The Vampires
They are the children of Lilith, the first of the undead — immortals who traded their humanity for a world that never sees the sun.
The Mother of All Vampires
Before the masters, before the castles and the Blood Bibles, there was Lilith — called Lylis in the oldest chronicles. She was human once. Tempted by a demon, she drank from the fruit of blood and took the forbidden knowledge of the god who had turned away from her. What that knowledge built was not a curse but a kingdom: she created her own world, and her children became the vampire race.
She sleeps now — or something close to it — in the Holyland of Adam, beside Adam himself. Her tomb is the reason Helea has no day.
The Twelve Masters and the Failed Awakening
From Lilith’s blood arose the twelve master vampires. Three of them — Vlad Tepes, Elizabeth Bathory and Gilles de Rais — made an alliance, entered the mountains of Helea and killed everyone they found in their path. Their purpose was not conquest but power: they wanted to open the tomb of Lilith, wake the mother of their race, and take what she held.
The tomb would not give her up. What the masters received instead was a sky without sun: opening the tomb did not awaken Lilith, but it covered Helea in an unbroken veil of darkness — a dark eden, perfect for the undead and fatal to everything else.
The Civil War of the Masters
Failure did not end the ambition — it sharpened it. The masters discovered that the only way to obtain Lilith’s power was to gather the scattered pieces of her soul, spread across Helea. Unwilling to share that power with each other, they broke their alliance and turned their armies on one another. The war of the vampires against the humans became a war of vampires against vampires. The pieces of the mother’s soul are remembered today as the Blood Bibles.
The Great Domains
- Castle Limbo — Elizabeth Bathory. The oldest and most famous of the vampire seats, west of Eslanian. Bathory lost her war against Blood Tepez and now hides while her clan restores her strength. Her dungeon shelters young vampires; her holy place, Hilanom, keeps the bottle of virgin blood that gave her eternal life.
- Castle Rasen — Blood Tepez. A fourteenth-century fortress on Mt. Rodin, built as an inner castle inside an outer one. Tepez is called the lord of spear, and his court is known for cruelty: his meals are served while he contemplates the humans pierced on spears around his lair.
- Lake Timor — Gilles de Rais. The third master froze an entire resort lake into ice and claimed the island at its center, where the tower called Lust Top holds the third lair.
Other masters hold other lairs across the province, but these three shaped Helea as it is today.
The Blood and the Powers
A vampire’s strength is drawn from blood, but not without cost: they sacrifice their own life force to fuel their powers. The bloodsuck binds a victim and drains their blood to restore what was spent; anyone bitten and left uncured will rise as a vampire themselves. The oldest blood magic grants shapes — bat and wolf — along with the power to hide in the ground and see through the night. But silver cuts against them like no other metal, burning away even the reserves of an immortal.
Why They Fight
The vampires fight for eternal life — not merely to survive, but to flourish and rule. They wish to conquer the holy book of blood, the Blood Bibles that are the fragments of their mother’s soul, and to raise humans as prey for their world. The night over Helea is their achievement; the Blood Bibles are their inheritance.