Tindr Tryggstad
aka Xander Cox
1043-
TINDR TRYGGSTAD / XANDER COX
Tindr Tryggstad was born in 1043 A.D. in Hordaland, Norway, a gifted skald and warrior who died at thirty-five during the Battle of Hjörungavágr. Counted among the fallen, Tindr did indeed die—he simply did not remain so. What happened immediately afterward is something he has never openly discussed, but when he emerged again, Tindr had become a vampire.
For centuries he wandered Europe under different identities, learning languages, music and, most importantly, how to disappear. By the late 1600s he had settled in England as Alexander “Xander” Cox, a cultured British gentleman attempting to bury his Nordic past. Fluent in several languages, Cox amassed a considerable fortune dealing in antiquities and artworks acquired during wars and political upheavals throughout Europe and Asia. Some were purchased legitimately. Others had considerably murkier origins.
By the late 1700s, Xander sailed for the New World and landed in New York City. There he discovered that the dock gangs and criminal slums were secretly controlled by a vampire nest led by Lucien Devereaux, a vicious French vampire who nearly destroyed him. Badly wounded, Xander fled south to the strange port of Gravesbury Park, New Jersey.
Gravesbury proved an ideal refuge.
Witches, Fae, Shifters and other supernatural beings had quietly occupied the region for generations, and another nocturnal eccentric attracted little notice. Xander settled near Hawthorne Bluff, recovering beneath the earth and returning to his first great love: music.
It was music that eventually drew him to Penelope Hawthorne, whose singing awakened the ancient skald within him. Their brief romance ended tragically with Penelope's murder, and Xander once again withdrew from the world. Her ghost is still said to wander Hawthorne Bluff humming the melody he composed for her.
When Gravesbury publicly acknowledged some of its supernatural population in 1950, Vampires were still an unacknowledged mystery. Xander eventually became an unlikely advocate for vampire integration in 1970. Recognizing that centuries of folklore, sensational newspapers and horror films had made vampires particularly feared, he founded VAMPR—the Vampire Awareness, Mediation & Public Relations initiative. Its mission was to dispel negative stereotypes, encourage responsible feeding and demonstrate that vampires could exist openly as artists, business owners, scholars and ordinary citizens.
A decade later Xander would become one of VAMPR's more embarrassing examples of why such an organization was necessary.
During the 1980s, Xander reinvented himself yet again, this time emerging into Gravesbury's underground music scene as a goth musician in a band called The Battery.
The Battery developed a cult following, playing throughout New Jersey drawing goths, punks and outsiders into Gravesbury's clubs Their growing reputation also attracted other vampires, some curious about the increasingly supernatural-friendly resort and others drawn by rumours that Gravesbury was a place where their kind could live with relative freedom.
For a time, Xander reveled in it.
Unfortunately, fame brought back some of the worst qualities of the ancient vampire. Drugs, nightlife and constant adoration eroded the discipline he had spent centuries developing. Surrounded by fans eager to get close to the enigmatic musician, Xander began feeding from groupies and admirers, sometimes while heavily intoxicated himself. What began as consensual experimentation became increasingly reckless as blood, drugs, sex and celebrity blurred together.
The ancient vampire who had once lectured others about restraint had become precisely the sort of creature VAMPR had been created to defend vampires against being portrayed as.
The Battery eventually imploded, and Xander disappeared from Gravesbury's music scene almost as abruptly as he had entered it.
It remains one of the darker chapters of his long existence—and one he rarely discusses.
Today, Xander Cox is again the cultivated antiquarian, musician and elder vampire of Gravesbury Park, while VAMPR continues attempting to maintain the uneasy peace between the living and the undead.
But somewhere beneath the outfit of the day, public relations campaigns and centuries of carefully constructed identities remains Tindr Tryggstad: the Viking skald who died more than a thousand years ago, the vampire who loved Penelope Hawthorne, and the aging goth musician who once learned that immortality does not necessarily make a man immune to his own worst impulses.