#project Blampire fanfic

[random-thought-depository]

I think the mental picture we're supposed to get of Blindsight vampire faces is prominent cheekbones, a sort of diamond-shaped facial profile, and long jaw ("lupine"), but biomechanically I'm not sure that makes sense?

If they have stronger jaws, that implies stronger jaw muscles, so probably kind of fleshy faces? And short jaws are better for delivering strong bite force.

I guess muscle is less bulky than fat, so if they don't have much buccal fat they might have stronger jaw muscles and still have leaner-looking faces?

Maybe the longer jaw is to accommodate some extra teeth? Would make sense for them to have a more diverse tooth array (evolved as omnivores who didn't do much cooking because the light and smoke would have drawn attention to them and revealed their position).

Also, they've probably had a lot of genetic bottlenecks in their evolution, so some of their distinctive traits might be stuff that just randomly drifted to fixation and isn't actually adaptive. Like, maybe they have a distinctive facial profile cause they just don't have much genetic diversity.

[random-thought-depository]

Vampire child development timeline that I wrote up as plot-relevant worldbuilding notes for my Blindsight fanfic. Focusing on ancient vampires cause it's an elsewhere fic set around 8-7,000 BCE.

Note: it pronouns are faithful to what I'll probably use for vampire characters in my fic; I think the old ones that had their own culture probably didn't have as strong a sense of gender as we do (I definitely headcanon Sarasti and Valerie being only cis-by-default) and as less social beings they didn't have as strong status emotions as humans so wouldn't feel the need to linguistically distance themselves from other animals by having a special pronoun for people, so it/its is probably the most faithful translation of how they thought of themselves.

Birth to 1 year old: nursing, feeds entirely on mother's milk, develops ability to walk and climb on and cling to things (usually mother).

1-2 years old: weaning: milk teeth have erupted, starts to think the solid foods mom eats smell tasty and starts to think mom's behaviors of chasing or trapping and killing and eating small animals looks like fun. With some parental guidance this turns into foraging behaviors and regular consumption of solid food, which gradually displaces mother's milk from the diet as mother's milk gradually dries up. By two years old or so transition from mother's milk to solid food is complete and the young vampire can feed itself on a day-to-day basis, though it's still dependent on its family for complex and evolutionarily novel tasks (like, say, weaving a blanket) and it will instinctively stay close to or cling to its mother or other parental figures. At the end of this stage the vampire is still mostly pre-verbal but has some limited comprehension of spoken language and can make some of its wants and feelings known through a combination of simple sign language and simple grunts and cries.

2-5 years old: learning to talk: first spoken words usually come at around 2-3 years old, acquisition of the vampire's native familect is usually more-or-less complete by 4-5 years old. Note for comparison: human babies usually say their first words at 12-18 months old: vampire children are slow talkers and a lot more of their brain development precedes linguistic fluency! Or, as vampires would think of it, human children develop slower in most things but are very precocious talkers.

4-11 years old: childhood: the young vampire is a child in the sense familiar to humans, albeit a precociously clever, self-sufficient, and perceptive child. Vampire children still seem relatively human-like at this stage; more talkative, more sociable, and more energetic than the adults, though less energetic than human children at equivalent stages of development.

11-13 years old: the young vampire is still pre-pubescent, but is now growing bigger, stronger, and smarter than a typical human adult (vampires do more of their growth and development before puberty). This is the stage of life in which a young vampire is likely to begin to participate in big game hunting with older relatives.

13-14 years old: puberty: reproductive organs become functional, menstrual cycle begins in females, secondary sex characteristics develop, interest in sex develops. Males experience a short growth spurt and increase in muscle mass as their bodies begin to produce adult levels of androgens; most vampire sexual dimorphism (lower than humans) develops at this stage of life.

14 years old: onset of adult metabolic pattern: as the vampire is now done with growth and intensive learning, metabolism lowers dramatically to reduce protocadherin input needs. The vampire begins concentrating much of their blood in the body core around the organs, resulting in classic vampire cool skin temperature and "bloodlessness." The vampire becomes much more lethargic, now spending most of its time in a sort of very shallow open-eye sleep in hidden dens, alternating short bouts of high activity (mostly associated with hunting, fighting, or mating) with long periods of low activity. Playfulness (broadly defined) diminishes as the vampire becomes much more conservative with its energy.

A vampire usually begins to participate in predatory attacks on humans with other members of its family at 14, around the onset of adulthood.

After reaching adulthood at 14, a vampire ages more slowly than a human due to its lower metabolism (kind of like those turtles that can live hundreds of years). Assuming nothing kills them before old age does, they live something like 130+ years. Menopause in female vampires occurs at something like 80. That's active life, during hibernation their metabolism gets so low they almost don't age, so vampires that hibernate a lot can easily live centuries if you count the hibernation periods as part of their lifespan; I wouldn't be shocked if a few of the old ones cracked the big triple zero mark.

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At first I thought ancient vampires probably had long nursing periods, like human hunter-gatherers, cause restricting their own reproduction was important to them so they'd value the prolonged lactational amenorrhea, but while nursing the mother couldn't hunt, and I headcanon that they 1) had a better sense of smell than humans so they could track the female ovulation/menstruation cycle by scent and do birth control by just avoiding sex during the five day or so fertile period per cycle, 2) were a less sexual species than humans so birth control by abstinence would have been easier for them. So I think they'd prefer other birth control methods.

14 is probably around when Neanderthals reached maturity IIRC; that was one reason I picked the number; I like to interpret vampires as a sibling species of humans rather than an offshoot, with some "primitive" traits retained from the last common ancestor, and I think it makes sense that vampires, as a more intelligent but less social species than humans, would not have developed the very long childhoods of Homo sapiens sapiens.

[random-thought-depository]

My headcanons for Blindsight vampire consciousness/internal experience:

This post makes a good introduction to my ideas about what Blindsight vampires are like, so I recommend reading it before reading this; just about everything in there is part of my headcanons for what Blampires are like, a lot of what I write here is basically an elaboration on the ideas there.

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""That too," Sarasti admitted, and looked right at me.

For the first time, I looked right back. And felt a shock of recognition.

I still wonder why I never saw it before. For all those years I remembered the thoughts and feelings of some different, younger person, some remnant of the boy my parents had hacked out of my head to make room for me. He'd been alive. His world had been vibrant. And though I could call up the memories of that other consciousness, I could barely feel anything within the constraints of my own.

Perhaps dreamstate wasn't such a bad word for it…" - Blindsight.

This makes it sound like vampires just don't have many intense emotions. I think this would fit well with my idea that vampires are very lazy creatures because they're basically built around keeping their metabolism as low as possible, and they're much less playful than humans (with play being broadly defined to include things like art, abstract curiosity, fantasies, and non-reproductive sex) because play is a product of surplus energy.

An idea I like here is this high priority on energy conservation/laziness extends to the way vampires think; they are much less prone to recursive thoughts, fantasies, daydreaming, idle musings, idle reminiscence, etc.. Their consciousness is very "in-world"; they are very focused on situational awareness and on matters directly relevant to their survival or social or reproductive success. This has some drawbacks, I think beings like this would tend to be kind of uncreative and mentally rigid compared to humans, but in a way it makes their brains more efficient; they are much less distracted/distractable and efficiently devote all or most of their cognitive resources to the highest priority matters at hand.

Ancient vampires probably had an activity pattern common in carnivores and low-metabolism ectothermic animals, of long periods of low activity punctuated by short periods of intense activity. I think this also might extend to how vampires think. By default most of the time they aren't doing much and don't really need those big brains for much, so they just kind of... put most of their brains in standby mode. Vampire mental and emotional life follows the patterns of a predator activity cycle: long periods of dull stupor punctuated by short bursts of brilliance and passion. When a vampire's brain comes fully on-line they are a brilliant superhuman genius, but most of the time they just don't have much going on up there. This was probably more true for ancient vampires than modern ones; modern vampires must to some extent accommodate themselves to the structure and demands of human society and probably spend more time "fully awake" (I wonder if they find this tiring?).

Actually, I think it'd be very on-brand if vampires by default spend most of their lives in a sort of very shallow open-eye sleep similar to the way cats sometimes sleep. During this state they would still be aware of their surroundings and would still have enough mental activity to recognize situations in which they need to wake up, and they might have a degree of high-function somnambulism (e.g. an ancient vampire mother might be able to let its offspring suckle and hold it to keep it from wandering out of line of sight, and I think it's not too outrageous to imagine a modern vampire might be able to get out of bed, use the toilet, take a shower, make and eat some ramen, brush its teeth, clean the bowl and pot and spoon, and go back to bed all without waking up), but they wouldn't have much else going on "up there."

One implication of that is the line between sleep and wakefulness might be much fuzzier for vampires than for humans. Let's suppose the modern vampire in the previous example gets a phone call while it's getting back into bed. It checks the phone, recognizes the name of its human boss on the caller ID, and immediately recognizes this as a situation that requires higher cognitive activity and wakes itself up. Once awake, it clearly remembers what it was doing, experiencing, and thinking when in shallow open-eye sleep and experiences no real discontinuity between the two states, its mental activity has simply increased. It spends a split second mentally reviewing the current work flow situation and deciding if it really needs to take this call, and decides it can be safely ignored. It promptly falls back into very shallow open-eye sleep, puts the phone on its bedstand, and tucks itself back into bed. A similar scenario might play out when an ancient vampire in open-eye sleep sees its sister and its mate enter the family hidey-hole empty-handed after an unsuccessful hunt.

Vampires might experience many gradations of consciousness as their brains finely adjust their brain activity level depending on the cognitive demands of the situation. I think vampires would be most conscious when they are socializing, when they are hunting or fighting, and when they are otherwise dealing with complex and unpredictable situations.

Note: in this model vampires do kind of just "no thoughts empty head" when they are alone or otherwise feel safe (or at least safe-ish) and have nothing in particular to do, but I think vampires would also have something very much like this behavior (mentioned in that post about owls that's one of my favorite references for possible Blindsight vampire behavior):

"In many ways, an owl is very much a wise animal because they devote all their time to silently observing. What people mistake as the bird simply “zoning out” is actually the bird analyzing everything it’s hearing and seeing. They don’t need to look around to observe, their ears see even more than their very keen eyes. They make silent note of everything you do in their presence, and if you misstep and cross them, they will remember it."

In social situations vampires are very much doing that! Blindsight itself mentions this as a vampire behavior:

"So, what are they like?" Pag asked.

"Vampires? I don't know. Just met my first one yesterday."

"And?"

"Hard to read. Didn't even seem to be aware of his surroundings sometimes, he seemed to be... off in his own little world."

"He's aware all right. Those things are so fast it's scary. You know they can hold both aspects of a Necker cube in their heads at the same time?"

This essay is a real-world reference I often turn to when thinking about how to write superhumanly intelligent characters (Blampires, Known Space Protectors, WH40K Primarchs, etc.), and in the context of thinking about how vampires might experience a much fuzzier boundary between sleep and waking consciousness something in it draws my eye:

"My first memories, from age 2-3, are what other people call a dream; my first recalled body-shape was not human. I was a horse who woke up as a human child! I've never had much trouble recalling dreams, including those from REM states earlier in the night, which in normal people fade out or get overwritten by later cycles in the night. I won't bother listing all the peculiarities of prodigal dreaming that I think exist--after all, I've posted a thousand dreams as examples. In brief, the dream-state for prodigies is clearer and very different from the state described by normal and gifted people, and even may differ physically."

If vampires have something like this, having more vivid and realistic dreams that feel more like waking consciousness and being able to recall them in more detail and clarity on waking, that would fit well into the "line between sleep and wakefulness might be much fuzzier for vampires" idea.

I suspect a big thing consciousness is good for in hominids is social stuff; to figure out how other people will react to you and how to get them to act the way you want them to act it really helps to have a model of yourself! So, a lot of what you have to do to be socially intelligent is, you have to build accurate models of your own mind and the minds of others and imagine how they'll interact. And isn't that a lot like dreaming? I think very intelligent beings who experience many fine gradations of consciousness, are often most conscious during social interactions, and experience waking consciousness and dreams as subjectively similar might have something like this thought, so something like this idea might have been part of ancient vampire cultural lore. I think, rather than the human awake/asleep dichotomy, ancient vampire culture may have thought in terms of a spectrum with deep dreamless sleep at one pole and the sort of consciousness experienced in dangerous and complicated social situations at the other. In this spectrum, very shallow open-eye sleep might be close to the deep dreamless sleep pole, while complex social interactions, hunting rapture, and the dreams experienced during deep sleep would be close to the hyperconsciousness pole. Ancient vampires may have seen waking consciousness and the dreams experienced in sleep as closely related and kindred phenomena, and even used the same word for both states!

In the Blindsight elsewhere fic set around 8,000 BCE that I'm working on, I "translate" the word my vampire characters use for humans as "Dreamers," and that's the context for that. In their language and culture it has connotations of "fully awake a lot" but also "lost in their own heads a lot, tending to pay more attention to imaginary constructs than to the real things in front of their faces" (they see humans' inferior situational awareness as partly a product of that, and they aren't wrong!). The phrase somebody in their culture might use for "I miss my recently deceased partner and I can't stop thinking about them and I think I might be engaging in maladaptive perseveration about them" would more accurately translate as "[Speaker's name] wanders the pastward dream-paths like a Dreamer, seeking [dead spouse's name] there" (modern vampires do the perpetual present tense thing, you bet old vampires had weird ways of talking about time and memory!).

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"He never uses the past tense," I murmered.

"Huh? Oh, that." Pag nodded. "They never experience the past tense. It's just another thread to them. They don't remember stuff, they relive it."

"What, like a post-traumatic flashback?"

"Not so traumatic." He grimaced. "Not for them, at least." - Blindsight.

So, the way I interpret this is vampires have very vivid and detailed memories and imaginations, to the point that remembered and imagined experiences are often about as subjectively real to them as their real-time sensory inputs. For instance, when a vampire remembers holding a glass, at least if it's concentrating on the memory, it feels like touching a real physical object; it experiences the weight, the resistance of the glass against its fingers, the coldness, etc.. A vampire with its brain running at anything remotely close to full capacity is experiencing very detailed and vivid subjective worlds of memory and imagination parallel to the "real world." If a human had memory and imagination that worked like this I think it would cause very disabling sensory and intellectual overload and they'd become very "lost in their head," it'd be like having the sensory input from three or six different bodies pumped into your brain simultaneously, but vampires have the sensory processing capacity and intelligence to deal with multiple subjective worlds simultaneously with no loss of functionality in the "real world."

Tangential aside: vampires have something like HSAM as part of their standard neurotype; they remember the past in much more detail than (most if not all) humans, and they're very fast learners.

Modern vampires have perpetual present tense as a signature linguistic quirk, and I think ancient vampire language and culture might have conceived of memory and imagination in a sort of many-worlds-ish way, like they would talk about past times and possible future worlds as if they're physical places that you physically travel to when you think about them. Like...

An ancient vampire sentence that might be translated as "I think you'd have a roughly 20% possibility of winning that fight," might be more faithfully translated as "[Speaker's name] wanders the futureward dream paths in which [listener's name] battles [name of enemy], and in approximately one in five of the potential worlds [speaker's name] visits, [listener's name] is victorious."

An ancient vampire name that might be roughly translated as Strategist might more accurately be translated as "far-ranging scout of the futureward dream paths."

An ancient vampire that recently lost a long-term companion and was admitting to a common ancient vampire grief behavior might say something best translated as "[Speaker's name] wanders the pastward dream paths, seeking past worlds where [dead person] lives, to spend time in [dead person]'s company."

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This post pretty well outlines my headcanons for how vampires experience, relate to, and express (or don't express) pain.

I'd also add to it: when a vampire is hunting, enraged, or afraid, it enters a state kind of like dothe and the limiters that normally exist keep it from doing things that might damage its body are overridden; in that state it can be a lot less responsive to pain than normal, but it's still aware of injuries and would prefer to avoid damaging its body.

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An idea I like, drawing inspiration from that post about owls, is vampires are actually kind of delicate, nervous, and fearful creatures, but this isn't obvious to humans because vampires don't express distress the way a human would. Vampire instincts and reflexes are built around the assumption that adult vampires can't count on receiving help or mercy if injured or sick and are likely to face situations where showing visible signs of pain would be worse than useless as it would alert enemies to their increased vulnerability. Vampire children in distress may cry out, but vampire adults instinctively hide vulnerability and express distress by flight, hiding, or aggression.

A predator's life involves careful risk/reward calculations and is in a way inherently more precarious than a plant-eater's life because it feeds higher up the food chain, where less calories and biomass are available (but what is available is more concentrated); an effective predator is not a hyperaggressive berserker, but a careful and cautious killer that avoids unnecessary fights and avoids fights against strong victims/enemies (this is why predators prefer to attack sick, injured, old, immature, or otherwise weak victims; ancient vampire predation likely followed a similar pattern, and I suspect that they also preferentially targeted socially vulnerable humans as many human serial killers do). Humans would be a nightmare to have as an obligate prey item: we're smart, we make weapons, we work in groups, we plan ahead with long time horizons, we seek revenge, and we hold grudges. Vampires were probably often quite dangerous to each other, competing fiercely for the very limited trophic space available in their very narrow and insecure ecological niche (as well as for normal animal points of contention such as mating opportunities). So I think vampire instincts would be very built around helping them survive in a very dangerous world. A vampire instinctively wants to hide most of the time, especially from humans, and if it can't do that it feels uncomfortable and unsafe. Vampires like to be alone in small private chambers with locked doors; there they can relax in a place where they are not seen and they are protected from potential enemies, in conditions that approximate the claustrophobic tomb-like hidden den of an ancient vampire individual or family. A vampire feels unsafe and uncomfortable in a place like a busy street, where it's surrounded by humans and clearly visible and can't be sure it'll be able to easily hide if it has to. Vulnerability tends to make vampires feel unsafe and uncomfortable, especially if other people are around; a sick or injured vampire being tended and given medical attention by humans is a nervous, skittish, prickly vampire. Vampires are instinctively nervous and uncomfortable around other people unless it's an individual they have formed a very close relationship with; if you were an ancient vampire, just about the only thing more dangerous to you than a human was a vampire who wasn't part of your family.

I think a plausible downside of those splendid vampire senses is vulnerability to sensory overload. For instance, I think going into a bar might have been a very disagreeable experience for Valerie. Being in a crowded space full of humans with no guarantee of an easy exit or hiding place would make her nervous and uncomfortable. But also, there might be loud music, bright and flashing or moving lights, maybe a TV on or whatever the Blindsight era equivalent is, a lot of people talking, and all those drinks and food and sweaty humans in a confined space might be quite pungent. This would tend to blur out softer sounds and make it harder to infer the sources of subtle scents and would fill her neural circuits with junk data, force her brain to work harder to assemble a detailed and accurate model of her environment. This would be a kind of vulnerability, so she'd find it very disagreeable; it would make her nervous and uncomfortable. I think this might be a common experience for modern vampires; a modern city probably has a lot more bright and flashing and moving lights and a lot more fast-moving objects, and lot more loud, persistent, and complex background noise than anything ancient vampires regularly had to deal with (closest equivalent might have been an ancient vampire who lived near a big waterfall and had to filter out its constant roaring). In this vampires might have experiences in common with autistic people. Humans in ancient times likely had anti-vampire defense tactics that exploited vampire vulnerability to sensory overload.

Hmm, does this remind you of Sarasti's theory about Scramblers interpreting human signals as a malicious attempt to make them waste cognitive resources trying to understand nonsense? He wouldn't be the first neuroatypical person to project his own frustrations with a society not built for people like him onto the alien!

As I said in that post about the broken arm scene in Echopraxia I linked to earlier, I think it's interesting to look at Valerie's behavior through the lens of "distress in vampires is often expressed as aggression." Two prominent examples of her "scary" behavior happen in situations that I think would be very disagreeable for a vampire. When she's nervous and uncomfortable, she tries to make you afraid of her.

I think divide and conquer might be another example of this. In Echopraxia, Peter Watts implies a connection between divide and conquer and the vampire facial recognition function. The way I interpret that is: when a vampire recognizes another vampire face, this triggers a reflexive surge of fear (and maybe also anger, which would likely be triggered by fear of a stranger anyway). Echopraxia implies that in modern vampires this reflex may have been deliberately strengthened by a genetic tweak, to make them less able to cooperate with each other, but I prefer to interpret divide and conquer as primarily a matter of nurture. The crucial difference is that ancient vampires got to socialize with other vampires while they were children. By doing this, a vampire would get training early in life to emotionally self-regulate when the fear reflex hit, and it would develop positive associations with the faces of its family that would counterweight the fear, and its memory would become filled with examples of the presence of others of its own kind having benefits as well as dangers which it could remember when the fear reflex hit. The fear reflex is likely weaker in young vampire children and gradually strengthens as a vampire matures, so by socializing with other vampires from infancy onward a vampire would get to gradually acclimate. Modern vampires are isolated from other vampires during childhood, so they don't get any of this, and they don't have experience dealing with other people as smart, strong, and fierce as themselves, which makes that experience scarier to them. If a modern vampire gets put in a room with another vampire they are unable to self-regulate emotionally and go into a sort of panic attack where they become completely focused on escaping from or destroying the perceived threat. The fact that they probably know this happens when two vampires get put into the same room doesn't help; they are expecting the other vampire to attack them very soon, and they are expecting any attempts they might make to self-regulate out of reflexive aggression to fail, and they are thinking maybe they should attack first so they have first mover advantage, so it becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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I think vampire children might seem a lot more human-like than vampire adults, at least in some ways. I think vampire children would probably have much higher metabolisms than vampire adults, because they're still growing. Their brains would also be highly active more often, because they're still in their high-intensity learning phase of life. Play is a signature behavior of highly intelligent animals, a kind of learning strategy, so I think it's very likely that vampire children played. I think they'd like games that kind of simulate hunting; they'd love hide and seek, modern small vampire children would like chasing laser pointers and wind-up mice like a house cat, and ancient vampire children probably often got their start as hunters by chasing and killing small animals as a kind of game that doubled as a way to acquire snacks. Vampire children would probably be more sociable and in some ways friendlier than vampire adults, as in ancient vampire society they'd need to socialize with their elders to learn from them and they'd be dependent on older members of their social group (being more sociable would also tend to lead to their brains being highly active more of the time).

Put this together with my ideas about how vampire brains work, and this means when vampires reach adulthood they'd have an experience similar to Siri:

"For all those years I remembered the thoughts and feelings of some different, younger person, some remnant of the boy my parents had hacked out of my head to make room for me. He'd been alive. His world had been vibrant. And though I could call up the memories of that other consciousness, I could barely feel anything within the constraints of my own." - Blindsight.

I love how that would add a poignant new dimension to that scene! Something like that happened to Sarasti too, but for him it was a normal and inevitable consequence of his biology, a normal part of growing up!

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From that prodigies essay:

"For example, I've noticed that the normal and the gifted treat thought and feeling as somehow antagonistic. I see this from the outside, but I don't get it. When I use abstract concepts they aren't defenses against feeling; words and ideas don't push me away from passion. Why should they? Logic and abstractions go back to my infancy. Analysis was part of my everyday flow as a small child, it was part of the feelings. Images too: if I try to express what I feel deeply about, I'm likely to use a dream image, not emotional labels, for such images are realer to me than normal people's language."

I really like the idea that vampires are like this, with the kind of belligerent twist you'd expect from them. A vampire doesn't experience fear, anger, or bloodlust as pushing it away from rational thought. Vampire terror, rage, or hunting rapture is a kind of terrible analytical calm focus; they are thinking clearly, they are highly aware of their environment and tracking many variables, they are capable of intricate and brilliant tactical and strategic thought, and their intelligence is very focused on the matter of hand. Terror, rage, and hunting rapture actually make a vampire smarter, because when a vampire is in those states its metabolism is running hot and its brain is freely burning glucose with all the energy-conservation limiters that normally limit its intelligence overridden.

I really like how beautifully that idea fits with Sarasti's wall of simulated screaming faces; they'd help him think better by triggering his predatory instinct! This also suggests another interpretation or layer of the broken arm scene in Echopraxia: Valerie is using self-harm as a kind of meditation technique, making herself smarter by deliberately inflicting pain and distress on herself while also tempting herself with a situation that triggers her predatory instincts (close proximity to a human who's obviously afraid of her). This is making me imagine other ways she might baffle and disturb the humans around her by indulging in this habit; like, imagine she's in a conference and she just casually breaks two of her own fingers while you're talking to her, or she comes out of her meditation chamber having very obviously slashed her arms with a knife a bunch of times while she was in there.

I think there's some definite dark comedy potential in the basically harmless but ridiculously edgelord productivity hacks modern vampires might develop if you go with the model!

With this model of vampire cognition, insofar as fear, anger, and bloodlust can cause a lack of self-control in vampires, it's subtler than how it happens in humans; a sort of temporary intellectual tunnel vision. For instance, the hyperaggression/panic attack that happens when two modern vampires are in close physical proximity isn't panic in the sense humans think of it, a vampire in that situation is still thinking clearly and intelligently, but its intelligence is totally focused on eliminating the threat posed by the other vampire. You might be able to goad a vampire into making a long-term strategic mistake by making it really angry, but you'd never be able to use that tactic to goad it into rushing you when it'd be immediately tactically smarter for it to hold back.

Regarding the images thing: I think it also would be very on-brand if vampire cognition is very "thinking in pictures"; they primarily think in images, emotions, and sense-impressions, with words being secondary and used more for communicating their ideas to others than to structure their own thoughts. Since vampires are less social than humans I think it'd make sense if they have slower childhood language acquisition than humans (especially relative to the length of their childhood, which I think would likely be shorter than ours), and that would likely contribute to this; they'd get more grounding in the physical before learning language and they'd have more time to develop strong habits of thinking without words. Slower language acquisition but high intelligence and mostly faster brain development would synergize with this; the vampire brain would do more of its development in silence (or, more precisely, in wordlessness - language would be only a small part of the rich world of sound that would be perceptible with vampire hearing!). I can't remember a time before I had language, and I expect I'm pretty typical for humans in that. A vampire might vividly remember what it was like to have no language and what it was like to acquire it from that starting point.

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Vampires are sociopath-adjacent, but I think they must have some capacity for altruism cause otherwise it's hard to imagine how any ancient vampire survived their childhood. I guess vampires might have some sort of evolutionary fairy human "breeding instinct," but they're closely related to humans so I think it's more parsimonious to think they just have the same neurological features that motivate humans to care for their children. This implies vampires have some capacity for affection.

My interpretation is vampires are usually fundamentally selfish in their actions and relationships, but they are capable of genuinely affectionate relationships with people they're very close to (though these relationships probably often still look kind of weird and scary by human standards). I think the easiest, safest, and most reliable way to get two vampires to like each other in this way might be for them to socialize extensively with each other while one or both of them was still a child, so childhood imprinting of this sort may have played a very big role in ancient vampire sociality. I also have an idea that vampire mothers might imprint something on their offspring during gestation that causes the mother and offspring to feel "warm fuzzies" when they smell each other's scent, encouraging them to bond, and this effect might also be transitive to more distant matrilineal relatives; that might also have been important in ancient vampire sociality.

I think modern vampires might have a lot fewer close relationships than ancient ones because they don't get childhood imprinting with others of their own kind. Presumably they had human caregivers when they were children, but I think the imprinting might not properly take then, like a vampire child might be intuitively seeing human adults as prey and threats rather than elders to look up to, especially as they start to become stronger and smarter than us and the humans around them start to get increasingly obviously afraid of them. As a consequence, modern vampires might be a lot closer to being pure sociopaths.

[random-thought-depository]

Idea for my eight millennium BCE Blindsight elsewhere fic: human/vampire hybridization was strongly influenced by parental imprinting, so hybrids born from human mothers were pretty different from hybrids born from vampire mothers. This lets me reconcile a couple of mutually contradictory ideas I had about what human/vampire hybrids were like.

Differences between Stargazer and the other significant human/vampire hybrid character in my fic, super-tentative name Yabdeeda.

- Stargazer was born to a vampire mother and raised in a vampire social group. Yabdeeda was born to a human mother and raised in a human village. They're both in the position of being neurodivergent in their mother's species because they're hybrids but having been raised with basically no cultural or social connection to their father's species (Stargazer is a lot more familiar with humans than Yabdeeda is with vampires, because Stargazer was created for infiltration of, interaction with, and trade with human groups).

- Stargazer is on the big side of normal size for a human woman (this is one thing I've changed my mind about since I wrote that linked post where I describe her). Yabdeeda is a like 6'10 3-400 pound giant. This is because vampires had more sex-antagonistic selection than humans so the vampire parental imprinting dominates, and vampire maternal imprinting inhibits growth to conserve resources for matrilineal siblings while vampire paternal imprinting "tries" to create a big, strong, fast-growing offspring that can win in competition against matrilineal siblings with different fathers, so weakly opposed paternal imprinting made Yabdeeda bigger than either of her parents (though another factor is that Yabdeeda is healthier than most ancient vampires).

- Yabdeeda has less intense hyper-empathy than Stargazer and/or is better at regulating it. This might have something to do with Yabdeeda being raised in human culture, which encodes more skills for self-regulating second-hand emotions (vampires just don't experience them much), but parental imprinting differences probably also play a role. Yabdeeda has a warrior/protector role in her community (unusual for a woman, but she's treated as basically third gender-y because of her differences from normal women); in her world, people like Yabdeeda may have been part of the original inspiration for myths of monster-slayers and superhuman warriors and heroes such as Hercules, Samson, Achilles, Goliath, Beowulf, Gilgamesh, the Nephilim, etc.. Mmm, this gets into somewhat spoilery territory, but certainly Stargazer's initial reaction to meeting Yabdeeda is that Yabdeeda's social role is something a person with Stargazer's default reactions to witnessing violence could never do.

Yabdeeda will be a significant character in my fanfic!

[random-thought-depository]

"Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death."

(Quote is from Planet of the Apes).

I think ancient Blindsight vampires might have had something a little like this idea, especially the bolded part.

I don't think they'd see humans as particularly evil or anything (I don't think they really had any notion of morality), but I think insofar as they had something like a moralized and mythologized notion of their place in the world, it would have been awareness of their role as a keystone species that shaped the biosphere by shaping human behavior and demographics and propagating Renfield hive ecosystems and probably doing various other forms of ecosystem engineering.

Basically, insofar as they'd have a notion of their species having some "higher purpose," I think it'd be something like that "wolves are good for the ecosystem" idea.

Note for possible cultural gap between Quiet and the others: Quiet's people (vampires in what's now Ukraine/Russia) might be a lot more fond of "let not the humans breed in great numbers..." The Anatolian vampires still remember the concept, and pass it dutifully down to their children, but they don't talk about it much, because... well, they're pretty obviously failing really hard at "let not the humans breed in great numbers..." It's one of the few examples of vampires feeling something like shame.

I've got a mental image of Quiet very pointedly reciting the vampire equivalent of that passage with some thriving Neolithic megasite visible in the background and being really smug. "We'd never let our humans..."

I think in MtG manna color personality type terms ancient vampires might be red-green-black, while modern ones might be red-black-blue (significant difference in mindset!).

[random-thought-depository]

I think it'd be interesting to do something like this but for what prehistoric Blindsight vampire language might have looked like. That would be way over my head, but I have some ideas (this can also be my ancient vampire language headcanons post)! @tanadrin, this might be something you'd be interested in!

Old vampire as a click language and a hunting language:

We can start with the descriptions of vampire language we get in Blindsight:

"You'll have noticed that Jukka Sarasti, like all reconstructed vampires, sometimes clicked to himself when thinking. This is thought to hail from an ancestral language, which was hardwired into a click-speech mode more than 50,000 years BP. Click-based speech is especially suited to predators stalking prey on savannah grasslands (the clicks mimic the rustling of grasses, allowing communication without spooking quarry)11. The Human language most closely akin to Old Vampire is Hadzane12." - Blindsight, Endnotes.

"I can't remember the last time I heard music but I hear something like it sometimes, eerie and discordant, full of familiar clicks and pops. My brainstem doesn't like it. It scares my brainstem to death." - Blindsight.

The sounds described in the second quote are implied to be vampire language. This would be an in-universe modern vampire conlang, but I think the author's intent is that vampires tend to drift toward a style of speaking with these features if left to their own devices, because of the way their brains are wired, and old vampire would have sounded like that too.

Wikipedia page for Hadza and a link to another web page about it. The second link I think has a video where you can hear the language being spoken. The salient feature seems to be that Hadza is a click language, so Khoisan may also be a potential model for ancient vampire. I'm not sure why Peter Watts picked Hadza specifically as the human language closest to old vampire, but the "triumphal name" thing does sound very on-brand as a thing old vampires might have done!

I'm kind of skeptical of this "click language = good for hunting" model, and I vaguely remember somebody else expressing skepticism about it in the Rifts newscrawl comments. The closest common natural woodland/savanna sound to a loud click is probably a breaking branch. If I was a member of a prey species, hearing a breaking branch while not seeing any obvious source of the sound is exactly the sort of thing that would make me nervous! Conversely, it seems like exactly the sort of sound a predator would want to avoid making! I have an alternate hypothesis for why old vampire might be a click language, which I'll get to later. However, I would suggest some other features prehistoric vampire language might have that would facilitate hunting humans:

1) A prominent vampire characteristic is superior senses. So I suggest that old vampire included sounds outside the range of human hearing. Words likely to be used during attempts at cooperative predation on humans had an especially dense clustering of phonemes outside the range of human hearing; many of them were inaudible to humans, like a (literal) dog whistle! I think a really proper attempt at a "reconstructive" old vampire conlang might involve consultation with a biomechanist!

2) Old vampire had an extensive repertoire of sign language, based on hand signs and movements of the large and mobile ancient vampire ears. This would have allowed silent communication at close range and in line of sight. Sign language may have been useful to old vampires for other reasons. If vampire children acquired language more slowly than human children and verbal speech "wired up" more slowly than capacity to understand spoken language (plausible for the least social hominid ever, I think), sign language may have been useful to young vampire children who wanted to express their thoughts but hadn't yet developed verbal speech. If so, it's also possible that a common ancient vampire disability was that the capacity to understand spoken language "wired up" but verbal speech never did, leaving the individual permanently dependent on sign language to express their thoughts; old vampires were probably a rather inbred species that suffered many genetic bottlenecks, so such a genetic defect might have been very common. Old vampire (or at least some familects) might have been as much signed as spoken, with most words having a spoken version and a sign language version!

3) Some old vampire words likely to be used during hunting might have imitated animal sounds, such as the call of a bird common in the area. If many vampire words imitated bird calls, this might contribute to the music-like quality of vampire speech (and I imagine might have been appropriately eerie!).

The vampire vocal apparatus:

The vampire vocal apparatus would be somewhat physically different from the human one (maybe especially for ancient vampires, who I think might have looked weirder). The jaw was bigger and longer and more muscular, and they had sharper incisors and canines. We know they were bigger than humans on average, and I think they might have more powerful lungs to make them better hunters. As a less social species, their vocal apparatus might be somewhat primitive. On the other hand, I think it'd make a lot of sense for them to be very good voice mimics and use that to trick humans while hunting them, which would suggest a very flexible vocal apparatus, and that might synergize with some of the stuff I talk about below to make old vampire language sound kind of all over the place tonally, ranging from low-pitched growls to high-pitched squeaks. Vampire speech is implied to be music-like in Blindsight, and I kind of like the idea that this means that when vampires talk in human languages they by default have a kind of high-pitched sing-song "horror movie creepy child" voice. I don't really have firm ideas on this, just a grab-bag of thoughts.

Old vampire was terse but complicated and a nightmare:

"I said forget the language. Think about the lifestyle. Residents are fish-eaters, eh? They hang out in big groups, don't move around much, talk all the time. ... Transients, now—they eat mammals. Seals, sea lions, smart prey. Smart enough to take cover when they hear a fluke slap or a click train. So transients are sneaky, eh? Hunt in small groups, range all over the place, keep their mouths shut so nobody hears 'em coming." - Blindsight.

Or, specifically, that's Isaac Szpindel explaining why Jukka Sarasti talks tersely. Old vampires were very intelligent, had superhuman senses and sensory processing, probably had frosty to hostile relations with members of their own kind from outside their own social group, and didn't want to talk much. So... I think old vampire would be a very efficient language in the sense that it's designed to let you say as much as possible in as few words as possible, but it would achieve this at the expense of being very complicated grammatically and an absolute nightmare to learn.

Old vampire would have had very many monosyllabic words, many of which could have multiple different meanings depending on context and/or grammatical modifications. It had a ton of tenses; there might have been an asking a question tense, a making a demand from a position of assumed strength tense, a making a prediction tense, etc.. It was also a tonal language, with many words changing meanings depending on which tone you're using. A single monosyllabic word might have had many different possible meanings depending on tone, tense, and context. Ancient vampire may even have functioned kind of like the Neanderthal conlang in that link at the top, and had the monosyllable as the basic unit of meaning (I think Blindsight Neanderthals might have been a bit vampire-like, so Neanderthal and vampire languages might have had similarities!). I think this might actually be the primary reason old vampire was a click language; with linguistic priorities like this it's really useful to have as many phonemes as possible; clicking and whistling sounds would have expanded the amount of possible phonemes, and thus the amount of possible monosyllabic words. I think this also means old vampire probably had a strong tendency to express complex concepts by making long meaning-dense compound words. For instance, the ancient vampire word that we might translate as "sad" might more literally translate as "experiencing mild chest pain, mild nausea, mild muscle ache/tenderness, depressed energy/activity, depressed appetite, mild stinging/burning sensation in eyes."

You can see how, in a sense, old vampire would be a magnificently efficient, very information-dense language. A single word of old vampire might be a sentence of English. A sentence of old vampire might be a paragraph of English. But this would come at the cost of old vampire being an absolute fiendish nightmare to learn.

I think also old vampire might have been complicated because they were in a sense too smart for their own good. From that Neanderthal conlang page: "Neanderthal languages were the most elaborate artefacts in the whole late‐palaeolithic Mousterian culture, full of exotic sounds, grammatical oddities, and esoteric figures of speech. They were trying to do all the work of conveying semantic content with an inadequate basic rulesystem plus a whole collection of special‐case extensions; you might compare them to a cobbled‐together software project badly in need of a redesign." I think old vampire might have been like this too, with the added wrinkle that old vampires used their superintelligence as a crutch overcome the conceptual deficiencies of such a language. Old vampire might have been kind of like the US government: the USA has an eighteenth century government spaghetti-coded to function in the twenty-first century; the old vampire of 100-10 KYA might have been an early Homo erectus language spaghetti-coded to remain competitive with the more conceptually sophisticated Homo sapiens languages by throwing lots and lots of memorization capacity at the problem. A vampire would have the memorization capacity to easily internalize a huge mental "rule-book" of grammatical "spaghetti code" along the lines of: modifying a word this way always means [thing], except in the case of [exceptional case] or [second exceptional case] or [third exceptional case] or [fourth exceptional case], etc.. Old vampire may also have tended to just let random grammatical cruft build up over tens of millennia as vampires had so much memorization capacity they felt little need to streamline their grammar.

Oh, and another thing...

"They never really talked like that, by the way. You'd hear gibberish—a half-dozen languages, a whole Babel of personal idioms—if I spoke in their real voices.

Some of the simpler tics make it through: Sascha's good-natured belligerence, Sarasti's aversion to the past tense. Cunningham lost most of his gender pronouns to an unforeseen glitch during the work on his temporal lobe. But it went beyond that. The whole lot of them threw English and Hindi and Hadzane into every second sentence; no real scientist would allow their thoughts to be hamstrung by the conceptual limitations of a single language. Other times they acted almost as synthesists in their own right, conversing in grunts and gestures that would be meaningless to any baseline. It's not so much that the bleeding edge lacks social skills; it's just that once you get past a certain point, formal speech is too damn slow.

Except for Susan James. The walking contradiction, the woman so devoted to Communication As Unifier that she'd cut her own brain into disunified chunks to make the point. She was the only one who ever seemed to care who she was talking to. The others spoke only for themselves, even when they spoke to each other. Even James's other cores would speak their own minds in their own way, and let everyone else translate as best they could. It wasn't a problem. Everyone on Theseus could read everyone else.

But that didn't matter to Susan James. She fit each of her words to their intended recipient, she accommodated." - Blindsight.

This is talking about the speaking style of the Theseus mission's mostly (trans)human active crew, but I think it'd be very on-brand if old vampire also had something of this quality! Ideas:

Like Justin Rye's Neanderthals, old vampires didn't really have regional languages like humans. Rather, the largest stable unit of vampire society was the family (usually a matrilineal extended family, sometimes just a heterosexual nuclear family or a sibling pair), and most old vampire families had their own unique familect, with its own distinctive vocabulary and turns of phrase. The distinctive features of the familect would have been partly just an accumulation of historically contingent cruft (our matrilineal great-great-grandfather used this phrase so now it's standard) and would partly reflect the family's unique circumstances and mix of personalities. For instance, a family with one or more members with the "can understand verbal speech but their own verbal speech ability never wired up" genetic defect might have had a particularly developed system of sign language, with almost every word in their familect having a sign language equivalent. I think old vampire may have evolved very conservatively in some ways, but in other ways it might have changed rapidly as each generation modified the familect to better fit their own needs. Neighboring families would probably usually have had pretty similar and mutually comprehensible familects, and then a vampire travelling away from familiar territory would have found the familects of the local vampires it encountered getting more and more different until it couldn't understand them at all. An old vampire family would usually have included individuals raised in different families (mate of the alpha female, etc.), and conversations between e.g. a vampire heterosexual mated couple might often have had a "Han and Chewbacca" dynamic, where each learned the familect of the other but continued to habitually speak their own.

I also think, in accordance with old vampire being very terse and efficient, old vampire might have a system of verbal shorthand, where a simple sound or gesture might be used in place of a much more complex phrase and understood to stand in for it from context.

All of this would make old vampire very difficult for a human to learn. And it would be literally physically impossible for a human to ever become a really fluent old vampire speaker (at least, without technological assistance). A human physically couldn't hear some old vampire phonemes (at best, they might be able to distinguish them by lip-reading, but some of them might be "throat sounds" that couldn't be read that way), and might be physically unable to pronounce them. And a human would lack the mobile ears necessary to make some old vampire sign-language words (this means Stargazer has a mild speech impediment by old vampire standards, as she lacks mobile ears; probably her family invented some substitute signs for her, a good example of the fluidity of old vampire familects).

I originally intended to include after this a discussion of how old vampire would reflect the vampire umwelt, but as often happens with me, this post is getting so long I think I'd better break it up. So, check back tomorrow (probably) for a post where I talk about how old vampire might have reflected distinctive features of the vampire umwelt, and also where I discuss the question of whether there might have been some old vampire oral literature that a human might find beautiful, relatable, and/or emotionally moving!

Edit: Here are links to the rest of the posts in this series: old vampire language part 2, old vampire language part 3, types of old vampire literature, the literary qualities of old vampire oral folktale-poetry, and a description of a few old vampire oral folktale-poems I think a human might like.

However, before I go now, there's one interesting possible aspect of old vampire I want to mention:

Old vampire writing?:

I think writing might have been useful to Pleistocene vampires and they might have invented writing hundreds of thousands of years before humans did! Just about everything about vampires suggests that a face to face meeting between old vampires from different social groups would have been a very dangerous proposition. Long distance communication, through writing, would then have been much safer! I think it would make a lot of sense for old vampires to have had a cultural institution similar to Gravedigger boundary trees.

While vampires might develop writing, I think they might have little incentive to develop an alphabet, as memorizing a few thousand hieroglyphs would be no big challenge to a vampire, so old vampire was probably hieroglyphic/ideographic. Old vampire writing would probably be of a sort suitable for carving into trees, as that might be a common writing surface, so that might influence the shape of the hieroglyphs.

Old vampire written language would probably have been more homogenous than old vampire spoken language, as the whole point of it would be to communicate with vampires from different social groups who might speak a different familect. For that reason, it might also have changed more slowly.

It's tantalizing to imagine some archaeologists on Blindsight Earth discovering an ancient vampire boundary tree preserved at the bottom of some anoxic lake or something, its surface covered in old vampire writing. Pity nobody would ever be able to read it!

[random-thought-depository]

I've decided my Blindsight elsewhere fic is going to be set in the seventh or eighth millennium BCE after all. Notes on how I'll portray the humans, focusing on how I'll approach the question of war and socio-economic inequality in early Neolithic Anatolia (the setting of my fic):

Inland agriculturalists: probably the most populous local branch of humanity, and the one where most of our archaeological evidence of the first farmers comes from. Farm wheat and pulse crops, but acorns, pistachios, and figs are also important food sources to them. Some livestock, but hunting is still the primary source of animal protein for many communities. Foraging of wild and semi-wild plant foods (e.g. acorns from wild and semi-wild stands) is still important for many communities; communities often surrounded by fuzzy concentric circles of various intensities of eco-engineering rather than there being a sharp dividing line between farmed land and totally wild land. Agriculture, originally an extension of women's gathering activities, is still highly feminized in this era; men participate in farming, but a lot of plant cultivation is women's work. Inland agriculturalist gender relations more-or-less follow the hoe culture pattern.

Inland agriculturalist society is relatively peaceful and inlander agriculturalist communities are not very militaristic; to the extent that they are militarized it's often primarily oriented at defense against vampires and coaster slave raiders. Serious direct attacks on settlements are rare, so settlements are usually not very fortified; what fortifications exist are often mostly for protection against vampires and coaster slave raiders. The biggest threat to inland agriculturalist communities is the new crowd diseases being spawned by the agriculturalist lifestyle.

Inlander agriculturalist communities are mostly relatively socio-economically egalitarian. What social hierarchy exists is mostly gerontocratic; the words of elders carry weight. The inlander agriculturalist socio-economic system distributes most of a community's surplus more-or-less evenly among most of its members.

Inlander agriculturalist communities often do have leaders who are usually men and usually hand power down to their sons. However, these leaders are very dependent on the ongoing active consent of the governed to have any power, and they have about the same material standard of living as normal members of the community (though they do often possess symbolic luxury goods like precious stones and stone cups as symbols of office). Inlander agriculturalist communities do not tolerate leaders who try to tyrannize over their community or who live well while their people go hungry.

At the other end of the social scale, the other major exception to the relative socio-economic equality of inlander agriculturalist communities is, unfortunately, slavery. Slaves are mostly female refugees from the coastal zone, who are vulnerable to exploitation because they have no local social connections. Slavery is highly feminized because agricultural labor is feminized and because women are perceived as easier to control; inland agriculturalists have little interest in enslaving men (the equivalent bad end for coaster refugee men is to be killed as a trespasser or to be driven away into the wilderness and sooner or later end up as vampire food or meet some other similarly nasty fate). Slavery is not hereditary, and slaves may achieve integration into the community on better terms eventually. An imperfect but possibly illuminating recent historical analogy for early Holocene Anatolian inlander agriculturalist slavery is Iroquois slavery/bride kidnapping/adoption. Slaves are a small percentage of the inlander agriculturalist population.

Coastal farmer-fisher-whalers: probably originally a sedentary fisher-whaler culture on the shores of the Mediterranean and the Euxine Lake (what later becomes the Black Sea) which then adopted agriculture. This is a precociously urbanized, stratified, and militarized society with long-distance trade and raiding, deep sea fishing and whaling, and what could generously be called fortified city-states ruled by kings (though they're more like big villages by modern standards, a few thousand people). They're kind of like an early Holocene equivalent of Vikings (late Bronze Age Greece may be another relatively good analogy). They don't appear in modern history books because a lot of their settlement sites are now below sea level (sea levels were still lower than today during this era, especially the level of the Euxine Lake) and the ruins they left have been pretty thoroughly chewed up by coastal erosion and scavenging by later humans.

The coastal zone is much more militarized than the inland zone. War is more frequent and is often existential (whereas for inlanders it's usually a matter of disputes over things like acorn-bearing oak groves and hunting grounds on the periphery of a community's territory), so coastal settlements are much more heavily fortified than most inland settlements.

The coasters have not yet invented a social technology of territorial imperialism; the goal of coaster aggressive warfare is the capture of plunder and slaves, which are transported to the aggressor city-state to increase its wealth and labor force. A lot of this slave labor is then used for agricultural intensification. The result is a sort of Darwinism of communities; stronger communities attack weaker ones, enslave much of their population, use that slave labor for agricultural intensification, get even bigger, use the resulting increased military power to attack more communities, and so on. The main wrench in this is that these practices tend to also make coaster city-states festering factories of crowd diseases and spread those diseases around, but this tends to synergize with rather than disrupt this dynamic: faced with declining populations, coaster leaders tend to try to solve that problem by capturing more slaves. Greater militarization and boats capable of coast-hugging journeys of hundreds of miles means the coasters are also well-equipped for opportunistic slave raiding, and coaster slave-capturing parties have made themselves a major hazard over much of Asia Minor (they're basically a similar hazard to vampires; unlikely to attack a main settlement unless it's very weak, but will pick off individuals and small groups). These slave-catchers, and coaster traders and military expeditions, tend to spread diseases around as they travel, much like European explorers, conquistadors, and settlers did in the New World 1500-1900. The coaster society is a major driver of regional population movement, as the coastal zone is constantly drawing in captives while at the same time it has an outflow of escaped slaves, refugees from destroyed communities, etc. (they also indirectly drive a lot of population movement from the plagues they spread and from people moving to get farther away from them).

Big and powerful coaster city-states have large slave populations. Coaster slavery is less feminized than inlander slavery, as the coasters have more use for male slaves for heavy agricultural labor, but it is still quite feminized, for the same basic reasons as inlander slavery. Standard coaster operating procedure after total defeat of a rival community is to massacre most of the men and enslave most of the women. Coaster slave catchers preferentially target women. Unlike the inlander society, in which the social technologies of coercion are very rudimentary, coaster society is beginning to develop things like slave barracks, chain gangs, professional slave overseers, etc.. Coaster slaves often do not reproduce themselves, due to short lifespans, the gender imbalance of the coaster slave population, and the "would you want to bring a child into that kind of life?" factor, but when they do coaster slavery is often hereditary, though coaster masters have the option of acknowledging children of slaves as their own (a lot of people born into coaster slavery are conceived by masters basically raping their slaves), in which case they inherit the social status of the father; the trend is to acknowledge sons (who are more useful to the masters as male heirs and warriors) early in life when they're young enough to thoroughly socialize into the master's culture while leaving daughters in slavery. Coaster society has much higher socio-economic inequality than inland agriculturalist or hunter-gatherer society. The basic unit of coaster social organization is the patrilineal clan, with smaller and poorer clans vassalized to bigger and richer ones, and clan membership and rank within the clan as major components of social identity and determinants of socio-economic status. Patrilineal descent being important means coaster society is more patriarchal than inlander society, with coaster women having less sexual freedom and less freedom in general than inlander agriculturalist or hunter-gatherer women (the fact that coaster city-states often have relatively giant majority-female slave populations also contributes to this; the institutions and cultural sensibilities of a society like that tend to be not great for "citizen" women either).

I made up the coasters cause I wanted to set up an Alien vs. Predator sort of conflict between the vampire pack in my fanfic and a suitably nasty human proto-state; I bet that shows.

Hunter-gatherers: these are still a major feature of the Anatolian world in this era, especially in the inland northeast and in regions that aren't great for agriculture (hills, mountains, uplands, swamps, etc.). They are mostly small groups of nomads; in this region larger and more sedentary hunter-gatherer groups have mostly adopted agriculture to some degree by this time. Already in this era these people can be understood as "barbarians" in the James C. Scott sense: people whose cultures have developed in dialogue with and reaction against settled people. A lot of these people are escaped slaves and refugees from the coastal zone and their descendants, and that influences their culture, e.g. intensifying the simple hunter-gatherer trend toward "fierce egalitarianism."

----------

Both the inland agriculturalists and the hunter-gatherers have to some degree developed a cultural identity of "not like those assholes on the coast and proud of that," and this has mostly influenced them in what I and probably you would see as good directions; weakening hierarchical institutions and cultural features and strengthening egalitarianizing ones. Unfortunately, I think the flip side of that process would be making the coasters worse; it'd be anachronistic to call the coasters fascists, but I think their culture would probably have a lot of that energy.

[random-thought-depository]

OK, time for my final Blindsight old vampire language "reconstruction" post, where I address the question: was there any old vampire oral folktale-poetry that a human might enjoy, relate to, or be moved by, and if so what did it look like?

This is part of a series. For previous installments, see: old vampire language, old vampire language part 2, old vampire language part 3, types of old vampire literature, and the literary qualities of old vampire oral folktale-poetry.

Here's what I imagine some of the most likeable to humans old vampire oral folktale-poems looking like:

Swift's death-contemplation poem:

This is an example of an old vampire tradition of death-contemplation poems or death laments, which are about the narrator contemplating their own death. Ancient vampires had a combination of psychological features that made the inevitability of their own death very painful for them. They did not expect any sort of afterlife. They were much more selfish than humans, and to a very selfish person the annihilation of their own consciousness and personality is one of the worst calamities imaginable (though I suppose they'd consider suffering some sort of "fate worse than death" even worse). Their superintelligence made the long-term future feel more "real" to them. Wrestling with this problem, old vampire culture produced a tradition of death-contemplation poems. To a human a lot of old vampire death-contemplation poems would sound like a mix of poignant and monstrously narcissistic and whiny. A common theme of old vampire death-contemplation poems was, essentially, "What's the point of the universe existing if it doesn't have me in it?"

I'll briefly summarize a death-contemplation poem I imagine being composed by Swift, the 110+ year old grandmother of the vampire pack in my early Holocene Blindsight elsewhere fic (vampires age more slowly than humans, so Swift's age is the vampire equivalent of 65 or so). She might have composed this death-contemplation poem partly for pedagogical purposes, to recite it to her grandchildren and (potential future) great-grandchildren.

The poem begins by briefly lamenting the terrible calamities Swift is facing and enduring, the weakening of her body and the inevitable annihilation of her consciousness and personality. It describes how she became aware of her own inevitable mortality as a child, and at first this wasn't so bad, but as her superintelligence fully wired up the distant future started to feel more "real" and the knowledge of her own inevitable annihilation increasingly frightened, saddened, and angered her.

This would include a revelation of some things of anthropological interest: old vampire culture thought aging was caused by a kind of sickness spirit, like infectious diseases, and ancient vampires were tantalized by the thought that, just as certain sickness spirits could be poisoned by certain plants, molds, etc., perhaps there was some medicine that could poison the sickness spirit of aging, killing it or driving it away and thereby granting the person who took it indefinite life and perhaps even restoring their lost youth. Many ancient vampires became seduced by this thought and roamed the world trying to find this cure; this was an especially common behavior in old (as in elderly) vampires, who'd sometimes think "sure, eternally young vampires are clearly very rare if they exist at all, so if this cure exists at all it must be very hard to find or access and I'll probably fail, but at this point I don't lose much by trying!" These quests for the fountain of youth were one of the closest things old vampire culture had to religious behavior! They may even have served an adaptive function: vampires on fountain-quest would roam widely and might spread useful ideas around that way, and if they were male they might impregnate some local females and thus spread their genes to areas very far from their birthplaces and mitigate the low genetic diversity problem of the vampire species; old vampire culture may even have had social and sexual practices designed to facilitate the potential idea-spreading and gene-spreading functions of fountain-questing behavior. Swift would mention that she has considered going on a fountain-quest!

Eventually, the poem would settle into a series of statements something like this:

What is the point of the sun shining if Swift is not around to benefit from it? After Swift dies, the sun might as well go out, plunging the world into an eternal frigid darkness and killing all life! But wait! Heron (Swift's daughter) and Heron's children need and benefit from the sun, and Swift values the well-being of Heron and Heron's children in a way that would be irrational by a purely selfish cost-benefit calculation. Therefore, Swift hopes that the sun continues to shine after Swift has died.

What is the point of prey animals existing if Swift cannot eat them? After Swift dies, all the prey might as well die, causing all vampires and predatory animals to die too! But wait! Heron and Heron's children eat and need meat and enjoy eating meat, and Swift values the well-being of Heron and Heron's children in a way that would be irrational by a purely selfish cost-benefit calculation. Therefore, Swift hopes that prey animals continue to live and breed after Swift dies.

What is the point of farmers continuing to work their fields if Swift can't eat them or the bread, lentils, etc. they grow? After Swift dies, those plants might as well be burned to the last seed! But wait! Heron and Heron's children sometimes eat bread and other grain-based foods produced by farmers, and they also sometimes eat the farmers who eat those foods, and Swift values the well-being of Heron and Heron's children in a way that would be irrational by a purely selfish cost-benefit calculation. Therefore, Swift hopes that grain plants continue to grow and reproduce and farmers continue to work their fields after Swift dies.

And so on.

In the end, Swift says that, since she values the well-being of Heron and Heron's children, she will not go on a fountain-quest that would almost certainly just end in her dying somewhere far from home, but she will remain with her family and help them until her strength fails. She then says that, since she cares about the well-being of Heron and Heron's children, it is possible for her to make plans that extend beyond her lifetime that might succeed in a way that matters to her, and that makes contemplating the future beyond the next few decades less depressing to her, and she hopes Heron and Heron's children develop equivalent relationships and are similarly comforted by them.

Quiet's lament:

This would be a sort of ancient vampire equivalent of The Wanderer, composed by a vampire female whose natal family had been found and killed by humans or rival vampires (she doesn't know which) while they were hibernating. It was composed as part of attempt at seduction, but it was also composed as something to recite to her future children if she won. If she'd won, it would probably have become part of her family's intergenerational cultural lore, and it was part of a larger tradition of lament-poetry composed by vampires who'd survived the annihilation of the rest of their family by violence or disease or some combination of both. It would probably be one of the most sympathetic and appealing parts of the old vampire oral literature corpus to a human because it was composed as part of an attempt to seduce a relatively high-empathy high-altruism neurodivergent vampire (she wanted it to make him feel sorry for her!), but it was not hugely divergent from normal old vampire lament-poetry traditions.

And yeah, if there's any human literature I can think of that feels like how I imagine the most sympathetic to a human old vampire folktale-poems feeling, it's The Wanderer! Like:

"There is none now living / to whom I dare / clearly speak / of my innermost thoughts. …one should keep secure / his spirit-chest (mind), / guard his treasure-chamber (thoughts), … The weary spirit cannot / withstand fate (the turn of events), / nor does a rough or sorrowful mind / do any good (perform anything helpful). / Thus those eager for glory / often keep secure / dreary thoughts / in their breast; / So I, / often wretched and sorrowful, / bereft of my homeland, / far from noble kinsmen, / have had to bind in fetters / my inmost thoughts, / Since long years ago / I hid my lord / in the darkness of the earth…"

It would need some modifications, but I can definitely imagine Quiet saying stuff that sounds a lot like this! Or...

"He thinks in his mind / that he embraces and kisses / his lord, / and on his (the lord's) knees lays / his hands and his head, / Just as, at times (hwilum), before, / in days gone by, / he enjoyed the gift-seat (throne). / Then the friendless man / wakes up again, / He sees before him / fallow waves / Sea birds bathe, / preening their feathers, / Frost and snow fall, / mixed with hail. / Then are the heavier / the wounds of the heart, / grievous (sare) with longing for (æfter) the lord. / Sorrow is renewed"

I can totally see Quiet talking about missing her mom this way!

The fact that she's composing it for a neurodivergent vampire atypically likely to feel sympathy toward humans may also create another parallel. The vampires of Quiet's period remember the vampire happy time and know life has been getting harder for their kind for the last < 20K years or so, which I think would give the vampire folktale-poetry of this era a particularly grim and fatalistic vibe. But the humans around them aren't having a very fun time either. I'm modelling the human society of this period as beset by rising socioeconomic inequality, widespread food insecurity and malnutrition, increasing intra-human warfare, and endemic and epidemic diseases. The landscape of Anatolia/Syria in this period is already peppered with the crumbling ruins of human settlements destroyed by plague, war, crop failures, or often some combination of two or three of those. I might have Quiet originally be from rather far away, the area that's now Ukraine and the Sea of Azov (the Black Sea would have been a lake and smaller in this period IIRC), but even that area might be negatively effected by the same processes. The newly evolved town-spawned crowd diseases may have raced far ahead of the farmers, carried by traders and nomads, and decimated the inhabitants of lands that have never seen a farmer (something similar happened with European diseases in the Americas). Per James C. Scott's "early agricultural societies were often very dependent on coercion to maintain their labor force" thesis, in this period hinterland Anatolia, the Caucuses, and the steppes surrounding the Black Sea lake may have a relationship to the agriculturalist-settled parts of Anatolia and the Levant a bit like Africa did to Europe and the Americas in the eighteenth century; a source of slave labor for the labor-hungry early agriculturalist communities. There are probably more than a few humans in Quiet's world who've survived the destruction of their communities. Vampires are very smart and Quiet could certainly intellectually notice the parallels between their experiences and hers, and it might occur to her that referencing that parallel in her folktale-poem might make it more sympathetic to somebody with a relatively high-empathy neurotype. Take all this together, and I could see her lamentation folktale-poem including passages a bit like this:

"Indeed I cannot think / why my spirit / does not darken / when I ponder on the whole / life of men / throughout the world, …/ So this middle-earth, / a bit each day, / droops and decays … A wise man must be patient, / He must never be too impulsive / nor too hasty of speech, / nor too weak a warrior / nor too reckless, / nor too fearful, nor too cheerful, / nor too greedy for goods, / nor ever too eager for boasts, / before he sees clearly. … A wise hero must realize / how terrible it will be, / when all the wealth of this world / lies waste, / as now in various places / throughout this middle-earth / walls stand, / blown by the wind, / covered with frost, / storm-swept the buildings. / The halls decay, / their lords lie / deprived of joy, / the whole troop has fallen, / the proud ones, by the wall. / War took off some, / carried them on their way, / one, the bird took off / across the deep sea, / one, the gray wolf / shared one with death, / one, the dreary-faced / man buried / in a grave."

"Where is the horse gone? Where the rider? / Where the giver of treasure? / Where are the seats at the feast? / Where are the revels in the hall? / Alas for the bright cup! / Alas for the mailed warrior! / Alas for the splendour of the prince! / How that time has passed away, / dark under the cover of night, / as if it had never been! … from the north there comes / a rough hailstorm / in malice against men. / All is troublesome / in this earthly kingdom, / the turn of events changes / the world under the heavens. / Here money is fleeting, / here friend is fleeting, / here man is fleeting, / here kinsman is fleeting, / all the foundation of this world / turns to waste!"

This is about the closest thing I can imagine semi-mainstream old vampire culture producing to philosophical thought a human would sympathize with!

A vampire creation myth?:

I can see old vampire culture having a creation myth. By this I mean not so much a myth of the creation of the world, but a myth of how vampires came to be the way they are. It might be one of the very few places where you could find something like the idea of a god in old vampire culture. I don't have a clear idea of what it would look like, but I imagine it sounding a lot like "The Story of the Blessing of El-ahrairah" from Watership Down. If I include it in my fanfic, "The Story of the Blessing of El-ahrairah" is probably going to be my main source of inspiration for it. This may seem counterintuitive and incongruous, because Richard Adams's rabbits and Peter Watts's vampires are in a sense completely opposite kinds of creature, but I think their experience of the world might have certain fundamental similarities. Ancient vampires too would experience the world as a very dangerous place where they are surrounded by very many enemies, and they too would rely a lot on cunning, speed, and stealth to survive in it. I can totally see an ancient vampire mom naming her kid some four syllable compound word that roughly translates out as "survivor very many enemies" and telling that kid, "Be cunning and full of tricks and you shall not be destroyed."

Other parallels I can imagine existing between the vampire creation myth and "The Story of the Blessing of El-ahrairah":

"Frith made all the animals and birds, but when he first made them they were all the same. The sparrow and the kestrel were friends and they both ate seeds and flies. And the fox and the rabbit were friends and they both ate grass." The vampire version of this would be something like "Frith made all the peoples. But when he first made them they were all the same. The Kindred (vampires) did not experience the shivering hunger (protocadherin y glitch) and in those days were not killers for they had no need to kill, they lived happily on fruit and honey and were friends with the Dreamers (humans) and the Cousins (Neanderthals) and all the rest, and were friends of each other." This is a fall myth explaining the protocadherin y glitch and its consequences!

The "original sin" was overpopulation. In contrast to the "be fruitful and multiply" sensibility of patriarchal human societies, ancient vampire society would have been built around a need to restrict reproduction; their lives would have been structured by biological adaptations and social institutions set up to facilitate that (reproductive hierarchies, cicada-like hibernation/reproduction cycles, etc.). Vampires would have been very aware of the need to control their own numbers, and I think a failure to do so at some point would be an intuitive "where all the trouble started" point to them.

One difference I think would exist: if there's a vampire equivalent of El-ahrairah, I think they would probably be female, and instead of El-ahrairah's many wives the vampire version would be something like, "And she made many daughters, and all her daughters made daughters, and all their daughters made daughters, so her family became so numerous that even Frith could not count them." This would be, among other things, a myth about the origins and necessity of vampire reproductive hierarchies!

"Frith could have killed El-ahrairah at once, but he had a mind to keep him in the world, because he needed him to sport and jest and play tricks. So he determined to get the better of him not by means of his own great power but by means of a trick." Yes, something very much like this, but in the vampire version the trick is...

"And so in their turn came the fox and the stoat and the weasel. And to each of them Frith gave the cunning and the fierceness and the desire to hunt and slay and eat the children of El-ahrairah. And so they went away from Frith full of nothing but hunger to kill the rabbits." The blessing of El-ahrairah myth tries to explain how the fox, stoat, and weasel became enemies of the rabbit. I think the vampire creation myth would similarly try to explain how humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans, etc. became enemies of vampires. But I think in the vampire creation myth, it would be the vampires who appear in the role most directly equivalent to the fox, stoat, and weasel; it would be the vampires that receive cunning and fierceness and the desire to hunt and slay and eat their cousins and who go forth full of nothing but hunger to kill their cousins! This would be the clever cruel trick vampire-Frith plays on vampirekind: giving them a great blessing (their superintelligence, superior senses, etc.) but slipping poison pills (the protocadherin y glitch and the facial recognition fear reflex) into it that make them the enemies of all other peoples and basically the enemies of most of each other! I think the implication would be that vampire-Frith has prepared for vampirekind an ironic punishment: "here is your great blessing; you're going to need it!"

And I can totally see the vampire equivalent of Frith explaining their decision to inflict the protocadherin y glitch on vampirekind by telling vampires "your people cannot rule the world, for I will not have it so."

While the vampire Frith-equivalent would be a sort of creator god, it would be something like the Deist watchmaker god. It would not be worshipped, and vampires would feel no loyalty to it. Insofar as vampires might have a notion of something like gods or spirits, I think they would approach them with this sensibility (from here):

"I see me and all beings I meet, up to gods themselves, as creatures in a big landscape. Maybe we play, maybe we fight, maybe we avoid each other. But I don't go worshiping some bigger animal down the block, that's silly."

[random-thought-depository]

Re: Blindsight vampire physical appearance: @brovitranduila has been awesome and made art of one of my vampire OCs based on my ideas about what Blindsight vampires look like!

Meet Heron, the alpha female of a vampire pack that existed in the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent during the early Holocene (illustration courtesy of Brovitranduila):

Notable features:

Heron's jaw is larger than a human's, and she has more powerful jaw muscles. If she showed her teeth, you would see that her front teeth are sharp and she has large canines like a baboon. Heron has a "chinless" jaw like Neanderthals; this is an ancestral trait that vampires kept and humans lost.

Heron's eyes have dark sclera, large orange/red-ish irises, and cat-like slit pupils. This is a mix of vampire weirdness and more ancestral features that vampires kept and humans lost. Vampire eyes are like Homo erectus eyes but with adaptations to night vision, which means vampire eyes look a lot like chimpanzee eyes but with more orange/red irises, slit pupils, and eyeshine in darkness (you can look up pictures of chimpanzee eyes for real-world reference). Humans got our distinctive eyes with white sclera after the human/vampire split. I like what Brovitranduila did with the eyes here, it nicely synthesizes my chimpanzee-like eyes idea with Watts's descriptions of vampire eyes (red-ish, intimidating stare).

Heron's earlobes are bigger than human earlobes. Heron "sees" with her ears much more than humans do, and her earlobes are like big deep dish antennae built to capture lots of sound and divert it toward her ears. Heron's earlobes are somewhat mobile; she can move them a little to point toward interesting sounds, flick them a little, etc.. Certain ear movements also served a communicative function in old vampire culture, and modern vampires make some of these ear motion gestures instinctively.

Brovitranduila also did a version of Heron with pointed ears:

At first I wanted to get away from the idea of vampires having pointed ears, I didn't see any obvious biomechanical reason for it and I wanted to do something different. But looking at this the concept grows on me. I like how they look like the ears of predatory animals like cats and foxes and give a sense of a being that "sees" with their ears more than humans do; they don't look like Spock/Elf ears (which is what I wanted to get away from), they really do give a nice touch of inhumanity and they feel functional instead of just like a random inhuman feature slapped on. And if this ear shape is common in mammalian predators it does suggest it has a biomechanical utility; when I look at it here I can intuitively see how a sound-capturing apparatus like this might be more structurally efficient than a more circular one. It gives a bit of a catgirl vibe, which I feel is actually pretty appropriate; I think it'd make a lot of scientific and aesthetic sense for vampires to be kind of cat-like (independent, self-willed, predatory, lazy).

The first picture is definitely more accurate for the nose and jaw though.

I also like how this made her look older and leaner, "alpha" in this context means something a lot like "mom," and vampires are supposed to look angular.

Thank you, Brovitranduila! You can see Brovitranduila's cool art on their Tumblr, they've got some neat Blindsight fan-art, check it out!

[random-thought-depository]

OK, time for my second to last (probably) Blindsight old vampire language "reconstruction" post, where I talk about what I imagine old vampire folktale-poetry being like as literature!

The literary qualities of old vampire poetry:

The first glaring difference between the old vampire folktale-poem tradition and human literary traditions was that old vampire culture had history but it didn't have fiction or even really much in the way of mythology (sickness spirit lore, a Fountain of Youth legend, and maybe a creation myth was about it for old vampire mythology - I'll talk about that in my next post!). Old vampire folktales were simply accounts of things that were done by or happened to ancestors, and given vampire super-memory they were usually pretty close to an accurate factual account of what really happened. Untruths sometimes crept in as a result of transmission errors, and vampire storytellers might fill in missing information with artistic license (with those parts marked as more speculative than the rest of the story), but vampires never took the mental leap to "I know it didn't really happen that way, but I think it'd make a better story if...," let alone creating entirely fictional stories. They were certainly intelligent enough to imagine such a thing, and would have been exposed to the concept by watching humans, but it would have seemed to go against the purpose of storytelling in old vampire culture. The purpose of old vampire folktales was to transmit useful skills and remember how ancestors had solved their problems or failed to do so, they were training data, so ancient vampires would have wanted them to be as accurate as possible - the word used for human fiction in old vampire language might just have meant "lies," the same word they'd use for behaviors like trying to trick an enemy by giving them false information (like with Cassie/First's people in The Nightmare Stacks).

The second glaring quality of old vampire folktales was their amorality. Old vampire culture didn't really have any notion of morality. They had social rules and things kind of like more sophisticated versions of mother's wisdom food list behavior, but these were more like a mix of purely pragmatic survival and reproductive strategies and something like the terms of a peace treaty or business contract. A vampire who performed a socially lauded behavior might be rewarded for it by other vampires, and a vampire who broke a taboo might be punished for it by other vampires, but this was purely a matter of game theory; there was no idea of virtue or sin attached. Likewise, a vampire who did something like deviate from their mother's wisdom food list might be worried about the possibility of bad material consequences like getting sick or poisoned, but they wouldn't feel guilty and they wouldn't feel like they'd sinned. Accordingly, old vampire folktales didn't have goodies and baddies; the narrative did not take sides. They simply existed to show various possibly useful behaviors the ancestors performed and show which ones worked historically and which did not.

The third very noticeable quality of old vampire folktales was that they were often pretty violent and grim. Ancient vampires led pretty dangerous and violent lives, and while hunting was often pretty fun for them, they didn't like being maimed or killed or getting sick, and they were still social enough to feel grief to some extent. Old vampire culture saw the world as an amoral accident, and ancient vampires did not expect an afterlife. I think a combination of Stone Age material conditions, vampire neurotype, and no expectation of an afterlife might be very emotionally painful in a way: a very selfish person would probably hate the idea of their own inevitable personal annihilation, and superintelligence might make the long-term future feel more real. This would all tend to give a lot of old vampire oral literature a violent grim melancholy fatalism. Also, remember Sarasti's "I'm using faces as a graphic interface cause the hominid brain has a lot of neural machinery for reading faces and it'd be a shame to waste it, my version is screaming agonized faces cause I'm wired for hunting" thing? I think something similar would apply to vampires using stories as a mnemonic aid: they'd really go for the blood and guts stuff!

So old vampire folktales were violent, gory, amoral, fatalistic, basically all about people-eating sociopath-adjacent serial killers... I think overall most humans would find that pretty off-putting! I guess some humans might enjoy that in a gonzo sort of way; if you're a fan of Game of Thrones/ASoIF, Warhammer 40,000, Green Antarctica, and grindhouse horror, you might enjoy old vampire oral sagas! I think even a human with a strong stomach for grimdark might start to find them just kind of depressing after a while though: a bleak tedious soap opera of violence and gross sex that stretches on and on over a history lasting hundreds of thousands of years, getting boring through sheer repetition, a history without a vertical dimension. That said...

The fourth very noticeable quality of old vampire folktales, and one I think a human might like better, was their sensual quality. Situational awareness was very important to ancient vampires, and their consciousness was more "in-world" than human consciousness, and they could see, hear, smell, and feel more than humans can. Compared to humans, they were less verbal thinkers and more visual, aural, olfactory, and tactile thinkers. Ancient vampires were a lot like this (from here): "Images too: if I try to express what I feel deeply about, I'm likely to use a dream image, not emotional labels, for such images are realer to me than normal people's language. Traditional Native American speech and rhetoric, using concise, carefully chosen images in place of abstract words, is much more intelligible to me than standard English." Old vampire speech was terse but rich with descriptions of images, sensations, sounds, smells, etc., so old vampire folktales were like that too. I think this might give them a vibe a little like the oldest English literature - or Tolkien!

An illustrative "translation":

Over here, I wrote about one of the vampires in my 8,000 BCE Blindsight elsewhere fic: "She’s called Drowning because when she was a young adult she once swam after a teenage human girl and killed her by holding her underwater. :("

I think her family might have a folktale-poem about that event! It wouldn't be an ancestor tale yet, but Swift has probably made a folktale-poem about it that she intends to recite to Heron's newest offspring when they're old enough, and if her family survives a few more generations it may become an ancestor tale. Notably, it would be a somewhat random sample of old vampire oral literature, not selected for likability to humans.

Here is a "translation" of part of this old vampire folktale that attempts to preserve the terse but sensual quality of old vampire (note that old vampire didn't have any "highfalutin" special way of speaking associated with poetry; the rhyme would distinguish it from other kinds of speech, of course, and a vampire composing poetry might pay closer attention to word choice and try for particularly evocative descriptions and clever and memorable turns of phrase, but this is pretty close to the kind of language style normal, conversational old vampire would have used, though hunting speech would surely be much more terse, mostly just an exchange of individual words, short phrases, and equivalently terse sign language):

"Three[1] strips away and casts aside her clothes and tools and weapons and stands lion-naked[2]. In the water they will slow her[3]. Her self[4] will be her weapon. She trap-springing runs[5] to the high rock. Speed guides her legs[6]. Her feet know the brittle sharp compressibility of dry grass, then the treacherous instability of bare dry loose dirt, then the unyielding hard complexity of rough and naked stone[7]. Blanket-stripped[8], fingers of cool air-touch[9] and warm heat-light[10] dance over her. She doesn't swim this river, but Swift shows her its dream-twin, so she knows the safety of breathless depth below the dive-splash[11]. She launches herself high and out, beyond the rock, over the water, and as she thrown-stone plunges[12] she makes herself an arrow to pierce the water[13]. She feels the movement-wind on her like the rest-cool fingers of a lover not yet passion-hot[14]. Her fingertips meet the water first, and then she pierces it deep, she disappears into it, it covers her. The water slows her, catches her, blankets[15] her. If she was rest-cool, miser-feeding her inner fire[16], it would be pain-cold, stealing her precious ember-warmth[17]. But she's in killing rapture, feverish passion-hot, so it's friendly, delicious, takes her fever, cooling her[18] like the amputation-knife[19] dipped bloody into water, making the confusing[20] mouth-watering scent of soup-hot water[21] and daughter-blood[22]. The water raises her and she swims, fighting the sideways-dragging current, thrown-stone-flipped[23] rising to the surface where she gulps and fills her lungs and dives again. She doesn't splash on the interface[24] like the Dreamer[25] girl[26], but upside-down jumps[27], rising and gulping and diving and swimming and rising and gulping and diving and swimming. The water's soup-murky but she doesn't need eyes to find the Dreamer girl, the cacophony and water-lash[28] of her splashing and the cat's-leap wing-beating[29] of her heart would show Three the way to her even in cave-dark[30] and Kindred-ambush-quiet[31]. Dreamer girl's a strong swimmer but Three's stronger. Three comes at the Dreamer girl from below like a shark death-ramming a seal, throwing its mouth at a seal[32] in the water plains where whale herds graze[33]. Her left hand[34] finds the Dreamer girl's leg in the murkiness and knows her foot callouses[35] and feels-travels upward and finds the softness of her leg and closes and she pulls."

TRANSLATOR'S NOTES:

[1] - Drowning's original name. In its original context, it meant "third offspring born from Heron [Drowning's mother]." Among early Holocene western Asian vampires, a baby would typically be assigned a placeholder name of this sort and then later, in post-infancy childhood or early adulthood, would receive a more distinctive name that referenced some memorable incident, triumph, physical or personality trait, or the vampire's position in their family.

[2] - I.e. like a non-hominid predator, which has only its own body for a weapon.

[3] - "Her" is an anthropomorphism: in every instance that it appears in this text as a reference to Three/Drowning, the original old vampire simply used Three's name. Also, in old vampire gendered pronouns were reserved for humans (Drowning's victim gets gendered pronouns!). I have taken this artistic license because I judged that here phrasing unnatural to English would do more violence to the original text, taking the reader out of its terse, flowing, fast, in-world feel.

[4] - "Self" here might also be translated as "body," but that imposes a dualism foreign to old vampire thought. Old vampire culture did not have a notion of a soul separate from the body, and it did not have a "flesh mecha" notion of the body's relationship to the mind. In old vampire thought, the body was the person.

[5] - As one might sprint to close the distance to prey in the first moments after springing an ambush.

[6] - Vampires are very aware of what they're doing with their legs and feet, and ancient vampires were especially so; as stealth-oriented ambush predators, minimizing footfall noises was very important to them. Drowning/Three trades stealth for speed, optimizing her footfall placement for fast movement instead of quiet movement.

[7] - As stealth-oriented ambush predators, vampires are very aware of the surfaces they're stepping on. Old vampire descriptions of movement often prominently featured descriptions of the surfaces the person was stepping on.

[8] - In her nakedness, Drowning/Three's skin is exposed to conditions of temperature, wind, and direct solar radiation it was insulated from while she was wearing clothes. This is visualized as the removal of a blanket (an important thermoregulation technology for ancient vampires, who spent much of their time resting or sleeping in their dens with their metabolisms running very low). Old vampire hunting clothes were not blanket-like; a more awkward but otherwise better translation of the old vampire compound word here translated as "blanket-stripped" would be "deprived of thermoregulation like a resting vampire whose blanket has just been taken away."

[9] - This denotes a tactile sensation of cool air touching the skin.

[10] - That is, sunlight! Or, more precisely, warming by direct solar radiation (as opposed to energy transfer from sunlight to air to skin). The idea here is that the air feels cool on her skin (at least in shadow), but direct sunlight on her skin feels warm.

[11] - That is, she is not familiar with this river from personal experience, but Swift has described it to her in detail, so she knows that the water below this rock is deep enough that she might not be able to hold her breath long enough to dive to the bottom and then return to the surface, and therefore she knows she can safely dive from the rock without fear of being injured by impact with shallowly submerged rocks or a shallowly submerged river bottom. I tried to preserve some of the weirdness of how old vampire talked about imagination and knowledge!

[12] - Her trajectory resembles that of a thrown stone, at first flying upward and forward, then arcing back down to the ground (or, in this case, the water) in a parabolic path.

[13] - In other words, she assumes a "torpedo" posture as she dives.

[14] - In sexual arousal, as in hunting mode, a vampire's metabolic rate would increase dramatically and they would allow their blood to freely flood their outer tissues instead of holding most of it in the body core. The sensation of air moving over the skin during diving is being analogized to sexualized affectionate touch by a lover who is not yet fully aroused and thus still has the cool skin temperature characteristic of the vampire resting state (and thus has cool fingers). The word here translated as "movement-wind" referred to the wind-like sensation of air friction experienced by a body in motion.

[15] - "Blankets" in this context denotes placing her body under a new regime of thermoregulation dynamics (as covering yourself with a blanket would).

[16] - In the low metabolism state that was the vampire default. The word translated as "miser" refers to personal resource conservation rather than ungenerous behavior toward others, and usually referred to a survival strategy, not a character trait (it usually functioned more like a verb than an adjective; a translation that attempts to preserve this quality would be "misering-feeding"). When used as a description of a person, it basically meant "poor" (with the disclaimer that it usually referred less to social position and more to ecological position, though those concepts have overlap - this word might be applied to a vampire individual or family forced into marginal territory by stronger rival families), but it also suggested well-developed survival skills. Arguably, "thrifty" would be a better translation of how the word is used here, but in this context it has an ambivalent affect, suggesting well-honed survival ability but also deprivation and precarity, so I have gone with the more negative "miser."

[17] - The water is cool enough that the sluggish resting vampire metabolism would struggle to maintain homeostasis while the vampire was immersed in it, therefore a vampire in a relaxed state would find immersion in this water a disagreeable experience.

[18] - Because she is in hunting rapture, her metabolism has accelerated and her body temperature has risen accordingly, perhaps to a temperature that would be feverish in a human. Immersion in cool water is now helpful and pleasurable because the water serves as a heat sink and cools her down. The word here translated as "passion" denotes strong emotion, increased metabolism, and increased cognitive activity (often but not necessarily all at once) and has associations with heat, sexuality, hunting, combat, socialization, danger, pain, complex thought, alertness, and dreaming - note that it has no connotations of irrational thinking; vampires mostly didn't experience strong emotion as pushing them away from rational thought, and in fact the state translated here as "passion" was associated with increased intelligence as it loosened or removed energy conservation limiters on brain activity.

[19] - Vampires were an epidemiologically vulnerable species because of their low genetic diversity. Needing to have body parts such as fingers, toes, an ear, etc. amputated because of an infected dog bite or other wounds was a common ancient vampire experience. These experiences are being evoked here. The amputation knife is hot because it has been heated as a sterilization measure and to cauterize as it cuts.

[20] - "Ambivalent" might be a more accurate translation, but I've been trying to avoid "thesaurus words" to preserve as much as I can of the terse quality of old vampire words.

[21] - This phrase exists to bring into the listener's mind a mental image of a ceramic pot in which soup is being prepared over a fire. The sort of soup an ancient vampire would prepare would probably contain meat (though probably not hominid meat - cooking would destroy the protocadherins) and exude an odor of blood during the cooking process. The listener is being guided toward the idea that when the amputation knife is cooled in water the result is something that smells like soup, like food.

[22] - The scenario being evoked here is a mother giving her daughter an emergency amputation and having the rather distressing experience of thinking her daughter's blood smells delicious and having her predatory instincts aroused. If there was anyone an ancient vampire would feel protective toward, it would be their offspring, and the mother-daughter bond tended to be particularly strong in ancient vampires. This whole tangent is basically misery porn! Its purpose is to make the folktale-poem more memorable and therefore function as a mnemonic aid. It's similar to Sarasti's wall of screaming faces, though recruiting somewhat different neural machinery.

[23] - She moves in a sort of parabola; diving, moving horizontally, and then rising back toward the surface. This is similar to the path of a thrown stone, but with the up-down axis inverted.

[24] - The water's surface. The human girl swims on the surface, but Drowning is mostly swimming underwater, surfacing only occasionally to exchange the air in her lungs and dive again. By doing this, she makes herself harder for her intended victim to track.

[25] - A rough translation of the old vampire word for a human. The word has connotations of "fully awake a lot" but also of something like "daydreamer." Old vampire culture saw waking consciousness and vivid dreams in sleep as kindred states and old vampire used the same word for both states.

[26] - The old vampire word used here is a loan word from a human language; it can denote an adolescent girl or an unmarried young woman. Like many old vampire gendered words, it is a "humanology" word, reserved exclusively for talking about humans.

[27] - A similar logic to conceptualizing a dive as an inverted thrown stone trajectory. Drowning's series of dives resembles a series of jumps, but with the vertical axis inverted.

[28] - The pressure waves caused by the human girl's movements, which Three/Drowning can feel across her body.

[29] - The way a bird's wings might beat when a cat is leaping at it and it's desperately trying to get off the ground, i.e. a very fast fluttering motion. The human girl's heart is, unsurprisingly, beating fast. The use of this image evokes the parallels between the two situations: Three/Drowning's intended victim is also being targeted for an attempt at predation and is also making a desperate effort to save herself.

[30] - As is often the case, the old vampire is richer: in the original language, this is clearly talking specifically about a very dark cave, so dark that even vampire night vision can't see much.

[31] - The quiet that would be necessary if you were trying to ambush another vampire. The significant implication is an inability to use echolocation. The narrative is saying that the human girl is making so much noise that Drowning could home in on her and find her using only passive hearing.

[32] - A shark's mouth is its weapon!

[33] - A kenning for the ocean! The narrator (probably Swift) is analogizing whale ecology to the more familiar situation of herds of herbivores grazing on a grassland plain.

[34] - Like most of her kind, Three/Drowning is ambidextrous.

[35] - That is, basically, feels them, but the old vampire word used implies a more thorough and intimate understanding.

As a general note, I imagine old vampire as difficult to translate into English, with different decisions about what approach to go with creating very different-sounding translations. A different translation approach might produce a very dry "just the facts the poet was trying to communicate" version of that passage that 1) would sound a lot less exotic and would be easier to understand, 2) might feel totally consistent with the "vampires are like Scramblers and aren't even sentient" interpretation. That wouldn't necessarily be an inferior translation, it might preserve a lot of tactics-relevant information the "artsy" translation chops off to keep the narrative from feeling slow, and since it isn't going for "vibes" it might preserve some features of the authentic language lost in the "artsy" version like the habitual use of Three's name instead of a pronoun. The "just the facts" translator might defend their approach by saying "while it's true that old vampire made very heavy use of imagery and sense-impressions to communicate information, it's an unwarranted anthropomorphism to assume this means it had a 'poetic' quality; it was likely just an artifact of the vampire's combination of very high intelligence, sensory processing intensive cognition, and relatively underdeveloped linguistic faculty, causing them to rely heavily on a relatively small and very 'body-centered' core vocabulary (possibly partly a legacy vocabulary inherited from Homo erectus) which was extended to talk about much more sophisticated concepts through an extensive system of simile and metaphor."

[random-thought-depository]

given that Stargazer was named that because she looked at stars with the intensity vampires usually reserve for prey, would a more direct but less poetic translation of her name be Star-Stalker?

I don't know if I'll use this (and I would only do so with your permission), but good one!

[random-thought-depository]

Ideas for Blindsight vampire physical appearance (I'm going to tag people I've seen doing Blindsight fan-art in case they find this interesting; @ryuki-draws, @wiltking, @brovitranduila):

I don't remember much detailed description of what they actually look like in the books. My preferred interpretation is:

They look weird; it is very visually obvious that they are closely related to humans but are not humans.

They're a sibling species of humans, not an offshoot. That is to say, vampires aren't weird humans, vampires and humans are different variations of weird Homo erectus. So I like the idea that vampires have some "primitive" features retained from the last common ancestor species that humans lost.

So, Blindsight vampire physical trait ideas:

- Weird jaws and teeth. In Blindsight they're described as being about as lupine as it's possible for a hominid's to be. My idea is vampires are more carnivory-inclined and more adapted toward eating raw meat than humans (that protein they needed to get from eating people would probably have been destroyed by denaturation, so they probably needed to eat the meat raw). So, compared to humans, vampires have a bigger jawbone, more powerful jaw muscles, and pronounced prognathism. They also have "chinless" faces like Neanderthals, because that's an ancestral hominid trait. Vampire molars are similar to human molars (they are omnivores, so they do have a use for grinding teeth), but their premolars are "scissor" teeth for shredding raw meat, and their front teeth are "scary" carnivore teeth, sharp and able to bite through and tear raw meat with ease (as per expectations, they have large sharp canines - a vampire looks most obviously inhuman when they show their teeth). Possibly vampires fit some extra teeth into their longer jaws. Male vampires could pass for humans more easily than female vampires, because facial hair could hide the weird jaw somewhat.

- Bigger and more protruding earlobes than humans, to direct more sound toward the ear kind of like a parabolic antenna. Possibly the ears have some limited mobility; can be flicked a little, inclined a little in the direction of interesting sounds, etc.. Movement of the ears may have had some expressive/communicative functions in ancient vampire culture, and modern vampires may still make some of those expressions instinctively.

- Weird eyes, but not just in the way you'd think. Yes, they have cat pupils and "eyeshine," but aside from that vampire eyes look like Homo erectus eyes, and Homo erectus eyes looked a lot like chimpanzee eyes. So vampire eyes look like chimpanzee eyes (so dark sclera and large sort of orange-brown irises) but with slit pupils and "eyeshine" in darkness. Human eyes are a whole different kind of weird.

- Edit: also, the books don't mention this, but I think it would make a lot of sense (and be thematically appropriate) for vampires to have the same rapid eye movements as Echopraxia zombies, and for the same reason. Though I think in vampires it might be a behavior associated with hunting and other high-energy states, and most of the time they might conserve sensory processing resources by processing vision more like humans do and moving their eyes more like humans do. A vampire doing rapid eye movements might be the same kind of red flag that the "hunting flush" is.

[random-thought-depository]

I'll take some time this Halloween to put up the next part of my Blindsight old vampire language sequence! Earlier, I said that I think vampires probably would have had an oral literature of sorts, and much of it might have taken a form structurally similar to human poetry and song (as the rhyme and rhythm would serve as mnemonic devices, just as they did for non-literate human cultures)! I also said that I think old vampire might have had a writing system! Today I address a question that follows from that which I think is interesting: what would old vampire oral and written literature look like?

So, a look at what I imagine various types of old vampire "literature" might look like:

Old vampire boundary marker writing:

This would be hieroglyphic/idiographic writing on trees, rock walls, or other convenient surfaces, used by vampires to communicate with vampires outside their own family without the risk of meeting an outsider vampire face-to-face. They would serve to put an outsider vampire on notice that they were entering or inside the family's territory (old vampire families didn't bother trying to police the borders of their territories cause they were so thinly spread, but they did have an area they usually roamed over and an outsider vampire in that area might be attacked), but an old vampire boundary marker tree, rock, or wall also often became a sort of message board; a vampire who wanted to communicate something to a vampire outside its social group would go there, put a message on it, and then check back later for a reply, and all the vampire families in the area might periodically check it to see if anyone had written a message addressed to them or otherwise relevant to their lives. Boundary marker writing served as a convenient medium for suggesting and negotiating deals and posting "love letters" (basically just another kind of deal proposal). Useful information that could be given away with minimal cost and risk might sometimes also be posted, in the hopes that others would reciprocate (vampires would have enough of a facility for game theory to realize the potential benefits of such a norm). And I like to imagine that vampires were still social enough to sometimes enjoy having "pen pals" so boundary marker writing often got a bit gossipy. A vampire might use boundary marker writing to tell another vampire about such things as the movement of a new vampire into the area or the killing of a mutually disliked enemy. I think some boundary marker writing might be kind of relatable or endearing to humans; vampire "pen pals" may sometimes have helped each other by doing things like telling each other where to find medicinal plants and may sometimes have shared news like the birth of an offspring or the death of a family member, and a death notice might sometimes be answered with a kind of condolence message. For neurodivergent vampires like Magpie boundary marker writing was often their only chance to socialize with another person who shared their neurotype, and I suspect a human might find some of the correspondence between such individuals quite poignant.

One alien and icky touch: I imagine boundary markers might be scent-marked by means such as urinating on them. On a more humanizing note, they might often be marked with self-portraits. Different language, same message; "you're in my hunting territory, this is what I smell like, this is what I look like" or "I've been here, this is what I smell like, this is what I look like."

Old vampire "love letters":

These were written messages exchanged between vampire males and females concerning the possibility of a mating partnership (they were usually something like a message carved on a tree trunk or daubed on a rock wall, not anything like an actual paper letter).

I've called them "love letters" for simplicity, but they were really anything but. They read much more like business deal propositions and negotiations. I think they'd actually mostly be some of the most alienating parts of the old vampire literature corpus to a human. For instance, one of Fratricide's early "love letters" to Heron might consist of him describing his "stalking" of her, announcing his interest in mating with her and impregnating her and acquiring the benefits of being part of her group, bragging about his size and strength and all the vampires and humans and dangerous animals he's killed, and suggesting that he'd be an asset to her family and give her strong offspring like himself. If you wanted to create a selection of old vampire literature calculated to seem to confirm the impression of "vampires were basically terrifying Lovecraftian abominations/starfish aliens that happened to be roughly human-shaped and maybe weren't even sentient," old vampire "love letters" might feature prominently in it.

One exception: on the rare occasions that a female with Magpie's neurodivergence became an alpha female, she might draw interest from males with the same neurodivergence intrigued by the possibility of mating with a female like themselves. A human might find some of the "love letters" exchanged between such individuals quite poignant. But this would be a very small part of the old vampire "love letter" corpus, likely less than 1%.

Like boundary marker writing, "love letter" exchanges might have usually involved an element of scent-marking and self-portraiture (e.g. pissing and shitting near a courting male's offered gift of a dead animal without taking the animal or removing or eating any part of it might communicate, "I've been here, I lingered here, I didn't take the gift, I'm not interested in you, go away").

Old vampire oral literature:

This would be old vampire "poetry," rhymed and often sung as a mnemonic device, maybe even often accompanied by a kind of simple music (probably drumming or something). This would be the motherlode of old vampire "literature." Unlike boundary marker writing, it was almost entirely intended for cultural transmission within the family. It would have three main purposes:

To serve as a store of practical survival skills; there would be poems/songs that give instructions about how to make a bow, how to start a fire, how to find medicinal plants, how to make clothing, etc..

To serve as a repository of historical memory, enabling the present generation of vampires to learn from events that happened before their own lifetime or otherwise outside the direct perception of their senses and to model a large repertoire of potential survival and problem-solving behavior.

To keep track of the genealogies of the vampires in the area, for inbreeding-avoidance and to otherwise minimize the chances of producing offspring with genetic defects (old vampires had a serious genetic homogeneity problem as a result of the many bottlenecks their species passed through during its evolution, so this was an important consideration for them).

I think most old vampire oral literature would combine all three functions. Humans tend to find information easier to remember if it comes with an interesting story. Vampires might be different cause they're less social, but I suspect Homo erectus probably already had a lot of neural machinery dedicated to social stuff which could be recruited by attaching information to an interesting dramatic story, so seems plausible this would be a trait vampires inherited and retained. So old vampire oral literature would probably have a lot of stories that pause often to make plot-relevant infodumps about stuff like how to tie various knots, how to make a bow and arrows, how to build a fire, etc.. I imagine old vampire storytellers might have exercised a lot of discretion about how many infodumps to attach (e.g. more with an audience that includes children, less with an entirely adult audience), and the structure of the poems might have been set up to facilitate this, with certain formulae that could be used as "hooks" for an expository infodump. Things like hunting techniques and sickness spirit lore would be transmitted by relating hunts an ancestor participated in, times an ancestor got sick, etc..

With their superintelligence I'm sure vampires had great memorization capacity - actually, I think that might be a big part of the reason their superintelligence evolved, cause without it they'd be very vulnerable to Tasmania syndrome. So I imagine this old vampire oral literature was very extensive; just about every adult ancient vampire was a walking library of a huge amount of this oral literature. Memorizing the equivalent of many Iliads is a lot easier if hearing a poem once or a few times is usually all you need to retain a perfect memory of it for the rest of your life! The main bottleneck on their transmission of cultural lore might have been just how fast they could talk to each other, and that might be an important secondary reason for old vampire to be a very efficient language. One potential implication I like is old vampires had very long historical memories despite being a mostly oral culture; the vampire characters in my fanfic set around 8,000 BCE will remember the vampire happy time (at least < 20K years earlier) in the same kind of way we remember the Roaring Twenties and the Napoleonic Wars, and they might well preserve accurate accounts of events that happened hundreds of thousands of years ago. They will be aware of the cycle of the ice ages.

One issue I see with this idea is gathering around to sing and drum regularly would be a glaring exception to the "vampires are transients and don't talk much" thing. One possible way I could see to reconcile them is: don't imagine a singing vampire as whirling around hitting a tambourine and shouting, imagine them as basically whispering. If vampires "see" with their ears and nose as well as eyes (my preferred paradigm for them), they might be able to hear whispers as easily understandable conversational volume talking (that would surely aid in hunting as well!). Vampire "poems" may also have relied heavily on sign language, so they might have also included an element of something like dancing.

I think that would be an appropriate kind of alien and a little creepy! For a human, sitting in a vampire poetry circle would be like... It's happening in at night, when the moon is down, or maybe in a very dark enclosed den or a cave, and you basically can't see anything. But you can hear something a little like strange, alien music and singing, full of whistles and clicks, at the volume of a loud whisper, coming from somewhere very nearby. If you could see in darkness as they can, you'd see the reciter's hands dancing, making restricted but fast and intricate movements.

OK, I'm suggesting old vampire has a story corpus. What are the stories like? Well, I think a very simple description might be that they were 1) true, 2) amoral, 3) sensual, 4) terse, 5) often violent. I think a human would probably find most old vampire oral literature off-putting, but there would be some vampire oral literature a human might appreciate! In my next and probably final post of this series, I will discuss what old vampire oral literature might look like in more detail, and maybe also present an example of a relatively sympathetic piece of old vampire boundary marker writing!

[random-thought-depository]

I know Blindsight says ancient vampire language was clicky, but I think it might make more sense if it was hissy, with a lot of sibilants and long aaaa sounds, to blend in with the sound of wind in leaves or grass. I tried making a little recording to show what I imagine it might sound like with that interpretation:

I think this could be appropriately creepy!

PoV: you're being hunted by vampires in a storm; do you realize anything's wrong (PS, the attack signal comes at around the 1:05 mark)?:

Could you hear them? Keep in mind, they would be a lot better at this than I am (much more practice and much stronger motivation and better hearing!), and I was deliberately going for "audible enough to be detectable and a little creepy" over "actually inaudible," as the latter wouldn't give people much to listen to!

One environment where I could see clicks being helpful for hunting is during or just after rain, when they might be mistaken for dripping water. Maybe vampires had different hunting dialects for different weather?

--------------

Oh, also, what if this...

"Every now and then I still hear a burst of pure voice, tight with tension, just short of outright panic more often than not: some sort of pursuit in progress, a ship making the plunge into deep space, other ships in dispassionate pursuit. The fugitives never seem to get very far before their signals are cut off.

I can't remember the last time I heard music but I hear something like it sometimes, eerie and discordant, full of familiar clicks and pops. My brainstem doesn't like it. It scares my brainstem to death."

But instead of naturally gravitating toward click languages, vampires just naturally gravitate toward languages that blend into background noise, as part of their natural hiding instinct? Modern vampires aren't hunting in the woods! If it worked that way, they'd be more likely to make a conlang full of sounds that easily blend into the background soundscape of a modern city! So modern vampire language might instead be designed to sound like traffic and machinery sounds plus snippets of innocuous street conversation and advertising jingles. I think that might be appropriately creepy in this context!

Every time they blow up a human ship they say, "Don't forget to subscribe!"

[random-thought-depository]

It feels a real shame that Stargazer's people never had an opportunity to *be* a people—there were hardly any vampires, really, and even fewer vampire-hybrids, but she represents something that's just far and away *better* than either of her parents: no obligate cannibalism, more social than vampires, more intelligent and perceptive than humans, and exceptionally empathetic. But this last quality, more than even their hybrid nature, probably sealed their long-term unviability.

That was kind of what I was going for. :)

I don't think Stargazer's hyper-empathy is a universal dhampir trait - if it was her family probably have known that beforehand and not tried taking her on a human hunt. So I guess that's something that might be sensitive to subtle gene interactions that might be different in different dhampirs. I like the idea that hyper-empathy was a pretty common dhampir trait though.

It occurs to me that in the Blindsight universe dhampirs that were raised in or defected to human society might have been part of the historical inspiration for legends of superhuman heroes like Gilgamesh, Hercules, Achilles, Samson, the Nephilim, etc. (maybe Gilgamesh was a dhampir produced by vampire brood parasitism adjacent behavior, while Enkidu was a dhampir like Stargazer who defected to human society).

The way I imagine Blindsight Neanderthals, they might have been a little like what a dhampir nation would have been like.

[random-thought-depository]

Blindsight fanfic stuff: disability in prehistoric vampire society headcanons:

On one hand, ancient vampires were very uncompassionate to individuals of their own kind who couldn't hunt. A vampire mother would usually eat her own baby or child if they seemed unlikely to mature into a successful hunter (because of deformity, disability, sickliness, being a slow learner, etc.). Vampires who got too old and feeble to hunt often didn't live very long afterward, as they'd often be quickly filicided and cannibalized by their own pack at that point. Similarly, a vampire who was temporarily incapacitated by injury or illness would be tended, fed and protected by their pack, but if their illness or injury rendered them permanently unable to hunt they'd usually be filicided and cannibalized. Vampires also had a significant rate of child-against-child lethal violence between siblings, which would have disproportionately killed weaker children.

On the other hand...

In my fic, a neighboring/rival pack to Heron's pack has a blind elder female vampire in it. This blind vampire can "see" so much through her ears and nose that she's able to move around the landscape and forage unassisted. She can even hunt on her own, by using tactics like "hide, wait for a human to walk by, jump out and hit them in the head with a club." So she is accepted and valued by her pack as a hunter (and was permitted to live by her mother because hers is a normal condition of blind vampires). More than that, they value her for her blindness! Can't get a crucifix glitch seizure if you can't see the cross, and having so much practice "seeing" with her ears, nose, and hands she's very good at moving around human settlements by sound, scent, touch, dead reckoning, and inference. Her pack values her in approximately the same way Heron's pack values Heron's half-human daughter; she's their "can approach and enter human farmer villages in relative safety" specialist.

Also...

Vampires had a long non-speaking phase, until they were around eight years old, during which they were dependent on sign language. And I am considering that maybe a significant minority of vampires never left this non-speaking phase and were dependent on sign language as adults. So ancient vampire languages included very well-developed systems of sign language (which was also useful for stealth during hunting), the use of which was totally socially normal for them; default vampire communication was something like half signed and half spoken. This made things a lot easier for non-speaking and deaf vampires! And, as with blindness, deafness was less debilitating for a vampire than for a human, because they had two other excellent senses and lots of sensory processing hardware they could use to compensate (maybe deaf vampires could learn to process felt vibrations as sounds so they could use their bodies as one big ear; it wouldn't as sensitive as normally functioning vampire ears or even human ears, but it might help).

So blind, deaf, and non-speaking vampires could function more-or-less socially normally in vampire society, could hunt, and as children were kept alive by their packs as future hunters and as adults were valued by their pack as hunters. And in some times and places blind vampires were actually valued by their packs for their blindness.