Dracula turned away from the window, the image of the wounded Punisher seared into his mind. Vulnerability to the sun was an ancient wound reopened, an echo of a past he had fought fiercely to overcome. His mind, an archive of centuries, involuntarily retreated to the early, chaotic attempts to propagate his bloodline, long before the Punishers' Code imposed order, long before the solar rings offered a semblance of normalcy.
The Embrace... he thought, the archaic term for transformation echoing in his head. In those early centuries, it was a desperate act, an attempt to create mates, to ease the crushing loneliness of eternity. But it was a dark science we barely understood. We believed the sire's will, the potency of blood, was enough... how naive we had been.
He remembered the failures. Not just the humans who simply died, unable to endure the transition, but those who changed in unexpected ways, twisted by dark alchemy and the nature of the mortal vessel.
The will, the latent power, the dominant emotion at the moment of change... he understood with bitter hindsight. We weren't creating copies of ourselves. We were unleashing something that fed on the human's essence, magnifying and warping it through the prism of undeath.
A pale, beautiful face emerged from his memories, a passionate young woman, perhaps a renegade druid or a wood nymph he had crossed paths with. He remembered the moment of transformation, the agony transmuted not just into bloodlust, but into a cruel, ethereal beauty. The unbridled passion... twisted into the cruel beauty of the 'Blood Fae,' Dracula thought. They drank blood, yes, but with the capricious malice of the darkest Fae. They developed an affinity for illusions, an unnatural charm, and some... some even manifested shadowy wings, vestigial but functional. They laughed as they hunted, indifferent to the sun that scorched us, their imperfect 'cousins.' The irony that Morgana Le Fay, now a reluctant ally of their enemies, had embraced a similar title was not lost on him.
Then he remembered others. A scholar obsessed with death, an amateur necromancer who sought immortality in the Embrace. And those whose soul already flirted with the grave... became the Necrovampires. Their transformation had been putrid. Bloodlust mingled with an aura of decadence, and they discovered they could influence the recently dead, whisper to spirits, a parody of eternal life surrounded by death. They were outcasts even among vampires.
But the most disturbing, the ones that sent a chill through him even now, were those born of brute strength and unbridled ambition. He remembered a barbarian warlord, a man whose will was steel and whose fury was legendary. Upon receiving the Embrace, his body had not only strengthened, but transformed. His skin hardened into overlapping scales, Dracula remembered, resistant to conventional weapons. Their physical strength rivaled, and sometimes surpassed, my own. We called them the 'Dracovampires'. Beasts of incredible power, almost impossible to reason with or control, consumed by the same fury and ambition that defined them in life. It had taken several of the oldest vampires to subdue the first of them.
We understood too late, the ancient vampire reflected, that transformation was not a uniform mold. Will, latent power, dominant emotion... all of it colored, warped, created... unexpected monsters from our own error, from our initial ignorance.
That was why the Code, he reminded himself, his resolve hardening. That was why the Punishers' iron Discipline. To prevent such... abominations. To forge soldiers of purpose, not erratic monsters born from the whim of human blood and emotion.
The idea that such failed creations, such divergent subtypes, might still exist in some forgotten corner of the world was a latent worry rarely allowed to surface. But now, with reality itself unraveling, who knew what ancient horrors might be stirring in the shadows?
He shook his head, pushing the memories away. They were distractions from the immediate problem: the sun. Vulnerability. The overwhelming need to restore the protection of his Punishers. The ghosts of the past served only as a stark reminder of what was at stake if they failed. They wouldn't be weak again. They wouldn't be a laughingstock again. He would find a way. He always did.