A millennium has passed since Lord Kain set his capital in the ruins of the Pillars of Nosgoth and began his conquest of the world. His first act was to recruit a cadre. Dipping into the underworld, Kain snared six souls and thus birthed his Lieutenants, of which I, Raziel was one. We, in turn, prowled the twilight of purgatory building six legions of vampires to pillage Nosgoth.
The destruction of the major human Kingdoms was inevitable. Within a hundred years, humanity had been throughly domesticated. To be sure, there remained some feral humans scattered across the hinterlands, clinging to their hopeless holy war rid Nosgoth of "the vampire scourge." They were tolerated. They made existence for the fledglings more challenging.
After the taming of the humans, our real work began: shaping Nosgoth to our will. Around the Pillars, slaves constructed a shrine worthy of our new age, worthy of our dark renaissance. Huge furnaces were built to belch smoke into the sky, shielding the land from the poisonous effects of the sun. Never had the world known a time of such beauty.
We allowed the remains of the legions, the lesser vampires, to have their intrigues. They provided amusement and spice to an increasingly uninspired court. As faction fell against faction we bet the outcome. We helped and foiled plots at our whim. We were the Council and Lord Kain, our only master...
The humans think it is a poison of the blood that makes us what we are. Fools, the blood only feeds the bodies we live in. To create a vampire, one must steal a soul from the abyss to reanimate the corpse. It is the body that depmands the blood sacrifice; our souls gain advantage from the powers of the underworld.
As we matured, our earthly bodies evolved into a higher form. We assumed the powers and nobility of the Dark Gods. With each change, the trival affairs of vampire and man held less interest.
Always, it was Kain who would change first. After the master had experienced a new gift, one of us would follow in a decade or so. That is until I had the audacity to evolve before my master. I was gifted with wings. And for my impertinence, I was damned...
To us the touch of water is agongy: it burns our flesh like acid. My punishment was to be cast into the Lake of the Dead, our execution ground fortraitors and weaklings. As my brethen heaved me into the air I could see the bemused expressions on their faces. The transitory thrill of something new. Then the pain. Melting, twisting, burning, falling. A new experience indeed. Time. I have no concept of how long I fell. Only that there was an end to the fall and through the pain I heard the voice. At first I thought it was merely the echoes of my own tortured mind, but I grew to understand that it was more. Something primal. Something angry. Something rightoues. Something aancient.
The Elder explained much to me. It told me of creation, of death, of souls and hunger. For eons the Elder fed upon the souls of Nosgoth. Then Kain's vampire dynasty deprived the Elder of sustenance. For centuries his hunger grew and festered in this place.
The Elder offered me a solution to my sorry existence - if I would stalk the Material Plane, slaying my former brethen, then I would have the chance to avenge myself against Kain.
How could one refuse such an offer?
