V The First
by WM

Book I

The Rise of the Basarab

V The First

Book 1

V The First

Intro

The Rise of the Basarab

Intro

"I’ve been watching humanity for eons.

I remain profoundly...

Unimpressed.

You believe we all live in the same world. Yet the world of the rich is not the world of the poor. The beautiful walk a different realm than the wretched. Even the world you knew in your tender years is not the one that greets you in later life.

What you call the world is merely what you see—a fragment of countless overlapping realities.

There is, however, another. It lies within, beneath, and all around your world, often hidden in plain sight behind a veil of shadows and deceit—an underworld, if you will.

You already know it. A world just beyond the grasp of the senses. You whisper of it at firesides. You glimpse it as that fleeting shadow caught in the corner of your eye. You feel it in the sudden silence of the forest, in the cold breath along your neck, in shivers that creeps along your spine, in the dark corners of dreams you dare not name aloud.

Like your own, this unseen realm is inhabited by a myriad of different tribes and hierarchies. Some can change their shapes; others wield natural forces or the minds of men. Some have even returned from the grip of death to never again fall in its thrall.

And, as with you, their lineage can be traced back to a single origin, a common source — a primal matriarch:

The All-Mother in the Dark.

She is the first of all. A deity older than memory, older than the world itself. Bound in flesh, immortal not by choice. She cannot die—yet death may be the one thing she longs for, more than you long for life. So, she dreams, hidden in the bones of the earth. And her dreams bleeding into yours.

She is mother and foremother to all Children of the Night.

And as for me…

I am something else entirely."

V The First

Prologue

The Dark Ages were, in fact, darker than we care to remember.

And the Middle Ages? Not so bright either.

If you were a child back then, you’ve have not be surprised if you found yourself under a rain of urine and faeces. People would throw their waste out the window or they would just go on the street. And, of course, that waste would find its way to the rivers and wells, so you could not drink the water. So, instead, you would drink beer and wine.

If you were a girl, your life was already decided. You’d be married off the moment you first bled. Therefore, it is quite possibly that you would have been drunk, pregnant and covered in faeces by the age of twelve.

If you were a boy, you’d be lucky to survive past twenty-five. Disease would ravage you. Or a blade would. Still, by then, you might already have sons—and even grandsons.

And yet, even by those astonishingly low standards, Basarab, warlord of Wallachia, was considered a savage brute by the very man who called himself king. So we remember in his famous words:

“I shall drag him by the beard out of his mountains,” roared Charles I, his voice echoing through the throne room of Visegrád.

“Like a shepherd drags his sheep.”

But history has a habit of remembering only one side of the story. And we seldom have the grace to admit the redeeming qualities that make our enemies great.

At the close of the thirteenth century, the world groaned beneath the weight of the ego of kings and ancient houses drunk on pride.

These were days of confusion and unrest. Days of fractured oaths and sharpened swords. Days of war.

The kingdoms of Central Europe stood splintered and eroding, and held together by little more than weak oaths and bloody blades. While, Hungary, once a mighty empire, now lay shattered, fragmented into dukedoms, principalities, territories made war camps, each guarded by lords more loyal to their bloodlines than their crown. And—oddly enough—it had not one, but two kings, stubbornly clawing at the throne. Charles I, born of the Capetian House of Anjou, was just one of them. Crowned by the Pope yet doubted by his own nobles, Charles ruled in name alone.

And as Charles claimed the crown, Basarab claimed destiny.

A vassal by title, but never by heart, Basarab had no sacred ancestry to rely on—unlike kings—and he had no need for it.

As the son of Radu the Black, the legendary founder of Wallachia, Basarab descended from a long line of formidable warlords, carved in battle and branded in fire. And by then, he had grown weary of the ceaseless pull and push of conflicts beyond the fringes of his realm.

No more fealty. No more vassalage. No more tribute to be paid. He would take what others inherited.

He would not acknowledge a king so far beneath his respect, and even less his admiration. He would not bend the knee. He had no master.

Basarab would rise up in defiance of the king and the Holy Crown of Hungary, a force ten times mightier than his own Wallachian host. And he would do so without the slightest hesitation, for he possessed something more dangerous than the greatest army or the deadliest weapons: A prophecy.

A vassal by title, but never by heart, Basarab had no sacred ancestry to rely on—unlike kings—and he had no need for it.

No more fealty. No more vassalage. No more tribute to be paid. He would take what others inherited.

He would not acknowledge a king so far beneath his respect, and even less his admiration. He would not bend the knee. He had no master.

He had only ambition, wrath… and her. The woman spoken of in whispers, embodiment of beauty and dread, with her luscious silver hair and rapacious golden eyes that—if the rumors were true—could see it all: the forgotten past, the hidden truths, and what is yet to come. They called her the Witch of the Woods. Her name? Dacianne.

“You will march into battle, lady victory by your side. A crown in your head, a thorn to sit, a realm to rule. But this, like everything else, will come at a price.” She said, her eyes glimmering like gold in the sun.

“A price?” he thought. Still she heard it clearly.

“A son of your blood, that is.” She clarified.

“If the price is blood, then I’ll pay it,” Basarab did not flinch. “I will sire a thousand and one little bastards for that is a price I would pay a thousand times over.”

“You shall have your throne,” she whispered, “Though you’ll never find peace.”

And before sunrise, she was gone. Gone with her mysteries. Gone with her truth. Gone, under the veil of night, without a single goodbye.

A title may be granted. A crown may be inherited. But destiny? Destiny must be seized.

And so, with no fear in his blood and no mercy in his heart, Basarab assembled his ragged army of loyal Vlachs—horsemen, archers, peasants-turned-soldiers—and attacked the Hungarian fortress at Severin. Victory was swift. More followed. Cities fell, banners burned, and still he pushed forward.

In response, King Charles, hubristic, impetuous and proud as he was, launched his invasion. He marched east with his loyal ones and his Cuman allies, leading an army—thirty thousand strong—into the mountainous fringes of Wallachia. Nobles and knights gleaming in the sunlight. He would teach the shepherd a lesson. He would crush the mountain brute. He would remind the realm who held the crown.

Nothing could prepare him for what came next.

Among the high mountains and tangled forests, the Hungarians could find no provisions. The king himself, his warriors, and their horses soon began to suffer hunger. The land offered them no welcome—only silence, stone, and shadow.

Basarab extended a final offer of peace. But Charles, prideful and blinded by his own pride, refused and furthered his army’s march. The lesson had yet to be learned. Basarab would make him humble.

From the shadowed ridges between Oltenia and Severin, beneath the canopy of the Forbidden Forest, the Wallachians waited. They knew the land. They knew the trees. And they knew what Charles did not: The All-Seer had foreseen it all.

With strong barricades, Basarab blocked the path of the invading army where they suspected nothing, cornering them in a narrow ravine where they were pressed against each other so tightly that the fighting men and warhorses could hardly breathe, and fight even less.

And then, from the heights above, on either side, the mountains screamed and hell rained down upon the Hungarians as flaming arrows.

Then came the sword strokes. And then, the silence of death.

The Battle of Posada raged for days. By the third day, a desperate King Charles traded his royal coat of arms for those of another. He was wise to do so— The man who wore his coat of arms was brutally slain when the Vlach mistook him for king.

Cornered and humiliated, Charles barely escaped with his life. And the lesson was learned at last.

Basarab was crowned the first prince of an independent Wallachia. She wasn't present to see it, but she saw it long ago.

In the centuries that followed, his descendants would sit the thrones of Wallachia, and through blood and marriage, his legacy would stretch across the Balkans. His bloodline went on to produce Tsars in Bulgaria, and kings in Serbia and Moldavia. But the prince of his bloodline whose name will echo across the ages is that of one Vlad III, Dracula.

In the twilight of his days, Basarab would often gaze toward the horizon, searching in the corners of memory for those bewitching golden eyes. And sometimes, in the stillness of dusk, he would murmur to himself: “She didn’t know everything, after all.”

Basarab never learned that when she left with no goodbyes under the cloak of darkness, she took with her something very precious, hidden deep within the secret of her womb.