1840
This year Dracula-Prime transforms a wealthy European nobleman and
close relative named Count Lucian Mordante into a soul-clone,
presumably believing the man's wealth and position would be useful to
him. Despite this man's noble nature, his relatively weak level of willpower
leaves him easy pickings for Dracula-Prime, who successfully makes him
into a soul-clone with a great degree of power.
However, the disadvantage of transforming a man of ostensibly good character into a soul-clone becomes apparent when the Mordante Clone's true persona has a strong conflict with the superimposed psyche and memories of Dracula-Prime. Though the Mordante soul-clone truly believes himself to be the
actual Dracula, and always gives into his bloodlust eventually, his
frequent feelings of guilt and self-pity cause Dracula-Prime to due to his increasingly frequent errors in judgment over the course of the decade to abandon the use of this soul-clone, and releases him to his own devices.
Dracula-Mordante continues to believe himself to be the true Dracula,
and he spends the succeeding decades both wreaking havoc on innocent
people and seeking power for himself, while often attempting to fight his
inner evil and bloodlust with the aid of an immortal female sorceress of
immense power (who claimed to be a goddess, but may have been a
previously human sorceress or member of the Homo Magi sub-species of
humanity who became an agent of the universal force of Order) called the
Conjuress.
Eventually, Dracula-Mordante becomes a tool of the "mad god" Chaos,*
and came to rule the worldwide cult devoted to this dark cosmic being
and its efforts to re-enter the Earth dimension and control humanity.
During this time, Dracula-Mordante increases his power further still as a result of coming into possession of a book of magick belonging to the cult known as the Crimson Chronicles (which may or may not be related to other tomes of dark magick, such as the Necronomicon, the Demonomicon, the Ruthvenian, and the Darkhold).
He eventually uses the the magicks of that tome to enchant his coffin so
as to allow him to create his own soul-clones whenever someone of an
extremely greedy or wicked nature laid in it (which they would feel
compelled to do upon opening it as a result of the enchantment), and this
includes the short-lived soul-clone created when a mean-spirited and
wealthy young man named Adrian Varney laid in the coffin. This
soul-clone of a soul-clone is destroyed in battle with Dracula-Prime's
old nemeses Abraham Van Helsing, Dr. John Seward, and Jonathan
Harker after he menaces Mina Harker.**
The Mordante Clone even sires a dhampir son in some manner
with a deaf woman named Gwethalyn Christen, whom he falls in love
with, and this son (whose name wasn't revealed in the recorded
chronicles) grew up to become a dangerous hunter that attempted to slay
him.
Dracula-Mordante clashed with various members of the Van Helsing
family through the decades, including Abraham Van Helsing and his
older brother Boris at one point, and also with Jonathan and Mina
Harker (when they were still married). Following the accidental death of
the Conjuress, Dracula-Mordante no longer challenges the evil nature
of both Dracula-Prime's psyche and the corrupting influence of Chaos
embedded within him (which he largely did out of his love for her), and
goes on to become a dangerous threat to the world on par with that of
Dracula-Prime, but working autonomously from him and seeming to
believe himself the true Prince of Darkness, like most of the other rogue
soul-clones.
At the beginning of the 1970s decade, his long-standing love/hate
relationship with Vampirella began--which goes on to this day--and he
also clashed a few times with Conrad Van Helsing and his son Adam.
Dracula-Mordante remains a dangerous threat to the world and one of
Vampirella's foremost enemies at the present time, and it's my conjecture
that there is some type of connection between him and another powerful
soul-clone of the Vampire Lord, Dracula-Mathias.
It's likely that Mordante's familial relationship with the Dracula lineage,
however distant, was what enabled him to utilize so much of Dracula-
Prime's power upon becoming a soul-clone. The two have also been
reported as resembling each other to some degree.
There seems to be evidence that Victor II lavished more love and attention
That Victor II might have been neglectful of Victor III and Victoria Marie
Birth of Countess Marya Zeleska to Dracula-Lejos and Maleva Blasko.
Llanwelly, England Elizabeth Talbot dies.
1849
Castle Frankenstein, Frankenstein Village Alphonse Victor develops a
strong dislike for his cousins when he discovers that Victor III and
Victoria Marie exhumed his recently expired, beloved hound and
dissected her.
Their odd behavior, combined with the tendency of his father, the Baron,
to drink and engage in improper liaisons with the young house maids,
prompts young Alphonse Victor to make a trip to New York, where he
visits Victor Frankenstein II and his daughter Felicia. He decides to live
there.
1850
Budapest An unidentified Dracula soul-clone hunts and kills Dr. Werner
Tartoff as part of the Vampire Lord's symbolic ten year interval mission of
vengeance declared upon the entire Tartoff lineage.
China American fortune seeker Thomas Caine, who is traveling
through China, encounters the soul-clone Dracula-Kah, who sends him
to Transylvania to return the Star Stone ring to Dracula-Prime.
Arizona, America Using the name and title of Baron
Latos Margulak, Dracula-Latos founds a secret city of vampires called
Purgatory. The goal was to create an army of vampires to invade North
America from within.
It should be noted that the dark tome of magick, the Ruthvenian, was
crafted by members of the notorious Ruthven vampire lineage, whom the
powerful and unique vampire known only as Lord Ruthven, a major rival for
global vampiric dominance to Dracula-Prime, belongs. Lord Ruthven's story
was first recorded in Dr. John Polidori's file The Vampyre, and this along
with subsequent files on him by various chroniclers have been collected
into a few volumes published by Black Coat Press: Lord Ruthven the
Vampyre; The Return of Lord Ruthven; Lord Ruthven Begins; and Micha Harris' file "May the Ground Not Consume Thee..." from Tales of the Shadowmen 5: The Vampires of Paris.
Dr. Polidori's file was adapted into 'comic book' format by Ron
Goulart and Roy Thomas in Vampire Tales #1, published by Marvels
Comics.
For the full story of Dracula-Mordante's saga, along with a lot of
speculations about this prominent soul-clone, see Prof. Nero's detailed
index to this version of Dracula.
* The "mad god" Chaos is an alternate name for the vastly powerful
Lovecraftian entity known as Azathoth, whose global Cults of Chaos were
once controlled by Dracula-Mordante during the two decades in the late
20th century in which he was a pawn of this entity.
** See the late, great agent Archie Goodwin's file The Coffin of Dracula,
serialized over two issues (#'s 8-9, both reprinted in #48) of the original
Creepy magazine by the efforts of agent James Warren, founder of Warren
Comics, whose staff was covertly given arcane information by the horror
hosts Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie, both of whom presently provide
clandestine sources of information to scribes writing for the present
iterations of Creepy and Eerie published by Dark Horse Comics.
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1853
"His studies in Britain lead him to find that an Englishman named Sir
New York Alphonse Victor Frankenstein marries his distant cousin,
Felicia Saville. The two of them make their home in New York.
Frankenstein Village Karenina Ward gives birth to Victor Frankenstein
III's son, whom she names Aloysius Victor Henry Ward, his first name
taken from her husband's father (in an attempt to cement a bond between
the boy and his stepfathere), and giving him the first and middle name of
Victor III as a double middle name of his own to hopefully forge a bond
between her child and his biological father at some point in the future.
The latter goal worked to some extent, as later Victor III would arrange for
Aloysius to inherit a large sum of the family money he may have acquired
via ill-gotten means. (Aloysius would go on to meet his cousin Henry
Frankenstein while both were approaching full adulthood, and would
attend the University of Vienna in Geneva together; both young men
would meet and study under Dr. Septimus Pretorius while in college,
and both would go on to create man-made monsters of their own.)
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Virginia, USA Victor Frankenstein II, while trying to rescue slave revolt
leader John Brown, once again crosses paths with his father's Monster.*
* See Robert Myer's edited journals of Victor Frankenstein II, titled The
1860
Castle Frankenstein Victor Frankenstein III, with the unwilling
assistance of Paul Krempe, creates his second Monster.
Fortunately for Victor III, but unfortunately for the world, he arranges to
Henry Frankenstein is born to Baron Alphonse Victor and Baroness
Felicia Frankenstein.
Rome An unidentified Dracula soul-clone fulfills the Vampire Lord's ten
year interval perpetual mission of vengeance against the Tartoff lineage
by killing sculptor Delvin Tartoff.
Birth of a young member of the Daninsky lineage who would grow up to
* See Terence Fisher's file THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN.
Transylvania Dracula-Prime creates another disappointing soul-clone.
This time the victim is a gifted but eccentric elderly English chemist
named Edwin Cobblepot, whom Dracula-Prime renames Grimpod. When choosing this subject, the Dark Prince was unaware of his incompetence, and like Lestat before him, Grimpod is released to the world. However, this soul-clone continues to believe that he is Dracula-Prime.