Seven Deadly Sins

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An Alternate Amber, by David Moore, Used With Permission.

Part IV:

The Children of the Damned

- Elders -

 Seven Deadly Sins
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Vampires notoriously keep their desires and abilities very close to themselves, and Oberon's brood are more secretive than most. Few members of Amber's court could honestly say they truly know another member of the court, but they all have public personas, and even a certain amount of what's hidden behind them becomes common knowledge over time.

This page is divided up into the following sections:

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Cymnea, Lady of Pride

Oberon's first wife was a noblewoman from one of the first Crimson Circle shadows, daughter of the Duke over a land Oberon annexed in distant memory. The settlement terms included food, money and slaves, which the Duke was prepared to sign over, if reluctantly. However, the Demon King discovered that the Duke had a beautiful daughter, and that his grudging willingness to sign some of his own people over into slavery was an attempt to get Oberon away from his country and back to Amber as soon as possible; he wished to protect his daughter by keeping her from the Demon King's attention. Oberon demanded that the daughter be sent with the first shipment of slaves. He hadn't, at that point, wished to make her into a vampire merely to humiliate and break the distraught Duke but when he saw her, he rethought his intentions.

Her beauty verged on the unearthly, and she was proud, cold and cunning. She wasn't the first prisoner that Oberon took to his bed, but she was the first to whom he offered unlife. He appealed to her vanity, using trickery and magic to show her her own face, aged and deprived of its youthful beauty. She accepted his gift readily, and in death became even more beautiful: her skin became pale to the point of translucency, her hair raven black and her lips blood red.

Oberon encouraged her to find lovers of her own. In her pride, she sought and collected men who neared her perfection, and her drive for perfection. Her search led her to Finndo, Osric and Benedict: a statesman, a magus and a warrior, each driven to the goal of supremacy in his respective field. Each, she believed, might be able to reach that supremacy with an eternity in which to strive. Surreptitiously and against her husband's will, Cymnea granted each with the Becoming, and later smuggled them into the castle to take the Communion.

Now, in Oberon's absence, Cymnea has appointed herself de facto head of the informal council convened by the Brides of Sin. The other wives may resent this, but they have always taken their lead somewhat from the eldest, domineering vampiress, and she and Faiella have always worked closely together to keep the younger wives in their place. Cymnea's colours are gold and purple, and her emblem is a gold crown on a purple field.

Benedict

Cymnea's only surviving progeny is Benedict. A near-obsessive student of the sword in his life, he had developed to the point of travelling from city to city, challenging masters to try and find someone who could teach him something. In undeath, he has allowed that passion to become overriding, spending thousands of years training in every kind of weapon, every form of battlefield, every strategy and tactic.

Benedict's chief defining characteristic is detachment. One might imagine a lack of passion to be a relief in a vampire, especially given how sadistic some of his siblings are. But the cold, calculated way in which Benedict pursues every action and the callousness with which he regards every fallen enemy or victim of crossfire are in many ways more terrible than the anger and cruelty of the other princes. Benedict even allowed his two brothers in blood to go to their deaths, simply determining that going to their aid or defence was too unlikely to yield positive results.

If Benedict's position benefits Amber, it is because as her defender he has successfully repelled all attacks directed at her, and conquered a considerable number of shadows in her name. It's doubtful he was inspired by love for his family, or any strong sense of loyalty, so much as by the presence of the Pattern. One dreads to think what might happen if he felt the need to take her for himself

Faiella, Lady of Gluttony

Oberon's second wife was the daughter of a priest in a highly restrained, puritanical shadow that the Demon King visited out of fascination for the double-standard its society pursued. He found her when visiting her father's house Oberon was blackmailing him over his pederasty and was intrigued to see in the priest's teenaged daughter what appeared to be a genuinely pure soul. Certain some black secret lurked behind her demure appearance, he made more frequent visits and started engaging her in conversation. She proved to be determined in her belief in God, the purity of spirit, the lamentable state of Man in the world, and the ever-present need to rise above the demands of the body.

Oberon switched tacks and tried bearing her own stance to its extreme. If the material world is irredeemably corrupt, he said, then the actions you take in it are meaningless. And if the goal of the good man is to rise above temptation, surely it follows that you should indulge and thus quench those temptations, since you can then better rise above them, and the actions you have taken in the past become irrelevant once you have redeemed yourself. Within weeks he had bedded her, and within the year, she begged him for the Becoming, and the eternity that would allow her to properly sate her treacherous body. They returned to Amber, where she become his second wife.

Faiella's lovers are men and women she drew in against their better natures, using guile and persuasion to make them knowingly and willingly perform acts they find abhorrent, blaspheming against their own natures in pursuit of a joy she never gives them. Eric she chose simply out of pique when her sister had already taken three men to the Becoming; Corwin and Deirdre, a married couple amongst whom she had insinuated herself, she was proudest of, and chose so that she could extend their mutual torture forever.

In the years since, Faiella has developed her philosophy to an absolute perversion of the faith she once pursued. The church itself, she believes, is irredeemably corrupt, a poor worldly reflection of the purity of spirit; she began desecrating religious icons and built a perverted mockery of a temple in the City, and began to hold debased services, establishing the Church of the Slain Unicorn. She and Cymnea side together to keep the other five wives in line. Faiella's colours are silver and blue; her emblem is a silver unicorn's head on a blue field.

Corwin

Of all the "children" of Oberon's brood, Corwin is probably the most human, simply because he had been an inveterate bastard when he was alive. A faithless, selfish, cruel, small-minded misogynist, he had callously hurt and abused most people he'd known, while his doting wife Deirdre, incapable of believing a bad thing about him, had grown more unhappy and suffered more even as she grew more incapable of leaving him. Faiella found them when he tried to pick her up in a bar; she had taken to him immediately, and had persuaded him to spitefully insist on Deirdre accepting her into their marital bed.

Faiella had then begun to prey on their relationship, weakening and undermining him while strengthening Deirdre and then vice versa, favouring first one and then the other until they were hopelessly enslaved to her favours and attentions. It was more than a hundred years ago that Corwin, disgusted with what had happened to him and his wife, stormed off into Shadow alone, where Eric arranged for his memory to be taken from him on Flora's shadow Earth. He returned a few years ago, attempted twice to take Amber from her regent, and was instrumental in Amber discovering Chaos and finding victory at the Abyss.

That battle also cost him his wife, which may have broken the last hold Faiella has over him. He has been absent the whole year since Patternfall, and may have disappeared again, this time permanently.

Clarissa, Lady of Avarice

Oberon's third wife required neither temptation nor corruption. A witch in a medieval shadow, she had discovered an ancient text revealing certain details about a powerful demon prince, "Thee Kinge of the Cittie of Nyght," Oberon. It had taken her years of painstaking research just to uncover this information; it took years longer for her to piece together the rituals needed to summon him, only to fail, time and time again. She prolonged her life with black magic, murdering babies and young girls to keep her beauty, and finally succeeded in summoning the Demon King to her location.

Initially angered by her presumption, he came near to simply killing her, but rethought himself as he recognised the resonance of the summoning. This mortal witch had fashioned a summoning magic akin in nature to his dead creator's Trumps without training or even a Trump to work from; simply a selection of crude Inter-Shadow summoning spells. What more might she be capable of doing? Believing the monster to be under control, Clarissa commanded him to grant her three wishes: eternal life, eternal youth and riches beyond imagining. Grinning, he gave all three with one act.

With some of the old Trumps to work from, Clarissa was able to revive their manufacture; it is rumoured that the family portraits that adorn the Throne Room walls are either Trump-like devices created from her study, or themselves failed early attempts at making Trumps. She also not only developed several magical powers, but began to tap new ways that vampires could use blood's potency in their powers.

Clarissa's chosen lovers were those with mystical knowledge or ability. Wizards, witches, alchemists, astronomers; any with ties to magic and magical power, who might be able to teach her more. Her offspring were those who had true potential to develop as magicians, who might broaden her own power base. They were also all red-heads, chosen for their similarity to her. Fiona, the eldest, was a sorceress from Shadow like herself; Bleys was a member of a secret society dedicated to power through indulgence; Brand a monk whose investigation into the occult had taken him down unwholesome avenues.

Clarissa is a foil to Cymnea and Faiella, constantly testing and undermining them. Were she to succeed in getting the other wives to side with her, she would doubtless be able to prevail; as the family's Trump artist and a powerful sorcerer, she has considerable influence of her own. However, they have no illusions about where rule would lie if they aligned themselves with her. Instead, she serves as a balancing factor, her ambition against Cymnea's sway. Clarissa's colours are silver and red; her emblem is a silver chalice on a red field.

Fiona

The eldest of those Clarissa made into vampires was a witch like herself, from a Bronze-age tribe in a distant Shadow. Trained, in the tradition of her people, as a healer and wise woman, she had begun to grow curious about the magics that curse and injure, eventually abandoning the community she had served to study in isolation. Clarissa found her when travelling through the shadow on personal business, and brought her to Amber to complete her training, later turning her into a vampire.

Fiona's chief characteristic is pragmatism. Sweet and good-natured, detached and vague, or spiteful and vicious as suits her needs, she balks at no act of violence in the pursuit of power or understanding. Her childlike, innocent appearance is starkly at odds with her nature, a fact she cheerfully exploits. Her chief area of research is the Pattern itself; she is rumoured to have developed insight into and power over Dworkin's creation which no-one else comprehends or can hope to duplicate.

Bleys

Clarissa's second offspring hailed from an Imperial state in a near-modern shadow, some members of whose leisured aristocracy diverted themselves by dabbling in the occult, forming secret societies and playing power-games with people and organisations. Bleys was a young, wild nobleman: wealthy, good-looking, well-read, accomplished at fencing, effortlessly skilled at everything he turned his hand to. This extended to love, where his good looks, easy charm and exquisite manners gave him all the conquests he wanted; and his appetite for these, and disregard for those he conquered, ran deep as the sea.

He joined the Society of the Golden Lamb more or less as another hobby, a new craft to master, and proved as skilled at magic as he was at everything else. Quickly rising through the ranks, he trampled over rivals and petitioners, laughing at the lives he ruined and the ambitions he dashed as he grew to ever greater scope. His womanising became more acute, and his tastes extended to darker forms of pleasure. By the time he found the innermost echelon of his secret society, only to discover the truth that all the secret societies were just public façades for the same cabal of sorcerers and politicians he had become irredeemably corrupt. He also caught the attention of one of Clarissa's servants, a warlock she had commanded to found the whole system of occult dabblers as a means of recruiting promising magicians, and was offered a new home in Amber.

Bleys' greatest crime is that his great charm and easy smile seem genuine. He gives every impression of being an affable and boisterous but kindly man. Behind twinkling eyes and a huge spirit of fun is a cold, selfish, darkly lascivious monster who has never had to work to achieve anything in his life. His studies have taken him across the board of magical and vampiric powers, never focussing on one area of magic more than another, although like his sister he is believed to know more about the Pattern than most.

Moins, Lady of Envy and Queen of the Kingdom of Bone

The tale of Oberon's fourth wife is a sad one. The Demon King, as a matter of personal pride, never forced the Becoming on anyone; but aside from rewarding beautiful consorts or useful servants with immortality, he delighted in making people whose natures rebelled against undeath choose it willingly. With Faiella it was a matter of tapping a well of perversity that existed beneath her morality and restraint; but Moins was a genuinely good woman, a loving wife and doting mother.

Married to a soldier in one of the shadows that would one day become part of the Crimson Circle, Moins had come from humble birth, but had been propelled to high standing when her humble-born husband distinguished himself enough to earn recognition as a court champion. One of the first things Oberon did as a display of his power, when he came conquering, was kill those champions in single combat; Moins' husband lingered, dying of a terrible injury while his victor watched, refusing to dispatch him. He died painfully but at peace, content to have died in the defence of his country.

Once the shadow had fallen to him, Oberon claimed the champions' wives as booty, taking Moins and several other women back to Amber. Interrogating each, taunting them, he came to realise how pure and how stubborn Moins was, and determined to break her. Commanding that her young son be brought to him, she asked him to choose. She would either ask him, Oberon, to turn her into a vampire, or she would ask him to do it to her son. Unhesitatingly, she chose herself; and Oberon was true to his word, and permitted the boy to return to his home, where he grew to adulthood, wedded, and died as an old man with many grandchildren.

For Moins, though, the effects of her decision would last a great deal longer than it would take for her to lose track of her son's entire family, as one line or another died barren, or records were lost, or people moved. Over thousands of years a person's entire culture can disappear, and no-one but Moins even remembers her son's name, but she remains. After a while, she retreated to the Kingdom of Ash, where she hoped to find her husband's ghost, or her son's, but neither ever appeared. That was when she began trying to take her own life, but a vampire of the Court of Amber is a difficult thing to kill, and she failed time and again. Now she remains in the Kingdom of Bone beneath the waves, lingering on images of her death, or the destruction of Amber.

Moins is caught between worlds. Once a wife and mother, she is forever lost to the simple happiness of watching her family blossom and grow and spending her final years content. Now a vampire, she is unable to fully become the gleeful monster so many of her fellows are. The only vampire she made was out of loneliness, and perhaps in an attempt to create a surrogate child who will not grow old and die as her real child did. Moins has little presence in Court, but her colours are recorded in the heraldry texts as green and silver; her crest is a silver tragic mask on a green field.

Llewella

To call Moins' unlife tragic leaves little space to describe Llewella's fate, since Moins was at least given a choice, however terrible that choice was. Moins' insanity changes by the ages, manifesting in different ways; it was during a mania for trying to retrace the mortal family she long ago lost that she found the little girl Llewella.

Oberon's fourth wife has lived for thousands of years, and it is a rare mortal family that can trace its lineage for so long. Even trying, as she did, to keep abreast of her family, she found that some lines ended barren, some moved and in moving changed their names or were confused with other lines, and various marriages and illegitimate births clouded names and identities. Even then, there were times, sometimes decades together, when she would all but lose heart and stop trying, focussing on her own misery or on her hatred of her "husband," Oberon. Only a thousand years or so after her son's death, Moins could no longer point to a single person and say with any certainty that he or she was descended from her. There were many that she suspected, or that seemed likely, but no definite blood kin.

Llewella was the only daughter of the last generation of the last line that Moins could guess, with any kind of likelihood, sprang from her son. At the time Moins found her, she was focussing with unusual fervour on trying to preserve her family; and when Llewella was orphaned by a war, she kidnapped the girl and, having some confused notion of saving the blood, turned her. Llewella came to Amber to live with her new "mother," and the two stayed in the Kingdom of Ash for many years before moving to the Kingdom of Bone. It is rumoured that both women walked the Ash Pattern; certainly Llewella arrived in Amber as a scared but composed little girl, and is now as distracted and mad as her creator.

Forever a girl of twelve years, Llewella will never know adulthood. That is her great tragedy, but it may prove her greatest blessing, for she seems never to have fallen to the cruelty and selfishness that her condition engenders, feeding only sparingly and then preferring to feed from animals: even Moins, for all of her tragic humanity, sometimes succumbs to the darker, more destructive side of her hunger.

Rilga, Lady of Wrath

Oberon's fifth wife was Queen of a warlike Amazonian shadow. A real-life Hippolyta, she had defended her home against Benedict's army bravely for a long time, but superior tactics and greater spite won out, and her army lay at the brink of disaster. Eventually, proud and regal, dressed in the manner of a monarch, she had parleyed with the enemy and demanded the right to defend her people in person. She would fight Benedict, or his lord, or whatever champion he should nominate, single-handedly, and the winner could claim her land as his or her own. Benedict was more than prepared to take this battle, but Oberon, who had been attending on the army to see how Cymnea's progeny performed on the field of battle, interrupted and insisted on being the one to take the queen's land by personal skill at arms.

The battle was dramatic but short. Rilga was a strong, passionate woman, but no match for the supernatural strength and speed of the undead. Defeated, she was taken captive; she planned to deny her "king" his prize by killing herself, but even as the knife she had smuggled into her cage pushed into her breast Oberon tore into the cage and ripped her life out, making her a vampire like him.

In spite of this defiance, she turned to the life of a vampire with amost unseemly fervour. Quickly mastering the applications of her new powers for strength and speed, she set about roaming Shadow for great warriors, candidates for the Becoming. Her lovers and protégées she pits against each other, constantly testing their strength and their determination. For all this, they are intensely loyal to each other and to their creator: the only thing that will cease their incessant competition and one-upmanship is the perception that an outsider is threatening one of them. Eventually, she chose three offspring, each masters of conflict in one form or another.

In the council, Rilga keeps herself very much to herself. She despises Clarissa, or she and the witch might easily threaten Cymnea's and Faiella's supremacy; in the games and manoeuvres that characterise power in Amber, she prefers to lend implicit support through her progeny, who backed Eric during Oberon's absence but always insisted, like Benedict, that their loyalties lay "with Amber." Rilga's colours are black and gold; her emblem is a black wolf rampant on a gold field.

Caine

Caine is the eldest of Rilga's brood and the clearest indicator of the folly behind assuming the Bride of Wrath and her progeny to be nothing more than warriors and thugs. A naval captain from a militocracy, Caine long ago decided that the form of contest at which he would excel would be politics and manipulation. Caine saw Finndo as trying too hard to be a great statesman rather than a successful one; to make his life and career a work of art. Caine himself sought merely to ensure, in any dispute or power struggle, that he was on the side that won, however inelegant or low his means to achieve this end. Often his approach is simply not to act, keeping his allegiances and plans to himself until he can take one decisive act to influence events. For instance, having kept his cards very close to his chest throughout the Patternfall war, perhaps trying to ensure he could claim some power regardless of who came out on top, he appeared at the eleventh hour to fire a wooden crossbow quarrel into Brand's heart, sending the traitor paralysed and helpless over the edge of the Abyss.

The tactics and trickery to which Caine has resorted are extraordinary. He is known to have roamed Shadow to find a mortal who was his twin, turned him into a vampire (albeit one who had not walked the Pattern) and then killed him, placing his body to try and flush out an enemy within the family. It is said that Rilga's progeny are the Amberites with the strongest grasp of the vampiric power to shapeshift into animals, and that Caine may have even learned to break with the standard range of shapes and guises, imitating people and drawing on unlikely powers and forms. It is rumoured that Caine has seeded an entire Shadow with vampires, who he constantly tests against each other and who fear him as some kind of vampiric God, awaiting an apocalyptic war at the end of time in which they will be called upon to turn against other ancient, powerful vampires whether as Caine's allies or his enemies. But then, the only thing about Caine of which one can be certain is that no rumour about him should be completely trusted or entirely dismissed.

Caine and his sibling Gérard both loved the sea in their mortal lives, and between them command Amber's great merchant and trading fleets.

Julian

The master of Arden forest is a paradox. A warrior from a nomadic tribe that placed great importance on their steeds, Julian is called Beast Lord and Master of the Hunt and is, in the Amber Court, the most accomplished at those vampiric powers that emulate or control animals. Half animal himself, he appears to find the form of a black dog, or a crow, more natural than his own, and the company of his hounds or his unique Nightmare, Morgenstern, more comforting than even his fellows in Blood. Yet he is the most visibly composed of Amber's court, refusing to reveal emotion or distress, as impassive and impenetrable as the eerie, reflective white armour he wears. Perhaps this is not so strange, since if Julian does still experience emotion, it could not be understood in terms of the familiar sentiments of mortals, or even the debased emotions of vampirekind.

Julian is the guardian of Arden, the sprawling primeval forest outside Amber. Like Amber, Arden is shrouded in permanent night; unlike Amber, plants thrive there. There is much speculation as to the nature of the gnarled, twisted trees and bushes of the forest, and as to how they have come to be here. Many assume that Julian somehow planted or created the place; certainly he knows and understands it better than any other. Loyal to Rilga and his two brothers in Blood, he sided with Eric during his regency; in general, however, he is unconcerned about what passes in Amber as long as his beloved forest remains safe.

Gérard

Rilga's final offspring is a colossus, with limitless strength and unbelievable speed. A prize-fighter from a shadow where combat, broadcast and publicised, has become the basis of everything from public entertainment to politics, Gerard is the epitome of the unarmed warrior, and the gifts of the Blood have only made him stronger. While few would want to find themselves within his arm's reach, many consider him to be crude and manipulable, too given to using simple force as a way to resolve situations. After a fashion, this is true; Gérard recognises that his greatest tool is his strength and skill in unarmed combat, so he finds ways of engineering situations so that he can draw on that. He knows that force can't resolve every situation, but is accomplished at avoiding confrontations where he can't push the issue and passing it off as simple-mindedness or affability on his part. While he may not be the political master that Caine is, he has the very great advantage of being widely and incorrectly seen as stupid or harmless.

Gérard tends not to turn to cruelty, manipulation or outright selfishness as often as the rest of the Court, although this is less out of some altruistic beliefs on his path than sheer disinterest. The more you try and control and manipulate people, he believes, the more time you have to waste maintaining that control; and to try and rule Amber is folly, with the united ambitions of the remainder of the Court turned against you. For this reason, he is sometimes seen as kinder and simpler than the other Princes, but that is misguided. A tiger will not try and manipulate you or take on the rulership of your household, but it is still unwise to bare your neck to it.

Dybele, Lady of Lust

Oberon's choices for the Becoming often seem part of a private game. Faiella and Moins he manipulated into requesting the kiss to prove he could overcome virtue; Cymnea and Clarissa he seemed to collect as sources of power and advantage. One could be forgiven for thinking that, with Dybele, he was moved by a more human desire. A high-class prostitute from a wealthy Empire in Shadow, Dybele is beautiful and sultry, by turns meek and girlish and slatternly and base. Oberon had been visiting the Imperial capital as a "foreign dignitary," making a study of the Empire's hierarchy and the complex system of bribes and blackmail which had become the backbone of the government. When he saw her, she was entertaining a private party to which he'd been invited, and he was struck by the way this whore from the ostensibly wholly passive position of giving up her body to be used by others nevertheless managed to master the room, favouring one man over another, creating jealousies and rivalries without ever seeming to be anything but absolutely pliant. Amused, he stole her away in the night and offered her eternity, which she accepted.

Unlife in Amber has changed her little. Publicly elegant and demure, she delights in her uniformly recognised but wholly unofficial role as mistress of ceremonies for the Court. By night, she has had a string of lovers to put any of her sisters to shame, but never favours one over another, and never offers any of them the Becoming. Controlling her suitors with her body, rewarding one and punishing another with her attention, she has quietly built a considerable empire around her bedchamber. Were she to try and take the throne for herself and her protegée, she might provide Cymnea and Faiella with a far greater threat than they probably realise; but she is content with having the power and not using it. Control is the thing that has always delighted her; controlling a man or woman with her ability to bring pleasure. Whether she uses that control or not is far less important to her than the knowledge that she could. Dybele's colours are red and gold; her emblem is a gold crescent moon on a red field.

Florimel

Unusually for one of the Brides of Sin, Dybele never selected a lover to join her in unlife. Florimel was something more akin to an apprentice. Taken from the streets of London on Shadow Earth, she was a whore like her creator, in whom Dybele saw great potential, but little opportunity. She sought to give her an opportunity, not just to get off the streets, but to win and control the desires and emotions of people on a stage beyond anything the teenaged girl could ever have dreamed.

Rather than indulging the opportunities her new life and powers gave her to use sex and desire to control people, Flora has moved somewhat away from that. Still expert in the arts of flirting and manipulation, she takes pride in the more public face of her creator's activities, playing the hostess, the diplomat, the mistress of etiquette. Eternally stylish and elegant, she receives more than her share of attention from the gentlemen of court, and from the men who linger around her creator, but keeps them at arm's length deftly and adroitly. So thorough is her manner and her good conduct, in fact, that the fact of her unlife, on the rare occasion it is brought home, always comes as a shock. She is certainly responsible for her share of deaths and suffering, as is any of the lords and ladies of Amber; but she is so capable in the art of smoothing things over and keeping up appearances that observers occasionally forget who and what she is.

Paulette, Lady of Sloth

Oberon's last wife is a sad creature. Whether Moins and Faiella's broken virtue, Cymnea and Clarissa's ambition, or Dybele and Rilga's passions, all his other wives have been characterised by strong personalities. Good or ill, there was something great about them already, that vampirism either twisted or exalted. Paulette's strongest characteristic was how human she was. A normal girl from a suburban home in a modern Shadow, neither too proud nor too meek, neither strenuously virtuous nor overly wanton, Paulette met Oberon at a nightclub she was attending with friends; they had even used fake ID to get in. Oberon had been at the nightclub hunting, and toyed with the young woman. She was excited by the brief contact he represented with a world more dangerous and varied than her own stable existence, but rebuffed his overtures, content with playing out any fantasies of accepting his offers in her imagination. Later on, he accosted her in an alleyway and drained her. Even as she lay dying of shock and bloodloss, he appeared moved by her humanity, and offered her a choice between living in damnation or dying in peace. Hazily aware of the magnitude of the offer, she nevertheless grasped at it like a drowning man.

She regrets that decision every day. Having had no ambitions higher than college, a job, a husband, children and a house in the suburbs, she has no idea what to do with eternity. Horrified at what she is, she lacks the strength of will to even attempt to take her life as Moins did. She is often away from Amber, seeking shadows where she can stand the sun and try to forget her nature; but she gets lonely without the company of other immortals, and always returns to the rightmost seat in the Throne Room. Paulette's colours are gold and blue; her emblem is a gold coin on a blue field.

Random

Even Paulette's one candidate for vampirism reflects her humanity. When she had been undead only for a few years, and desperate to escape her condition, she returned to her shadow of birth and tried to recapture some sense of what she had been. She steered clear of her friends and family even desperation wouldn't get her to tackle that pain but started to frequent some of the nightclubs and bars she used to know. There she met Random, a drummer in a local garage band who had just broken up with his long-term partner. Paulette hooked up with him, and they began moving awkwardly along the start of a relationship. She was suddenly struck by the fear of him aging and dying, though, and she forced the Becoming on him. Her actions disgusted her, as she realised she'd implicated him in the entire world from which she had been trying to escape with him in the first place. They drifted apart not long after that, and Random has mooched in and out of Amber in the handful of centuries since. He has no strong objections to unlife, although he was furious at Paulette for denying him a choice, and has used eternity mostly to entertain himself, following music and culture in various shadows and getting a kick out of the "whole immortal deathgod thing." Like his creator, Random has little interest and no ambition in Amber; he is younger than any of his siblings, in some cases by millennia, and has no illusions about his ability to assert power over them.

Random is one of the few offspring of the Brides of Sin known, at the start of the Patternfall War, to have bestowed the Becoming on another, albeit unsuccessfully. After he was turned into a vampire and he and Paulette drifted apart, he managed to rekindle his relationship with his former partner, Morgänthe. The two were back together for a short time when she found out what he had become, and he offered to make her like him, that they might share eternity. Morgänthe accepted, but when he drained and turned her, she fell mortally ill and the turning succeeded only in sustaining her on the cusp of life. Unknown to either of them, she had become pregnant with Random's child before he had left her for Paulette, and her body consequently rejected unlife. Morgänthe died in his arms several months later, her son Martin breathing his first even as her she passed away.

Random raised Martin in secret, terrified to reveal the boy's existence to anyone. Martin was a perversion, part mortal and part vampire, and Random had no idea what should be done about him or what punishment might accrue should his crime be discovered. However, Brand found out about the boy, who became central to the traitor's plan to destroy the Pattern. Little is known about the Martin's current whereabouts, although a rebellious mortal underground movement in Amber is said to be hiding him. In the meantime, a great deal of suspicion is being levelled at Random by the Queens of Amber, and the youngest Prince has had to work hard to assure them that he is not harbouring Martin and knows nothing of the treacherous rebellion.

The missing sixth wife of Oberon?

The rumour occasionally arises that Dybele was not Oberon's sixth wife. Supposedly, the Demon King turned another wife only a short time before the Bride of Lust; but Rilga, finally elevated from her position of youngest wife after a thousand years, immediately set about abusing and oppressing her. According to the tale, the wife created two progeny, and the rivalry extended to those two and Rilga's Caine, Julian and Gérard; eventually it became so fierce that the unnamed wife and her offspring fled, or were exiled, or murdered

The wife's rumoured two offspring are described as "twins." Whether this means they were literal twins before the Becoming, or selected for their similarity to one another, or merely turned at the same time, is speculation. In any case, no-one who met the wife and her two offspring, if they ever existed, dares speak of them; and no-one who has heard of them would dare ask. An effective ban exists on even acknowledging that they ever existed; if Oberon is no longer here to enforce that ban, few would brave Rilga's anger by raising the matter.

And those who rest

It is a very difficult thing to kill a vampire Prince of Amber; they regenerate the most terrible injuries, and even the sunlight of lesser worlds holds no fear for them. Transfixion merely paralyses them, end even if one succeeds in killing them with fire or decapitation, it is possible for one who has taken the Communion to literally rise from the dead, even if the body is so much ash. Nevertheless, the wars, intrigues and difficult times that have plagued the land of the City of Eternal Night have taken a few immortal lives.

Little is known about Dworkin, the founder of Amber and her first Demon King. What is known about him is the history of Amber's foundation, and vague legends about his legendary power, strength and evil. He stole the Gem of Law from Chaos, drew the Pattern with his blood, built Amber, created and trained Oberon, with him conquered the Crimson Circle, and was the first sorcerer and Trump artist in the Amber court. That Oberon is believed to have killed this redoubtable creature is testament to the second Demon King's own strength and ingenuity. Exactly how Oberon killed his creator is a matter of much speculation.

Oberon's death a year ago was by his own actions. Brand's failed attempt to destroy the Blood Pattern and overthrow the order of creation had left the Pattern damaged, crippled. Oberon's blood was closest to that which had made the Pattern; he was the strongest, and knew Dworkin's device best. Sending his wives and their progeny to the Courts of Chaos, he stayed to repair the Pattern. He was successful, but was supposedly destroyed in the process. The question that plagues his successors is why. Oberon was not noted for his selfless demeanour. Was there something he feared that was more dreadful that death? Was there something about the Pattern he knew that others don't? With these questions unanswered, few are willing to trust that Oberon is finally dead; beings as old, powerful and cruel as him don't readily die.

Finndo and Osric were the first of their generation, the eldest two offspring of Cymnea. Obsessively driven to perfection, the one in politics and the other in magic, they were very like their surviving sibling; one shudders to think what magical acts Osric might have achieved with the millennia his brother has had to study swordplay, or what Finndo might have achieved as a leader of men. Their greatest failing in life was a tendency to view their lives and careers less as processes to achieve something and more as works of art in themselves.

They became too preoccupied in their ideas of their own greatness, and challenged Oberon's rule. They failed and, outmanoeuvred and neutralised, were borne away. It is generally agreed that they were executed, although as with Dworkin it is uncertain what method might have succeeded in killing them. The most popular belief is that Oberon used the Gem of Law in some way; it is the artefact that the Demon Kings used to keep Amber's sun out of the sky, and it is generally believed that the true sunlight of Amber would be enough to kill a vampire Prince.

Created mostly out of pique after Cymnea made three creations of her own, Eric fell very much in love with Deirdre as a result of Faiella's interference, and a fierce rivalry grew between Eric and Corwin. When Corwin stormed away from his creator and her games a century ago, Eric made arrangements for Corwin to be crippled and lose his memories on Florimel's home shadow, where Dybele's child watched him for hundreds of local years. With Oberon and Corwin gone, and Rilga and her spawn placated by Faiella, he positioned himself as Regent. When Corwin's attempted coup failed, he changed the title to Demon King. When Chaos attacked on the Black Road, Eric fell in battle, staked and beheaded. His body was borne into the Crypt to heal, but in the year since Eric has shown signs neither of recovery nor decay; his body remains, inviolate, at rest. People murmur darkly about the power in the Gem of Law, which he was wearing at the moment he died; it has great power, they say, but requires great mastery, and Eric proved weak, losing the spark of his life to the jewel.

Corwin's wife Deirdre was a meek, spiritless housewife with a misogynistic, abusive husband until the Becoming; Faiella spent the centuries that followed toying with Corwin and Deirdre's feelings, playing them off against one another and shifting the power balance between them with her own involvement. As Faiella's interference eventually drove Corwin away, to Deirdre it gave strength, and a measure of coldness. Finding her feet and some identity, she became strong and independent, shutting herself off from love and caring and putting on a bluff, hearty air. In the last few years, husband and wife even became something like friends and allies on an equal footing, and if Deirdre hadn't fallen into the Abyss with Brand at the final battle, they might have found some kind of reconciliation.

Universally villified as a weakling and traitor, Brand was Clarissa's third and youngest creation. A former monk from a medieval shadow whose investigation into the occult led him to deeper study and, eventually, practice, Brand was recruited by Clarissa and persuaded by the offer of an eternity in which to further his study. Convincing himself all the time that he was studying infernalism, and volunteering for undeath, purely to understand the enemy better and be better prepared to fight, he sank deeper into Clarissa's coven and their plotting. Gradually, his objections and his self-delusion were stripped away, and he became ever more callous about the violent, terrible things his study led him to. He excelled at magic, and his creator's craft of Trump artistry.

Eventually, though, he regarded himself, and his career, with horror. He realised he had become a monster, and repented of his crimes. Taking Moins' example of the futility of attempted suicide, and in any case believing it to be a mortal sin, he set about plotting the destruction of Dworkin's Pattern, which should enable him to bring about the end of Oberon, the Court, and his own unlife. His researches uncovered the existence of Martin, the half-mortal, and suggested a way in which his blood could be used to denature the Pattern and end it all.

Brand failed. Discovered by his siblings, he was betrayed and imprisoned in a distant shadow, only escaping when Corwin, largely unaware of what had been happening, managed to get him into a Trump contact and back to Amber. He continued plotting the destruction of his family until eventually, shot through the heart with a wooden crossbow bolt, he fell into the Abyss at the edge of Chaos, bearing the Gem of Law with him. Perhaps there, if nowhere else, he has found oblivion and redemption.

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