The house on Sycamore Lane had been empty for years, its sagging porch and peeling paint a warning to passersby. Locals whispered about the Crawl Space Ghost, a malevolent spirit said to lurk beneath the floorboards, but no one dared to investigate. When I bought the house at auction, desperate for a cheap fixer-upper, I dismissed the rumors as small-town folklore. That was my first mistake.

The forest beyond Eldermoor village was a place of whispered dread, its gnarled oaks and tangled undergrowth swallowing moonlight like a hungry void. Locals called it the Black Hollow, claiming it was cursed since the village’s founding in 1693. They spoke of a witch cult that gathered at the witching hour—3 a.m.—to dance around a bonfire, chanting curses to summon the devil himself. As a skeptical journalist named Eliza, chasing a breakout story on occult practices, I saw an opportunity to debunk the hysteria. Armed with a flashlight, notebook, and hidden recorder, I slipped into the Black Hollow under a moonless sky, the air thick with the scent of pine and something acrid, like burning blood.

In the year of our Lord 1773, London was a city of shadowed alleys and flickering lamplight, where the opulence of the gentry mingled uneasily with the squalor of the poor. I, Sir Edmund Vane, a gentleman of modest estate in Mayfair, was known for my scholarly pursuits and reserved demeanor. Yet, a malady of the nerves, mistaken for death by the physicians of that rude age, brought upon me a fate most horrific. In a cataleptic trance, I was pronounced dead, my body consigned to a mahogany coffin and interred in the cold earth of St. Giles’ churchyard. I awoke to darkness, my screams muffled by the suffocating weight of six feet of soil, my nails splintering as I clawed at the coffin’s lid, air dwindling until oblivion claimed me.

It all begIn the uncharted abyss of the cosmos, where light falters and time is but a fleeting illusion, there existed a rogue planet named Vyrath, a blackened sphere adrift in the eternal night, untouched by the warmth of any star. Its surface was a labyrinth of obsidian spires and crimson chasms, pulsating with veins of luminescent ichor that glowed like the lifeblood of some unholy beast. Here dwelt the Vyrathii, a race of vampiric beings, their forms both beautiful and grotesque—tall and emaciated, with skin like polished alabaster, eyes burning with a scarlet malevolence, and mouths filled with writhing, needle-like fangs that dripped a venom that burned through metal and bone. They were not born of mortal flesh but forged in the crucible of a death goddess, Nyxara, the Weaver of Oblivion, whose name they chanted in rituals that shook the very fabric of the void.ins with an idea.