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Shanya was a beautiful wildling girl – born to the rugged hills on the edge of the Shroud where all life is imperiled as a flickering candle unshielded against the wind. Her parents were taken in the night when she was a child – she cried till she had no tears, and then she laughed through the pain. She embraced life with a fierce joy, knowing full well every second could be her last, and pushing on even as the people of her tribe died screaming in the moonless night.
The greatest treasure of her existence was Murdal, the chieftain of her tribe, who saw the glowing life inside her that no darkness could quell. She was not beautiful to gaze upon - a taloned hand seen to that, leaving her disfigured on the night her parents were dragged through bloodied snow. She was not fair, but a beacon burned in her, denying the terror that had seeped into her people’s hearts like a slow-killing sickness. She was fiercely alive.
Their marriage was brief and full of passion. She was soon quick with child, and as her time grew nigh, they came from the Shroud to take her, as they had her mother and father years ago.
They spoiled her in every way. They ravaged her body, drank deep of her blood, and worst of all stole the light of life from her eyes - replacing her spirit with a thirst that would never die, and a disdain for mortal longing. They granted her the bleak gift of cold immortality.
Her child was born in congealed blood – a misshapen thing, half-human half-vampire. Sometimes these abominations were kept as novelties or slaves, often rounding out a noble’s sick menagerie of freaks, and Shanya kept the boy, though she treated it as more a beast than child. His name was Vaden. He lived in a world of nightmares.
Finally, a band of monks of the Broken Sun liberated him. They took him from his mother and her new masters when he was six. Then they taught him to kill.
The sunlight does not kill him, as it does his mother’s people, but neither does it leave him unscathed. Its touch is as fire, though he refuses to shun its golden eye. Vaden’s entire body is covered in violent black scars and ashed skin – weeping blood like tears from a thousand cracked eyes upon his flesh. He endures the sun’s punishment – a toll paid daily for his polluted blood.
He hunts them now. Slaughtering the vampires as they once did his mother’s people. He is silence and shadow, a blade on the wind. Vaden the Ender. He who brings Death to the Deathless. The slayer of immortals, and the phantom feared by every vampire in the Shroud. His legend grows nightly. The Elders know his name. They tell the others tales of his predations – as a human mother might warn children of bugbears in the night.
“Do not wander alone, child, even in the cold embracing shadow of the Shroud. There is a killer in the snow – and Vaden is his name.”
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Razor Coast Preview: Doom at Anchor Bay |
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The greatest piratical battles of history are recorded in song or scrawled by the quills sages. Anchor Bay is the site of the Siege of Dralnor Crackhull, where two great pirate kings and their armadas battled over an unknown, but much sought after artifact of obscene power rumored to lie beneath the waves in this solitary bay. Legends purport over three hundred ships clashed here rending each other asunder in the close quarters of the bay. The water ran red with the blood of a thousand men, hacking each other to bits with axe and blade. During the high point of the bloody siege, an explosion blasted water a mile into the air and waves of scorching death coursed across the surface of the bay, incinerating flesh and ship alike in a blossom of white-hot fire. The only evidence these two pirate armadas existed now lies on the bottom of the bay – hundreds of misshapen, half-melted anchors, scored by tendrils of some sinister arcane fire.
The source of the all-consuming explosion is unknown, but horrifying theories abound. One such theory suggests the contested artifact is the cause. Ancient lore speaks of a great black helm adorned with skeletal wings once worn by the demon king Zaldronagus. Zaldronagus led an army of fiends in a gambit against the heavens, but tasted only the bitter bile of defeat. Supposedly when a chorus of angels shred Zaldronagus to pieces, his helm fell from the sky to an unknown location on the surface of the Known World. Some claim the helm fell to the bottom of Anchor Bay. More than one sage suggests the helm lured the pirate armadas there, whispering promises of power and glory, and then consumed their life-force in the blast. Sated for now, Zaldronagus’ ancient helm harbors his wrathful spite-blackened soul, and may call others to their doom to satisfy the demon’s whim. Other sages purport he is assembling a new body for his helm to top – one of shipwrecks and molten man-flesh, with great cannons for eyes, a mast-bristled back, and the faces of a thousand dead mariners screaming out from its hellish visor. |
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Razor Coast Preview: Legendary Locations |
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Halgrin’s Rest: Legend speaks of an impossibly gargantuan giant, dwarfing even the Dreadsmoke range whose name has passed through antiquity as “Halgrin.” He sailed the ocean in a canoe of earthen stone long before the first volcano rose above the eternal waves of Father Sea. Halgrin’s jilted lover, an ancient storm goddess slew him, in an age before time, when he chose the freedom of the sea over bans to her. She capsized his canoe with terrible winds at the same spot where today strange gargantuan jags of rock now crest the waters of the ocean. Supposedly, a giant skeleton as tall as the everpines of distant Krajin, rests in the deep waters below.
Halgrin buried his spear deep in the ocean floor – his last act before the drowning sea invaded his lungs. There it rests today. Halgrin’s spear quelled the sea’s wrath, and so long as it pierces deep into the heart of the ocean’s floor, Father Sea cannot drown the world. Sages claim the fiercest storms are Father Sea struggling to pull the spear from his insides and rage free upon the land once more.
Face of the Frozen God: The foreigners believe this strange collection of floating icebergs and glacial islands are nothing more than a climactic aberration adrift from the frozen black seas locked in the icy embrace of the Ebon Shroud far to the north. The foreigners tell themselves this twenty mile wide flotilla of ice will melt when the next heat wave descends on the coast – and yet it persists for hundreds of years. This cryptic formation of ice islands has occupied the same reach of the Razor for as long as anyone can remember.
Tribal elders claim the ice is the face of an old god, the strange drifting of the islands are its ancient spirit’s way of communing with the world – echoing its terrible will through the ages. Far above the Face of the Frozen God a race of icy-winged predators, called Sinkara, dwell amongst the clouds. Their sages decipher the god-speak over the millennia – reading shapes formed by an icy mouth of frothing waters hedged in by jaws and jagged teeth made from a thousand ice bergs. This god gazes skyward with rancorous eyes of crystal the size of mountains, speaking prophecies of frozen doom, or perhaps revealing secrets lost to the ages.
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Cruciata was many things before the Shroud took her: child, orphan...murderer.
Entrusted to the Order of the Broken Sun when her mother’s purse and patience ran dry, Cruciata was a special child. She read the classics of a dozen civilizations by the age of twelve, reciting the poems of Dralnok, the stratagems of Kithmanthir, and the carnal secrets of Mutra from memory. Her dark mind was a labyrinth of secret lore, ageless wisdom, and terrors best forgotten to the scouring talons of time.
She frightened the monks of the Order with her quiet ways, and frozen half-dead eyes…all but Kreigos, the brutish winesop who crept to her quarters in the dead of night and left a cold rage inside her. She killed him with a length of steel wire from an old clockwork organ one night, in the way of the old Kalish-Pahd, the self-tightening knot – the embrace of Kali she had read of in one of the forbidden tomes of the scriptorium.
The monks cast the poisoned child out – relieved for a good reason to be rid of her. But she did not walk alone for long. In the moonless night, they came to her, and found her strangely unafraid. It was forbidden to take one so young, but the Duke proclaimed her destined for his bloody kiss.
Cruciata Navaar, Daughter of the Shroud, Queen of Unremitting Agonies.
The Child Bride of Midnight.
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