a truce between the Wamphyri Lords and Ladies. But because they were Wamphyri, it couldn't last. Greedy, jealous, territorial, they were a plague unto themselves. And eventually even Shaitan was whelmed and fell, and was driven from Starside into the cold and inhospitable Icelands.
All of these things are legends told aforetime. But what remains to be told was previously undisclosed ...
Perhaps wolves, like men and bears, foxes and bats, and other species, were creatures of both worlds: Sunside/Starside, and the so-called Hell-lands on the far side of the Starside Gate. Perhaps, springing from the one cosmic germ, a universal soup of genesis, similar forms of life were pre-ordained in the primal plastic of many worlds.
The fossil record of earth suggests it was so. But unless some palaeontologist was fortunate (or unfortunate?) enough to know exactly where to dig, he would never in all the world find anything remotely resembling the Wamphyri of Sunside/Starside. He would not discover them among the strata of Earth's prehistory, for in their beginning Earth was not the homeworld of the Wamphyri. But for an accident of
Nature (the Gate on Starside, and later a second Gate, forged in error and ignorance by men), the Wamphyri could never have ventured here. There would have been wolves of the wild in our world, but not werewolves.
Of the latter:
It has been told how men and beasts went down to the vampire swamps to drink, and how creatures other than men - but most certainly beasts - returned from that place. Until they learned better, the grey brothers of the mountains were among the first victims of the swamp-born horror. Contaminated with a vampire spore, occasionally a sick wolf would return to the pack. But he would be different and changed forever. Like any human wanderer or explorer suffering the same fate, he would become an outcast from his own kind.
Men savaged by such an animal would usually die, to rise up again as vampire thralls - but without a master! Then they in turn must flee from their families and friends to wander as outcasts until their former brothers tracked them down, or the furnace sun found them wanting. Or they could cross the mountains into the dubious safety of Starside.
But they were different again from the victims of human vampires; not only did they fear the sunlight but revelled in the moonlight! For there was something of the grey brothers in them, whose mistress is the full and tumbling moon.
Also, they were generally insane - lunatics -or at the very least, they lacked total command of their senses. As such and despite that they were dangerous, they fell easy prey to men, the sun, the human vampires of Starside. Thus, in the language and psychology of the world beyond the Starside Gate, it was such pitiful creatures as these who would have been the true lycanthropes: madmen who thought that they were wolves!
Except... there was another sort.
Paradoxically - and for all that it sickened such lifeforms as suffered its infection - vampirism was the source of an incredible longevity. For the sickness was spiritual and of the soul, while life was physical and of the blood. Which meant that rarely, mercifully rarely, a wolf infected with a vampire spore would live long beyond the years of a true wolf, and its leech ... would mature! Then the real danger, when a wolf such as this should savage a man!
For the vampire is tenacious, and the bite of this wolf would carry a deal more than venomous spittle! Indeed it might even carry the egg of its leech, by means of which a true vampire extends something of itself down all the ages.
And whether or no the victim died, he would rise up again undead and Wamphyri! Such men were. They were men -but the vampire egg of a wolf was in them, with whatever it had contracted or inherited of its former host's makeup.
And unlike the poor lycanthropes of a different civilization and world (whose blood might be infected however slightly with some faint trace descended from Starside?) the werewolves of that paralel world did indeed have the power of transformation: metamorphosis into their ancestral form. Al it took was the moon flying ful over the boulder plains, to transform man into beast-man, to turn certain Lords of the Wamphyri into men with the faces, forms, and ferocious appetites of wild dogs!
Homo sapiens, Canis sapiens, loup-garou ... werewolf.
Radu Lykan - banished through the Hel-lands Gate by Lord Shaitan,