"In the beginning, death ruled all. Then came the one whose blood refused to die."
Long before kingdoms rose and fell, before men named the stars, there lived a man whose blood defied death itself — Alexander Corvinus. When a great plague swept across the world, his flesh healed where all others rotted and his blood transformed pestilence into purity. He became the first immortal and from his veins came three sons, the Trium Sanguis, the Three Bloods.
One was bitten by a bat and became the sovereign of the night... the first Vampire.
One was bitten by a wolf and became the beast of the moon... the first Werewolf. And the last remained human bearing within him the Pureblood Gene, untainted by curse or corruption, destined to echo through the ages.
Time flowed like rivers of dust, and the world forgot their names. Yet the night remembered.
Centuries later, in the distant lands of the East, a wanderer emerged, pale as the moon and ageless as the mountain's shadow. None knew his name, but the scriptures called him the First Sire, for his blood carried the power to make others as himself. He had been born of the bat-bitten son's line, his blood both gift and curse.
Wherever he walked, kingdoms fell silent. Men bowed not in faith, but in fear.
It was he who found Vlad Țepeș, the impaler prince of Wallachia, a man who had lost everything to war and treachery. In despair, Vlad sought strength beyond mortal reach, and the First Sire offered it freely. Under the light of a blood-red eclipse, Vlad drank his blood and was reborn, neither man nor corpse, but something eternal. Thus was born Dracula, the Lord of Shadows, the first of the Turned Vampires, whose hunger could never again be sated by mortal food or faith.
The First Sire vanished soon after, as if the world itself swallowed him whole. Some said he turned to dust with the dawn; others whispered he walked into the sea to sleep beneath the waves but his blood endured, living through the children of the night that followed.
From Dracula's line came many breeds some savage, some refined. Those who wandered west through the centuries evolved, their bodies growing colder, stronger, harder than stone. Their hearts no longer beat, yet their beauty transcended death itself. They shone like diamond in the sun, living paradoxes, radiant yet damned.
These would one day be called the Eclipsed, though mortal tongues named them otherwise... the Twilight Vampires. They were the distant children of Dracula.
And so the night was divided by blood yet all were bound by one origin. The Corvinus Gene that wove the tapestry of all immortal kind. Each believed their bloodline the truest; each carried a fragment of the ancient design. But only one man, the untainted heir of Corvinus' last son would one day awaken the secret that could unite them all... or end them forever.
"For the blood remembers," the old seers wrote. "And one day, it shall call its heir."