Nicole Cadet Fantasy Art

Writers, please, if you are going to write tales about vampires/ werewolves/ demons/ folklore/whatever... please, please, research the history of the name your characters use to call themselves. Vrykolokas/ Vrykolakas stems from Greek and Eastern European tradition of dead that rise, not Western/ French sources. Templar knights of French Origin (11th-12th century) would have unlikely have called themselves Vrykolokas - this term was not popularised in Western Europe until the 17th century. Sure, they would have lived through this time, but think about it... you tend to stick to the names you learn as a child. Western Europeans called them Revenants as early as the 12th century (stems from the French word revenir, meaning "to return").

I spent the entire time I read Lynn Viehl's Darkyn series which was fairly entertaining being strangely disturbed by the term until I remembered reading about Vrykolokas as Greek vampire-like demon creatures (includes a snake woman Lamia - another one of Zeus's lovers cursed by Hera). It really bugs me when writers go to obvious pains to create worlds around an interesting subtext, then screw up something majorly obvious.

And yeah, she possibly had reasons for using the word (probably it just sounded cool), but little things like that just irritate me :P