Santino

Santino leads the great vampire coven in Rome and receives Armand into its ranks. He gives the coven’s religious doctrine a historical frame, teaching that vampires should embody an unexplained affliction upon humanity; under his direction, Armand becomes a disciplined ritualist and an emissary sent to gather and instruct other Children of Darkness.

Identity and Doctrine

Santino is introduced as the leader of the Roman coven, whose meeting place lies in the catacombs. He comes down the stone steps to receive Armand with outstretched arms. The narrative identifies him as having been Born to Darkness during the Black Death. He tells Armand that, in 1349, while plague devastated the human population, he received a vision that vampires should resemble the Black Death: a vexation without explanation that would make people doubt God’s mercy and intervention.

The coven is presented as a dark counterpart to the Roman Church. Santino takes Armand into a sanctuary lined with human skulls and teaches him vampire history and the group’s great laws. The setting and instruction bind the coven’s authority to religious ceremony, while its central purpose is framed as an assault on human certainty about divine protection.

Armand’s Initiation and Training

After Armand loses the master who had given meaning to his existence, he enters Santino’s Roman coven and bows before its leader. Santino receives him and begins his instruction, moving him from familiar rituals and prohibitions toward the larger laws governing the group. The initiation supplies Armand with a community and a new account of what vampires are for.

Santino presents that account as a tradition reaching back through the ages: vampires prey on humanity by night and are the chosen of Satan. Those admitted to the ranks, he says, first prove themselves through a hundred crimes before receiving the Dark Gift. Their initiation entails an apparent death before loved ones, a small infusion of vampire blood, confinement in a coffin, and eventual emergence with the strength to break free. Santino’s teaching makes this ordeal a test: those who rise become Children of Darkness, while those too weak to escape receive no mercy.

He also explains the Rules of Darkness as a regime governing both place and conduct. Vampires must live among the dead and return to their own graves or similar resting places; they must shun light and lure victims away from company; and they must honor the power attributed to God through the crucifix and the Sacraments. Santino insists that they must never enter a house of worship, which his doctrine represents as a place where divine power could render them helpless and destroy them. These rules make the coven’s identity legible through burial, nocturnal predation, and ritual prohibition.

Leadership and Influence

Armand pleases Santino by memorizing the laws and mastering the ceremonial incantations, rituals, and prayers. Under Santino’s leadership, he witnesses elaborate Sabbats and learns from vampires he regards as the most powerful, skillful, and beautiful he has known. His training turns him from a new adherent into a representative of the coven’s authority.

Santino sends Armand out as a missionary to gather wandering Children of Darkness into covens and guide others in the Sabbat and the performance of the Dark Trick. Armand carries these teachings through Spain, Germany, and France, where he instructs other vampires in the group’s blessings and rituals. He recalls moments when the coven surrounded and comforted him, drawing unity from his strength; the movement outward thus grows from the belonging he first found under Santino’s direction.

Armand also develops an unusually effective practice of killing. He learns to summon people who wish to die, calling silently near their homes until a victim appears. This capacity is part of the expertise he acquires within Santino’s world, where ritual instruction and predation are intertwined.

Narrative Significance

Santino’s account of vampire history is a sectarian explanation, not a neutral description of the supernatural order. The coven treats Satan as master and its own predation as a divinely appointed challenge to human faith. Its rules prescribe reverence for Christian objects even as its members claim an allegiance to Satan, giving the doctrine a deliberate tension between the religious forms it retains and the hostile purpose it assigns them.

The teaching also exposes the cost of a closed tradition. Armand asks about the ancient beings known as Those Who Must Be Kept, but Santino admits that he does not know what the phrase means; neither, he says, does any vampire he has known. The coven consigns that unresolved history to silence and declares its own doctrine sufficient. Santino’s authority therefore shapes Armand not only through what he teaches, but through the boundaries he places around knowledge: mysteries that cannot be explained are set aside in favor of a coherent faith, a shared ritual life, and a defined mission.