Mathias Cronqvist, born in 1062, was a member of the legendary Cronqvist family. Born in a time where the world was lacking in education, the Cronqvist family stood out as a beacon of incredible knowledge; the family orally passed down teachings of alchemy and magic, which eventually ended up in Mathias’ hands. Mathias, possibly the smartest and most prodigious of his family, wrote down these teachings in a notebook and studied them for years.
Years passed and Mathias quickly became friends with a young knight named Leon Belmont. With Mathias fighting for the church as a master tactician, and Leon fighting as an unrivaled swordsman, they made their company of knights nigh-invincible. However, one fateful day, Mathias received news that his wife, Elisabetha, died from illness. Horribly wounded by this news, Mathias headed home and was bedridden.
During his time alone and suffering from horrible grief, Mathias’ mind began to twist. Realizing that all he ever prayed for during his expeditions was Elisabetha’s continued safety, he grew to develop a deep hatred of God for taking away the only thing he ever asked to keep safe. Using his immense intelligence that surpassed nearly everyone on Earth, Mathias devised a master plan.
Losing all ties to his friends, blinded by his grief and anger towards God, Mathias used everyone he needed to use in order to realize his goals; he used Leon Belmont, Leon’s betrothed Sara Trantoul, the alchemist Rinaldo Gandolfi, and even the vampire king Walter Bernhard, to finally obtain a powerful relic known as the Crimson Stone. The Crimson Stone was a godly relic written about in alchemic text, which Mathias had studied and finally obtained.
Absorbing Walter’s vampiric soul into the Stone, and then absorbing the stone itself, Mathias’ power grew immensely; not only did he gain vampiric powers from Walter’s soul, but also eternal life, which he would use to spite God’s decree of mortals having limited life. Furthermore, because he was the embodiment of everything that opposed God’s order and law, Mathias’ power source became the primordial entity, Chaos. And, due to becoming the King of the Crimson Stone and the Dark Lord, the entity known as Death became subservient to him.
Although Leon knew he had to defeat Mathias, the vampire quickly escaped and left Death to deal with his old friend. From that day on, Mathias had kickstarted a blood feud between him and his former brother-in-arms; and the Belmont Clan would go on to hunt Mathias for the next several centuries.
Eventually, as Mathias continued to plague the lands as the Dark Lord, he went to change his name to Dracula Vlad Ţepeş; widely known to the public as Count Dracula. He continued his hatred of God as a bitter, immortal man, until one day he came across a woman known as Lisa. Dracula was shocked by how much Lisa fully accepted him, and how much she bore resemblance to his former wife, Elisabetha.
Slowly but surely, Dracula warmed up to Lisa and let her into his life, and the two got married. They bore a child together who possessed the powers of a vampire but the heart of a human, named Adrian Fahrenheit Ţepeş. Their family lived very happily for a time, until the church caught on to Lisa’s marriage to the Dark Lord. Lisa was quickly taken and crucified in front of her son, Adrian, though Dracula was away at the time.
However, when Dracula eventually found out about her murder, he was infuriated. Yet another wife, another person he let into his life and fully loved, taken away from him. Unstoppably infuriated, Dracula turned his hatred from not only being on God, to humanity as a whole. This is what truly sparked Count Dracula’s war on humanity.
Because of this war, the Belmont Clan was alerted and rushed to the Transylvanian countryside to finally take out Dracula. Trevor Belmont, teaming with several other powerful warriors (including Dracula’s son, who now went by Alucard,) confronted Count Dracula and was the first one to slay him.
Dracula was killed, but this would only be the first of many times. For the next five hundred or so years, the Dark Lord would be resurrected and slayed by vampire hunters time and time again. Eventually, the day came in 1999, when Dracula was revived at his peak of strength. A massive war began, between Dracula’s forces and the armies of mankind. Spearheading the charge on the side of mortals was Julius Belmont; a distant descendant of Mathias’ old friend, Leon.
Julius reached Dracula and finally slayed the Dark Lord for good, sealing him away in the lunar eclipse, along with the Belmont Clan’s legendary weapon, the Vampire Killer whip; the Vampire Killer being sealed alongside Dracula’s soul would serve as a magical seal, keeping him away for the rest of time.
For the first time in the past 900 years, Dracula was dead with no way to resurrect himself. As a result, with no other option, Dracula and his powers were reincarnated into a new body completely unaware of his past. This new body was that of a Japanese high-schooler named Soma Cruz, who would spend the majority of his teen years trying to suppress Dracula’s dark powers from taking control of him.
However, Soma would finally find the source of Dracula’s power in the Chaotic Realm, with the entity known as Chaos. Directly challenging it and taking it out, Soma finally ended the source of the Dark Lord’s power, and the book closed on a long saga of hatred and grief.
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