Vampire

## *Vampires*

*The Originals*

* *1, 2, 3, 4, 5*

*Legacies*

* *1, 2, 3, 4*

**Vampires** are magically reanimated human corpses which are inhabited by the spirits of the deceased person and who closely resemble the living human they were before their transformation. Vampires feed and survive on the blood of the living, typically on that of humans, and they can also transform other humans into more of their kind by sharing their own blood with them. Vampires are one of the many known supernatural species that were created by Witches, albeit through the creation of their progenitors, the Original vampires.

## Creation

A human who has consumed vampire blood in some way (whether by drinking it, having it poured into their open wound, or by being injected with it) and has subsequently died with the blood in their system will be magically revived as an undead vampire, just like the vampire who sired them. The exact nature of the human's death is irrelevant to this process; the only condition that must be met is that the body has to be more-or-less intact and able to function once they reawaken in transition, though the upper limits of physical damage upon a human body by which vampirism can recover has yet to be defined.

### Vampire In Transition

In order to complete the transition into a vampire, the person must then consume a significant amount of human blood, at least a sip's worth, within the next twenty-four hours, or else they will die. Vampires can only feed on human blood in order to complete their transformation—animal blood or vampire blood is not sufficient to finish the transformation from human to vampire. However, in this case, "human blood" can include the blood of a human witch, Camille O'Connell, who completed her transformations by drinking the blood of witch Vincent Griffith, respectively. Additionally, the blood need not be from a live human; Caroline Forbes completed her transitions by feeding on donor bag of human blood and Vicki Donovan completed her transition by drinking from the newly-deceased Logan Fell, who would then awaken a short time later to find himself in transition as well.

A vampire in transition is neither truly living nor truly dead until they make their choice to either complete their transition or to abstain from feeding and ultimately die. This puts the semi-vampire in a strange liminal space between the two states that can affect them in different ways. For example, a vampire in transition is immune to the effects of a dark object known as The Serratura, which is said to create an impenetrable barrier through which nothing living or dead can pass; this was evidenced by the fact that Camille, while in transition, was able to activate the Serratura inside of a shipping container to trap Tristan de Martel inside without being trapped herself. In a similar vein, until a person in transition drinks human blood to complete their transformation, they will not be susceptible to the standard weaknesses of a vampire (i.e. they can still walk in sunlight and can enter homes without an invitation).

### Sirelines

Every regular vampire who has ever existed is descended from those of their kind known as the Original vampires, who, unlike the majority of vampires, were turned not by dying with vampire blood in their system, but who were instead transformed using a spell that was cast using dark magic at some point around 1001 AD in what is now modern-day Mystic Falls. However, the ritual that resulted in their transformation does have similarities to how normal vampires are turned, in that they had to consume blood (in their case, the blood of the human Petrova doppelgänger Tatia which had been enchanted with an adapted version of The Immortality Spell by their powerful witch mother, Esther) before being killed while that blood was in their system.

After the Originals awakened in transition, they fed on the blood of another human from their village and were officially transformed into the world's first true vampires, from which all other vampires were created. Their blood possesses mystical properties that are passed down to each and every one of the vampires they sire, along with every vampire sired by their progeny, connecting all vampires to one of the six Original vampires from whom they are descending by a bloodline. Due to this link, the death of an Original vampire will result in this connection being severed, and every vampire in the deceased Original's bloodline will follow them in death within an hour. This bloodline connection can be broken, however. Using magic, Davina Claire and the the Sisters used a spell that Davina created to break the sire line of an Original in an attempt to free all of Klaus and Elijah's sirelings from their progenitors. This spell made it possible to kill an Original without killing their sirelings in the process. The spell was only performed on Klaus but never succeeded.

## History

As Ayana expected, the creation of the Original vampires eventually led to the start of a "plague" in 1002 after the Originals inadvertently learned they could turn humans into more of their kind by feeding them their blood and killing them, which caused the population of vampires to multiply in increasing numbers over the centuries following the species' creation. However, the progeny of the Original vampires soon proved to be much weaker than their sires, even those who were closest to them in age, giving the Originals a high status that demanded respect from their younger sired vampires.

After being turned, the Original vampires became slaves to their bloodlust and their heightened emotions. When Niklaus and Neveah killed for the first time, Neveah and Klaus discovered that they, unlike the rest of their siblings, was also a Werewolf due to being a product of his mother, Esther's affair with the North East Atlantic Pack's Alpha, Ansel, making Niklaus and Neveah the world's first hybrid; a werewolf-turned-Original vampire. Mikael, furious at the discovery that Niklaus was not his child, forced his wife to suppress Niklaus, and Neveah's werewolf side before finding and killing her lover, Ansel. The deaths of Ansel and at least half of his family at the hands of the new vampires turned the werewolves against the new race. After their father's rampage, Klaus, furious at his mother's betrayal and hurt that she would turn her back on him and his twin sister, killed her when he lost control of his werewolf anger and then blamed it on Mikael so his siblings wouldn't abandon him as well. Knowing that Mikael would hunt them down and kill them, the five vampire Mikaelson children left the New World for Europe, where they eventually settled in Marseilles in 1002, living in the woods and feeding upon the humans they came upon on back roads.

After the five of them realized they had fed on and killed four noblemen and a noblewoman, they figured out that their victims had been headed to the Court of Marseilles and decided to take on their identities and hide in plain sight from their father, giving them the opportunity to actually live in a home rather than squatting wherever they could find shelter. With the help of the Count de Martel's servant, Lucien Castle, who offered to help them by teaching them the customs of French nobility and royalty in exchange for the Mikaelsons sparing his life, the Mikaelson children went to the Count Martel's castle and introduced themselves as the children of the Count de Guise before being invited to stay as guests in the Count de Martel's castle. Once there, they settled into their new lives of comfort as noblemen and made friends with those at court, including the Count's children Tristan and Aurora de Martel, the latter of whom was the object of both Klaus and Lucien's affections.

It was shortly after they had come to stay at the Marseilles court when they realized they could heal humans with their blood; this fact was made apparently after they found Lucien had been viciously tortured by Tristan, who mistakenly believed Lucien had made amorous advances toward Aurora (though, in reality, it had actually been Klaus). After Tristan whipped Lucien's back dozens of times and sliced his mouth open from ear to ear, Lucien angrily stabbed Klaus with a knife and caused the vampire's blood to drip into his own wounds, healing them completely as the blood circulated through his system. Incorrectly assuming that he had been turned into a vampire like Klaus, Lucien went to attack Tristan in revenge for being tortured by him and was promptly killed by the lord's guards. Klaus tried to feed him more blood to heal him, leading Elijah to presume that their blood only healed the living. However, once Klaus and Elijah prepared to give Lucien a traditional Viking funeral, Lucien awakened in transition as the first non-Original vampire to exist in the world, as well as the first vampire progeny to be created with Klaus' blood. Lucien then completed his transition by feeding on a servant and joined the Mikaelsons as vampires at court.

Not to be outdone, Aurora, after learning of Klaus' secret, begged Klaus to turn her as well so that she, who was dealing with melancholy and other mental illness, would be strong and healthy like them, but he refused, not wanting to curse Aurora to his fate. Knowing she would never be able to convince him to turn her, she slit her own wrists in a mock suicide attempt, tricking Rebekah into healing her wounds by feeding her vampire blood. She then tried to get Rebekah to kill her to turn her, as well, but when Rebekah refused for the same reasons Klaus did, Aurora angrily asked her to leave. Having what she needed to turn herself, Aurora walked over to the window of her tower and allowed herself to fall off of the ledge, killing herself and transforming herself into the second non-Original vampire and Rebekah's first progeny.

Unfortunately, in time, rumors started to spread in the village about demons who fed on blood as a result of the seven vampires' feeding habits, and it soon became clear that Mikael would be coming after them. In the middle of a heated argument between Aurora and Elijah in which Aurora confessed that Klaus had killed Esther, Elijah accidentally and unintentionally used mind compulsion for the first time to cause her to see Klaus as a monster and to stay behind rather than trying to flee with them. Before the Mikaelsons left court, Elijah, who had gotten the hang of compulsion and could now use it intentionally, fed Tristan his blood and killed him, making him his own first vampire progeny. He then compelled Lucien, Aurora, and Tristan to believe that they were Niklaus, Rebekah, and himself before forcing them to flee the castle, allowing them to be the bait that Mikael chased while the real Mikaelsons traveled on to Italy and settled in Tuscany.

Lucien, Tristan, and Aurora, who eventually became known as the Trinity, believed that they were actually Klaus, Elijah and Rebekah for over a century, until Elijah being daggered for the first time in 1114 caused their compulsion to be broken. Though they then knew their true identities, Mikael continued to chase after them, causing the three younger vampires to become incredibly resentful toward the Mikaelsons, which is what eventually pushed them to search the world for weapons they could use to destroy their sires.

The growth of the vampire race led to several attempts to end them before they grew too powerful. One attempt involved a witch descended from the powerful Qetsiyah who created an order of five magically-enhanced vampire hunters called the Brotherhood of the Five to hunt down and destroy the vampires and the immortals on Earth. They began hunting vampires in Italy during the early 12th century as the Normans conquered southern Europe. However, they attempted to defeat the Originals with White Oak Ash Daggers created by the witch who empowered them, not knowing that Klaus' werewolf heritage made him immune to weapons made of silver.

This allowed Klaus to kill all of the hunters and undagger all of his siblings, with the exception of Finn, who he hated for his self-loathing attitude toward vampirism. However, the spell that empowered the hunters did not die with them—instead, several new hunters emerged during the following centuries with the same powers and dedication of the first. Several freelance (and often ordinary human) Vampire Hunters also began to appear as a result of the vampires' amoral actions, and various weapons were created to use against them, such as stake-shooting guns and vervain grenades, as technology began to improve throughout the ages.

At some point, the initial conflict between the vampires and the werewolves emerged once again when the vampires discovered that a bite from a transformed werewolf was fatal to them. Determined to protect themselves, the vampires declared war on the werewolves and drove them to near extinction. Several packs survived but, by the early 2000s, most vampires believed that werewolves were merely a myth.