he was already in the pit of oblivion. But as Shaitan saw his innards, his blood, the very circuits of his life ... something new happened.
His creature went into spasm within him. It gripped his spine, put out suckers into his veins and organs to revel in his, its, passion. Shaitan coughed, gagged, felt a rising in his gorge, something creeping in the contracting column of his throat. He choked the thing out: a pale sphere no bigger than an eyeball.
It shimmered; it was alive with flickering cilia; it fell in a froth of spittle to Turgo's open chest. And in the next moment it turned scarlet ... and was gone, soaked into him!
Shaitan reeled to his feet. He felt dizzy, nauseous; he knew instinctively that this thing - whatever it was - was irreversible as the breathing of swamp-born spores. Which was reason enough to see it out to its end. And so he left Turgo lying there unconscious, with his chest laid open and bloody, and the scarlet vampire egg burrowing in him and hiding in his flesh ...
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
Turgo Zolte recovered; his torn flesh healed, and quickly; he was Wamphyri!
And he hated Shaitan as no creature was ever hated before. Shaitan knew it, and would say to him: 'But you are my son - my true son - which is why I now name you Shaithar Shaitanson. You are not the ugly spawn of trogs, many of which I have made and put down, but Wamphyri! Oh, you had a father before me, but he made you mortal. And I have made you immortal. Why then do you despise me?'
'I was what I was,' Turgo would growl in answer, from where he hung in chains of silver. 'And I preferred it. You have made me other than that -'
'- More than that!'
'- Which disgusts me. I spit on your name and won't take it! Nor will I drink the blood of men.'
'Oh, but you will, eventually, or wither and die. The blood is the life.'
'Not my life.'
'Fool!'
'Ordure of blood-sucking bats!'
And always Shaitan would be enraged. But he could not kill him. For Turgo was his son, of a sort.
In the end he turned him loose, sent him forth, banished him out of Shaitanstack. Not to the north, for he would watch his progress. No, he merely turned him out on to Starside, to make his own way in the world.
Turgo went to Sunside but could not stay there. The Szgany pursued him; the sun threatened him; his foetal vampire tugged at his will, so that if he stayed he must kill. He did kill - but only to live on beast-blood. Finally he sought out men vampirized in the swamps, recruited them, returned to Starside and gathered together an army of trog thralls. And in thirty years he built Shaith-arsheim, but well away from the aerie of his so-called 'father'. And so in the end Turgo did take his great enemy's name, calling himself Shaithar Shaitanson ... by which to remember his 'father' the better and hate him all the more.
By then Shaitan's house was finished and furnished; his banner - a skull head with horns - fluttered from the high ramparts of his aerie, and he was known on both sides of the mountains as Lord Shaitan of the Wamphyri. Which pleased him greatly.
Turgo was still a lesser Lord, and much given to nightmares. One night he dreamed he drank Szgany blood, and when he woke up it was true. In the night he had taken from his odalisque, a girl stolen from a Sunside tribe. He could deny it no longer: he was Wamphyri! Then, blaming Shaitan and loathing him more yet, he devised a sigil of his own: Shaitan's horned skull-head - but split in two halves by a silver axe!
Shaitan saw how he was abhorred and bred more and better warriors. Turgo bred them, too, as a safeguard. And through all of this men came lurching from the vampire swamps to build their aeries in the stacks. Their industry was great, so that they had little time for wars.
Two hundred years flew by and the Wamphyri were mighty and many. Too many ...
Now, on Sunside, the Szgany had become Travellers, nomads, Gypsies who went from place to place by day, and slept in deep forests or caves at night. And for them it was as bad or worse than the aftermath of the white sun. The Wamphyri gave them