The Blind Valiant

PROLOGUE.

Everyone has their own way of telling our story.

Some say it began scores of thousands of years ago, with two siblings quarrelling over a bitter misunderstanding. A quarrel that ended in the murder of one at the hands of the other. The egregious act poisoning his blood forever.

Over the years since that unfortunate time, the tribes and peoples of the Evvoia came up with names for us in their many tongues. My father’s people called us Fells just as my mother’s knew us as zehirli kan – cursed angels. But they all meant the same thing.

Darklings.

Poison blood, kin killer... a blight.

That last one was the only one that got our nature quite right.

We were blights to the Noirish who considered themselves the natural order of our world, they of Divine descent. They’d looked upon our beliefs and faith of the Lemegeton and called it blasphemy... sin. Evil.

 And those whom they caught evangelizing its faith in either deed or word, were condemned and executed without hesitancy.

 I did not have to remember the bloody history between we, the Fells and the Noirish. It was too long to even guess its beginning but the end still so recent that it is firmly imprinted in every child’s memory.

We had tried to fight back. Using our sorceries against theirs in a relentless but futile bid of self-preservation and survival. The scales shifting from one side to the other at the turn of the wind since the start of the Crusades.

 But we had lost. Our crushing defeat back in 345 B.D. had come when a grand scale assault was made on Kosti Dům, our capital. Damaikar, our most ruthless deity ever to unite his divided brethren and the Fell cities, had been slain at last.

 His Madrigals and people were hunted down, slain or bound in shackles we wouldn’t be freed from for the next millennium.

As for the Lemegeton, our most holy and powerful grimoire was stolen and destroyed; never to instruct future generations in the ways of our ancestors and weakening those who survived to the yoke of slavery and death.

 Though now our power had all but been extinguished, the war had become even more precarious and unrelenting, for the Echelon soon discovered that the laws of Lemegeton could never be thwarted.

 There must always be balance, that ancient force proclaimed.

Pure Noirish families soon began to produce children of Fell blood, posing an even greater threat to the Echelon. Yet our oppressors did not falter, for the next millennium, they pursued and persecuted those of us with Infernal blood running through our veins.

 Centuries might have passed but the tactics had not changed: purge out the infection before it became an epidemic that could rouse that age old revolution.

Even if it meant attacking other Noirish like them who rebelled to protect their Fell loved ones. Sometimes these children were willingly herded over like oblivious lambs to the slaughter. It was a sickening and unforgivable sacrilege, the lengths they would go to assert their superiority over us.

Yet it was during the Cleansing of 1847 A.D that the Echelon, the governing body of the Noirish, brought upon themselves a penalty for the atrocities they’d committed against the Lemegeton.

 But first it begins with a man who didn’t know himself.