Sevrin Veyr

SEVRIN VEYR

Sevrin Veyr was the first vampire and, after his first death, the first Zompire. Every Zompire curse can ultimately be traced back to his refusal to accept that another person did not belong to him.

He wanted eternal love.

He received eternity.

Appearance

Before the curse, Sevrin was considered handsome, well dressed, educated, and socially respectable. That matters. There was nothing about his appearance that explained what he became, and no outward deformity that forced him into bitterness. His horror began in entitlement, not ugliness.

As a vampire he became pale and increasingly gaunt, with intense eyes and a careful elegance that deteriorated alongside his sanity. After becoming a Zompire, resurrection never returned him completely to the appearance of an ordinary living man. His skin remains cold, his movements sometimes too still, and repeated deaths have left him with an indefinable sense of being repaired rather than healed.

Depending on when one meets him, Sevrin may appear immaculate, filthy, wounded, freshly resurrected, or dressed in the fashion of a century he has not yet bothered to abandon.

Behavior and Temperament

Sevrin is intelligent, obsessive, possessive, theatrical when emotional, and capable of genuine charm. He can be patient for years and catastrophically impulsive in a single night.

His defining flaw is the belief that intensity of feeling can justify control. He has spent centuries learning that he cannot possess Mara, followed by equally many centuries forgetting that lesson when loneliness, jealousy, nostalgia, or pride gets the better of him.

Time has not made him simple. He can regret what he did. He can understand that Mara hates him. He can even accept responsibility for periods of his life.

Then, eventually, he is still Sevrin.

His immortality has also produced profound exhaustion. He has tested execution, suicide, starvation, dismemberment, fire, magic, and other methods of death. Every attempt ends the same way.

Eleven weeks later, he returns.

Mara

Long ago, Sevrin became obsessed with a young woman named Mara. She did not return his affection. She married another man, built a family, and had children.

Sevrin refused to accept her choice.

He turned to dark powers, became a vampire, entered her home, bit her, abducted her, and imprisoned her beneath his mansion. He believed immortality would eventually force the world into the shape he wanted.

It did not.

Mara's grief, isolation, and captivity broke her health. After years of imprisonment she died. Sevrin lost what remained of his sanity, turned others into vampires during a violent rampage, and finally killed himself.

All the vampires created through him died with him.

Eleven weeks later, Sevrin awakened.

So did the others.

So did Mara.

The First Zompire

For a brief moment, Sevrin believed the impossible resurrection had finally given him what he wanted.

Mara rejected him again.

The centuries since have not produced a clean ending between them. Their relationship is infamous even among a people accustomed to grudges that outlive kingdoms.

Mara has escaped him. Sevrin has pursued and recaptured her. At other times he has driven her away, only to seek her again. She has returned voluntarily more than once. They have spent years apart and periods genuinely together. They have protected one another, betrayed one another, abandoned one another, reconciled, and killed one another.

Death rarely settles an argument when both participants are expected back in eleven weeks.

No one, including Sevrin and Mara, seems capable of stating exactly what they are to each other now. Victim and captor remain the beginning of the story, but immortality has added centuries of dependency, resentment, familiarity, affection, hatred, habit, guilt, and mutual violence on top of it.

Their relationship is not romantic proof that Sevrin was right. If anything, it is evidence of what happens when two people are denied the ordinary mercy of distance, death, and final endings.

Xanaras

Sevrin is among the Zompires most fascinated by Xanaras.

He has spent an existence looking for something capable of ending the curse permanently. The arrival of the Infinite World Feeder therefore presented a possibility no weapon, executioner, curse-breaker, or experiment had offered before.

If Xanaras can consume worlds, Sevrin reasons, perhaps Xanaras can consume whatever keeps bringing him back.

Whether Sevrin actively belongs to a Xanaras death cult, supports one, exploits them, or periodically despises them can vary with his current state of mind. What does not change is that he sees Xanaras as perhaps the first genuinely new answer to a question he has been asking for centuries.

Relevance

Sevrin is not an ancient figure whose bones lie beneath a ruined castle.

He is still alive.

That makes him a living witness to the creation of the Zompire curse, one of the oldest surviving personalities in An'kor, and potentially one of the few beings who remembers historical events that no longer exist in surviving archives.

He is also dangerous for a simpler reason. A person who has died countless times, returned countless times, and exhausted most ordinary fears can become very difficult to threaten.

Sevrin Veyr wanted forever.

Forever has had a great deal of time to disappoint him.