Editing Vlad von Carstein (section)

=== As Vlad ===
The place he eventually reached, Sylvania, was a dangerous place, with the majority of the land covered in dark and ominous forests. Although it was an Imperial province, it was already reputed as a barbaric place where the dead did not rest easily and served as a refuge for evil necromancers and sorcerers. This fact was probably because the rough terrain and large forests provided plenty of hiding spaces for the dark sorcerers plus the fact the soil in a good chunk of the province was contaminated by a warpstone meteor strike some time prior which gave the sorcerers dark magic a power boost. Adding to the general ominous nature of the place, some of the more prominent dark sorcerers who had settled in the province previously had worked to ensure a great many castles and towers were built in places where dark magic was most abundant, and then once the work was done they promptly went and married into some of the noble lines of the province.

One of the descendants of these marriages was the evil Otto von Drak who ruled the province at the time of Vlad's arrival, and was the father of Vlad’s future wife [[Isabella von Carstein| Isabella]]. He was a deranged man that would order the execution of peasants simply to prove a point and demanded unbelievably high taxes when he remembered to have it done in between bouts of violent madness. Fortunately, he had as much influence over his realm as one of the peasants he terrorized as the petty nobles ignored his authority. Unfortunately, they were nearly as bad as he was and so the average peasants' lot in the province was still rather miserable all told. Otto being evil and crazy couldn’t care less about the peasants though, instead being far more concerned with the fact his brother Leopold wanted to marry Otto’s daughter Isabella so he could get the province; because nothing solves hereditary insanity quite like incest! However Otto hated his brother (and thought the whole idea of his brother marrying his daughter was nasty as he didn't approve of incest) so he tried to find someone to marry Isabella off to as quickly as possible. However the only noble in the province Otto thought worthy of her committed suicide rather than being forced into marriage and no one outside the province wanted anything to do with her.

Thankfully for Otto in the year 1797 IC, on a dark and stormy night (cliche or not, got to respect the classics), Vlad arrived [[Just As Planned|right on time]] to ask for Isabella's hand in marriage while Otto was on his deathbed. Desperate to stop his rivals seizing his land on his death, Otto agreed, and Vlad and Isabella were married minutes before Otto died. Vlad thus seized the province; his first act ripping out Leopold von Drak's heart and hurling him from Drakenhof's battlements (at Isabella's request). Most of the other noble families objected to the thought of having an outsider rule them, but they were either won over by his charm or silenced. Under Vlad's iron grip the province of Sylvania prospered. The other Counts of the Empire looked on with indifference at the changes, since Vlad was a far better ruler than the old von Drak family even if they'd set the bar so low a dog would've been better.

Though Vlad had married Isabella for power, what had started between them as a marriage of convenience swiftly blossomed into unholy love. The pair became confidants in each other and all but inseparable. Isabella begged Vlad to give her the Blood Kiss so they could be together for eternity, but Vlad was aware to the downsides of vampirism and loved her too much to subject her to that. When she lay dying of wasting sickness (AKA Consumption, which - today - is known as Tuberculosis), Vlad made her a vampire so he wouldn't lose her. For two hundred years, Vlad ruled over Sylvania with Isabella by his side, using different names to avoid suspicion. However, Drakenhof's oldest woman found out his real name and figured out his age; she spread the word that her grandmother had been a little girl when Vlad came into power, at which point even the dimmest Sylvanian realized something unnatural was happening.

This revelation however turned out to be a case of too little too late as by this point there was nothing anyone could do to shake the Vampire’s iron clad grip on the province and stop whatever he was plotting...which was really bad as what he was plotting was nothing short of a full scale war against the fractured and divided Empire. To aid him in this endeavor Vlad made sure to send out agents to collect Warpstone from the city of Mordheim after it was struck by a comet laced with the stuff. Once that was done Vlad waited till the night of Geheimnisnacht and then threw a party for all of Sylvania's nobles, human and vampire alike (with fancy food on the humans' menu, and the fancy humans on the vampires' menu). After his vampires slaughtered the nobles, he used a recovered book of Nagash to start a ritual to summon the dead of Sylvania in a giant army to fight the Empire and appoint himself emperor.

However something that even vampires found unnatural happened with Vlad during the war; Vlad got killed multiple times, for every time Vlad was killed he came back. Vlad's first known death was being decapitated with his own sword by captured enemy general Hans Schiffen, but that night Vlad came back and violently reasserted control of the vampires that same night. The second time he had his head smashed in by the hammer of the Templar Grand Master of Middenheim's knights, Jerek Kruger, only to return to attack Midddenheim a year later and drain Jerek of blood (while also turning him into a vampire in the novel). At another siege he was impaled by five lances and took a Runefang through the heart, but was back to normal and overseeing the crucifixion of his killers the next day. At a battle for a river crossing, a lucky cannon shot decapitated him, yet within the hour he was back on his feet and slaughtering the cannon's crew. Unknown to nearly everyone Vlad’s unnatural vigor was because of his magical Carstein Ring that allowed him to come back from wounds that would otherwise permanently kill even a vampire.

In 2051, Vlad, backed by an absolutely massive undead army swollen by the resurrected Imperial dead laid siege to the city of Altdorf. The siege lasted for many months and the more people who died the bigger Vlad’s army grew. Though the emperor at the time was a pussy, Grand Theogonist Wilhelm the Third actually had some balls and refused to surrender, spurring the surviving soldiers on for one more battle. Just when all hope seemed lost for the Empire on the second to last night of the siege, Wilhelm dispatched Felix Mann, the greatest thief of the age, to steal Vlad's fabled ring and source of his immortality (he had been covertly tipped off about the ring by a traitor within Vlad's own camp - [[Mannfred von Carstein|Mannfred]]). After slipping by the guards, Mann stole the ring, leaving Vlad vulnerable. When he woke the next day and found the ring gone, Vlad furiously ordered a final, full-scale assault on the walls. As the vampires swept aside all who stood against them, Wilhelm confronted the Vampire Lord atop the very walls of Altdorf. Vlad swiftly gained the upper hand, fatally wounding Wilhelm. The priest saw Sigmar's people beginning to waiver in the face of evil, and the Vampire before him howling with triumph. With a prayer to Sigmar on his lips, Wilhelm used the last of his strength to charge Von Carstein, resolving to destroy Von Carstein by sacrificing himself. Even as Wilhelm took Vlad's blade through his chest again, he seized Von Carstein and bore him over the ramparts. Man and vampire were impaled on the stakes placed below the battlements, Vlad landing first, Wilhelm landing on top, driving the vampire down further. With a terrible scream, the Count died, unable to come back without his magic ring.

Vlad's Undead army crumbled without his power to guide them, and the few surviving vampires apart from Isabella fled quickly to Sylvania. The casualties the vampires had inflicted on the forces of Altdorf were so horrific the Empire's forces couldn't pursue them. Vlad's camp was looted by the Imperials, and among the remains were found Vlad's copies of the Liber Mortis and the Book of Nagash that he had: these were taken by the Temple of Sigmar and locked away in the temple's deepest vaults (though Mannfred made off with a page of Nagash's book in the novel, and the ring, after taking them from Felix along with Felix's hands). The last casualty of the Siege of Altdorf was a distraught Isabella, who chose to kill herself with a stake rather than carry on through eternity without her beloved husband.

Vlad's corpse was found and put through all the treatments believed to keep vampires dead to make sure he wouldn't come back; breaking his knees, tying his corpse up with silver wire, garlic in the mouth and buried on sacred ground. Vlad was even buried under Wilhelm's corpse as an extra guarantee against his return. In the second Vampire Wars novel, the vampire Jerek Kruger - now Jerek von Carstein - strong-armed a human gravedigger into exhuming Vlad's remains to try and find The Carstein Ring. But it wasn't there, so Jerek abandoned the grave and the terrified gravedigger with no word on what happened to Vlad's remains.