Re-Vamp

Awakening

Re-Vamp

"After more than 500 years, nothing could have prepared me for this strange and scary world"

Arnaud de la Roche, a young nobleman from the Gascony region of 15th century France, slowly opened his eyes, feeling a mix of confusion, fear, and a deep sense of loss. How had he ended up in this strange place?

He tried to sit up, but the dead weight of an animal on his chest prevented him from doing so. Growling in frustration, Arnaud realized he was trapped in a kind of underground hollow, with barely enough space to move.

As he struggled to control the panic threatening to consume him, a painful truth began to dawn on his perception: he had awakened in a world he no longer recognized, centuries away from everything that had once been his home.

But let me start from the beginning and tell you how our protagonist arrived here...

The story of Arnaud de la Roche's coffin, the slumbering vampire of Gascony, is an odyssey worthy of being told in its own right.

It happened at the end of the 15th century, shortly after Arnaud had entered his long slumber following the Battle of Castillon, which had marked the end of the Hundred Years' War between France and England. At the time, the body of the young and handsome man was found in his bed, seemingly transformed into an incorrupt mummy.

Of course, our vampire had not participated in the fight... But it was in fact one of the reasons why he had "starved to death." You see, Arnaud is not a vampire like the ones in horror stories, he is a "vampire by birth" - the only true vampire in the world, and not a person afflicted with rabies or one of the innocent accused of witchcraft in those times.

You see, the body of our vampire emits a fog when it's exposed to the sun.

Those who found him, amazed by such a phenomenon, decided to preserve the body in a wooden coffin reinforced with metal. Perhaps, in some distant future, Arnaud would manage to awaken from his eternal sleep. In the meantime, the mysterious sarcophagus was guarded in the vaults of a castle in the Gascony region.

However, the story did not end there. In the early 16th century, with the rise of the Spanish Empire and the increasingly frequent expeditions to the New World, the Spanish crown showed great interest in acquiring strange relics and antiquities that could be proudly displayed.

This is how a Spanish agent managed to infiltrate the castle in Gascony and convince the residents to sell the mysterious coffin. Intrigued by the promise of a generous reward, the nobles accepted the offer, unaware of the true identity of the "mummy."

The coffin was then loaded onto one of the galleons departing from the port of Bordeaux, bound for the Caribbean. During the crossing, the crew soon noticed that the casket seemed to emit small, sporadic sounds, causing unease among the superstitious sailors.

The captains, fearful that it might be a demon or a cursed spell, tried to keep the secret and hide the cargo from the passengers.

Finally, after several weeks of voyaging, the galleon docked at the port of Veracruz, in the newly conquered New Spain. There, the coffin was transferred to a carriage and taken towards the capital of the viceroyalty, the imposing city of Mexico-Tenochtitlán.

By then, the legend of the "mummified demon" had already acquired almost mythical proportions among the ship's crew. Some swore they had seen the coffin move on its own in the middle of the night, while others claimed to have heard strange whispers coming from its interior.

When the carriage arrived at the viceregal palace in Mexico City, the coffin was received with great pomp and ceremony. The viceroy of the time, a Spanish nobleman named Antonio de Mendoza, was fascinated by the ancient relic and ordered that it be placed in a place of honor, within one of the most sumptuous halls of the palace.