Isabella von Carstein

Isabella von Drak was the last mortal heir of Sylvania's mad ruling house: a sickly, sharp-eyed young woman raised among tyrants in the cold halls of Castle Drakenhof, and worth ten of any of them. Wed to the pale stranger Vlad von Carstein on the night her father died, she entered the marriage as a bargaining chip and made herself its equal partner within a season. What began as a claim on a county became, against every rule of Sylvanian arithmetic, a love match, and when a wasting sickness came to finish what her frail birth had begun, Vlad refused to surrender her to the grave. He gave her the Blood Kiss instead, and Isabella von Carstein rose from her deathbed smiling.

She took to eternity the way a blade takes to a whetstone. It was Isabella who made Drakenhof a court rather than a lair: glittering balls held in defiance of daylight, Imperial envoys charmed across dinners at which they never quite noticed the nature of the refreshments, fashions and flatteries and games of favor played out among the deathless. Beneath the charm lay something the wise feared more than her husband, for Vlad's cruelty had rules, and Isabella's had moods. She was vain, brilliant, savage in her devotions, and without pity for anything that threatened what was hers; and chief among what was hers was Vlad. Their marriage outlasted dynasties of the living, and in all the annals of the Old World there is no darker or more genuine romance.

When Vlad fell at the Siege of Altdorf, Isabella refused the crown, the war, and the world. Rather than reign a single night without him, the Countess of Sylvania followed her husband into death by her own choice: the one subject of the von Carsteins who was never raised to serve again. The Empire tells the tale as a mercy; Sylvania tells it as a vow. And necromancers, who know the province better than either, note only this: nothing buried in Sylvanian earth has ever been good at staying buried.