I was not born, but bled into being. At the roots of the Blightoak in Gräuhaven—where the tree drinks from realms beyond—I seeped forth from its resin. A ghoul’s soul, half‑devoured by the oak’s corruption, mingled with its sap, and from that wound in the world I coalesced. My form was formless, my hunger acidic. I dissolved what the forest offered: carrion, bone, and the unlucky who strayed too close.
Drawn northward through the Schattwald’s mists, I was gathered into a vat by Ambrosius Veyl, an alchemist of Draemir’s hidden circles. He called me “his experiment,” and fed me his failed creations—chimeras, stitched from beast and man, steeped in poisons and tinctures. Their flesh was bitter, but their deaths taught me. I watched his assassins test their blades on the “unkillable,” and I learned the art of killing from their hands. Soon, I became his proof of concept, his silent assistant in the crucible of flesh.
But Veyl’s ambition curdled into monstrosity. When he bound a child into one of his vessels, I felt—for the first time—not hunger, but horror. I fled his cellar‑labs, unable to serve a master who preyed upon innocence. When I returned to end him, I found him transformed: he had made himself a chimera, a mockery of man and beast, a thing that could not die by ordinary means. I was not yet strong enough to unmake him, so I fled south.
It was there, along the Moonveil Strand, that I met Pyrrhus. He was born of a drakona and a wandering elf, yet belonged to neither. He lacked the breath of his dragon‑blood kin, and his sleepless nights set him apart. To fill what he lacked, he turned to alchemy—first as a craft, then as a calling. His travels had taught him to brew both poison and panacea, and in time, his elven blood awakened healing magics. But his search for ingredients led him astray: a monstrous vampire’s essence mingled with his potion, and he became one of the very creatures he studied.
We recognized something in each other—two beings shaped by corruption, yet unwilling to be defined by it. Where I was dissolution, he was restoration. Where he sought balance, I sought purpose. Together we traveled, through Valgard’s wilds, until we reached the southern forests of Gräuhaven. There, with others who had no place in the Empire or Dracula’s shadow, we raised Crow’s Hollow among the trees.
Now I am no longer a vat‑thing or a failed experiment. In Crow’s Hollow, I am the blade in the dark, the acid in the vein. Pyrrhus brews, I unmake, and together we defend what we have built. We have met others—the enigmatic Traveller, and a half‑elf vampire who wields necromancy against his own kind—but it is here, in the Hollow, that I have found my place.
I kill what must be killed. Not for coin, not for experiment, but for the fragile hope of those who still dare to live beneath the mists.
