The History of a New World (Framing a Horror Fantasy)

Author and journalist G.W. Pomichter is at it again, and he is creating and reimagining a whole new world in which to populate with bastardizations of some of speculative fiction's most beloved beasts. Below is a glimpse of the world that Pomichter is creating. Leave comments and tell us what you think of this "new mythology."

In The Beginning

Five millennia ago, when human beings were building the first megalithic structures and settling some of histories’ earliest cities, power was scarcely held by mortal men. Most of these early civilizations were ruled by the immortals. Pharaohs, Kings and Emperors, Immortals all, directed men for millennia to band together and erect cities, monuments and temples in lamenting remnant to a lost paradise.

It has been said that these were the children of the fallen angels of heaven’s war. No one really knows. It has been said they met the first men who walked upright out of Africa — out of Eden and out of grace. No one can know for certain.

They were powerful magical creatures and the early men worshiped them as on to God himself.

But men would not be tamed, and they grew in numbers and they took from their masters the want and love and lust for power. They drove the immortals from their thrones and into the shadows beyond firelight, beyond the fringe of civilization and into legend, lore and whispered antiquity.

Soon men ruled in the name of their once proud gods, until time and dust and ruin left the immortals forgotten, their names bastardized and relegated to myth.

But they did not end. They survived in the dark woods and deep hollows between the cities of mankind and they thrived in secret. The most feared and powerful of these forgotten deities were three races most blessed with longest life, singularly primal and predatory instincts and having hoarded unto themselves in the dark all that was left in the world of magic and mystery.

Umpyr, known throughout time as the Vampyre, was blessed with life so long that mortal men would birth and bury 25 generations in their lifespan. Stronger than a man by ten times, fierce of temperament and shrewd and calculating, these were among the most feared and dangerous of the trinity. But it was not their intellect or their power that men had feared. It was their blood lust. Ancient rumor and folklore tied their origins to a pact between the prince of the fallen angels and an ancient, long forgotten tribe of humans pledged to serve in his war against heaven. The angel, Lucifer, promised the men and women of the tribe immortality in exchange for their help, but providence and defeat denied the gift, rendering them and all their progeny to live and die in a hunger to match their ambitions. For this reason, as much as any that history has forgotten, the vampyre’s thirst for blood was unquenchable. When they ruled beside their immortal brethren, humanity bled and poured its precious life force out upon altars and into jeweled chalices to escape their wrath. Some say, it was the cruelty of the vampire that led to men’s revolt. None now live, mortal or immortal, that would know for certain, and like all of the angelic fallen, Lucifer himself, long isolated, has been relegated to legend and having fathered such has become infamous in abstentia.

The second pillar in the sacred trinity of immortals was a race rumored to have been bred when those first fallen of heaven, resentful of mankind, took to wed the beasts of field and forest — the shape shifters.

The strongest, most ferocious and revered of these — and perhaps last to roam the world, were the descendants of the angel Lycenia. Known as the Lycan — the wolves of night walked in the daylight as men. They were vicious on the hunt or in battle. They were compelled by the most basic animal predatory instincts. They possessed unwavering loyalty to whatever master they pledged themselves and not only capable, but inherently bound to coordinated pack behavior. Long after the realms of men had driven their mythical masters from power, it was said that no mortal king would deny the wolves a place in their armies. Conquerors coveted the pledge of the pack to their sides, until, long ago, the last of the Lycan seemed to vanish. They lived on only in the mystical shrouded lore of the drifting and shiftless Romani tribes.

The strong base of the trinity rested on one of the most treacherous immortals — the covens. The covens were a race of witches that legend says were once hunted by heaven, itself. In ancient times, it is said, they were bred of the marriage of angels to mortal women. The ancients called them Nephilym. Men have called them by many names. They lived nearly as long as the vampires, but they do not share that creature’s need for blood. They lived and prospered in plain sight, as no man could know their difference. They looked and lived in every way as humanity, save for but the power in their blood. They wielded the energies of a living universe with ease, and born of mortals, were ruthless in their pursuits of power. They rose to prominence in cultures throughout mortal dominion until the tides of time turned and the one God came to replace the many in the hearts of humanity, and men drove them from the daylight, into the shadows. But there they waited. Still infused with understanding and magic, their power, it is said, will not be denied.

In the year 325 A.D., in a city called Nicaea in the mortal kingdom of Bithynia the Roman Emperor Constantine convened a special assembly known by his subjects as the first ecumenical council, which was believed to be the first effort to formally establish the Christian church. Among the Christian bishops, though, from around the world, Hebrew rabbi’s, pagan priests, and desert mystics came. At the summit, while publicly laying the scaffold of a new world religion, representatives in secret debated the future of the immortals still walking among humanity. A representative of a European tribe of nomads, rumored to have descended from the earliest Egyptians, called Gypsies, who hailed from the far reaches of India, brought the most ancient texts and histories containing the most complete record of their time since the dawn of human kind. Fierce military warriors and dedicated to the study of the ancients, they called themselves Romani, a name the emperor, himself, was said to have given, and pledged themselves to an eternal mission to watch and keep the magic and mysteries of the immortals apart from men and their dominion over the earth. When the council had been concluded, the newly formed Romani were sent as emissary to immortals. It took 78 years and nearly three generations to discover and bring representatives from each of the factions together in 403 A.D. in the Roman city of Verona.

With emissaries of all of the tribes of immortals gathered in one place, a rogue band of humans, steeped in the legends of their once oppressors, brought an army to bear on them. The Army was led by a man named Alaric, who might have been Lycan, himself, and whose attack may have been a ploy to establish the superiority of the wolves. It was only with the help of a Roman general, secret leader of the Romani, Stilicho, that the band was defeated definitively, and history largely ignored the role of the immortals. Far away, the newly appointed Roman Emperor of the West, Honorius, as tribute for his Romani warriors assistance, was allowed by the Trifectual Conclave of Immortal Elders to establish a new Western Empire capital in the once immortal stronghold of Ravenna. Honorius, as a reward for his faithful Romani general, took Stilicho’s daughter to wed, and history would never question their secret alliances.

To show his ongoing gratitude to the immortals’ conclave, Honorius granted them secret sanctuary in the Carpathians far to the Eastern frontiers of his empire bordering his brothers Eastern Empire and that of the Goths. Honorius himself, was said to have received the transubstantiation ritual to become immortal, but it was never proven, and most dismiss it as a rumor started by his brother, Emperor in the East, Arcadius, who was jealous of his brother’s alliance with the once powerful gods of old. It was often disputed that the sanctuary city of Carnuntum was not Honrius’s to give, but rather belonged to the powerful Goths. It matters very little, as generations of mortals would live and die and rulers would come and go, all in but a moment of a single immortal life. They fled further and further, deep into the east, into the treacherous and mountainous Carpathians to a region known in antiquity by their Romani guardians as Wallachia, to live far from the cities of men. The immortals stayed deep in caverns, roamed the wild mountain forests and lived invisibly beside humans in small villages throughout the region.

Later, this sanctuary wilderness would be plundered of its rich folklore, and under the dominion of lesser princes, the existence of the immortals would again be dismissed as legend and rumor. But their guardian Romani never forgot their mission, claiming the mountain range and plains and fields around it as Romania. Though the Romani people were often believed to be subjugated to their immortal companions and even enslaved to mortal principalities, their traditions and their ancient knowledge survived and the truce remained. It would be a thousand years, until a mortal ruler would break the truce with the immortals by bargaining with a Vampire faction to secure his own power against an enemy. It ended badly.

In 1477, the ruler was killed by one of his own soldiers, and his elite Vampyric guard, known as the Moldavians were slaughtered at the hands of the wolves and witches. The body of infamous Vlad Tepesh was destroyed by the Conclave and to prove their alliances with men, his severed head was sent in a jar of honey to his enemies.

The legends claim that the leader of the Vampires conspired with a Nephilym, and a Lycan, and that Tepesh underwent the ritual transubstantiation to become an immortal, himself. It is whispered that the unholy trouple hoped to create a mythical immortal known as the Eterius, or one who saves in the ancient Sumerian, who was prophesied in antiquity, and was said to bear all of the strengths of the immortals and none of their weaknesses. It was written that the Eterius would unite the clans in Duranki, a bond between heaven and earth, and restore them to dominion over mortal men. It has been speculated that the Eterius was, from mortality, the one restored to heaven’s grace who would ascend with the fallen back to heaven, and lay humanity forever in servitude to their own immortal children.

The brutal Vlad, as it turned out, was not this messianic hero.

After the discovery and subsequent disruption of the plot, and fearing that humans might learn of the prophesy and the conspiracy, the Trifectual Conclave of Immortal Elders gathered and agreed upon the adoption of the Trilateral Covenant — three fundamental laws under which all immortals would be governed, and the violation of which would render the life of an immortal forfeit.

1. No immortal shall betray or reveal the existence or history of their existence to the mortal world.

2. The factious tribes would sever their communities, and no immortal of one tribe would walk among the others. Umpyr, Lycan and Nephilym communities would forever exist separately and apart.

3. No mortal shall undergo the unstable and dangerous ritual of transubstantiation for any cause, that it might give one faction advantage over the others and over human kind.

The history of mankind from these days until the present is littered with secret and lost alliances with the ancient and powerful. But, under the sacred laws passed down for the past 1000 years — barely 4 generations for immortals — excepting rare, unintended glimpses, immortals seemed to vanish into the depth and dark of mankind’s imagination.


Comment: What would you do with this universe?
Comment: Could you build a story in this universe?