COMPLETE! The Wasteland. A woman screams in the night. Spotlights flash on a pile of dust in the desolate patch of land that lay just beyond the tall crosses that picket the boundary of Encampment R-34. A group of curious students leave their bunkho...
To Matthias Corvinus, the worshipful King of Hungary, be this letter taken.
I am grateful for the provisions your rider has carried. I have scarce had any food and took to the natural sort. The wild herbs and toadstools gave rise to haunting visions. I return'd your rider and postponed my own until these dreams abated and my health returned. I now have a full mind to recall the events during all this time.
Beyond the ridge, we took note of the smoke in better light. My rider confess'd that it was, in fact, the result of an existent blaze. The smoke was too thick to approach, and the stench too abominable to withstand. Outside the wretched disaster, he discover'd a wounded villager in the mud who had been slashed nearly in half for being a Turk sympathizer. This Wallachian perceived much of what had taken place and offer'd his account in lieu of a death speech.
The Prince of Wallachia, Vlad Tepes, approach'd the gates of this Turkish battlement in the garments of a high-station'd Ottoman warrior and demand'd entrance. I find sufficient reason to conclude that this was the dress of the captured Bey, Hamza Pasha. Behind him, the legion of false warriors were clothed in Bulgarian colors, carrying banners of the Ottoman Empire. It was observable, even from afar, that this was another massacre. I can still smell overwhelming death on the beard of my rider. I will beg him to shear it clean.
This wither'd villager learned that Vlad is planning to enter Bulgaria across the ice of the Danube and strike the Sultan on his own lands. As the gypsies, he knew much about the Dracula. Long ago, Vlad and his brother Radu had been given to the Turks by their own father to prove loyalties. When their father perish'd, and Wallachia fell to Hungarian rule, Vlad was released to take his country back for the Ottomans, only to be unseated when the war was through. His second return to the throne speaks of vengeance.
I could have written more than I have done, but I do not desire it myself. It is clear to us all that Vlad Tepes has broken peace with the Sultan.
Am sending this missive very speedily by way of my young rider.
Writ on the twenty-first of February, Fourteen Hundred and Sixty-Two
Ezzelin von Klatka
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