V The First

Myths & Truths

Myths & Truths

Myths & Truths

From the pages of the secret manuscript of Lord D. von Croÿ.

Myths & TruhtsWM

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Myths & Truths

Lord D.

Behold, the greater part of the hidden wisdom of the Underworld is gathered not in many tongues, but in the single hand of an Ancient Revenant Lord—preserved within a leather-bound tome he bore ever close to his heart, "The Ember Codex" though its script be wrought in the forsaken speech of an age long fled.

A chronicler among immortals, a scholar of mortal folly, a scribe of shadows, and faithful keeper of the eternal record—he hath endured the passing of empires and the ruin of kings, wearing in each waking life a different mortal name: Darius, Darion, Dariel—yet all but veils upon the selfsame soul.

So through the circling centuries he sealeth his testimony with one unchanging sign:

— Lord D.

Lord D.

Darius isWM

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Lord D.

Darius

Darius is immortal—one of the blood-cursed, bound to the unending hunger of the eternal night. The breath of the living sustained him in life; their blood sustains him still, for good or for ruin.

He was not born of shadow, but fashioned into it: once a mortal man, turned at the edge of death by the dark rite of another of his kind. The world has called such creatures by a hundred fearful names—Striga, Upyr, Revenant, Chiropteran—yet all speak of the same dread lineage the living whisper of as vampires.

Though he is the youngest to sit among the Council of the Revenant Lords, sovereigns of the underworld’s hidden dominion, his turning came in an age when Greece still wore the crown of empire.

In his first life he bore a curse as treacherous as any sorcery: a beauty too rare for the world to hold without harm. Desired for his grace, sought for pleasure and for company in the decadent courts of that ancient realm, he inspired longing, envy, and ruin wherever he lingered. His mortal story closed in tragedy, as if fated to mirror the brief and troubled arc of his days.

Yet death would not claim him entire. Deemed too rare a soul to be surrendered to the worms, he was raised again by a draught of the All-Mother’s own blood—an ascension that made of him an Emperium Striga, highest among the blood-born, endowed with powers that eclipsed those of his kin.

Some say the night itself leans nearer to hear his steps, as if remembering the hour he first rose from the grave.

The Ember Codex

Ember CodexWM

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The Ember Codex

“Break the seal, and the ash shall speak.”

Across these vellum pages, in the measured hand of Lord Darius, unfolds a rare vantage—an unclouded view of the unseen realm and its ceaseless entanglement with the affairs of humankind.

Through the Oracles of the Four Elemental Watchtowers—temples scattered at the thresholds of earth, water, air, and fire—he claimed sight beyond mortal borders, their voices serving as his distant eyes and ears. From this watchful height he charted both worlds as one, their boundaries more fragile than either would ever confess.

By ink drawn dark into ancient vellum, Darius writes of the Sacred Canon: a grave litany of laws that bind the Underworld and the creatures who abide within its shadow. He speaks, too, of the Anointed Ones—scattered lines of humankind, set apart by either divine blessing or the decree of the Revenant Overlords, whose blood is forbidden to be spilled or corrupted by unnatural means.

Yet among his chronicles, none compels as keenly as the sections he called the “Abouts”—marginal reflections and coldly lucid footnotes on the species that haunt the dark beneath our feet and walk unseen beside our kind. It is here that the manuscript becomes less a history than a mirror, revealing the nature of beings older than memory itself: their instincts laid bare, their cruelties unvarnished, their few virtues measured without indulgence.

His tone is neither cruel nor kind. It is the gaze of one who has outlasted dynasties, whose emotions have narrowed to a pale remnant of what once was, until even grief and wonder have become distant echoes—occasional masks they wear for their own unfathomable reasons.

There is a hush in these pages, as though the ink remembers what the world has forgotten, and waits for the patient hand willing to turn the next leaf.

Secret Wisdom

Sacred Knowledge

The Bestiary

The Sacred Canons

The Anointed

The Bestiary

The BestiaryWM

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The Bestiary

“Name them, and they stir in the dark again; remember them, and the Veil grows thin.”

Bound in timeworn leather and secured by a fading clasp of bronze, this ancient scroll-book is known as “The Bestiary.” Within its brittle vellum leaves are set down the creatures of the unseen world—their breeds, their lineage traced unbroken to the primal matriarch, the All-Mother.

The script is rendered in a lost alphabet, a tongue of curled sigils and silent strokes. Across those pages we find the measured hand of Lord Darius von Croÿ, whose words remain as steady as the ink that binds them to the page:

“Most of the unseen born to the All-Mother dwelt not in flesh but in the ethereal reaches beyond the Veil—beings of thought and pulse, shaped of the Mother’s own emotions. Mortals called them demons, but the truer word is daemons. They were neither wholly good nor wholly wicked; they simply were, as tides are, rising and receding with her moods.”

*“Then came the Light. And with it came humanity—though few remember that there were once other human races, as ancient as the earth itself. Nature compelled them to contend, until only one lineage endured.

In that age, after the rise of humankind, the first true Children of the Night were born of the All-Mother’s womb. Many took the guise of mortals, though some bore shapes that defied the eye, and even those who looked like men and women wielded the powers once reserved for gods.”*

“Ages turned. The Children of the Night, like humankind, grew numerous. They bred among their own and sometimes with mortals, and so the divine blood of the All-Mother thinned, splintering into tribes and races—each branch a shadow of the first matriarch’s might.”

The Sacred Canons

Sacred CanonsWM

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The Sacred Canon

“Law holds the night in its iron grasp—yet even the oldest decree may one day be unshackled by shadows.”

The Sacred Canon is the unyielding body of laws that binds every creature of the Underworld—each Child of the Night held to its decrees under the ultimate penalty of death. Etched in the earliest days of the hidden realm, these edicts were shaped to shield the supernatural from mortal sight and to compel a fragile order among races long at war with one another.

Among the oldest and most unbending of these decrees was the Prohibition of the Cambion, a law that forbade the mingling of witch and incubus, lest their union bring forth a breed neither realm could control. Yet in the twelfth century, the Overlords themselves struck down this ancient prohibition without proclamation or plea.

For more than two centuries the reason lay buried in silence—an omission that whispers of a design more deliberate than chance, a secret sealed in shadow for those patient enough to seek the pattern beneath the centuries.

Even now, the parchment remembers the weight of that rescinded law, as if the ink itself resents being unbound.

The Anointed Ones

The Anointed OnesWM

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The Anointed Ones

“Spill not the blood that bears the seal, for in its ruin the woven fate of realms would fray.”

Across the turning of centuries, there have arisen certain mortals set apart from their own kind—men and women whose lives bore the weight of unseen favor. Some were watched over by the hand of the Divine, others safeguarded by the solemn decree of the Overlords of the Underworld.

Their blood was never to be spilled in sacrifice or rage; their will was not to be bent by sorcery or shadow; no harm was to touch them by forces beyond the natural world. Such was the covenant sealed over their lineage, as though the threads of their existence were too tightly woven into the pattern of things to be severed.

Among these guarded lines stands the House of Basarab, its name carried forward beneath this ancient protection—a bloodline spared by both Heaven and the dark realm alike, destined to carve its mark upon the pages of history.

It is whispered that the earth itself recoils from the spilling of their blood, for in that crimson tide sleeps the echo of older promises yet unbroken.

The "Abouts"

The AboutsWM

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The "Abouts"

Footnotes and Thoughts

Across the vellum pages of Lord Darius’s manuscript lie a constellation of marginal notes—footfalls of thought gathered in the margins like whispers beside the main text. They are neither sermon nor lament, but the calm observations of one who has walked among the living for millennia, his gaze stripped of judgment, his wonder long subdued.

This compilation, known simply as the “Abouts,” is where the ancient Revenant turns his pen toward the varied races that share the world’s dark corridors. Each entry is rendered as a quiet reckoning: a measure of nature over legend, of instinct over rumor, as though he were recording not tales but the pulse of each creature’s being.

Reading them is to feel the hush of candlelit stone halls, where every line carries the weight of eyes that have watched the centuries drift by, and remembers what the living have chosen to forget.