Pinkerton's Bestiary Log 4: The Vrykolakas
The Vrykolakas, the primary Species of Zombie Vampire
Pinkerton’s Bestiary is a supernatural field journal from the Annals of S.O.L.M. universe, documenting monsters, curses, and occult threats encountered by hunter John Pinkerton.
New entries and stories are published weekly.
I spent a great deal of time talking about the Vorvolakos because through them the manifestations of the vampiric virus or curse are most apparent. When it comes to the Vrykolakas, the situation is much simpler. The only anomaly here is the emergence of the Flesh-Wearers, which seem to be a hybrid of the Full-Bat variations and a lower class of zombie vampire. Here, I should probably take a moment to explain why these two variations of vampire developed into the Flesh-Wearer.
Full-Bat variations are categorized into two camps: those with sentience and those without. However, they cannot return to a human state, and the Flesh-Wearer’s true form is bat-like. And the zombie vampire’s rates of decay can vary. So, it’s believed that the Flesh-Wearers developed their ability to grow human skin from a zombie variation. But why do our scholars assume that it must have been a zombie and not one of the lesser Vorvolakos? Because the chief anomaly of the zombie vampire is that they lose their sentience. There have been a handful of times in the past where a zombie vampire has retained or regained their sentience, but this is not typical among that species. What has occurred then is a vampire that grows a suit of flesh, probably reminiscent of a zombie vampire that showed little signs of decay—palish skin and nothing more, perhaps—but mentally they are essentially non-sentient. In the Flesh-Wearer’s case there might be exceptions, but I haven’t heard of them. They perform a kind of mimicry. That is, they can answer questions and interact, but their minds are constantly focused on feeding, and this compulsion is much stronger than the typical hunger, which interacts with the human will to twist the mind into feeding. This hunger is more like an instinct. It’s important to note that the real commonality between the Flesh-Wearer and the zombie vampire is that the true person is dead, gone entirely. If it has access to memories inside the brain, they are fragmentary at best, snapshots they can use to infer a backstory. But both variations are fully animalistic in nature. It’s just that one can form words the same way a computer can pretend to have a conversation, and the other grunts. In short, it is the degradation of the mind that persuades most to believe that the Flesh-Wearers are a combination of the Full-Bat Hybrids and a lower-class zombie vampire, but it is entirely possible that the Flesh-Wearers are the result of a Full-Bat that lost its sentience, and the curse was introduced to another factor. We just have no guess as to what that factor might’ve been.
