There is a particular kind of dread that comes with writing a scene you have been putting off for months, and mine, for years, was the first time I had to let Vlad speak. Not the Vlad of the chronicles, not the forest of stakes or the frightened Ottoman envoys or the name that has terrified children on both sides of the Carpathians for five centuries. I mean the other one. The young prince, newly married, standing in a candlelit room with a seventeen-year-old bride who believes, with her whole heart, that she has just married the love of her life. I had spent years reading about Vlad the Impaler. I had never once had to sit inside his silence and decide what he might actually say next.

The Hero I Already Knew

I did not come to Vlad as a stranger. I grew up on his story the way other children grow up on fairy tales, told by a fire in a Romanian village, half history and half something closer to legend, and long before I ever wrote a word of fiction about him, I had already spent a lifetime reading everything I could find about the real man underneath it. I knew the shape of his childhood: the boy handed over as an Ottoman hostage at eleven, informed years later, from captivity, that his own father had been murdered and his elder brother tortured, blinded, and buried alive by the same Wallachian nobles who were supposed to serve them. I knew what it meant that he inherited a throne squeezed between two empires that could each have swallowed his entire principality without much effort, and that the brutality history remembers him for was never separable, in my mind, from the sheer desperation of the position he had been born into.

That version of Vlad, the strategist, the survivor, the prince who turned terror into the only weapon a small kingdom had left, was never difficult for me to write. I had, in a sense, already been writing him in my head since childhood. The difficulty came later, once I decided that a man this complicated deserved to be shown falling in love.

Finding the Human Underneath

Writing Ana’s side of the story meant writing the version of Vlad that history left almost no record of at all: Vlad as a young husband, mischievous enough to slip past a locked door just to steal one more look at his bride before their wedding, tender enough to whisper that she was meant to be his the moment he met her eyes across a crowded room. I gave him a mysterious smile that did not quite reach his eyes, and a particular kind of sadness sitting behind them that Ana notices long before she understands its source. I wanted a reader to fall a little in love with him too, the way she does, because I think that is the only way the rest of the story actually means anything. If Vlad is simply monstrous from his very first appearance on the page, then everything that follows is just watching a villain be villainous. If he is genuinely, believably a man Ana could love, then everything that follows becomes something considerably harder to sit with.

That tenderness was never invented out of nothing. It came from the same research that gave me the tyrant, the historical record of a boy who lost his father and brother to exactly the kind of betrayal he would later punish so mercilessly, a boy who learned, far too early, that love and loyalty could be taken from him without warning. I did not want to excuse what came later. I wanted to understand where it came from, and then let a reader watch it arrive.

Watching the Turn

The hardest scenes I have written in either book are the ones where Ana starts to notice the distance between the man she married and the ruler everyone else describes to her in careful, frightened whispers. A girl accused of an innocent mishap, threatened with the stake for it. A description of impalement so casually horrific that Ana feels sick just hearing it secondhand. Vlad’s own voice going suddenly hard and cold whenever his father and brother’s names come up, vengeance still burning in him years after the boyars who betrayed them were supposedly dealt with. I did not want Ana to discover a monster hiding behind a mask. I wanted her to watch a genuinely loving man be, at the very same time, entirely capable of horror, and to feel the particular vertigo of realising those two facts cannot be neatly separated from one another.

That is, I think, the real difficulty of writing Vlad honestly. It would be far easier to write two different characters, a devoted husband in one chapter and a butcher in the next, and let the reader decide which one is the truth. But I do not believe that is what actually happened to the historical man, and I did not want it to be what happened to my fictional one either. He is not the loving husband concealing a tyrant. He is not the tyrant occasionally performing tenderness. He is, uncomfortably, both at once, the same hands capable of a gentle caress and a merciless order, and I think a reader only really understands him once they stop looking for the moment he switches from one into the other and accept that there was never a clean line to find.

A Legacy Sebastian Cannot Escape or Disown

If Ana’s story let me write Vlad from the inside, Sebastian’s story let me write him from the outside, through the eyes of a descendant who has to somehow carry both halves of that inheritance without the comfort of choosing only one. Sebastian grows up hearing exactly the same split verdict Wallachian villagers have handed down for generations, hero to some, butcher to others, and discovering that he is Vlad’s own blood does not resolve that split for him. If anything, it makes it worse. He cannot simply admire his ancestor, knowing what that admiration would have to overlook. He cannot simply condemn him either, not once the shadow of that same inheritance starts shaping his own life in London in ways he never asked for and does not fully understand.

I think that unresolved inheritance is the truest thing I know how to say about Vlad the Impaler, in fiction or otherwise. He is not a puzzle waiting for the right piece of evidence to resolve him into hero or into monster. He is both of those things sitting inside the same man, the same choices, sometimes the same single afternoon, and every reader who has ever asked me which one he really was has, I think, already sensed the answer they are not going to like: that the question itself is the wrong shape to hold him.

Human, Hero, Tyrant

I called this article by all three words on purpose, because I have never found a way to write Vlad honestly using only one of them. He was human enough to fall in love at first sight and mischievous enough to steal a private moment with his bride before the guests arrived. He was heroic enough to hold a throne against an empire that could have crushed him without much effort, driven by a courage that genuinely deserves to be remembered as courage. And he was, by any reasonable modern measure, a tyrant, capable of cruelty so severe that even his own wife could not fully reconcile it with the man she loved. Writing him has meant refusing, again and again, to let any one of those three words quietly erase the other two. I am not sure I have solved that tension anywhere in either book. I am fairly certain I was never supposed to. Some men simply refuse to be remembered as only one thing, and I have come to think that Vlad the Impaler, more than almost anyone else in history, is exactly that kind of man.