| Carmilla | |
|---|---|
 "I have myself read her account since then, and I cannot say I regret actions made in haste and anger then! I have said it: in love there is great sacrifice. Well so too is there great blindness! I bitterly regret only what I had believed of her; I see I was wrong. She is gone, now, and her father and her gouvernantes, all the rest of them. They live now in the ink and paper that she committed me to and saw sold to the world; my heart is cold to her but I won't begrudge her the legacy. Neither will I be caged by it." | |
| Canon: | Le Fanu's Carmilla |
| Species: | Vampire |
| Hometown: | Karnstein, Styria |
| Age: | ...I'll get back to you |
| Journal: | languorously |
| Player: | Dele |
she moves through moonbeams slowly[]
Mircalla, the Countess Karnstein, is better known as Carmilla, the Styrian vampire who favours beautiful young women of the upperclass (much like herself) for both her victims and her lovers. She was born in the late seventeenth century to the Karnsteins, an aristocratic Hungarian family in Styria's remote countryside, who were (before their name and titles became extinct sometime in the eighteenth century) by all accounts a bloodthirsty and abusive selection of individuals prior to the curse of vampirism touching their family. A Moravian nobleman, Baron Vordenburg, rescued the villagers from the vampire's sway when he destroyed the vampire who'd haunted and killed Mircalla - but Vordenburg had been a devoted lover of the Countess during her life and was unable to bear the idea of harming her even after her premature death. Instead, he broke her monument and claimed to have destroyed her, only to spirit her corpse away to safety.
(This has been widely regarded as a bad idea.)
she knows just how to hold me[]
and when her edges soften[]
- Báthory Erzsébet × Mademoiselle la Comtesse is a monster, and as such, she likes to be around other monsters - particularly the ones who will pet and cosset her and take care of all the busy little details that Carmilla doesn't like to interest herself with. She fancies herself utterly in love with Elizabeth, and is deeply enjoying her present life as the Countess's mistress.
her body is my coffin[]
- gentledudes
i know she drains me slowly[]
As a vampire, the Countess Karnstein has a number of oddities and abilities peculiar to her. Locked doors don't really do a hell of a lot against her, and she's capable of transforming into a black wild cat roughly four or five feet in length; her superior strength in her natural form extends further to inducing a permanent numbness in whichever limb she's forced in her grip. It might heal, but if so - slowly, and not wholly. She has two very sharp fangs, which are typically visible if you happen to have the occasion to look in her mouth. While Christianity doesn't seem to harm her, displays of it agitate her to the point of a barely suppressed hysteria, provoking vicious fits of temper.
To all appearances, she seems perfectly alive; the sunlight doesn't appear to harm her, but she never rises before about one in the afternoon. Her pulse is slower than a human's, but present. During the day, she sleeps for maybe six hours in her leaden coffin - within which she's submerged in blood. (Thus the references to 'amphibious vampirism'.)
Her attentions can provoke a response that's simultaneously adoration and abhorrence, presumably because she's beautiful and charming but ultimately a monster that will kill you with a smile and call it love. Adoration tends to win out, but the feeling of revulsion in the back of one's mind generally remains. She can lull her victims into a kind of almost drugged calm and unwillingness or inability to move, but the pain of her teeth might jolt them from it. She has the typical run of superior senses, as well as all this; sight, smell, taste, hearing, etc. She's not merely faster than a human, but also capable of what looks to the untrained eye rather like teleporting; my interpretation of this is that she has some knack with moving through shadow seemingly instantaneously.
Her languor and apparent frailty is probably just a habit of her own; the elder vampiress with whom she traveled doesn't display it. She is not weak or frail, using her unspecified "illness" most often as an explanation for strange behaviour or means of securing attention. On the subject of not being weak: she's very difficult to destroy. Being beheaded, burned and then scattered into a river was a temporary reprieve from her and it took Carmilla roughly ten years to pull herself back together and regain her strength (at which point she went back to Karnstein and killed everyone connected in a fit of pique), but she did do it. She can be set back and she can probably be confined, but goooood luck killing her permanently.
she wears me down to bones in bed[]
Carmilla was written by Sheridan Le Fanu and heavily influenced the gothic fiction that followed it - namely, Bram Stoker's Dracula, who is basically a betesticled rip-off. I am not Le Fanu, and I am likewise not Gemma Arterton who I've opted to represent the Countess with.