Right now the People are embroiled in an inner power struggle. The head of the Atlanta office retired—or perhaps they killed him off, nobody knows—and two of the Masters of the Dead are maneuvering their way to the top spot. One is Ghastek, who is quite brilliant, competent, extremely dangerous, and wrapped in a protective shell of world-weary arrogance. Basically a know-it-all with the expertise and a pack of vampires to back it up. The other is Mulradin, of whom we know little except that he is a family man and he becomes perturbed when people say harmless things, such as “Holy shit!” in the earshot of his wife, who mustn’t be sullied by being exposed to such coarseness. Bite me.

Here’s the kicker: most people don’t know it but the entirety of the People answer to one man. Remember the Age of Magic and wizards with godlike powers? Turns out that when magic began to disappear from the world, not all of those wizards died. Some of them went into hibernation. Thousands of years later, the Shift woke one of them up. Think about it. Here’s a man unconstrained by ethics and morals. A man who used to rule an empire. A wizard-king, a law unto himself, who has lived for thousands of years with the power to crush thousands of lives with one single push of magic. A walking nuclear bomb. A man so powerful, he doesn’t need a name; he has phrases attached to him starting in all capitals. The Father of Undeath. The Builder of Towers.

He calls himself Roland now. I asked the Consort why and she showed me the Song of Roland. It’s a twelfth-century ballad about a knight who is ambushed because of treachery and refuses to blow his horn out of pride until all of his soldiers are dead and he finally blows so hard, his temples burst and he dies a martyr. Make of it what you will.

Thousands of years ago, Roland created vampires and now he runs the People from his territory in the Midwest. There are stories and myths of him scattered throughout folklore, the Torah, the Bible, and other holy books under different names. Apparently, Roland has two compulsions. First, he is a social engineer. He builds empires. He can’t help himself. He knows that the only way we can achieve enlightenment is under his rule. Democracy isn’t a concept he considers relevant, which is really bad news for us. Second, he falls in love. He falls in love a lot and makes children, and sooner or later, these über-powerful children turn on him and he has to kill them. For example, Abraham was one of his; they had some sort of a spat, and Roland exiled him until Abraham finally died later in poverty. Not exactly the way the Bible tells it, but there you go.