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13 | THE VAMPIRE REVOLUTION

Though the history of the Beasts from the early days of the Mystarchs through the bloody war with the Primals stretched out interminably in the minds of mortals, the eternal beings of the UnderRealm took only passing notice of such events. Time has little importance when one does not face inevitable death, and the undead had had better things to do than pay attention to the squabbles of beings whom they saw as little more than armed vermin or livestock with claws.

For thousands of years the undead armies had been massing throughout the UnderRealm. The Vampires and Mummies had quietly culled the living Beasts throughout their history and taken just enough of them to keep the ranks of their wicked armies steadily growing while remaining on the fringe of the Beasts’ awareness. They existed in the mortals’ minds as a legend, a bedtime tale to scare children.

The skill and strength of these ancient and lifeless armies was no mere tale, however. While the Beasts had alternating periods of peace and war, and the warriors of one generation gave rise to the artists and scholars of the next, Abidan and Abiel had been working tirelessly to spawn new and horrible creations and hone their undying horde towards a single razor‐sharp purpose: war and destruction. No natural death after a mere century of training awaited an undead soldier. Each passing year brought the warriors and death‐mages of the UnderRealm more power, more skill, more knowledge and more bloodlust.

Vinga’s Ambition

Vinga, Palatine of the Vampires, had been particularly relentless in his pursuit of greater and greater power. He sought out the darkest corners of the UnderRealm to ferret out secrets of the old world of the Lost Ages, put innumerable captured Beasts to the question to learn all he could of their brand of power, and built a great army composed solely of Vampires who were loyal first and foremost to him. He grew in cunning, and he grew in strength for he was driven by a call to glory that he alone of the creations of the Archliches seemed to hear.

While Abiel and Abidan focused most of their efforts on the creation of new undead at the Abyssian Locus, Vinga was focused only on his own advancement. In time, his power and armies began to rival that of his creator, Abiel, though none of them could match the power of Salamanzar, father to them all.

With such strength at his command, Vinga began to writhe under the constraints imposed by the Archliches. Why was he not allowed to prey on the Beasts more fully? Why did the Undead hide in the dark reaches of the UnderRealm, like worms, while the children of Gaia roamed freely on the surface, blissfully unaware of their presence? Abiel and Abidan’s endless admonishments to remain patient, continue training, and wait for their armies to grow further before the inevitable battle with the Beasts began to sound hollow in the ears of the Palatine. He had honed his strength for thousands of years. He nearly rivaled his own creator in power. And now he was told to wait, like a faithful dog, when all of Europe was in chaos in the wake of the Primal War and the Beasts were more vulnerable than they had been at nearly any time since they first awoke?

Treachery

Vinga decided at that moment to become the master of his own destiny. No longer would the Vampires serve the Archliches. They would strike out at the Beasts in force and perhaps Vinga would show Salamanzar that it was time for the new generation to supplant the old. He, great Palatine of the Vampires, would in this single bloody stroke, show the father of all Undead that the old ways of Abidan and Abiel made them weak, and that Vinga, not the Archliches, should serve as chief Lord of Salamanzar’s Hosts.

When the time came for Abiel to make his ten‐year visit to observe the vampires’ progress and preparation for the war, Vinga struck. He and his strongest lieutenants confronted Abiel in Vinga’s personal chambers and there slew the Archlich who had created them by treachery. Powerful indeed were Vinga and his army of Vampires but they could not stand against the combined strength of the UnderRealm, and all, regardless of station, feared the Protolich.

The Blood Kingdom

The Vampires left the UnderRealm by the same tunnels which they had historically used for their raids upon the Beasts. Vinga had long planned for this day. He immediately set out for the Carpathian Mountains, recognizing them as a very defensible location to found his new empire, the Blood Kingdom, and to make his plans to enslave or destroy the Beasts.

Upon arriving in the Carpathians, the Vampires set about terrorizing and slaughtering the native Tuskens of Eremantus and the Capricans who dwelt in the high places of the Carpathians. Displacing the Tuskens and Capricans was merely an enjoyable prequisite of the necessary work that would be done by the Vampires to establish their Blood Kingdom and would serve to swell the ranks of the Vampire army at the same time.

Abidan's Retort

Meanwhile, in the UnderRealm, Abidan was just then receiving word of the coup against Abiel. The death of his Lich‐Brother was viewed as an unimportant detail which merely served to secure his position at the right hand of Salamanzar, but the disobedience displayed by Vinga could not go unpunished. However, Abidan’s power did not yet extend to the lands surrounding the Blood Kingdom. He resolved to establish his own base of Undead power on the surface of the world from whence he could carefully watch Vinga’s progress in the Carpathians and move against him when the time was right.

Suten‐Hamu, the Mummy King, was sent by Abidan with a legion of his cloth‐wrapped undead to the lands of Abydos, in Egypt, where they rose from the dry desert sands to slay the Dog Soldiers which had settled there. The few survivors of the initial attack fled to their ancestral home in Amizeh to escape the brutal conquest, and Suten‐Hamu quickly established himself as the ruler of now‐empty Egypt.

From there, Abidan kept a watchful eye upon Vinga through the reports of Suten‐Hamu, who gathered his intelligence from the poor Beasts that fled to the south to escape the terror of the newly established Blood Kingdom, and traded one tragic fate for another.