The Genocide of the Razielim

Raziel's death sent a wave of fear throughout his clan. They would no doubt be seen as equally guilty for Raziel's blasphemy and meet the same fate. The clan elders worried for the pupating - those Razielim who were currently in a stasis of slumber, undergoing new evolution - and formulated a temporary plan. Before Turel's slaves had completed the Smokestack, Nosgoth's light remained a terrible obstacle. To spare fledglings from immediate death, each clan had constructed vast underground cities in which to house their newborn until they evolved enough to withstand the more deadly effects of the sun. It was here that the Razielim elders relocated their sleeping brethren to remain protected against the foreseen wrath of Kain.

However, after Raziel's execution, Kain disappeared. No trace was left of their Master. It seemed as if they had worried for naught until the remaining Council members came together to discuss Kain's absence. While Dumah and Turel were most concerned with the empty seat left by their master, each challenging the other as the 'rightful heir' now that Raziel was gone, it was Zephon who steered the discussion toward Raziel himself. Their former brother had committed a grand treason undermining Kain with his latest gift, and surely he had passed this insubordinate new trait to his clan. In fulfillment of what Kain had started, they must put every last Razielim to death. After a period of debate on the matter, they all came to agree on this and the Razielim were viciously hunted. Even flight did not save them as they were ambushed by vampire patrols and their wings torn out in mimicry of their impertinent patriarch. Soon, every trace of the Razielim was gone, bodies dissolved in water or immolated in flame, weapons melted down for metal, monuments shattered into rubble. But deep beneath the Erebus Mountains east of Coorhagen, Raziel's subterranean city remained hidden with his evolving children safe within. And in time, they would emerge.

Years after the merciless hunt against their clan, the Razielim awoke to unfamiliar territory. They had gone to sleep in their homeland and woken up in a great underground vault. Maddened with voracious bloodthirst, as was always the case when a vampire emerged from the state of change, the fledglings were distraught to find that there were no attendants waiting, no humans collected to feed them as was the standard practice. Their sole thought was to satiate this wanton hunger and yet they could not. The Razielim elders held the keys to unlocking this protective vault and all of those elders were dead. The newly-evolved vampires did not know what had befallen their clan, however, and so they waited patiently for their elders to bring the blood they craved.

For decades, they waited. Having risen with new and pleasant forms, the deep darkness and deprivation of blood distorted this beauty into travesty. Their fair skin grew hard like thickest chitin, their fingers became disjointed and grotesque and as the starvation took its toll, their fresh new wings shriveled to the point that bone protruded directly through the membranous skin.

Starving and deranged, the Razielim saw only one option. They would have to claw through the vault's massive door to reach freedom. And so they commenced to work, desperately scraping away, fingers worn bloody from the unending effort. And those who became too weak, who collapsed in the line of this singular duty, were set upon and torn apart for whatever few drops of blood could be pulled from their veins.

The only solace to the Razielim was that they were immortal and thus time offered no obstacle to their escape. With this in mind, they clawed, scraped, struggled to break out of the vault and into the underground city beyond. At long last, they achieved this but, lost and maddened by the incessant hunger and ruination of their once-proud forms, could not bear the effort to fly free. A small reconaissance party was selected and sent out to survey the area, hopefully to find a way home. And this was indeed found. The leader of this party, a Razielim called Eskandor who once held glorious dreams of joining the ranks of the clan elders, settled his group upon the nearby landmark of Coorhagen.

Corpses littered the streets, decapitated Melchahim and burnt Dumahim. The breeding pens stood empty. The blood farms were destroyed. Aghast at the state of the place and worried for what had transpired in their long absence, Eskandor and his scouts returned to the temple-city of their fellow clan members and led them out toward Coorhagen, then onward under cover of night to their home regions.

It was here that they found, not their elders waiting with fresh blood, but a circle of vicious reavers led by Dumah himself.