Unbended:Undead

Chasmvampire

The name of this creature sounds silly to you? Why don’t you tell them that in person if you get the chance? The bad news: crosses, garlic and wooden sticks won’t help you at all against these things. Neither will they, if the stories told are true, fall in love with cute, human female heroes. The bottom line is, chasmvampires are simply formidable killing machines, blessed with great power and an admirable agility. These beasts aren’t really vampires in the strictest sense, at least not, if you look at dietary habits closely. Chasmvampires tend to tear into anything living that doesn’t belong to their own race, ripping it into handy pieces that they consume raw – and they do this quickly and with deadly efficiency. Is there any good news? Well, in principle, yes, as the chasmvampires can only be found at a single place in Aetherra. The cartographers among you will have already suspected where: of course, this place is the Chasm of Dimona, that can be found in the most outer southwestern tip of the continent. You could say: desert at the top, chasm at the bottom – that can’t go well. But it explains the name of these spear-toothed monsters. If it’s still not sounding threatening enough to you, you might consider the name that the inhabitants of the area close to the Chasm gave them: Hakkra Shizzar, which, freely translated, means “the darkborn.” Are chasmvampires a plague and a danger for the human settlements nearby? Only rarely. Chasmvampires can only survive in the specific micro-climate of the Dimona caves. If they are exposed to the conditions on the surface of Aetherra for a longer period of time, they perish. That doesn’t mean that these creatures never set out for smaller hunting trips, but rather that these trips are never particularly extended as they rarely move more than a few Cambrian miles from their safety of their refuge. That’s why the chasmvampires at the utmost get a few careless travelers between their frightening fangs. What do we know of the history of these monstrosities? Well, the accounts aren’t consistent, but it seems certain that the vampires are descendents from much older creatures that chroniclers count among the Creatures of the Beginning. It is said that Aureth did not manage to get a hold of every of his early creations again. Some of them withdrew to the Chasm of Dimona and hid there, deep in the impenetrable darkness of this place, until the Creator finally stopped his search. Here, deep underground, the realm of the chasmvampires came into existence; a place that in peculiarity surpasses everything else in Aetherra. Finally another bad news: There are things hidden deep in the chasm that are of elementary importance for finding an effective means against the effects of the Drift. Be prepared for a descent that few would wish for.