[i]Twenty-seven years ago,[/i]
[hr]
Windblown ice drifted across the frozen ground, blowing over the Earth in wispy veils of white. Biting, icy wind howled across a frozen hellscape utterly devoid of any life. Nothing could be seen under the hazy, gray sky but endless white interrupted only by the occasional outcropping of black basalt jutting out from under a crust of snow. Few other lands were so harsh in the dead of winter. 

But here in the very northernmost lands in all the world, it was only early autumn.

Such a climate made even the rather disagreeable weather of the Lands Under Shadow seem as pleasant as the mildest of the Jade Isles. North of the fjords of the Broken Lands, across frigid waters of the Thousand Teeth, was a land so remote and inhospitable that it had no name in any civilized tongue. The Seal-Eaters had some names for this place in their incomprehensible language, but even they rarely ventured beyond the icy coasts. Seals and walruses - the only things of interest to those primitive folk - occupied only the coastal areas. The icy heart of that septentrional continent belonged to no man.

That was not to say that this place was completely uninhabited. Deep inside a narrow fissure within a crag of icy rock was the haunt of perhaps this land's only inhabitant, and one of the few vampires left in the world.

"Thaw, damn you," snarled the occupant of this dank lair as he tossed another patty of dried muskox dung into a firepit of coals and anemic flames. The freeze-dried lump of oxshit crackled as it slowly ignited, illuminating the corpse of a Seal-Eater strung up over the fire by a sinew rope tied around his ankles. Frozen absolutely solid, his round, pale face was perpetually frozen into the terrified howl that punctuated his brutal life. Even the hatchet that the vampire had buried in his belly months ago was still there, intentionally left in the petrified corpse so as to keep as much precious blood inside the body.

Drops of mucus from inside the frozen cadaver's nostrils melted from the warmth of the fire, dropping and sizzling angrily on the coals directly below. The drops of moisture raised the vampire's hopes that his victim would thaw soon. Producing a jagged knife from the tattered folds of a robe of animal hides, the vampire made an incision across the Seal-Eater's bony cheek. Freshly-melted blood dripped at a teasingly-slow rate from the cut, each of which the vampire greedily captured in a bowl fashioned from a human skull. The incision would clot shortly, especially given that the vast majority of the corpse's blood remained locked inside his frozen veins, but it would yield enough to hold the starving vampire over for a few hours while the rest of the cadaver thawed out. Hardly a spoonful of dark red blood had pooled at the bottom of the skull before the vampire gulped it down.

"Blegh," the vampire grunted, scraping the blood off his tongue with yellowed, jagged fangs. "You taste positively dreadful," the vampire complained to the corpse hanging in front of him. "No sweetness at all. Fishy, just like the seals your kind eat."

"You know, I've tasted a great many of your kind over the centuries," the vampire continued on, holding the bowl under the sliced cheek to collect the occasional droplet of blood. "Dining options are rather limited in these latitudes, and admittedly I have never cared for the flavor of your people. That said, I must confess that you, sir, have the dubious honor of being the most unpleasant-tasting fellow I have ever fed on."

A spittle of melted saliva dripping from the corner of the Seal-Eater's mouth and sizzling in the fire was the only response.

"Such an honor is not conferred lightly, sir. Over my long life, I have tasted the blood of every race of man in this world. Even by the standards of my kind, I am very advanced in age. We vampires are immortal, you see, and the only things that can kill us are silver, sunlight, or a wooden stake in the heart. Seeing that the nearest woody shrubs grow fifty leagues south of here, that your people haven't developed even the most basic metallurgy, [i]and[/i] that the sun doesn't shine here for nearly two months in the winter... I am rather safe here. There is a price to pay for such safety, to be sure. But, if you are to survive to be nearly two thousand years old, you have to make some sacrifices."

"Some of my peers might call me a coward for the lengths I have gone to ensure such a long life. 'Dregen the Craven', some have called me." The vampire gave a shrug, cupping the skull bowl in his bony fingers all the while. 

"Admittedly not an entirely dishonest moniker," Dregen rambled on. "But what was I supposed to do? I was a minister under Lord Nosferas, not a warrior. My strength was not in fighting, but in problem solving. And so when Nosferas was killed and Zachaeus led mortal men in his war against other vampires, I solved that problem the best way I knew how: I disappeared! I traveled up to this desolate place and let all the other vampires kill themselves and forget that I ever existed. Those that called me Dregen the Craven? All but a handful of them are dead. Zachaeus is too busy ruling the Lands Under Shadow and managing his idiot children to pay any mind to his cousin Dregen banished to the very edge of the world."

"I'd be a liar, though, if I said I didn't miss life down south, back during the times under Lord Nosferas. He was a tyrant to be sure, but those loyal to him could count on his protection. A little freedom was a small price to pay for a good bloodmeal, or more stimulating company than a dead Seal-Eater."

Moisture was beginning to drip from the ears and mouth of the upside-down corpse at a steady rate now. Dregen gave a pinch of the Seal-Eater's throat, testing to see if his jugular had thawed out yet. The vampire had nearly slit the half-thawed throat when he felt the presence of an intruder in the cave.

Dregen spun on his heels toward the entrance of his lair, hunching over his dagger as he stared wide-eyed out into the icy wasteland outside.

[i]"Chkuna tklakak nag 'tmek!"[/i] Dregen warned in the guttural tongue of the Seal-Eaters. "Begone, or I'll kill you!" He repeated in his preferred language. Only the howl of icy winds outside his cave could be heard in response. Several tense moments passed before Dregen saw what had disturbed him.

Fluttering against the frigid wind outside, a tiny, solitary bat flew in from the blizzard and perched itself on the vampire's arm. It was nearly dead from exhaustion, with numerous pinholes and nicks in its membranous wings earned from what must have been an arduous journey from God knows where.

"What a curious visitor!" Dregen exclaimed - immediately relieved of his initial fear as he examined the bat clinging to the sleeves of his crudely-stitched robe. "You are a very long way from home, my little friend; at least a hundred leagues my estimation. Just look at your wings! What could have possibly possessed you to fly so far north?"

The shivering bat stared into Dregen's eyes as the vampire probed the little bat's memory. Dregen's eyes once again went wide with surprise.

"You've flown so very far, my little friend. Too far to jest about such a thing. But how can [i]that[/i] be?"

The vampire probed the bat's mind and saw into its memories once more.

"How can that possibly be true?" Dregen asked again. "Zachaeus and his heirs are all [i]gone[/i]?"