Self-Preservation

It is easy for humans to kill a vampire for good, if they have the vampire defenceless and know how. That’s why our law has very serious prohibition against discuss the subject in human presence or write it down in any media humans could access. Young vampires are not allowed to know anything about, you need to prove maturity and have a need to know this. Old timers, of course, we all know this because we came from a time before integration. Before the Laws of Secret even, in cases like mine.

What a human has to do to kill one of us permanently is simply extract the hearth from inside the chest and expose it to direct sunlight.

Has to be direct and has to be actual sunlight. No artificial imitation affects us. If the sun touches vampire body the vampire will burn, of course, can became just like a burned human body. Just drop blood in it, the vampire is back, good as new. You can cremate the vampire, we can be reduced to ashes like human bodies can, takes five times longer for most of us, but the ashes are identical to human ashes.

Some, granted, very few, can bring themselves back to life from a pile of ashes. All they need is for the ashes to get dispersed in air or water. They will find living things, with blood, and will eat some of those from inside out.

However, any vampire can be brough back from ashes by the right vampiric power. Takes a ritual, someone who has the right blood-seed developed and has tasted your blood at least once. Because of that all Vampiric Houses keep a bottle of blood of each one of their members. And we have the cultural habit to share vials of our blood with our closest friends and lovers, for safe keeping.

Decapitation, being eaten by beasts, dissolved by corrosive substances, exploded by nukes, those things mean nothing more than being burned alive some can mean less. However, if you take the hearth entire, intact, and expose it to sunlight, that achieves irreversible results.

Vampires have other ways to kill other vampires, and that is a different kind of sensible matter for conversation. Human can only permanently destroy a vampiric life in that way.

Incidentally, if we need to save a vampire who felt in battle, we cut the hearth from its body to put it in a velvet sac, traditionally. The sac can then go into some box or backpack. When possible and convenient all that needs to be done is drop the hearth in some volume of human blood. Wait up to 24 hours, and the vampire is back, intact, with all memories up to the instant of **** and often even a couple of hours after. We linger like invisible floating ghosts around the place where we felt, often enough.

Humans would love to know that sort of detail about our intimacy. They push through all diplomatic channels for that information. If we didn’t have superior technology, aside and in addition to the powers of the blood, they would have managed to include that piece of knowledge in every training manual for military special forces.

“But are we not allies?” the insist. If I had a penny for each time I heard that, I would be able to build me an entire city just by melting all this useless coins.

Of course, we have allies among the humans, and enemies among our own kin who also have their allies among humans. Still, we have our interest as a specie, separated from the humans. We need to hunt humans for maintain our sanity, and some now and them our prey dies in those hunts. Humans do not fancy that, and in all honesty we cannot blame them for that position.

Neither should them blame us for keep secret of our weakness from them.

Whenever a band of human anti-v terrorists steps in our secret by accident, attempt and error, or by encountering some sociopath traitor among our kin. The knowledge makes them priority for our special forces. Which are considerably better trained and better equipped than any human military could dream to be.

We can manipulate and erase memories, bend the will of humans, and we can turn them into loyal slaves by forcing them to drink the blood of one same vampire too many times. We can also turn humans into vampires, what is often the best way to avoid the loss of a talented vampire hunter. Some of those fanatics have intelligence, will, and cunning far above the average candidate we would consider to invite into Nocturnal Society.

Of course, no Noble Family actually restricts itself only to the blood relatives of their descendants and eventual consorts. We all step out that restricted parameter when a human has potential enough.

More often than not that means the potential to develop rare and/or useful blood-seeds. Exceptional mundane skills and talent sometimes is enough.

Goes without saying, in any circumstance, a vampire hunter will be killed instead of turned into a vampire or even kept as a thrall. If we are not sure if we can keep the person safely.

We are, as individuals and as institution, a lot more durable than our human counterparts.

Knowing that do not makes the average vampire less careful.

We do value our lives, and the lives of those who are important to us, more than we value the lives of strangers. And we also give more importance to the life of a vampire when it is compared to the life of a human.

It’s only fair to look after our own.