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The History of Nosgoth
The world of Nosgoth has seen much darkness over the course of it's life. In the beginning, there were two races of dominant creature. The Vampires and the Hylden. The Vampires were not then the parasitic, blood-drinking creatures that they were cursed to become. They were an angelic, blue-skinned race of winged creatures. They were unfalteringly devoted to their God, and were in harmonious unison with the life of the planet. They were masters of magic and superhuman acts.
The Hylden were very different, but not woefully so. The Hylden were not gifted with the abilities of winged flight, like their Vampire cousins. They were not gifted with magical abilities and they were not known for religious servitude. Their gift was that of invention, of technology and material progress.
The two races of creature coexisted peacefully for millennia. Then disagreement reared it's head. The Hylden renounced the existence of the Vampire God, challenging the Vampire's beliefs and promoting the progression of society through science. The Vampires were outraged and insulted. It was not long before war broke out. The two races clashed violently in the fields, the sky and the sea. Waging war across the entire world, scarring everything in their path.
At the apex of the din, the two camps were in the process of creating their ultimate weapons, their individual solutions to bring an abrupt end to the seemingly endless war. The Hylden had built a monstrous, city-sized, subterranean weapon simply called "The Device". The Device was powered by a special kind of raw energy called "Glyph Energy". The Glyph Energy was a form of green plasma that was fatal to vampires while simultaneously non-harmful to any other form of life on the planet. The Glyph Energy came from a very specific source though, a giant, pulsating blob of flesh and sinew called "The Mass". The Mass did not necessarily generate the Glyph Energy, it was just simply capable of harnessing the latent energy in the atmosphere and channelling it through The Device's conduits for use as a weapon. The Hylden's plan was to simply veil the planet with enough Glyph Energy to decimate the Vampiric population 100%. They never got the chance to use it.
The Vampires had constrcuted something wholly different. They built a structure known as the Pillars of Nosgoth, nine stone columns that reached almost endlessly into the sky, and God-only-knows how far into the earth. Those nine columns were built as the physical manifestation of the nine key essences that bind reality together. The Mind, Conflict, Nature, Energy, the States, Dimension, Time, Death and the most important of them all, Balance. The Pillars were enchanted and given dominion over each aspect that they embodied, sealing the fate of the world within them. Each one of the Pillars was also given a Vampire counterpart, a living embodiment of their own nature. These were the Pillar Guardians, and each one was chosen by the Pillars themselves. Each Guardian was granted with mastery over their Pillar's essence, and together, they ruled the world. The nine Guardians were referred to as the Circle of Nine, with the Balance Guardian leading them and the world at his or her whim. The final piece of the Pillars that was constructed was the mystical Soul Reaver blade, an unbreakable and unstoppable weapon of righteous fury. The Soul Reaver was used as the key to the Pillars, allowing their powers to be fully locked and unlocked. Once the Pillars and the Reaver had been completed and the enchantments were finished, the Vampires used their new weapon to banish the Hylden to an alternate dimension, a twisted mirror image of Nosgoth known only as the Demon Dimension.
However, the Hylden were far too cunning to be simply shunted away to an alternate horror world. As a final attack on the enemy race, the Hylden used the Device to channel a curse throughout the entire world. The Hylden sent violent, mutating waves of sheer agony throughout the entire Vampire race, domming them for eternity. The permanent effect of the curse was that the Vampires were inflicted with bloodlust, sterility, and the greatest offense of them all: immortality.
You see, the God that the Vampires worshipped was known as the Wheel of Fate. The constantly turning, recycling and purifying system of the world. The Wheel of Fate was responsible for taking the sould of the deceased, breaking them down into pure soul energy and then spitting them back out into the world as new, pure life. The Wheel of Fate would devour the memories, personality and individual marks of each soul, leaving a blank slate to be re-used as another form of life on the planet. The Wheel fed on those souls, and now the Vampires were no longer capable of providing those souls for their God. Having been forcefully ejected from their God's purifying system, their souls were doomed to fester in their immortal bodies, and as such, they were cast out from their God's care. They were religiously exiled by their enemies, which would prove to be a comparable fate to the one they inflicted upon their Hylden brethren.
Millennia passed. Many of the Ancient Vampires committed suicide to try and regain the favor of their God. Many shunned their God, and spread their vampiric curse onto willing and un-willing human prey. As the vampiric numbers thinned, the human numbers drastically increased, and evolved into more and more intelligent life. The Vampires, however, still claimed control over their human herd and exerted force and fear where necessary. The ruling Vampires would also spread their curse where necessary, in order to balance their numbers and keep the race from dying out. The human vampires were created through dark rituals as a way of preserving the vampire bloodline, since vampires were no longer born by natural means. Because of the vampiric sterility, though, this created a problem in regards to the Pillars. You see, the Pillars choose their Guardians at birth, and Vampires were no longer born.
So, the Vampires took it upon themselves to seek out the replacement Guardians. They would find each new Guardian as he was born and turn him into a Vampire, so as to keep the Pillars under vampiric rule. But, all things have a way of changing, and this is no different.
There was an uprising amongst the humans. The revolt was instigated by two men, a warrior named Mortanius and a devious strategist named Moebius. They led the charge against their Vampire lords, and won. Moebius in particular had proven to be the Vampires greatest adversary, because he claimed ownership of a mysterious staff equipped with a Vampire-disabling orb on top. The orb was capable of bringing any vampire to it's knees, spelling the creature's imminent demise.
The revolt brought with it the deaths of the entire Circle of Nine and tranferred ownership of Nosgoth from the Vampires to the humans. Mortanius and Moebius were both chosen by the Pillars as the Guardians of Death and Time respectively, and seven more human members were selected as well. The Vampire race dwindled and the humans prospered for thousands of years.
Thousands of years later, Moebius was the leader of an army of religous zealots named the Sarafan. The Sarafan were a fanatical army of paladins and clerics in violent and psychotic servitude to the Wheel of Fate. Under the rule of Moebius, they had hunted and exterminated Vampires for hundreds of years, breaking their numbers down to a paltry count. They were ruthless, hateful warriors who would mutilate and desecrate the bodies of their Vampire enemies all in the name of holy mandate. The Sarafan were a scourge to the Vampure race, and nearly succeeded in destroying them all. They had even succeeded in hunting and murdering the oldest known vampire in the world, the only remaining member of the original blue-skinned, winged Ancients that had originally inhabited the planet, Janos Audron. They tore his heart from his writhing body, left his dying corpse behind and took the organ. Still beating with Vampiric unlife, the named it the Heart of Darkness, and it sat in Sarafan custody for hundreds of years. They learned that the Heart had the power to restore vampiric unlife to a fallen Vampire, and if it fell into the wrong hands, it could be used as a disastrous weapon.
500 years before the death and resurrection of Kain, and shortly after the murder of Janos Audron, the Sarafan suffered a terrible blow. The vampire Vorador, the second-oldest Vampire in Nosgoth, Janos Audron's apprentice and the first human vampire to ever be created, attacked the Sarafan Stronghold and assaulted the Circle of Nine. He slaughtered six of the Guardians, sparing only Moebius, Mortanius and one other, simply because he was unable to locate them. The 6 murdered Guardians cried out to their protector, Malek, the commander of the Sarafan Army. But, he arrived too late. He squared off against Vorador in an attempt to kill the best once and for all, but was knocked unconscious in the battle. He would later be punished by the Circle for his failure.
Simultaneously, however, another mysterious figure infiltrated the Stronghold at exactly the same time. This seemingly invincible entity tore through the Stronghold Guard and began slaughtering another crucial group of individuals within the Sarafan Order: The Sarafan Inquisitors. The Inquisitors were a separate team from the rest of the army. They consisted of 6 individuals, and were used as a sort of special task force for the Sarafan Order. They consisted of the warriors Melchiah, Zephon, Rahab, Dumah, Turel and their leader, Raziel. The Inquisitors, the strongest members of the Sarafan order besides malek himself, were decimated by the dark creature. They were ceremonially entombed in a large crypt and were remembered as heroes.
Malek recieved a far worse fate. For failing to protect the Circle of Nine, his soul was torn from his body and fused into an enchanted suit of armor. He would live eternally, but would never experience the pleasures of the flesh ever again. He was also chosen by the Pillars as the replacement for the recently departed Conflict Guardian. The rest of the Guardians were replaced, and their order was restored. The Sarafan did not survive, however. Their morale was utterly devastated by the loss of the Inquisitors and the punishment inflicted upon their leader, Malek. A hundred years or so went by, and eventually the Order disbanded.
30 years before the death and resurrection of Kain, another horrible tragedy struck the Circle, only this one being far, far worse than the last tragic event. Ariel, the Guardian of Balance, leader of the Circle was murdered at the hands of an unknown assassin. Not long after, an hour maybe less, her lover Nupraptor, the Guardian of The Mind, found her deceased body. He cried in violent anguish, his mind snapped in half, and in his abysmal torment, he sent a psychic shockwave throughout the entire Circle. This uncoordinated attack dragged the rest of the Circle into madness with him, and within moments, the pristine white marble of the Pillars transformed into ragged, cracked, black stone. The Guardians had become corrupted, causing the corruption of the Pillars that they were tied to, which in turn would cause the corruption of all of Nosgoth. This would prove to be the beginning of the downfall of Nosgoth.
And that does it for the backstory. Tune in tomorrow for the next installment, Blood Omen.
 
Last edited by Raziel; 2004-06-16 at 01:51 AM.
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