WHY
The Hidden Reasons
Where mankind remembers the myths and legend,
he was there witnessing and recording the true events that caused them.
And the why.
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.
"WHY?"
The boy asked a third time...
Somewhere in the south of Transylvania,
in the early 1300s
A year had passed since Lord Darius von Croy welcomed Wolfgang into his ancient manse.
The boy who was raised amongst the tender care of nuns in the isolated Convent of Saint Catherine, had settled into its silent halls with remarkable ease. What had once been an unfamiliar labyrinth of stone, candlelight, and forgotten centuries had become the only home he seemed to know.
For he remembered nothing.
Not the convent.
Not the massacre that had ended his former life.
Whether those memories had been claimed by mercy or by some deeper mystery, Darius could not say.
The Lycan nature revealed itself more with each passing month. Wolfgang possessed an instinctive need for companionship, forming bonds quickly and offering affection without reservation. It was this unwavering loyalty that had earned his kind an old and rather contemptuous nickname among the Nobilis.
Dogs.
The wolf was unmistakable.
Yet another inheritance stirred beneath those instincts.
His mother's.
At first, Darius dismissed it as coincidence.
A passing thought would cross his mind, only for Wolfgang to speak of it moments later. Never the whole thought. Only fragments. A word. An image. A half-formed idea that should never have left the silence of his own mind.
As though the boundary between their thoughts had begun to thin.
Then, one quiet afternoon—
"What is Artois?"
The question escaped Wolfgang before he seemed aware he had spoken it.
He frowned.
"What... what are the Artois?"
Darius did not answer.
No visitor had crossed the manor's gates.
No servant knew that name.
The boy had never entered the forbidden library, nor could he have deciphered its ancient texts.
There remained only one impossible conclusion.
Wolfgang had plucked the name from Darius' own mind.
Not by intent.
By instinct.
A silence settled between them.
It lasted only a heartbeat, yet it carried the weight of centuries.
Something had awakened within the boy.
Not tooth.
Not claw.
Something infinitely more dangerous.
When Darius finally spoke, each word had been carefully weighed. The Artois Brothers of Paris belonged to a history few dared speak aloud. Their name opened doors that were better left sealed, and warlocks were hardly a subject for a child.
Least of all for this child.
For Wolfgang was no ordinary boy.
Within him converged bloodlines, prophecy, and an inheritance older than kingdoms. Behind those golden eyes lingered the gift of the All-Seer—a gift neither of them yet understood.
Most children wished to know what a thing was.
The curious asked who.
Wolfgang always sought the question hidden beneath both.
Why.
Darius told him
WHO and WHAT
But the boy knew
WHERE and WHEN,
for he had seen it in his nightmares.
Yet "WHY" belongs only to those who have witnessed the ages unfold—those who have seen actions become consequences, consequences become patterns, and patterns become the only means by which the future might be understood...
and, perhaps, altered.
Perhaps they did not know it yet.
Perhaps, in some distant corner of their understanding, they sensed that they were standing upon the threshold of something far greater than themselves. They were already halfway through the years of the Great Famine, when hunger had begun to reshape kingdoms and empty villages, and yet their attention was fixed upon a player whose arrival—and the events that would follow—would set in motion one of the longest and most devastating conflicts in recorded history: the Hundred Years' War.
And before that century had run its course, Europe would be brought to its knees once more by an enemy no army could defeat—the Black Death.
War. Famine. Plague.
Three calamities that would scar generations and alter the course of history.
But none of these things happen without cause.
Someone moved the first piece.
Someone knew what was coming.
But WHY?
Long ago, in his human life he was the boy asking
"WHY?"
Since the youth of his first life he had the heart of a scholar
When Darius first began to study and classify the creatures and beings of the Unseen, he was no older than Wolfgang was now. He wrote his earliest observations in the language of his mother, yet the method behind them had been given to him in Greek by Theophanes of Stageira, a natural philosopher who claimed to have once studied under Aristotle himself. From him, Darius learned to look beyond names and appearances and ask what a being was by nature: its Physis, the essence of its nature; its Genos, the kind to which it belonged; its Ethnos, its people or branch; its Oikos, the sphere, habitat, or order in which it existed; its Archē, the principle by which it was governed; and its Technē, the art through which its nature found expression. And so, in the first pages of what would eventually become his Bestiary and the Abouts, the young Darius began with the question that Theophanes had taught him to ask of every living thing:
What, by nature, is this being?
And this is how he began to understand why things come to pass and why things are the way they are.
Lord D.
The one who held the quill
Lord D.
Lord Darius von Croÿ
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.
EMBER CODEX
COMPENDIUM
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.
PROPHECIES
Prophecies
The Future Was Written
long before men could read
A prophecy is not a prediction of what might be. It is the echo of a future that has already begun. It drifts through dreams, whispers from forgotten temples, and reveals itself only to those burdened with the sight to behold it. Some dismiss it as myth. Others wage wars to prevent it. Yet destiny has little regard for belief, for what is written beyond time will always find its way into history.
THE BESTIARY
The Bestiary
“Name them, and they stir in the dark again.
Remember them, and the Veil grows thin.”
The Unseen Realm, or underworld, is inhabited by a myriad of creatures of different breeds: Witches who whisper to the elements, warlocks who bargain with shadows, Revenants cursed with immortal hunger, Lycans who prowl beneath the moon, Mages wielding forbidden arts, and Saints whose martyrdom burns brighter than steel. Together they weave a world where the march of history beats in step with the pulse of legend.
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BESTIARY
THE ABOUTS
The Abouts
by Lord D.
An unemotional compendium of the nature of beings by an ancient Revenant Lord, Chronicler of the Unseen
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.
About Humans
About Daemons
About Shifters
About Jinns
About Incubus
About Witches
About Revenants
About Cambions
About Ghouls
About Sucubus
About Warloks
About Lycans
About Dragons
About The Fallen
