Vampire

Monsters of the Void
Vampires are a disease, literally they might be carried in a body for a time but it is nothing but a puppet with its strings being pulled. The true vampires are something like a undead virus hybrid. They can infect cells, but only those that are cool. For vampires only gestate and thrive in the cold. The carriers of the vampire disease are wrapped in ghosts and spells which bend and twist light around them until they cannot be touched by heat.

Vampires despise large bodies of water, thick air and direct sunlight.

Vampires despise fire.

Vampires grow colder the deeper into their hosts you go.

You have never seen the flesh of a vampire, only experienced a glamour of their presence. They wrap light around their bodies with their inherent magic to protect them from heat.

As such you can ‘notice’ a vampire by seeing its glamor is not reflected in a mirror.

Vampires devour ghosts and infect corpses, they must chill you down before you will support the virus. They may draw out your flesh, blood or other humors if they are weak in order to freeze it and kill the cells (feeding on the souls of your lost cells).

Vampires are from space, and the most powerful vampires are the massive clouds of crystallized corpse ice or undead comet cores with armours of ice and rock to protect them. They prefer to drift in the void between stars, lapping up drifting souls and attenuated spirit noise.

Vampires almost never want to be on the planet intentionally and have settled here by chance or agencies outside their control. It is a struggle for them to keep alive, they seek out cold cool places and most succumb to the heat, burning/melting/evaporating under the locally searing conditions.

Vampires read the minds and ghosts of the corpses they control and remember with crystals woven in the ice at their body cores. A vampire virus without crystals to store memories will forget everything but what they can read in the body.

A vampire will sometimes mistake itself for its host.

When fighting vampires are capable of isolating you from light and then refrigerating you. This is extremely lethal to most organisms.

Most of the time however a vampire prefers to fight others with their masterful glamour and illusions, seeming to shape shift, turn into clouds, dissolve or otherwise terrify/overwhelm with terrifying apparitions while the actual body sneaks up behind the target and swallows them into lightless cold or drains them of their fluids.

Of particular note, gargoyles can neither see a vampire’s illusions OR the vampire itself. Only the subtle evidence of its passing, such as mist and a drop in overall ambient temperature. However gargoyles are also mostly immune to all the ways a vampire can cause harm.

As such those places guarded by gargoyles (such as churches) are almost never willingly entered by a vampire. Some confused vampires even have traumatic phobias of the mere symbols of structures protected by gargoyles.

Vampires can propel themselves upward but are usually too weak to manage to escape from the pull of the world they are trapped on without amassing a much larger crystalline body of frozen corpses and significant shielding.

Vampires in anything but frozen conditions must wander constantly to have a steady supply of ghosts or they will fail to maintain their refrigeration, a vampire leaves the spirit world around it drained/flattened by their passing.

Trolls are generally not particularly hindered by vampires, and as the vampire merely requires the souls of dead blood to sustain themselves rather than the material (which the troll will reclaim) a vampire and a troll can have either a mutual or harmless parasitic relationship (the vampire benefiting more than the troll usually).