Belladamma Volga

Every village in the Shyishan deep-wilds tells the same story under a different name: the grandmother in the far woods who knows your sins by smell, whose word the wolves obey, who takes the wicked and the promising alike on moonless nights. Belladamma Volga is the truth those stories grew from. First of the Vyrkos bloodline and old beyond any surviving record, she is a creature of hearth-magic and hedge-curse rather than courtly sorcery — a witch who can call the winter down a chimney or pull the wolf out of a man and leave it standing in his boots.

To her vampiric get she is family in the oldest sense, fierce and absolute; the Vyrkos are a pack before they are a dynasty, and she is the will at its center. To the mortals of her territories she is something stranger than a tyrant — a keeper. Belladamma genuinely believes she shepherds her herds, guarding them from worse predators and culling them by her own patient husbandry, and it is that sincerity, more than her power, that makes the wise fear her. A monster can be bargained with. A grandmother who loves her flock cannot.