Byron: The Dark Witch

Prep the Fourth : Byron Bathory, Dark Witch

Contest Entry : Byron Bathory, I Am Become A Name

I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known.

If a name could bear a curse, it could be supposed his name was it.

The forename, alluding to the inspiration behind Polidori’s ‘The Vampyr’, was no doubt a result of having a professor of romantic literature for a mother. The surname, on the other hand, once belonged to a sadistic female serial killer and was inherited from his misfortunately named Scottish father.

With that kind of name, he was never going to live a peaceful life.

It was imbued with hundreds of years of peculiar history. History so vivid and unfinished that perhaps it was best that men like Byron Bathory were as rare as the ghost orchid that bloomed along the crooked path winding through the trees towards the strange little house in the centre of the forest where he lived.

The young man, teased as a child for being ‘positively vampiric’ what with the familial gaelic pallor and his nocturnal nature. But people didn’t laugh at him now. The sweet child wrapped up in dreams and portents, the vociferous youth who had protested across cities, he had grown up. He had unfolded into an elegant young man, a powerful blood witch. Jack Almerder didn’t understand how his life existed before the effervescent Byron had transformed from a paper soul to a man of flesh and bone.