The Draconic Wizard Workshop

The Nature of Sapience and Power

By Mithras al-Farsi

Originally written November 19, 2025.

Via Regalis. The Road of Kings. The path a vampire walks when they believe themselves superior to humanity, but still responsible for it. There is nothing to rule if you have no subjects, or if they do not respect and follow you. You have a duty. You must uphold your honor and your oaths. You are responsible for those beneath you, because you are superior to them, and thus have the power to protect and guide them. A vampire can be a monster and protector both, something completely inhuman, watchful, hungering, but never too much. Never too far, else they have failed in their role.

I once thought that this was a particular trait of the vampire—the ability to be worse than humanity. That we have powers beyond them, and power corrupts. It is all too easy to become something unimaginable, horrible, unspeakable. Something that must be destroyed by its fellows before too much damage is done to either world.

I was wrong.

This is an essay about the atomic bomb.

I have been a vampire for over three thousand years. I have seen our highs and our lows. I have been Lord of London for much of my existence, and have guarded it jealously from those who might destroy it. I am the sun, the fangs, the shield of London. It is mine. Some of its inhabitants are my enemies, true, but anyone I believe I can remove from the stage, I do so.

There is wisdom in restraint. I do not kill all of my enemies. To do so would cause untold disruptions. Deaths. Collateral damage. Sometimes, it is inevitable, but it is best avoided. I am above collateral damage. A lesser ruler may destroy the entire building to get at their target, but generally, I am above such things. Occasionally, it is necessary, but those are times I do not relish.

I am well-versed in war and conflict. I know its costs. I know what it can buy. I know how those uninvolved will always die. People who do not deserve it will suffer and die. This is unavoidable. I know armies that march towards each other, on foot and sometimes on horseback, with spears, swords, and axes, bows and slings and perhaps crossbows. I was aware when the firearm was invented, and aware of the damage it could do to the human body while largely being ineffective against the vampiric one. Another sign of our superiority, I supposed. A vampire is capable of greater evil than a human, but so too are we capable of greater honor, I thought. We are an expansion of the sliding scale in either direction. To fight against that monstrous nature is noble. Our power and our ability to rise above our nature makes us better than them. Invincible, except when we are unlucky.

I learned that I was wrong when London was bombed in the second World War. So much of my city fell, and I could do nothing. Nothing short of flying up there and destroying the airplanes dropping the bombs myself—and who knows how many I would have set off in the process? Who knows what damage would have been done, if I would have killed myself in my reckless attempt to protect my people? I huddled in the ground with the kine and hoped that they would pass. Night after night, they came, and I was helpless as my city crumbled.

Untold Kindred were annihilated. I could not protect them. I could not protect the mortals, either. It all came down to luck. Who was hit. Who made it to shelter in time. Whose shelters were destroyed. Kindred I thought unkillable were lost in random bombings that did not target them, for those dropping the bombs had no idea that we existed. Allies. Enemies. In equal measure, we were wiped from the board.

I do not know if what I felt was fear. Trepidation, perhaps. Anxiety in certain doses. Anger. Grief. My people were killed and I stood by. They fed me, and I did not protect them. I could not hope to stand up to these weapons—I did not know what their limits were, nor what my limits were in the face of them. Would I survive a hit? I never found out and I never risked it.

Eventually, the war ended. The bombs stopped. I heard loosely of what happened, with victories in Germany and the Americans bombing Japan. I didn't think much of it at the time. My city was safe. My people had, to some extent, survived. I had to rebuild my haven and my court. We had to take stock of who was alive and who wasn't. There was too much to do to care what was happening across the world.

A ancient vampire is an insular thing. A territorial one. Most do not travel much. We care what affects our immediate world and nothing more. Younger, more modern vampires pay more attention to what happens in far-off lands, but those of my age don't have a concept of it. Rarely did people leave the area they were born in, in my time. I was only well-traveled because I was a soldier, and that did not make me interested in what happened in lands beyond mine. To hell with what the mortals do on other continents. I had my own concerns. I had to prove to myself that I was still superior: a vampire, a god. I could not protect my people, but I would do better this time. No more long torpors in times of rapid technological development. Next time, I would be ready.

Then came times of great darkness, of the deepest kinds of vampiric monstrosity realized. The Beckoning of Flesh and the worldwide assault of the Tzimisce Antediluvian. The Eldest was the embodiment of what I had always thought about vampires: that we have the greatest capacity for evil. No mortal could ever do what the Eldest did. It wasn't possible. A vampire who steps outside of the bounds of human morality and comprehension does so to either rise above or sink below them, and it had found new depths of depravity. I understood this. It reaffirmed what I had always known.

No.

No, the mortal humans had beaten it to rock bottom.

There is wisdom in restraint. There was no restraint at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is honor in precision. There was no precision in those bombs. There is disgrace in collateral damage, and that is all I see.

I am… afraid.

I am afraid of the monstrous technology that grew while us old vampires squabbled for blocks of territory and sources of blood. I am afraid of the depths to which the mortals have sunk; have we done this? Or have they always been capable of it? Is a vampire human after all, and simply finds it easier to move into extremes that have been possible since the dawn of time? Is it our power that grants us this? It seems the only reason I thought us more capable of great acts was that it was easier for us. It is easy to perpetuate monstrosity upon others when you have supernatural powers that let you do so quickly, easily, and to a group. Similarly, I thought that was what made so many vampires better than our mortal counterparts: despite this power, despite our ability to be so evil, we do not do it. We stand firmly against it even as our fellows lose themselves to the urges of the Beast. It is simply the way of things.

Mortals have found a way to match and even exceed us. They may callously destroy hundreds of thousands of lives in an afternoon. They may destroy a city. They made permanently change the lives of millions of people. Those that survive may be scarred for life, from the heat, the light, the radiation. That is not to speak of the horror of it that will never leave them. The things they saw. The people they lost. Those that were gone in an instant, with nothing but their blackened carbon outline on the wall as proof that they lived. The bystanders. The children. The people who had never hurt or angered anyone for doing anything other than existing.

I have been destructive. I have been callous. I have destroyed those who did not deserve it on my way to someone I thought did.

But not like this. I could never do this. Not if I wanted to. Not ever. I don't have this kind of power.

Vampires, yes. I could destroy vampires. I could turn night to day. I have not done so, but I could, and now—I don't know if I actually could, having learned this. I would think too much of the ones who had not incurred my wrath, and just happened to be near the windows. Collateral damage. The… innocent, as it were.

They incinerated those people. They hit schools.

There is no reason to kill children.

It is power, I think, that set us apart from mortals for so long, not an inherent part of vampiric nature. It is the power to do as we wished to them. That kind of power is intoxicating, and we love it. I love it. It can take one to extremes, of good or of evil. It has nothing to do with the vampire itself, although great evil is often accompanied by the Beast—it has to do with the power that the vampiric condition grants us. Power is what allows these grand gestures of morality in any direction.

And now, while the average individual human has no more power than they once did, some do. Organizations do. Multiple heads of governments can call for the instant annihilation of thousands of people. All that stops them is the promise of retaliation. Mutually assured destruction: a concept many of my kind are familiar with. It is why so many Methuselahs and even Antediluvians avoid conflict with one another—the risk of destroying one another is too high.

Monstrosity is not the purview of the vampire alone. Mortals are quite capable of it—even at depths I had thouht none but the greatest Methuselahs could reach. They throw weapons at one another that are better suited for winding Antediluvians. They destroy each other out of nothing but hatred. They are more evil than I had imagined.

But they are more good, too. Just as my unwillingness to utilize my power for rampant destruction raises me above my peers, so too does it elevate those who have such powers and would never utilize them for such a thing. Power is a multiplier, and what is done with it shows the truth of one's character. The separation between humans and vampires in this way was due to a power unbalance that grows smaller by the decade.

I do not know what to think of this. I believe I do not like it. I prefer things to remain the same. I am an old vampire: I like it when things move at my preferred speed. I do not want things to change.

But they have changed, and I have changed slower than them. Adaptation is necessary for survival, so adapt I must.

What is the difference between a mortal and a vampire? A human and something else similarly sapient? Anything capable of holding power and anything else?

I no longer have a concise answer. Whatever the answer is, it is something long and complicated, more nuanced than I had previously given it credit for. I underestimated mortalkind and do not intend to do so again. I had long since forgotten what it is like to be one, but living in a body with a few of them has given me a fucking clue.

I'll keep up, this time. It might be all that I have the power to do, and there is responsibility, even in that tiny drop.