A Letter from the Chronicler

My dear friend, forgive my silence. Returning to my notes on Ashkeep has cost me more sleepless nights than I had expected. Their official Codex tells a well-ordered tale.

After the First Long Ash, the tribes endured centuries of war until an ancient prophecy foretold the return of darkness and the coming of the Prince of Ashes, who would unite them. Then came Caedros, a farmer’s son offered in sacrifice who returned from the mountain pale, drained of blood, and unable to endure the sun. He denounced the priests of Moloch, proclaimed himself the Prince of Ashes, and foretold a Second Long Ash. For three years, his name spread among the tribes. When the sun truly vanished and he walked beneath the darkened sky without burning, many came to regard him as the messiah they had awaited.

The tribes rallied to him, their chiefs were overthrown, and Caedros proclaimed them the Ash Folk. The Codex claims that he then gave his life to restore the light, and that his five companions founded Ashkeep around his tomb. The city prospered under their successors before declining and passing into ruin.

I have spent a great portion of my life studying this account, and I no longer believe it to be true. Caedros certainly existed, but what returned from the mountain was no longer wholly human. Too many early testimonies describe the same pallor, the absence of blood, and his inability to endure sunlight for the truth to have been entirely erased.

Caedros had become a Vampire. More troubling still, vampires appear throughout the earliest centuries of Ashkeep, around the Five, the first Princes, and the very institutions that shaped the city. The deeper one looks, the less Ashkeep’s celebrated order resembles a work of civilisation and the more it resembles some vast machine whose true purpose I have never been able to determine. Something was being sustained there, perhaps even fed.

Their presence gradually disappears from the records shortly before Ashkeep begins to decline, after which the city empties and finally collapses. This is why Neron’s return troubles me.

Centuries later, he appears with remarkable knowledge of the lost city, assumes the title of the thirteenth Prince of Ashes, and begins repopulating its ruins. If he truly intends to restore what once existed there, then one must ask what else he is rebuilding alongside the walls, the laws, and the institutions.

For on one matter, at least, I am now certain that the Codex lies: Caedros never died.