Delivery for the Damned Sneak Peak: The Caveats of "Immortality" (Patreon)

“To be immortal is to be inhuman.”

Despite being a werewolf, the Roman philosopher Plaubius succinctly summarized the dilemma faced by all vampires. The human psyche simply isn’t resilient enough to exist eternally, and most vampires reach their breaking point around their eighth century of unlife. Early texts on the supernatural recount the horrific mental breakdowns of elderly vampires, claiming that their sanity abandoned them and they became violent. No longer possessing the wherewithal to protect themselves from the sun, the flesh of these octo-centarian vampires decayed, their horrific appearance leading them to be referred to as “zombies.”

(For information on the necromantic Revived, see page 128 of the THAB handbook.)

Modern medicine, however, indicates that the inevitable decent of a vampire into Zombiesm isn’t simply a psychological issue. Indeed, Zombiesm shares many similarities with the human disease of Alzheimer’s, including memory loss, impaired verbal ability, and decrease in judgement. Given that many in the medical community argue that vampires are indeed still human, parallels can certainly made between the two conditions. For both humans and vampires, late onset dementia is a deeply tragic disease which robs individuals of their sense of self and societal autonomy.

Despite the superficial similarities, it would be erroneous to draw a direct parallel between Zombiesm and Alzheimer’s. Elderly vampires are infinitely more dangerous than their still-human counterparts who suffer from mortal dementia, as vampiric forgetfulness manifests in an inability to recall their own nature. Zombies mistake their blood cravings for a more generic hunger for human flesh, and will attack any living creature in vicinity. In addition, whereas Alzheimer’s disease effects only ten-percent of humans over age sixty-five, historical evidence suggests that all vampires over a certain age will inevitably succumb to Zombiesm. Vampire culture thus dictates that all newly Turned decide on a “Die-By” date, a year centuries into the future where the vampire will walk directly into the sunrise and thus meet their final death while still in possession of their faculties.

At first, The Tradition of Inevitable End (T.I.E.) was to help vampire covens remain hidden from the humans whom vastly outnumbered them (difficult to do when a former member rampaged through a town eating the inhabitants). Now, T.I.E. is viewed as a humanitarian precaution—both in order to prevent the loss of human life by a zombie, and to ensure that the vampire is given the chance to die with dignity while still maintaining their sense of self. Some vampires protest T.I.E. as outdated and narrow-minded, claiming that Zombiesm is the natural evolution of their kind and should thus not be prevented. 

Could these claims be right? It is, in fact, true that zombies often possess physical strength far superior to even that of a normal vampire--even to the extent of a certain level of sun immunity (although not enough to prevent sunrot). Regardless, whether vampires possess the potential to be immortal remains a mystery which will never be answered without countless casualties.