The Vampire Gatsby

Written by BellaDonna De Wolf

In the year 1929, the United States stock market teetered on the edge of collapse. Some people barely scraping by while the wealthy managed to slide by the great depression cloaked in the glittering mirage still flickering from the ashes of the Roaring Twenties. While tucked away in hidden corners of the world, beneath the gilded chandeliers beginning to collect dust in New York estates, a darker force raised its head. Awoken by the cries in a thousand tongues... The living called it the schemes of high society, the fat cats and robber barons.

One thing was certain though, Jay Gatsby was no longer among the living. He had once been a man who built his empire on longing and illusion, on wealth drawn from the underworld, on whispered dreams that dissolved with the sunrise. On that night in 1922, floating face-down in his own pool, death took him to her chest as she embraces all things. No amount of wealth can buy you an eternity worth living, not even for a man such as him. But an undead, cursed thing, that may be negotiable. 

In the darkness a hand, cool and hard as marble, plucked him from the water. Struck his name from the Fate’s book, stole him back from their merciful arms. Instead of that silence of death, he awoke to a nightmare wrapped in flesh, a beautiful beast in the shape of a young woman, pale as death, hair as red as fire and eyes alight with unholy hunger. She saw all he had done, all he had been and offered him a new dream—one bathed in crimson blood and death. One where he would have to watch as all he knew, crumbled to dust in the hands of time. Where he remained untouched.

He awoke to hunger that gnawed his belly hollow, abandoned by his sire deep within the wilderness. He awoke to the power to take and take until the world was nothing but a husk under his touch and see the exact nature of the monster his greed became played out over centuries. He woke to eternity of punishment. To a society of monsters trying to masquerade as men.

It took time to find them again, the creatures like him. Stumbling through the great depression clueless to his nature beyond what his urges demanded. When he found that girl and the society that had created him, they were but a fraction of the world he had been forced into. The Order of Eterni—an ancient, secretive cabal of the undead. Their influence a thread woven through the fabric of every nation. Each society and region with their own goals and leaders.

He learned of the Jiangshi in China, hopping through shadowed streets amidst the rise of the Nationalists. Of the strigoi in Romania, creatures whispered of in hushed tones even as villagers fled the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire. The asiman in West Africa, drinking blood beneath the cover of colonial rule, their rituals surviving the onslaught of Western imperialism and the hunters who worked to take back power rightfully owed to them. Of the Sekhmet cult in Egypt, hidden beneath the sands as archaeologists disturbed ancient tombs, their priests still making offerings to a lion-headed goddess of blood, war and healing. In America, the aristocracy of the undead flourished in the speakeasies and penthouses of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Blood flowed like bootlegged gin, and the great vampire houses waged wars not with bullets, but with influence. Al Capone’s empire masked something older beneath the facade of the mob, and Wall Street was not only built on money, but on the deals of creatures who could afford to wait centuries for their investments to bear fruit. Every place where humans lived, so did their undead kin. Different paths, creeds, and origins, but damned nonetheless to live a life outside of time.

Jay Gatsby, ever the man of his time, began to find his way back into society in his new un-life as he had his old one—with style. He transformed his estate into something far greater than a mansion of earthly pleasures. It became a sanctuary for the undead elite, a place where the old world met the new, where vampires from across the globe gathered to indulge, to scheme, to plot their survival and control over a changing world. Here, beneath the shimmering illusion of another lavish party, whispered deals were struck that would shape the fates of nations. You may see them even now… The shadows lurking in the darkened corners of cabarets, still walking the streets eyes a bit too bright in the dark, ever watching, ever waiting, just this side of something monstrous.

But even immortality has its dangers. There have always been hunters among the living who knew of their kind. Others among the undead who did not agree with toying with the lives of mortals. The Vatican’s inquisitors sent to purge them from the shadows. Scientists in Germany experimenting with ways to unearth and destroy them. The Bolsheviks, having torn down the old Russian aristocracy, whispered of creatures lurking beneath the ruins of the Romanovs and how to never let history repeat itself. And beyond the glitz and the jazz that covered deep suffering and an ongoing class war, something old stirred—a hunger that made even the Eterni shudder in remembrance.

Yet, for now, Gatsby raised his glass of ruby-red indulgence, smiling as the music played in countless estates and mansions and bars. The night was young, just as he would be for the rest of time. The hubris of youth and power he could not fully grasp, blinding him in the dazzling decadence around him. He was a man born hungry, and a vampire even more so. Jay Gatsby was never content to remain in one place. Over the next century, he took his grand parties beyond the shores of America, orchestrating soirées in the shadows of Parisian cathedrals, beneath the crimson lanterns of Shanghai, in the ruins of lost palaces in Cairo. Any place just forgotten enough, to allow for his guests' indulgence. His legend grew, whispered among those who walked only at night. The undead, from fledglings to ancient lords, flocked to his affairs, each a testament of their time, a memory frozen in place to a world that refused to stop time with them.

And now, in the year 2025, Gatsby calls once more. This time, the revelry finds itself in Denver, Colorado—a city of gold rush ambition making a fitting stage for his latest spectacle. The Arcane Vampire Ball is no mere gathering, but a continuation of his eternal vision: a night where mortals and the undead mingle in decadence, where secrets are exchanged beneath flickering light, where those who enter may never wish to leave.

Gatsby watches, waits, and the party has only just begun.