Travian was born beneath the shadow of the Schattwald in Gräuhaven, where every child grows up with the howl of wolves and the toll of the curfew bell. From his youth he proved himself a hunter of rare skill, ranging the borders of the forest where geists drifted and wolfpacks prowled. Villages whispered his name with respect, for he walked roads others feared to tread.
It was in the Gravenmere, Duskwatch’s bog‑choked lowlands, that his fate was broken. There he crossed paths with Batrackh, a vampire of the Hollowveil courts, whose hunger was matched only by his cruelty. Travian did not die that night—he was remade. When he staggered back to Gräuhaven, he was no longer wholly mortal. His senses were sharpened beyond human ken, his strength unnatural, his sight piercing into spectrums unseen. But worse than these gifts was the curse: the voices of the dead. They whispered from barrows, crossroads, and gallows trees, and Travian could not shut them out.
For years he fought the madness, until Batrackh himself returned—not to kill him, but to teach him. The vampire showed him how to answer the voices, how to bind the restless into broken forms of life. Travian learned necromancy not from tomes, but from the mouths of the dead themselves. Yet Batrackh believed this training would consume him, that his fledgling would collapse beneath the weight of so many graves. He was wrong.
Travian endured. And when he rose from that crucible, he turned his power not to servitude, but to vengeance. Now he stalks the villages and forests of Gräuhaven, a hunter of hunters. Vampires who prey upon the weak find themselves hunted in turn, their own victims raised against them as grim allies. The people call him Bloodtainted, half in fear, half in reverence—for though he is marked by undeath, he wages war upon it.
He seeks Batrackh still, through the Veinways of Draemir, the haunted passes of Duskwatch, and even the parishes of Valgard, where the Church whispers of a ranger who commands the dead. Travian does not deny the name. He carries it as both curse and banner, until the night he drives his stake through the heart of the one who made him.
