The antagonist of House Kaligor, dead a thousand years by Lotan's reckoning, and the reason he says his family is cursed.

Lotan's telling uses two spellings — Noctyrix and Noctryix — near enough evenly. This wiki uses Noctyrix. Nobody has ruled on it.

What She Was

One of the first vampires Strahd turned, and in love with him. He rejected her at every turn; his fixation on Tatyana left room for nothing but carnal use. Her love became hatred, and she went looking through Barovia for power enough to take revenge.

The Amber Temple found her first. Its vestiges wanted a new protector — the lich Exethanter had grown old and forgetful, unable to recall his own name — and they gave her what she was looking for.

She became a bruxa: a vampire the equal of Strahd himself, and forbidden to touch him, because the vestiges still wanted his evil to feed on.

What That Bought Her

None of a vampire's usual limits. She walked in daylight, entered houses uninvited, and kept a shop. She used what Lotan calls her kiss of darkness to turn Strahd's own vampires to her side and play with them. And she sold her own wine beside the Wizards of Wine's, carrying its curse into people who had troubles enough already.

Given what his family later bought, Lotan tells the wine part with more feeling than the rest.

The Death

Her evil fed the vestiges, so the temple could not be sealed while she lived. Velonar's party came for her through the Amber Temple — past Exethanter, past a pair of amber golems, past an arcanaloth who despised her enough to guide them but not enough to fight.

They found her in a hall of black marble laced with amber, surrounded by followers her wine had driven mad. The fight was short. Flameskulls none of them had summoned fought on their side, and her spells failed as though counterspelled — the arcanaloth, helping more than he had promised.

The Curse

Bleeding out from a gash in her neck, she cursed the bloodlines of everyone in the room. Every lineage present, tainted forever.

Her blood was then used, with Andrea's knowledge, to seal the temple for a thousand years.

Lotan descends from two people who were standing there.

Ties

Related

Andrea KaliskinyA druid of the Fifth Order of Celtans who joined the sealing of the Amber Temple — and, by Lotan's account, was sent to do exactly that. Velonar KaligorLotan's ancestor — the warlock who is said to have burned Count Strahd to ash, sealed the Amber Temple, and bought a winery with the proceeds. House KaligorThe Barovian line Lotan comes from — a warlock ancestor, a druid bride, a dead vampire's curse, and a winery that has outlasted all three. Lorenzo di ErranteA name from a thousand years past — the younger di Errante brother of legend, lost with his house in the catastrophe that raised the fog over Vallombrosa. Marcello di ErranteA figure from the legend of Vallombrosa, surviving in the Amaranth Theater's annual restaging of The Tragedy — and in a thousand years of contradictory tales. Tolomeo LucenteA scholar and explorer who surfaces only in the margins of old records — remembered, where he is remembered at all, for chasing knowledge others left alone.