#Fairies, #Myths, & #Magic Spooktacular Author Spotlight Guest Post – “The Dawn Fangs,” by Charles E. Yallowitz

Posted on October 19, 2017 by Colleen M. Chesebro 33 comments

WELCOME… ENTER IF YOU DARE!

Today’s spooky author guest post is from Charles E. Yallowitz. Charles writes epic fantasy novels that transport you to another place and time. His imaginary worlds are filled with the battles between good and evil featuring an incredible variety of creatures: half-elves, dwarves, drites, the undead, and much more. Currently, he is working on a new series. If you love vampires, this post is for you!

“The Dawn Fangs”

By Charles E. Yallowitz

Thank you, Colleen, for letting me be a guest. My name is Charles E. Yallowitz, and I’m the author behind the Legends of Windemere, which is a fantasy adventure series. Currently, I have vampires on the brain because while I’m promoting and finishing up my current series, I’m starting to write the next one.

This is all about the vampire civil war that took place after the Great Cataclysm and saw the rise of a new breed of blood-sucker. While the Dawn Fangs have made a few appearances as enemies and allies in Legends of Windemere, they’re still a mystery since their origin is a pretty long story to tell. That and I’ve been wanting to write a vampire story since 1999. Unfortunately, the landscape of this genre has changed to one of more romance than horror and saturation. Pretty sure the instant people read vampire, their minds went to one of many YA stories that involved a young woman falling in love with a handsome man that is lacking a pulse. So, what did I do to make the Dawn Fangs stand out?

Putting them in Windemere, which is a world of magic, helped to make changes since the Earth-based parts of the mythos no longer worked. For example, a cross wouldn’t make sense in a world without Christianity, but they could still be weak against holy magic. The counting thing, needing soil to sleep in, and many of the other more minor weaknesses were eliminated as well.

My goal was to make the Dawn Fangs the alpha predator of this world.

One of the aspects that was always in this series was that at least the main character would be immune to sunlight. Now, I made that a central part of these new types of vampires. The Old World species lose their powers in the sun, but the Dawn Fangs remain strong. This gives the new monsters an advantage in their civil war, which I countered by making it that Dawn Fangs can’t use magic like their predecessors.

It is a big gamble because everyone thinks of vampires being hurt by sunlight, which is actually more of a Hollywood thing. Read ‘Dracula, ’ and it’s said that he’s only weaker in sunlight instead of hurt. So, I actually went back to an older version of the mythos at one point.

Without magic, I needed to give the Dawn Fangs something to make them terrifying and superhuman physical abilities wasn’t enough. I played a lot of Vampire: The Masquerade, which has every vampire type with three powers. They worked with clans, but I decided to make every Dawn Fang unique. Each character has a different triad of abilities that fall into a Body, Mind, and Magic division.

For example, one that shows up in Legends of Windemere: The Mercenary Prince has claws (Body), talking to spirits (Mind), and moving through shadows (Magic). This added a level of danger since any heroes running into these vampires won’t know exactly what they’re going to deal with.

Much of the differences have been physical, but the biggest one I came up with ended up changing their entire society. This would be that while Dawn Fangs are vampires, they aren’t undead. Holy magic is still painful, but they have heartbeats and can eat regular food for a little energy. Combined with the sun immunity, I realized that they could live among mortals, which is why you occasionally see one in the background of a story. Dawn Fangs can be your neighbor, a tavern owner, a carpenter, or whatever any mortal could be. I didn’t realize what I was doing here, and I did fear I was making them less monstrous.
As much as I wanted these characters to be forces of destruction, I realized I couldn’t make them good guys like that. This altered their entire society, which became one of predators to one that simply wanted to live in peace. Any Dawn Fang that causes trouble is brought to their own court, so they exist within and outside of the mortal societies.

They are still deadly and should be feared, but my vampires seemed tired of the hunted and hated creature cliché. I was a little disappointed in this until I realized it worked so well for the world I was making. Now, I could do so much more with Dawn Fangs instead of making them nothing more than antagonists or the occasional random encounter.

After I accepted #5, I decided that I should take the final step and make them act somewhat human. They still have the desire to drink blood and have some disdain towards mortals, but the Dawn Fangs feel the full range of emotions. Love, fear, loyalty, and honor are there, which I’ve found many people don’t expect from vampires. If angered, they will become the traditional killing machine, but they have dreams beyond that. One might have the ability to change their voice to any other one they hear, which leads to an interest in singing. A heightened sense of smell and taste could cause a Dawn Fang to be more into cooking than hunting. The sky became the limit for what roles they could have.

So, that’s the basics of the Dawn Fangs, which are a dangerous species that seem to have no interest in terrorizing humanity. There is another reason for this, but it’s a big part of my 2018 series, War of Nytefall. Legends of Windemere still has some hints about it, but the real time for these vampires to shine is in their own series. Hope everyone enjoyed this peek behind the curtain.

On September 15, 2017, Charles released the fourteenth novel in his Legend of Windemere series, called: Path of the Traitors.

Also, The Legends of Windemere, Book One is offered as a FREE Kindle download on Amazon.

MEET THE AUTHOR

Author, Charles E. Yallowitz

Charles E. Yallowitz was born, raised, and educated in New York. Then he spent a few years in Florida, realized his fear of alligators, and moved back to the Empire State. When he isn’t working hard on his epic fantasy stories, Charles can be found cooking or going on whatever adventure his son has planned for the day. ‘Legends of Windemere’ is his first series, but it certainly won’t be his last.