood they have to draw on…' Vanysa's lips pursed tight, her opinion on Inta, such as she'd come to know him, was an iffy one. His unfortunate beginning notwithstanding, his life since then waxed and waned between predatory and peaceful. From wolf, to sheepdog, and back again.
'I suppose there is only one other important stop.' Vanysa told herself as she looked up at the sky and watched the dark of night settle in. 'I have to visit his last known place of occupation before the war and the amnesty… then I can meet and speak with him myself, and then deliver my report to His Majesty to decide whether or not he should be permitted to see the Lady Entoma.' Vanysa swallowed and started to cough as she tried to picture Inta meeting Lord Ainz and expressing his desire for the maid demon.
'I've heard of scary papas about their daughters… but what about when the papa is a god?' She wondered and for long, happy minutes, her laughter filled the empty library until it was time to put her research away and go on to the next step.
*God Rising: The Cult of Ainz
**Taming of the Beasts