Night Blades and Morning Blood

Foreward

In the beginning, when the trees were young and the mountains soft, the land of Atuas was ruled by tribal chieftains. As the winters came and went they fought over tiny creaks, scraps of forest and fields sown with salt. Clans, tribes and war bands burnt their neighbours at every point of the compass and without mercy.
Out of the famine and the flames a group of warriors banded together to form the Order of the Night’s Blood. Assassins for hire, they murdered leaders, warlords and wealthy merchants without exclusion. Striking from the shadows in secrecy, they were but a story to those who could not afford their bloody services.
But every force of power must have constraints, less it break apart and spiral into anarchy. Its first members set down a code, the book of death. Written in the tome were the rules that governed their order and the fitting punishments should they not be upheld.
But the brotherhood’s time was in short supply.

From across the eastern deserts came a mighty force. An army of immense size strode out of the dust and sand, desperate and homeless. 100,000 men tried and tested in battle marched across the ruin that was Atuas. Armed with the finest steel and clad in plate and mail they smashed the wooden ring forts and stone hovels of the natives. Some noble chieftains held out for a time and rode valiantly into battle, but before long all would fall to the armies might. From the fringes of the deserts from whence they came to the mountains of the land of the five rivers once powerful men were bent and bowed.
A great general rode at the army’s head; the purest soldier who ever lived, betrayed and banished from the home he loved. Under the banner of a burning Harpy, the warrior King accepted oaths of fealty from every man of standing in the land in whatever manner their customs dictated.

But with the salvation and peace the emperor promised, so too loomed the death of the Order. As he wandered across the dessert, the burning harpy found a long-forgotten city built in blood and sand. A thousand thousand wicked deeds had been done within its walls and in the deepest, darkest crypt they found them. The Scr’gori. Dark shade assassins born of smoke and steel that fed on the contracts they completed. As the demon city fell beneath the sand once more, a powerful mage trapped them in their crypts, hoping they would never see light again. But his efforts were in vein.
Fearing what they had unleashed, the emperor agreed to bring the Scr’gori shades into his ranks as assassins. Bound under the same conditions laid down by their former masters they served, or else they turn and lay waste to the generals men.
As the unstoppable thousands swept across Ataus, the Scr’gori were kept in reserve, waiting, hungry. Finally, the burning Harpy’s men moved north, beyond the forest, to the ice fields and the frozen sea. Ill prepared for the harshness of even a mild winter, thousands died as the ice tribes, bound together for the first time against a common enemy, picked off the great host one by one. Thousands more sat down in the snow and never rose to march on, the cold a greater enemy than the invaded savages.
After many months, having gained little ground at great cost, the emperor let loose his secret weapon. To this day, the men of the snow fields still remember what legend dubbed “The night of frozen blood”.
Thirteen chieftains awoke to find their eldest sons split from collar-bone to groin; there insides eaten and the scraps fed to the dogs. Distraught, the chieftains laid down their swords and each tribe came into the fold of the new empire without further bloodshed.
However, victory had come at a cost. At the chieftains behest, the emperor saw the damage that had been done, the cost that had been paid. And the emperor wept.
Under the guidance of the general’s most trusted advisor, Koben the mage, a ritual was performed in secret, at the heart of the great forest. Every leader of the once divided land shed blood in the name of returning the shades to eternal entrapment. All but one, the Scr’gors leader, and the most prolific killer of them all, were returned to eternal incarceration. But nobody knew. Not even Koben the magnificent had knowledge of his failure. Nobody but the Order of the Night’s Blood.
The details of how they came to know are lost to the annuls of history, but as the emperor slept in his newly forged kingdom, the Scr’gori shade dissolved from a shadow and struck. Unsatisfied with the victory, it is said the shadow assassin gloated, his black knife at his enemies’ throat.
And that was when they came for him.
It is said that the Order of the Nights Blood fought the shade for a full moons turn until finally victory was theirs. The Scri’gori was entombed, its location secret to all and forgotten by the passage of time.
The emperor, now wary of assassins, thanked the order and girfted with survival. Having learned that no one man should be in controlled of such skilled harbingers of death, they were left ungoverned by any save themselves. But stipulations were imposed. The book of death was burned. And the book of life was written. No human life was to be taken ever again. But the brotherhood survived.
As befits them, no great deeds are sung for hero’s bathed in shadow, only stories told to children and around a soldiers’ fire.
For almost a thousand years the empire lived in relative peace, until a new enemy reared its ugly head. From the land of five rivers, the Direus legion came.