The oldest surviving fragments place the origin of vampirism not in kingdoms or castles, but in an age before recorded civilization. Long before the rise of nations, early tribal peoples living near the scar later associated with Crestfall became entangled in a prolonged and devastating conflict. Oral traditions describe famine, brutal winters, dwindling game, and escalating cycles of retaliation that slowly transformed survival into obsession.

As the conflict worsened, some among the losing side turned toward the wound itself. The scar in reality had already become feared and quarantined by surrounding peoples, associated with impossible dreams, missing time, strange lights, and places where the world behaved incorrectly. Yet desperation has always drawn humanity toward forbidden things.

The surviving myths disagree on what the first thieves believed they were stealing. Some traditions claim they sought immortality. Others suggest they sought divine strength, protection, or transcendence. A few fragmented accounts imply they believed the wound concealed the blood of gods themselves. Whatever the truth, they attempted to draw power from something beyond the boundaries of ordinary reality—and succeeded only partially.

The result was not true immortality, but severance. The transformed no longer existed entirely within ordinary life. Ancient descriptions portray them as existing in a strange state of temporal dislocation, partially removed from the normal flow of reality itself. They did not age correctly. Their wounds healed unnaturally. Their bodies moved with impossible speed and strength, yet something essential within them no longer felt fully alive.

Blood became necessary not as food alone, but as tether. Later occult interpretations suggest the stolen condition placed them partially within another state of existence entirely, forcing them to continually draw living vitality back into themselves in order to remain anchored to the mortal world.

What horrified the surrounding tribes most was not their appearance, but their presence. The transformed still looked human, but no longer felt human. Witness accounts repeatedly describe them as emotionally hollow, unnaturally calm, impossibly fast, and devoid of ordinary warmth or fear. Some traditions insist animals refused to approach them. Others claim the world itself seemed subtly reluctant to acknowledge their existence.

The theft ended the tribal war almost immediately. Faced with the transformed, both sides recognized something far worse than defeat had entered the world. Ancient enemies united against the new horrors, abandoning their conflict to drive the altered beings away from the wound and from human lands entirely.

The surviving stories differ on what became of the first vampires afterward. Most claim the transformed fled northward across the frozen passages connecting the continents, eventually disappearing into the unknown territories that would later become associated with northern Asia and Eastern Europe. Their ultimate fate is lost completely to myth.

In the aftermath, the tribes surrounding the wound became increasingly protective and secretive regarding the region. Rituals of silence, restricted territories, and inherited warnings emerged to prevent future contact with the scar. Some traditions suggest this was also the moment the distant presences beyond the wound began to withdraw or shield themselves more carefully, as though the theft itself had altered whatever fragile relationship existed between realities.

Kael was the last son of a dying chief. His tribe was starving, their enemies closing in, the spirits silent. He had watched his brothers fall, his mother weaken, and the future of his people curdle into a single, bitter certainty: they would be gone before the next thaw. It was in this despair that he turned to the forbidden place, the basin where the world was wrong. He had heard the stories of the Still-Walkers, not as a warning, but as a promise. If the land was wrong, perhaps it could be made right.

He did not go alone. He took with him the last of his warriors, men and women with nothing left to lose. They carried no offerings, only the blades of their ancestors and the hollowed-out bones of their last hunt. They did not seek to understand the wound; they sought to force it to give them a boon. They stood at the center of the basin, under the unfamiliar stars, and Kael did not pray. He demanded. He cut his palm, let his blood fall onto the silent stone, and shouted into the uncaring air, "Take this, and give us what we need to survive!"

The wound answered. Not with a voice or a vision, but with a feeling. A sensation of being un-tethered, of the world's rules coming undone like a poorly tied knot. Kael felt his own heartbeat slow, then stop, yet he did not die. He felt the cold seep into his bones, yet he did not shiver. He looked at his fellow warriors and saw the same change in them. Their eyes were no longer filled with desperation, but with a vast, terrifying emptiness. They had not been given strength. They had been removed from the need for it.

They returned to their tribe not as saviors, but as strangers. The people saw them and rejoiced at first, but the joy curdled into fear. The transformed moved without sound. Their skin was cool to the touch. When they spoke, their voices were flat, devoid of the passion and grief that had defined them. Kael looked upon the face of his mother, the woman he had sought to save, and felt nothing. Not love, not duty, not even memory. Only a hollow, gnawing hunger.

The breaking point came when a child, his own niece, ran to him with a handful of berries. He looked down at the offering, at the warmth of her living hand, and the hunger roared within him. He did not mean to harm her. He simply... took. The tribe's screams were the first sound to truly echo in the wound since its creation. The war was forgotten. His own people, his former enemies, united as one and drove the transformed out with fire and stone. Kael and his warriors fled, not from defeat, but from the terrifying, hollow truth of what they had become. They had not stolen life. They had stolen the space where life used to be.

The Blood on Stone: The belief that the stones at the center of the basin are permanently stained, and that on certain nights, they still seem to weep a slow, red liquid.

The Unseen Hunt: The legend that some traditions insist fragments of the first severed line still wander the far north, not as lords, but as silent, eternal hunters, forever chasing a prey they can never truly catch.

The Cold Embrace: A term used in later folklore to describe the initial touch of a vampire, not as a seduction, but as a chilling loss of self.