WeWriWa 2/9/2020 - Draculesti Dynasty - Torture Chamber

 Welcome back to this week's excerpt for the Weekend Writing Warriors weekly blog hop! We are deep in the throes of my reader letter, which precedes my newest novel, Defender of the Faith, book #1 in the Draculesti Dynasty series.

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Without further ado . . . let's journey into the torture chamber.

So how do we make the jump from Defender of the Faith to Vlad the Impaler? Vlad’s battlefield tactics of impaling people on stakes are legendary and make us cringe today, but history tells us that Vlad’s were tactics worked against the Turks – an enemy that utilized equally brutal tactics, as seen in Vlad’s early life and years of captivity. He beat the Turks at their own game in terms of sensationalistic brutality. Would anything less monstrous, by today’s standards, have worked against an enemy so brutal? Vlad didn’t think so – and the stories that have swirled down through history about his time(s) on the Wallachian throne proves he was right.

While Vlad is characterized as a bloodthirsty sadist remembered namely for his methods of execution, we must remember that torture and execution were very popular during the Middle Ages and were carried out almost as an art.

Public hangings and public beheadings were festival-like occasions, with people streaming into town from miles around to witness the bloody spectacle as excitedly as we might sit down in our living rooms with our families to binge a new Netflix series. Hangings and beheadings were the tamer counterparts to other torture and execution methods of the day, such as being dragged through the streets, hanged until half dead, cut down, genitalia cut off with red-hot blades, gutted while still alive, then hopefully beheaded before being torn into four sections, or quarters. No matter how death was dealt out, families watched and cheered and added to the hype and hysteria, always turning out in droves.

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