Lady Ilona is a vampire who was born just after the War with Winter ended
About
Ilona was renowned as a cruel, vain and capricious mistress in her own land and beyond, even before she was gifted with the vampiric curse.
The vampire curse magnifying her traits a thousand fold, Ilona slaughtered her own kin to take sole control of the realm. Ilona contempt extends to her own dark kin, wielding a silvered greatsword, enchanted by countless dark blessings to be lethal to vampires.
Seeking neither unity or dominion, Ilona seeks the total extinction of every living and unliving creature in the world. A danger to all, and most dangerous of her kind.
Biography
The vampire today known as Lady Ilona had her mortal birth soon after the end of the War of Winter, born into the aristocratic masters of a tiny mountain state between the Halpi Mountains and Tragar. She was raised in an atmosphere of luxury and privilege, tutored from the earliest possible age in the arts of governance and administration of her family’s small, yet proud and highly independent nation. Whatever the ambitions of Ilona’s parents however, they were to be dashed, for from an early age the spoiled young countess proved herself shockingly unstable.
She was prone to violent tempers and fits of rage, demanding the utmost attention from all who served her. As she matured, the countess grew ever more vain, demanding that an entire wing of her castle be hung with hundreds of mirrors so that she might admire her own beauty at every opportunity. She demanded constant flattery and soon the parents of local girls sent to serve as handmaidens complained of the abuse meted out to their daughters by the haughty Ilona, word of her ugly nature spreading far and wide.
Perhaps in the normal order of things Ilona would have lived the life of a petty aristocrat before passing away four score and ten years later, a footnote in the annals of the realms of mortals. But it was not to be. Upon her majority the young countess’s parents entered into the traditional process of arranging for her a suitable marriage. Numerous suitors came - for in the aftermath of the Winter War there was much rebuilding to be undertaken and many ancient lines requiring fresh blood.
While Ilona’s parents identified dozens of potential husbands they considered suitable, the countess rejected each and every one, ejecting them from the castle in her characteristic rage. All of them it was, but for one would-be husband, who upon entering the court one night is said to have caused the usually simmering girl to swoon and turn uncharacteristically shy. History does not record the name of this dashing suitor. All that is known is that he spent but a single night at Mount Ungar before vanishing as mysteriously as he arrived. One night, though, was enough for him to leave behind a dire legacy for the whole world of Mantica.
When she next appeared before her parents, Countess Ilona was entirely changed. Her flesh was as white as a death shroud and her eyes radiated darkness. Her teeth were sharp as needles and her nails unnaturally long. Worst of all, she moved with the supple, supremely threatening grace of a hunting predator, and it was not long before she made the full extent of the change known. In the blink of an eye she slaughtered her parents and their guards. With a blood curdling screech she demanded every one of her servants abase themselves upon the floor as she seated herself upon the blood- soaked throne of her father. On that eve the creature that would become known as the Bloody Countess was born, a creature who would become one of the most murderous vampires ever to stalk the land.
If Ilona was vain in life, she was a hundred times more so in undeath. Resplendent in the majesty only a vampire can muster, she longed for adoration and flattery. She knew she was beautiful, but her vampire nature denied her the pleasure of looking upon her own reflection. She relied upon the fawning appeasements of her servants, yet deep inside she knew these were not freely given. She had hundred of portraits painted, but in none of them she could trust the artist to have captured her true likeness, free of any flattery. Consumed by rage, Ilona launched herself upon a world barely recovered from the devastation of the Winter War and her Undead legions laid waste to vast swathes of Mantica.
None of the speaking races were exempt from her wrath as she called forth shambling hosts of corpse-warriors to spread destruction from Abercarr to the shores of the Endless Sea. The more blood she spilled the more unquenchable her thirst became, and soon it mingled with her terrible narcissism. The choicest of captives she ordered dispatched to her ancestral home high atop Mount Ungar, where legend has it she bathed in pools of blood drained from the necks of virgins. Whether truth or slander, few doubt that deep in Ilona’s soul her innate vanity and the vampire’s thirst for blood had become conjoined into a terrible and murderous addiction. The suitor’s gift had granted her eternal un-life, and the blood in which she bathed would ensure she maintained her beauty, no matter the cost mortals paid, for all time.
When she makes war upon the peoples of Mantica, the Bloody Countess does so at the head of a vast horde of Undead warriors. Like all vampires, she has the power to call forth the dead from their graves to march at herside, and she appears to have a special draw on the vile hearts of Ghouls and other such creatures. Furthermore, Ilona rarely goes into battle without at least one lesser vampire paying her court, a thrall ensnared by her dark transfixing beauty and hoping to mingle his blood with hers. To date, Ilona has declined to marry any such suitors, although plenty have perished attempting toprove themselves worthy of her hand.
Some claim that Ilona waits for the return of he that turned her, but others say she knows he has been destroyed and that she has foresworn all hope of nuptial bliss. Whatever the truth, Ilona the Bloody Countess makes incessant war upon all who dare stand before her. In battle Ilona bears a silvered greatsword, the lethal metal subject to dark blessings that make it the bane of all other vampires. This alone is regarded as evidence by many of the extent of her unreasoning fury, for by slaying her own kind she must surely have abandoned any hope of uniting with other vampires and finding common cause with the forces of darkness. Yet still, vampire and mannish suitors alike flock to pay her court, and all are struck down with the contempt Ilona shows to all those who stand in the way of her dark passions.
Gallery
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Lady Ilona Model -
Lady Ilona Art -
Lady Ilona 3rd Edition Rules
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