But they were not all as good at surviving.
Most of these organisms died out after a few generations. They were created wholesale without direction, and simply could not survive in most environments, if at all. Deep in the earth, one may find fossils and imprints of beings that only ever numbered in the hundreds before their extinction.
The more exotic life-forms found their homes underneath, in water, or in the spaces between, but the surface was the uncompromising stronghold of flesh, wrought from organics. These creatures fought among themselves, intermingling and warring until the animals you see today fought off the others to the margins of the world. Tigers and wolves teamed up to destroy basilisks once, and succeeded.
But the fate of the world lay in an unassuming bipedal group, composed of large apes, their smaller, chimp cousins, and early humans.
Oh, and vampires.
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| Chimps are fucking terrifying |
While homo sapiens was figuring out tool usage like a bunch of wimps, their ape cousins were squarely focused on being able to bite clean through the throat of anything they wanted and rip limps from sockets. While most had a vegetarian diet with the occasional insect, using their bulk and natural weapons for defense, and humans were omnivorous, vampires were entirely carnivorous.
Humans and vampires are much more closely related than humans and chimps. Vampires come from a branch of early humanity that got stuck underground for a few thousand generations. The Veins of the Earth ain't exactly the most hospitable place - scratch that, it's a frozen hellhole - but they adapted well.
In an environment like the Veins, energy efficiency is a necessity. Vampires split from humans just as the brain started to expand, but well before advanced tool usage. The human brain is a ludicrous energy load, an absolute handicap in such an environment.
Vampires don't give a fuck.
They maintained brain growth even in the dark reaches of the earth, and got it to suit their needs. They shifted from being vision-based creatures to hearing, smell and touch-based. They could hear light breathing and smell flesh through the stench and noise of the Veins the same way a human can see a camouflaged snake in the underbrush. Their bodies became compact to fit through squeezes. Their hair grew back to ward them against the cold. They formed nuclear family groups, loosely tied into tribes; the less related, the more acceptable it was to eat them. They had rudimentary language, encoded in quiet clicks and rumbles that imitated natural sound around them. And the proximity to Cthon had... stranger effects.
The influence of the world-spore, slight so far from the core but very distinct over the course of thousands of years, accelerated the mutation rate in the vampire genome. Arcane radiation drove rapid evolution of species. The vampires would hunt and feast on hot blood to warm them. When the hunt grew scarce, they cannibalized each other and ate fungus. And when the hunt was prosperous again, they would breed. The slow development of human children for the sake of full mental development was forgone in exchange for the ability to move and prey from a young age. This only sped their evolution.
Finally, they learned how to wait. Patience was cast into their DNA, such that a family of vampires could hibernate for months off a fresh kill, only to awake from stasis when something hot and edible came along. They became exceptionally difficult to kill; even a mortal wound could be healed with blood, flesh and some time in stasis. A vampire can pursue prey that has a good chance of killing it, to a seemingly suicidal degree, and so long as they survive to kill, they can heal. Disembowelment is a frustration, so long as they can gut you before going down. They blend in, and what appears to be a desiccated corpse may still be waiting, too long gone to know your passing by scent. In the Veins, be careful where you bleed.
So when a vampire first found its way back to the surface world after fifty thousand years, it had never known that its ancestors came from this place. It was a land of milk and honey, where hot, fleshy prey roamed openly. They had gained a powerful aversion to sunlight, and lost visual potency, but their other adaptations more than made up for that.
For a few months, there may have been only a pair of vampires on the surface, gore-soaked Adam and Eve rolling in moonlit pastures, for how disturbing that image is. Then more arrived in paradise. And they called their friends. The population exploded on surface prey, displacing the dominant nighttime predators - big cats, canids and some reptiles - from their niche. And eventually, they found humans. Humans who, in the last fifty thousand years had refined their sight, communication, record-keeping and tools while the vampires had become apex predators.
The humans, only beginning to form basic civilization, had quite a fight on their hands. They had dealt with other nocturnal predators before, but all at once were faced with an enemy that was like them. The vampires did not attack rashly; patience was in their genes. And in hazy genetic memory, they recognized us. Long lost relatives, who did not hunt with tooth and claw as they did, who could not hibernate or return from the brink of death. The vampires learned our languages, while theirs were too quiet for us to notice. They waited on the borders of our camps, shying from the campfire until they could gather numbers. From the moment they laid eyes on us, they had an instinctive need to subjugate a weaker branch of the family, to dominate, to ... assimilate.
To mate. (Ew ew ew ew ew)
Which they did. Until humans adapted right back.
Turns out, advanced social networks, tool development and the ability to operate in both day and night are really, really effective. Humans had been advancing at a leisurely pace, and vampires gave us the kick we needed to get our act together. Under the strain of that threat, we weaponized fire, captured prisoners, learned torture and the principles of counter-intelligence. The upside of the enemy knowing your language is that you can get information out of them. With weapons of stone and wood we beat them back. We learned the virtues of decapitation. We smoked out whole dens in the day, and they either burned underground or fled into the noon sun, where they were hacked to pieces.
Before long, the vampires knew they were losing. And they refused to leave this world. The pure-bloods, full predators, built tombs for themselves, where they still sleep. The others engaged in direct and frantic interbreeding, ensuring that their genome would not be lost. And within a dozen generations, vampires looked to be extinct. No more nighttime raids, no more missing family members. When potent warriors who danced in battle and bathed in blood appeared, they were honored and revered. These were the descendants, only a fraction vampire, but enough to make a difference. Without the external threat, humanity turned its newfound destructive instruments inwards, and at the head of many a tribe were ferocious warlords with pointed teeth.
The New
Vampire DNA is this world's version of Neanderthal DNA. Everyone's got a little bit, and the differences are in the fractions of a percent. The old genome does not reassert itself, or suddenly appear in certain individuals; it's too diluted. There are nobles in far off castles, isolated and strange, the products of long royal inbreeding, who glory in violence and drink the blood of their fellow man. They don't have any more vampire in them than anyone else. More than likely, they were bored and spoiled aristocrats who read about vampire history in a dusty textbook and romanticized the hell out of it. Add a splash of elitism, and voila, you get Vlad Tepes or Elizabeth Báthory.
The subject of vampire ancestry has attracted other attention. The efforts of mad sorcerers splicing vampirism into themselves or creating children of increasing purity have been ... disturbingly fruitful. But those creations have yet to be released onto the world, still locked up in wizard's lairs or in the chains of aristocratic decorum and ignorance.
So the legend of the vampire would have lain fallow, if not for the knights of Astaroth.
The Order of the Viper
Astaroth, Devil of Poison, nemesis of Tayv. Centuries ago, seven kings swore their fealty to his power, and became immortal. They were traitors to kin, each and every one. They betrayed their own families, tortured and killed for Astaroth. Their connections to vampire lore are token.Vampires, at the very least, are mammals. The knights of Astaroth grew venomed fangs, slitted eyes and forked tongues. Where they walk, pestilence and famine follows. They plot in sunken fortresses, making sure that the gods have better things to do than turn their attention solely to them.
These are the bogeymen that parents warn their children about. When crops wither and waters sour, the peasantry often accuse the local ruler of having fallen under the influence of the Vipers. This is sometimes true.
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