In a Glass, Darkly

Setting | Elders | Characters and System | A Sample Character

This is a re-imagining of the Amber history, in which Dworkin was afflicted with vampirism as a final punishment before fleeing Chaos; a decision his enemies would later come to regret. Much of the history of Zelazny's world is intact, but distorted: some of the heroes of the Amber Chronicles become villains in Blood of Amber, and vice versa, taking similar actions for very different reasons

This page is divided up into the following sections:

• The Curse of Dworkin
• The Court of Amber
• The Patternfall War
• The Present Night

Click on the section headings to return to the top of the page.

The Curse of Dworkin

The story begins with Dworkin, a reckless, brave, dangerous, and very possibly good-intentioned young nobleman of Chaos who stole a precious artefact the eye of a god and fled into Infinite Shadow. As a punishment, and in order to trap him out in the Maelstrom that he might be hunted down, the Witches of Chaos performed a great ritual. They sacrificed Dworkin's only living relation and traced her blood back to him, transforming him into a deathless and unchanging Vampire. Deprived of the chaos inherent in all living things, he lost his control of the Logrus and foundered in Shadow, eventually seeking rest and safety in an oasis of calm, a grove at the foot of a mountain, placid in the moonlight.

It was in this grove that he met the place's guardian, a unicorn a thing of beauty of purity that recoiled from the undead prince's corruption and rose against him, attacking him with her slashing hooves and magical might. The battle was titanic, but Dworkin prevailed, feasting on the beast's blood before seeking shelter from the coming dawn. With her last breath, the beast cursed him, that her horn would be a constant reminder of his crime, and of the connection he had forged with her by taking her blood; for all time, he and his progeny would be vulnerable, rendered helpless, when their hearts were pierced, whether with horn, or bone, or wood, or any once-living thing.

When he arose the next night, Dworkin took the gem he had stolen from Chaos and crafted a design in a cave in the mountainside with his own blood, understanding little but the need within him to recreate the burning, intricate pattern he had seen inside the jewel. The task took him all night, forcing him to rest once again at dawn; but as Dworkin stood over his creation on the third night, he realised that he held in his hand the means to ensure that he would never fear the sun again. Calling out the power in the stone, he halted the movement of the sky at midnight, when the sun was furthest from view, and the brilliant light of the full moon cast everything in eerie, distorted silhouette. In all the millennia since that night, the fair land of Amber has not seen a single dawn; and Dworkin, strengthened by the Pattern that shared his lifeblood, had nothing to fear from the weak suns of other worlds.

Travelling out into Shadow, Dworkin found a man a great warrior, scholar, statesman and sorcerer called Oberon and drained him of life, feeding him his own blood and making him into a thing like himself. Oberon attuned himself to Dworkin's Pattern, and the two men raised a mighty and beautiful city, where they ruled for many years. The mortal people of Amber could scarcely farm without the light of the sun, so their cruel kings set them conquering. The armies of Amber rolled over their neighbouring Shadows, and the wealth of countless other worlds began pouring into the City of Eternal Night. With enforced trade agreements and fealties, Dworkin and Oberon created a community of satellite worlds called the Crimson Circle. They were terrible and noble, their power unquestionable.

But evil, they say, carries the seed of its own downfall. Jealous of his creator, Oberon conspired against him, eventually murdering him to ascend to the Obsidian Throne of Amber himself. The people of Amber tell many hushed tales of how this was achieved, all hearsay; that he used the Gem of Law to call forth but one ray of pure sunshine to strike him on the spot; that he staked and beheaded him, and seeded the body with certain flowers and herbs to prevent restoration; that he tore the life from him, draining him of the blood that gives him potency in a parody of the feast that all vampires must make of their mortal subjects; that he did not kill him at all, but trapped or crippled his creator, who languishes even now in the grips of a prison or punishment more terrible than we can imagine. It matters little.

The Court of Amber

Oberon, like his maker, was lonely; but sought lovers, not companions or co-rulers. He sought and turned wives, bringing them back to Amber to live under his reign; witches and concubines, testament to his power and grace. These are called the Blood Queens, the Brides of Sin, the Demon King's Whores. He forbade them from creating progeny of their own, but the eldest, Cymnea, disobeyed him, believing herself his favourite and immune to his wrath; she envisaged herself as Oberon's "true" wife, and her sisters in blood as mere concubines.

Cymnea was driven by perfection. Her beauty, it is said, was peerless in life, and undeath has only made her more coldly ideal. Her lovers, a practice Oberon tolerated and even encouraged amongst his wives, were men who pursued perfection as obsessively and dispassionately as she did. Finndo was the perfect statesman, ambitious, diplomatic, driven and adaptable. Osric was the consummate magus, studious and arcane, ceaseless in his pursuit of knowledge. Benedict was the perfect warrior and war leader, relentless and precise, endlessly rehearsing battle and duel in his mind. Cymnea's first choice of candidate for unlife was Finndo. Draining his life away, she fed him from her blood and transferred Dworkin's curse to him. When he was strong enough, she smuggled him into the family crypt that he might walk the Blood Pattern and join her in power. In time, Osric and then Benedict joined him.

It is nigh impossible to keep a secret in an incestuous house like Amber's royal family. Faiella, Oberon's second wife, knew of Cymnea's disobedience and believed she could be no less Oberon's favourite than Cymnea was. Faiella caught her lovers in cruel bonds of envy, desire and self-destruction, and it was Eric, one of the most handsome and most twisted, that she chose for the Becoming.

Oberon had known about Finndo, but had not yet chosen a course of action. It is a wonder that he hesitated at all; perhaps he felt that destroying him would be too great an effort, or that he might one day prove a useful pawn or resource. Maybe he was even driven by so human a quality as pride, or desire to see his achievements live on in another generation. He was reluctant to judge one illegally created vampire, but four illicit progeny demanded action. Balking at destruction even then, he transfixed them all with wooden stakes and entombed them in the family crypt, sealing them away. They were known as Oberon's Bastards, and to even speak of them was treason.

Many years passed until Faiella approached her husband with a request. Two of her pets, Corwin and Deirdre, a man and a woman who had been married to one another before she set about corrupting them and making them her own, were leaving the beauty of youth behind them. If he indulged her to make them undead, she promised to keep them under control. Grudgingly, he extended his permission and the two were blessed with the Becoming. When one wife had been indulged, all demanded the same, and in short order each of his then four wives had one or two "children" of her own. Confronted with a furious Cymnea who refused to create new progeny after her search for perfection had brought her the three great men who now languished in the crypt, Oberon made a rare display of fairness and released them, and Eric. For a short while, the three generations of vampires ruled in some semblance of harmony, their combined power turned against the rest of reality. With Dworkin dead and Oberon near-obsessively keeping his subordinates uninformed, even Chaos was forgotten: Amber was the one reality, the greatest power in the many universes.

What happened next was almost inevitable. Cymnea had chosen a politician of matchless skill and limitless ambition for her eldest creation, and he had been punished, rendered powerless, imprisoned. Rankling at his loss of authority, straitjacketed as he was even after his release, Finndo began to plot against the man he and his fellows had been taught to call "father." Osric joined him in conspiracy, but Benedict demurred, believing the odds too much against them. Some say Eric threw in his lot, too, but kept sufficiently distant that he was able to clear his reputation when the conspiracy failed. However, that Eric should succeed in escaping Oberon's wrath where Finndo failed despite his supposed cunning and skill at manipulation seems unlikely.

Oberon proved to be every bit worth the throne he had fought for. Finndo and Osric were revealed, outmanoeuvred, and caught. They were, supposedly, executed, although as in Dworkin's death there is some uncertainty as to how, or even whether they are truly dead at all. This may be deliberate: the master tyrant must be disinclined to let it become common knowledge whether and how one of the Blood may be killed.

There were other tragedies to strike the family. At the time of Osric and Finndo's uprising, Oberon had had five wives for a thousand years: haughty Cymnea, degenerate Faiella, ambitious Clarissa, jealous Moins, and savage Rilga. He has since, of course, taken wanton Dybele and dissipate Paulette; but few remember and none speak of his rumoured sixth wife, gifted with the Becoming shortly after the deaths of the two eldest of Oberon's "children." Supposedly, she created two progeny of her own, but rivalry between this sixth wife and Rilga finally no longer youngest amongst Oberon's wives and between her two offspring and Rilga's Julian, Gérard and Caine led to the unnamed wife and her offspring being driven away or, depending on the account one hears, murdered. In any case, goes the rumour, to utter their names or even to profess knowledge that such people ever existed was forbidden, and enforced by the Demon King's own anger. If they ever existed at all, it became as if they did not.

So seven wives there have been, and they have sat these long years in seven carved seats, arrayed in a broad curve behind their husband and master's great Obsidian Throne. Except the fourth, middle seat, which has remained empty for time out of mind. For his wives, Oberon chose women whose souls rested on the cusps of humanity even in life: Cymnea's pride was with her in the aristocratic house of her breathing days, for instance, and it was Clarissa's greed that began her on the occult study that caught Oberon's attention to begin with.

Moins' selection, then, was the more tragic and inexplicable for not following the pattern; sweet and gentle, she was offered by Oberon the choice of accepting the gift of his power (he has always insisted his progeny accept the change willingly) or asking him to bestow it on her young son. She chose the path of self-sacrifice, taking his damnation on herself and watching her son grow to a healthy man and lead a long life. She has had a long time to reflect on the wisdom of self-sacrifice, however: her son died an impossibly long time ago, and she cannot even say for sure what has come of his family over the years and generations. Envying mortals and her fellow vampires alike, the one for their happiness and simplicity, and the other for their apparent lack of regret or sympathy, she tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to take her own life. Now she lives in the ruins of the Kingdom of Bone beneath the sea with her only created progeny, a girl called Llewella who Moins turned in hopes of giving herself a companion for eternity, and who is now as mad as her creator. The middle-seat in Amber has remained empty for centuries, but Oberon allowed no-one to remove or sit in it, amused by its significance.

The Patternfall War

And so things remained stable, after a fashion, until a century or so ago, when first Corwin and then Oberon disappeared quite abruptly. Both men had left Amber before, without announcement or explanation, but never for so long. For almost a hundred years Amber was administered by Oberon's wives, their seats surrounding the vacant Throne from which their power derived. None of the women dared place themselves on the throne, fearful lest their husband return. Instead they began to manoeuvre their progeny to try and gain the seat, confident that the winning candidate could still be thrown to Oberon's questionable mercy when the Demon King returned.

After the initial moves were made, Eric took the Throne. Benedict had evidently decided against the risk of taking the throne, or his neutrality had somehow been bought; in any case, he declared that his support was for Amber, not for any king. Corwin was missing. The charismatic and darkly lustful Bleys stayed uncharacteristically quiet, skulking in the shadows with his witch and warlock siblings. Rilga and Faiella appeared to have made behind-the-scenes arrangements, as the former's three created offspring sided with Eric. Seating himself on the Obsidian Throne at first as a Regent, Eric took possession of the Gem of Law and began to entrench himself in Amber.

The events that followed are recent history, and known too well. Corwin freed himself from a captivity several subjective centuries long, amnesic and ignorant of his own nature on a world out in Shadow, in time to join forces with Bleys and attempt a coup against the Regent. This attack failed, and Eric, sensing the last opposition to his power gone, claimed the crown and imprisoned Corwin. A black road appeared out of Shadow, bringing knowledge of Chaos forcibly to the vampires of Amber; Corwin freed himself again and, using knowledge he had gained many years before, brought fresh troops to the rescue of Amber. In the terrible battle that followed, Eric was staked and beheaded. His body was taken to the family crypt, but was not restored by the Pattern, a fact that mystifies and unsettles the vampires of Amber, although it has not decayed either. It rests there to this day.

A conspiracy had been uncovered. Brand, effete and studious, had eventually rebelled against the acts of wilful corruption to which his study of magic had forced him; against the damned half-life he had to lead; against, in fact, the entire existence of Oberon's Court and the City of Eternal Night. Investigation had brought to his attention the existence of Random's illicit child, created when Random was very newly turned and thought to bring his mortal lover Morgänthe into unlife with him. Unknown to either of them, Morgänthe had been pregnant at the time he tried to bless her with the Becoming; her body rejected the kiss, and she had fallen sick, dying some months later giving birth to a creature partially mortal and partially vampiric in nature.

Random had been distraught and terrified, keeping the cause of his lover's illness and the nature and existence of her child from even his own creator; but Brand's scrying had enabled him to find out about Martin, and his research had suggested something interesting to him. The Pattern was a thing of blood; the blood of mortals sustained it, and the blood of the children of Oberon enriched it. But blood that stood in both worlds, that was of the night but tainted with sunlight, might be able to destroy it. Tempting his siblings with ideas of remaking the universe in their images, he hatched a plan to find the boy and use him to destroy the Pattern, and with it Amber, Oberon's family and himself.

The plan was elegant and clever, and a fuller accounting of it, and the outcome of the attempt, may be found in Corwin's writings. It almost succeeded, partially erasing and distorting the Pattern, so that Oberon had to remain in Amber to redraw and repair it while his descendants took the battle to Chaos. The Demon King achieved this but disappeared, some say absorbed by the Pattern, giving his life that it might restore itself. A servant of his will brought the Gem of Law to his heirs at the other end of reality, where the vampires of Amber united to oppose Brand; transfixed by a wooden crossbow bolt to the heart, he fell from the cliff top at Chaos, taking the Gem and Corwin's former wife Deirdre with him into the endless Abyss.

The Present Night

The battle went well for Amber, and the family returned home. Benedict continued to plead neutrality; Eric, Deirdre and Brand were missing or dead; Corwin disappeared shortly after the war; and Bleys and Fiona were disgraced by their involvement with Brand's plot. That left Rilga's progeny, mad Llewella, dissolute Florimel and foppish Random as candidates for the throne. Caine was too clever to rule from the spotlight, and Julian and Gérard were content with their own realms and areas of influence. The Queens of Sin eventually decided to leave the Obsidian Throne empty for now, which suited them fine, ensuring as it did that no one Queen would have pre-eminence over the others and that they risked nothing of Oberon's wrath should he return somehow from whatever had befallen him.

A year has passed. Terms have been drawn with Chaos, and while they rankle at the military concessions demanded of them by Benedict and Caine, they are content with the isolationist philosophy behind those concessions. Amber is ruled, a little uneasily, by a broadly equal council of the former Wives of Oberon (although Moins remains in her self-imposed exile under Amber Bay), with the empty Obsidian Throne a symbol of their authority. The mortals of Amber briefly rebelled after news of Oberon's death, but there was a quick and bloody purge and order was restored. A personality cult to the traitor Brand has emerged among the mortal malcontents, and efforts are being taken to eradicate it.

The loss of the Gem of Law has been keenly felt, especially once it was realised that the moon and stars were beginning to move. The moon is now near the western horizon, and the eastern sky is beginning to pale. The first dawn in tens of thousands of years of night may soon come to Amber, and it may be a long and terrible day indeed

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Copyright © David Moore, 2003. This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.