He had seen the growth of affluence since the dawn of the Christian era. Even coming out of the Egyptian desert, a ragged half-crazed remnant, he’d been astonished at the abundance of the people of the Roman Empire—that common soldiers rode horses in battle (an unthinkable advantage for a being of Gregory’s time), that Indian and Egyptian fabrics were sold over the whole known world, that female peasants had their own great looms, and that solid Roman roads bound together the empire, replete with caravansaries for travelers every few miles, and plenty to eat for everyone. Why, these enterprising Romans had actually invented a liquid stone with which they built not only roads but aqueducts to carry water over miles to their ever-growing cities. Exquisitely made pots, jugs, amphora were imported to the remotest towns for sale to the common people. In fact all manner of practical and fancy goods traveled Roman roads and waterways from roof tiles to popular books.

Yes, there had been great setbacks. But despite the wholesale collapse of the Roman Empire, Gregory had seen nothing but “progress” ever since with the early inventions of the Middle Ages—the barrel, the mill wheel, the stirrup, the new harnesses that did not choke the oxen in the fields, the ever-spreading taste for ornate and beautiful clothes, and the building of soaring cathedrals in which the common people could worship right along with the richest and most privileged among them.

What a far cry from the great churches of Rheims or Amiens were the crude temples of ancient Egypt reserved entirely for their gods and a handful of priests and rulers.

Yet it fascinated him and intrigued him that it had taken the romantic era to produce vampires bound and determined to make themselves known to history and in such melancholy and philosophical literature as those books.

There was another key aspect to this that greatly puzzled Gregory as well. He felt with all his soul that this was the greatest age for the Undead that he had ever known. And he did not understand why the poetic authors of the Vampire Chronicles never addressed this obvious fact.