It's just the first chapter and we already have a fratricide. I like where this is going. I wonder though, are vampires a common knowledge amongst ponies? And if so, are they exclusively bat ponies or can exist as other species?

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Heya! I can't spoil too much, but I can at least tell you a bit about common knowledge on the subject matter, stuff that you could learn from really anybody in the area, it just hasn't come up quite yet in the story.

Vampires are known to exist but are thought to have been mostly wiped out, outside of Luna Bay, since a bunch went balls out and backed Nightmare Moon when Luna fell a few generations back, leading to more of a bloody rebellion. This drove a wedge between the bats and the rest of the more conventional pony races, which ultimately led to a large portion of the already semi-isolationist bats moving up to the Luna Bay area. There have been some reports of non-bat vampires, but they haven't been verified, most believe that these are just ponies being overly imaginative or confusing some other dark magic activity in the area for vampirism.

Despite many knowing that they exist, time has taken its toll, and scarce few ponies beyond Luna Bay know the actual rules behind vampirism, what abilities they have, or their weaknesses beyond old superstition at this point. Some more paranoid scholars believe that this is the result of a deliberate disinformation campaign by the vampires themselves, although there has been no proof of such either.