COMPLETE! The Wasteland. A woman screams in the night. Spotlights flash on a pile of dust in the desolate patch of land that lay just beyond the tall crosses that picket the boundary of Encampment R-34. A group of curious students leave their bunkho...
The nineteenth of October, Fourteen Hundred and Seventy-nine
To my dear family,
This being I mentioned, Dracula, I have not seen him again. But he remains in the fight against the Ottomans. Of how, I shall elucidate.
The Turkish forces retreat'd to the mountains, where they scattered. I, and a force of my choosing, took chase and lost them at dusk. We made camp and prepared our weapons for first light.
Nary a shot was fired.
Hearing a strangeness in the night, I slipped away from the men under my charge and went out to ascertain what my ears had heard. To my unbelieving eyes, I discover'd the enemy impaled in an upright position on over five hundred cleft'd trees. The how of the matter is the most shocking question, for there is no army in Christendom capable of preparing pikes from living trees and raising victims to such heights. And absolutely none that could do such deeds in so little time. I knew it to be the work of Dracula.
I must have faint'd in my delirium, for I was woken from that very spot this morning by the men of my charge to discover the trees empty. The bark blacken'd by blood. No bodies to be seen. The impaled have vanished.
Yours alone, Ezzelin
FROM CHRONOSCOPE - A sequence of scratched out sentences was discovered on the backside of the page.
That is not the fullest truth. I would like to spare you from the rest, but writing of the matter assists in the comprehension. Something else had happen'd to the men. They writh'd in place atop the sharpen'd trees. I could not, and would not, approach them as they were gradually lower'd by their own weight down the living pike. There was one near me, however. More of monster than man, he gnash'd his teeth at the moon, clawing his own waist bloody to reach the pike within. His weight was gradually lowering him downward. He should have already perish'd from bloodlessness, and yet he was sustained. When the tip of the tree hit his heart, he dispersed into something like dust. Before growing faint, I swear on all I believe that I saw Kumpan, a man whom Vlad III call'd the High Gypsy, hide away in the shadows.
FROM CHRONOSCOPE — letter discovered unopened at a dig site for the ruins of Castle Klatka at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains
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