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Dolingen von Gratz
Biographical information
Aliases

Countess Dolingen von Gratz
Ellen Crone
Dearg due
My Countess (by Dracula)
Monster
Ghost
Demon
Strigoi

Gender

Female

Species

Human (formerly)
Vampire

Status

Undead

Age

200+ years old

Cause of Death

Suicide

Killed By

Herself

From

Ireland

Skills

Inhuman beauty
Vampiric powers

Occupation

Spouse to the Tyrant of Ireland
Nan to the Stoker family

Relations
Love interest

Deaglan O'Cuiv

Friends

Bram Stoker
Matilda Stoker
Thornley Stoker
Patrick O'Cuiv
Maggie O'Cuiv

Enemies

Count Dracula
Dracula's gypsies

Appearance
Based on

Bram Stoker's Nanny
Countess Dolingen von Gratz
The Dearg due

Source

Dolingen von Gratz, later known as Ellen Crone, is a major character in the novel Dracul (by Dacre Stoker and J.D. Barker), the authorized prequel to Bram Stoker's Dracula. She serves a crucial role in Bram Stoker's health and his exposure to the supernatural.

Biography[]

Long ago, Dolingen was a young and kind peasant's daughter whose beauty was legendary all across South Ireland. While many men desired her, only one equally pure as her could win her heart: a peasant boy by the name of Deaglan O'Cuiv. Her father however, was not pleased with the idea of his daughter Dolingen being with another peasant so he forbid them from being together.

Having heard of the tales of Dolingen's infinite beauty, a cruel Tyrant proposed her marrige. Tempted by the man's wealth, Dolingen's father eagerly accepted and soon after, Dolingen would adopt her new husband's surname: "von Gratz". The Tyrant however, soon began to torture his new wife in the most depraved of ways while holding her captive in one of the towers of Castle Artane.

Unable to live with the pain of being caged and away from Deaglan, Dolingen eventually jumped from the Castle's tower and fell to her death. Feeling an immense guilt from not being able to save his beloved from the Tyrant, Deaglan came to her tomb and left a rose out of respect. Not long after, the bitter Tyrant also visited her tomb and, out of spite, grabed the rose and tore it appart, causing his hand to bleed. The Tyrant's blood reached Dolingen's corpse and after rejecting God for the indignities she suffered in life, she rose from her grave as one of the undead.

Enraged and vengeful, the vampire made her way to Castle Artane where she hypnotized a guard to let her in. Once inside, Dolingen entered a frenzy and began to slaughter everyone on sight until she reached her husband's chambers, whom she tortured to death by slowly draining him of blood all night long. The next night, she traveled to her father's village. At first, her father thought that she was a product of his imagination but soon he realized that it was in fact his daughter literally back from the dead. However, he wanted nothing to do with her and utterly refused to let her inside his house, even going as far as disowning her as his daughter. She besieged her father for days and murdered anyone who brought him food (eventually murdering the whole village) until she was able to enter his father's house due to the latter dying of hunger. But before he died, his father writed a message with his own blood; that he always hated her because she murdered her mother when she was born. Overcome with a feeling of immense guilt, Dolingen decided to return to her only source of happines: Deaglan O'Cuiv. She made her way to her beloved's house where she found him and they embraced. Seeing the monster that his beloved had become, Deaglan drove a knife through her heart and proceeded to crush her head with a mace, crying all night long with grief.

Three years later, Count Dracula travelled to Ireland and dag Dolingen out of her grave. He took her to his Castle in Transylvania and there he reanimated her by taking the knife out of her heart and feeding her with blood, stating that Deaglan's method of killing vampires was not the correct one and so she remained undead. Dolingen quickly questions Dracula on the reason he brought her there and demands to return to Ireland. Dracula however, states that she will learn to love him because he is offering her a new life with him and jewels, and states that Deaglan couldn't possibly offer anything to her other than contempt for being a monster, stating that mortals cannot comprehend creatures such as her or himself. Despite this, Dolingen remains true to her love for Deaglan, utterly rejects all Dracula's advances towards her and is revolved by his liking to calling her his "Countess".

As the time goes by, Dracula begins to feel frustrated by Dolingen's constant rejections and decides to travel to Ireland once more to kidnap Deaglan. When he returns to Castle Dracula, he turns Deaglan into a vampire in front of Dolingen's eyes and has his gypsies tie him to four horses that dismember his body as they begin to run in the four distinct directions. Dracula then tells a weeping Dolingen that she brought this onto herself and that now Deaglan would suffer eternally for her actions. He then places his ring in Deaglan's dismembered hand and orders the remains to be placed in different graveyards across all Europe.

Dolingen eventually managed to escape Castle Dracula in 1801 and embarked on a quest to restore her beloved's remains. He began to travel Europe with stolen maps from Dracula's library. However she knew she had to keep a low profile because Dracula found out she escaped and, in his rage, murdered all the servants in his Castle before chasing after her. After uncovering many of the graveyards Dracula chose to hide the body pieces of Deaglas, her search eventually lead her to Ireland, where she went by the name of "Ellen Crone" and was hired by the Stoker family to work as a nanny in 1847. This was roughly at the time when the Stokers where having their latest son, Bram.

The child's birth was difficult and he was not breathing when he came out of his mother. Instinctively feeling protective towards the newborn, Ellen granted the baby her vampiric blood so that his body would be healed. The Stokers never found out what she did to him but rather accepted it at the time as some kind of miracle, and eventually forgot about it. Thanks to her, Bram would grow as a sick child who would be forced to be confined un the attic during his childhood because of his fragile health but Ellen wouldn't leave his side, for she was beginning to see this child as her own; telling him bed stories to cheer him up and attending to his needs like a mother would. Though not as close as she was to Bram, she developed a deep bond with the rest of the Stoker children, namely Thornley and Matilda Stoker: giving the former a piece of her hair when he lost himself in the woods so that she could "always find him" and the latter always trying to draw Ellen but never being able to portray her despite being an excellent painter.

In 1854, when Bram began to suffer a severe fever, the Stokers called the doctor Edward to use his leech treatment on him. Knowing that leeches wouldn't work on Bram because he should never have survived his birth in the first place, Ellen decided to call everyone off the room, even Edward. Once they were alone, Ellen shares her blood once again with Bram, causing the illness to disappear and saving his life. Because of this strange events, Bram and Matilda became suspicious of their Nanny and they began to spy on her and Enter her room when she was not there. They discovered their her vampire's box under her bed and Dracula's maps. With the growing certanty that something was off about Ellen, the children decided to follow her one night when she sneaked out of the house to the ruins of Castle Artane. Once they found her there, they still followed her to a swamp, where she took off her cape to reveal an incredibly aged body (due giving Bram to much of her blood and not drinking for a while) and then disappear into the water of the lake. There, at the bottom of the lake, she had the remains of Deaglan O'Cuiv and soon afterwards she transportes them to her coffin, which was in turn transported to Castle Artane. All of this was being done because Ellen was planning to leave the Stokers; Dracula had arrived to Ireland, her presence there was a serious danger to them. When she read in the newspaper that the O'Cuiv family (Deaglan's descendants) were murdered by Patrick O'Cuiv, she knew that Dracula was in truth the one to blame and that this whole event was bait for her to get out of hiding.

Before leaving the Stokers, Ellen puts both Bram and Matilda in a trance, and carried them back from the swamp to their respective bedrooms. She then teased Bram a bit about the reason he is alive and of the why behind those special powers he was now displaying (accelerated healing, night vision and a psychic link to her) before lashing out of the dark and feeding him again with her blood, telling him "sleep" and calling him her "child". After this, she helped Patrick O'Cuiv fake his suicide in prison and turned him into a vampire along with his daughter Maggie to ensure their safety. While she left their home, Bram and Matilda wouldn't give up trying to uncover the secreto behind her and returned to Castle Artane the next night, only to find her empty earth box with nothing but Deaglan's hand with Dracula's ring (which Bram decided to take for hismelf).

While she left the Stokers that night, she never left Bram whom she occasionally still visited to feed him of her blood so that his illness would not return. Meanwhile, she travelled and managed to find all of Deaglan's missing pieces (except for his heart). However in 1868, Matilda saw her on a graveyard on France and this lead Bram, Matilda and Thornley to investigate on her once more. Thornley, now a renowned psichiatrist, contacted the expert in the occult Arminius Vambéry and with his help, they uncovered Ellen's true identity as a vampire. They also showed him the ring that they found in one of her coffins when they where children that beared the symbol of the dragon and the inscription "Casa lui Dracul". Vambéry quickly realized who the ring belonged to and explained that Dracula was an incredibly ancient sorcerer of immense power (a "god among men") that sold his soul to the devil and brought the evil of undeath into the world. Later that night, Dracula attacked Thornley's wife Emily who has been assaulted relentlessly by him ever since he came so Emily is in the process of turning into a vampire. Vambéry later called a seer to tell them where Ellen was headed. While he got interrupted many times, when Emily came and touched the seer, he screamed "Whitby" before Emily let go of him and, much to Thornley's despair, jumped out of the window to go to meet her sire.

Using Bram's link to Ellen and, subsequently Ellen's to Dracula, they realized that Ellen must be in Whitby but Dracula is chasing her. Following Bram's link, they ended up in Whitby's Abbey where they encounter Ellen with her vampiric childer Patick and Maggie O'Cuiv. Ellen then shows her past memories with Dracula to Bram which causes them both to cry. She explains that she is guarding Deaglan's body and that if they can kill Dracula and then placing Deaglan's heart in his body at the same time when she is pouring her blood in his body, then Deaglan would finally be free of Dracula. However, the missing piece, the heart, is in a place called the Village of the Dead near Munich, which is filled with Dracula's vampires so she needs mortal help to retrieve Deaglan's heart during the day.

They all eventually leave for Munich by boat and later by train, with the vampires kept in their coffins. Once they arrive to the Village of the Dead, they notice that Dracula has arrived before them as the whole place is filled with his gypsies. After looking around, they find a tomb with the "Stoker" name on it and decide to dig it. Once dug, Emily is found inside screaming and under her the heart of Deaglan O'Cuiv is finally found. Once night falls, they all reunite in a house, where Ellen restores Deaglan but the latter is still weak because of the lack of living blood. Outside, Dracula grows impatient and threatens to burn the whole building to the ground by conjuring a massive electrical storm and urges Ellen to keep her end of the bargain, to not expect things to go her way this time. She reluctantly goes outside with Bram and all the undead break ranks for them to pass. Dracula spares all of their friends and then leads them to a white mausoleum which says "Countess Dolingen von Gratz seeked out and found death 1801" and "the dead travel fast". He commands Ellen to enter the mausoleum but not before stating that she will learn to love him in time. As Bram and Ellen embrace, Ellen passes a piece of paper that reads the coordinates of Castle Dracula and her last request to "end him".

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