the vampire

frederick castle

history

Frederick Castle was born in 1879 in [ REDACTED ] to [ ? ] and [ ? ].

Mere hours after his birth the boy was left with a neighbor, a gentle woman with a large heart and no children of her own. She was called Lillian Castle and Frederick's parents gave her a third of their savings in exchange for taking the baby and maintaining silence about the transaction. His parents used the rest of their savings to charter a ship to an unknown village in Eastern Europe. They left the boy no letters, no belongings, only the clothes on his back.

As soon as the baby was stable enough Lillian took him to her hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. She kept Frederick out of school and taught him to cook and clean so that she might send him out as a house-hand to bring in extra pay for their little family of two. He worked for neighboring families, called Lillian 'mother,' and all was good and well.

Eventually, inevitably, he turned eighteen, and Lillian succumbed to fever. Frederick was left with three-hundred dollars and nowhere to go. He slept in parks and behind buildings, anywhere that sheltered him from the souring weather. When the money began to run out—blown mostly on booze and the odd meal here and there—he took a job at an inn, cooking and cleaning, tending to repairs, in exchange for a thin mattress upon which to sleep in a dusty storage room.

It was at the inn that he met the men who would shockingly alter the course of his young life.

Judah and Gaius were not large men, but they commanded every room they entered. They spoke in hushed tones between themselves and when they spoke to others it was with an eerie tranquility that sent shivers down the spine. Their clothes were immaculate and their skin unblemished, and when they looked upon humans they oozed intrigue and superiority. From the moment they set foot in the inn Frederick could not keep his eyes off of them.

And he hadn't meant to spy on them, but he was young and curious and in the right place at the right ( wrong? ) time, checking in on the stabled horses one last time before bed, when he saw them lead the barmaid into the shadows behind the inn. She was always kind to Frederick, allowing him drinks when he was down, and offering friendly smiles when they passed one another in the halls. And so when he heard her scream he rushed to help without hesitation.

What he saw shocked him to his core. The two men from the inn had the barmaid at their mercy, neck exposed, rivulets of blood spilling down her throat. And the men had fangs, and rippling veins beneath their eyes, and Frederick was frozen.

The vampires spared his life because they'd decimated their last footsoldier in a fit of rage and could not return to their maker without a replacement. They turned Frederick with Judah's blood and brought him to Tamar, the woman they answered to.

Tamar was a ripper with little concern for anything beyond hunger and hedonism. She liked Frederick because his hair was long and he took direction well. She taught him how to hunt, how to compel a meal, and commissioned him a daylight ring from one of the many witches in her arsenal.

Serving the rippers was fun for the first decade or so. Frederick followed them across America, up into Canada, across the water to Scandinavia, into Russia; where Tamar, Judah, and Gaius went, Frederick was at their heels. He cleaned up so that their trail of bodies across the world could not be traced back to them ( not that any human could track down vampires that did not want to be found, anyhow ) and all was well.

But all was repetitive, and nothing changed. Until Tamar grew colder than she once was, unhappy with the predictability of their lifestyle. Where she was once wild and dangerously alluring she became careless and wicked, and Frederick grew to fear her. Judah and Gaius were no help; when Tamar said jump they did not question how high, they simply leapt. The small band of rippers became authoritative and cruel and Frederick's role as footsoldier morphed into one as prisoner. He was not allowed out unaccompanied by one of the three, he was not to feed without letting one of his captors finish the kill, and he was allowed no personal freedoms aside from his own name. And even that was beginning to sound foreign to his own ears.

It took one-hundred-and-forty-ish years, give or take a month or three, for Frederick to find his freedom. And it was his freedom that found him, coincidentally, in the form of an old ( six-hundred years on earth old ) ripper hunter who slayed Tamar and her men and freed Frederick on the promise that the young vampire seek out a certain school in the town of Mystic Falls, Virginia.

He'd seen so much blood in his time with the rippers, so much carnage, and so much blind rage, that when the hunter asked him his name he could only say, "Red."

He kept his promise to the hunter, hauled out to Virginia, and began life anew at the Salvatore Boarding School for the Young & Gifted, where they pledged to teach him how to exist in the world as normally as any one vampire ever could.

etc.