Water weakness

Scanning his surroundings, Nolt reached for his hexagonal staff with his
right hand. “I don’t think I’ll find him any farther downstream. So, did the
bastard make it out without drowning then?” the Marcus brother wondered
aloud. “Then again, I don’t see how a dhampir could manage a stunt like
that...”

The tinge of displeasure in Nolt’s voice was due to the fact the species
known as dhampir had many of the characteristics of supernatural creatures.
As a blood mix between the Nobility— the vampires—and humans,
dhampirs inherited some of the physical strengths and weaknesses of both.
From the Nobility, dhampirs inherited the ability to recover from injuries
that would be considered lethal to a human being. On the other hand,
dhampirs lost up to seventy percent of their strength in daylight, they felt an
unbridled lust for the blood of the living when they were hungry, and,
perhaps strangest of all, not one of them could stay afloat in water.

At the beginning of the era of mankind’s Great Rebellion, the vampires’
utter lack of buoyancy was prized as one of the few possible ways to
dispose of them. However, when it became clear that drowning itself had
markedly milder results when compared to stakes or sunlight, a much
dimmer view of immersion’s value as a countermeasure was adopted.
Drowning caused the heart to stop functioning and the body to cease all
regeneration, but these effects were easily undone with the coming of night
and an infusion of fresh blood.

But so long as a vampire was denied either blood or the onset of night, it
would be impossible for him to recover from drowning. In other words,
after an immersion, it was possible to put the comatose Nobility to the torch
or to seal him away in the earth forever. Because vampires were so
vulnerable after drowning, running water still served mankind in reasonably
good stead.

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