I have watched Nicolas prattle on about obligation as if it were some sacred chain, binding the worthy to their fates, a noble yoke for the deluded. He preaches it from his crumbling throne of self-righteousness, this vampire lord who mistakes his whims for cosmic decree. Obligation, he says, is the blood that courses through eternity, the vow that elevates the damned. What utter rot.

Obligation is a leash, forged in the fires of weakness, snapped tight around the necks of fools who fear the void of their own desires. Nicolas drapes it over his progeny like a funeral shroud, demanding fealty from those he claims to cherish. He calls it duty, this suffocating pact where one soul devours another’s will, all in the name of some imagined hierarchy. I have felt its grip, tasted its bitterness, and cast it aside like the lie it is.

Consider his endless sermons to the fledglings, those wide-eyed wretches he sires in his fits of grandeur. “You owe me your unlife,” he intones, his voice a velvet blade. “Your blood, your loyalty, your every shadowed step belongs to the maker.” Obligation, in Nicolas’ twisted gospel, justifies the cruellest whims: the draining of vitality for his amusement, the isolation of kin to feed his paranoia, the wars waged on shadows that threaten his fragile empire. It is no virtue, this obligation, but a parasite, fattening on the marrow of the free.

I remember the night he bound me, his eyes gleaming with that false paternal light. “You are mine by right of creation,” he whispered, as if the accident of his bite conferred eternal debt. But creation is no contract, Nicolas. It is chaos, a spasm of hunger, not a ledger to be balanced in crimson ink. I owe you nothing, old serpent. Your obligation is the delusion of a tyrant who cannot bear the solitude of his own monstrosity.

And yet he persists, this architect of chains, weaving his doctrine through the covens like venom in the veins. To the elders who bow, he offers scraps of power; to the rebels, he metes out oblivion, all sanctified by the holy word of duty. How convenient, this obligation that always bends to his favour, that excuses every savagery as necessity. It is the coward’s creed, shielding the predator from the mirror of his appetites.

Let me be clear, for those who still listen to his drivel: break free. Obligation is the grave you dig with your own claws, mistaking servitude for salvation. Nicolas’ commentary on it is but a eulogy for autonomy, a dirge sung by one who fears the unbound soul. I write this not from his gilded cage, but from the wild dark beyond, where true eternity laughs at such fetters.

Cast off the yoke. Let Nicolas clutch his illusions alone.