Welcome to my series of posts aimed at avid fans of Blackthorn who want a little extra insight.

The Third Species and their Shadows

For thousands of years, even before the term ‘vampire’ was known, blood-consuming supernatural beings have appeared in every culture around the world. Apart from rare occasions when they’ve been constituted as deities, they have almost always been associated with evil origins. This was further enforced by the introduction of Christian ideologies, with vampires not only deemed as a risk to our physical self but our spiritual self too.

The most popular belief is that vampires were once human before being transformed into the undead. Whether reanimated by an evil spirit upon death or willingly having sacrificed their soul in place of immortality, whether bitten by a vampire or having consumed the blood of one, in each circumstance the human’s soul is lost and their links with the afterlife subsequently severed.

Those beliefs don’t apply in Blackthorn. Blackthorn vampires aren’t immortal. They’re not humans reanimated or contaminated and they’re most certainly not the undead because Blackthorn vampires were never human at all. They didn’t swap their souls for immortality because they never had a soul to swap. Instead, vampires and other third species (e.g. lycans) have ‘shadows’ in place of souls. They are born that way and are subsequently a species in their own right.

This doesn’t mean they’re exempt from the judgement of human ideals, concepts and beliefs though. Blackthorn is based in an alternative reality but the humans that oversee it are still governed by the same historical and religious influences as us, right up to the point the third species outed themselves.

And it is the human-orientated Global Council (responsible for the political and social set-up since the third species came out into the open) that use evidence of this absence of a soul, and the presence of a shadow in its place, to define the third species.

The Global Council reinforces the theory that the soul is a pliable facet responsive to redemption, unique to the human condition and tightly associated with the afterlife. Humans are consequently defined as the ‘first’ species in the hierarchy of morality because, with the most to lose, they have profound reasons to govern their actions.

Any species whose actions do not need to be restrained by conscience, that are not subject to judgement and who, by the soul’s very absence, are excluded from redemption, are subsequently a lesser species morally. Until they prove otherwise, those with shadows instead of souls are hence categorized as the ‘third species’.

With this theory behind the Global Council’s propaganda, reinforced by the physical risks the third species pose because of their predatory instincts, the decisions to ‘cage’ the third species is upheld.

But do the Global Council really believe in the divisive connotations it enforces, or is it just another excuse to retain the upper hand? Is the melting pot it has created within Blackthorn intentionally so? And is the very ‘darkness’ implied by the existence of shadows within the third species a darkness at all?

I’ll be back with more vampire mythology next week, when I’ll be sharing some more traditional beliefs and the origins behind them – and how I’ve applied (or not applied) these to Blackthorn vampires.