| Category | Lexicon |
| Type | God Era lore |
In the God Era, angels, gods and mortals fought alongside each other against a great demon invasion spanning the Quara'tun System. These armies of the Abyss, serving Demon Lords, were bent on carving out portions of the mortal realm for themselves. One of the worlds that was under the cross-hairs of this Demon Spawn War (8972 GE - 9493 GE) was Bal-Kriav. In this world's Ma'Ohari Region, the Covenant General Silvanus faced the demon lord Graz'zt.
One of the units under Silvanus was the Second Light Division, or Zephyr Talon. This unit was tasked with scouting and picking off stragglers. A few members of this group left a stain on the realm that is oddly not mentioned in any of the Plaques of Aphalur.
The treants of Einglach tell legends of a curse or corruption that befell a group of archons that thousands of years ago were based out of Zan Urk. In each of the legends, they call this group the Forsaken Six. The treants, each with a varying tale of them, usually portray them as neutrals and not leaning to much to either side of the balance. In the Demon Spawn War, they served under the then archangel Silvanus. They functioned as scouts and were tasked with patrolling a large area of Ma'Ohari. Some of the unit's soldiers took to performing battle rituals which sometimes used the blood and body parts of their slain enemies. They would boil the demon blood and use it in war tattoos, coloring their armor and weapons with it. The demon body parts were used in necklaces or as territorial markers to threaten the demons. These practices had their intended effect on the enemy, for if not in overwhelming numbers, the demons would often run from the sight or even rumor of them being in the area. When these practices started getting a bit too dastardly for Silvanus's tastes, he gave them a warning:
You are taking a journey down a well-worn path that will soon split, one will be a steep arduous climb that doubles back, the other is twists and turns, going down, easy to travel for even the lame, this one leads to oblivion.
- Silvanus, "Path of Hope and Oblivion"
This warning caused many Zephyr Talons to give up their rituals, but not so the Forsaken Six. This lot of celestials continued and things got worse once they started consuming the blood of their enemies. This consumption was not done because of any perverse intent. It was done because of a particularly useful spell that allowed them to see what the dead had seen before they were killed, and it was particularly long - up to a day in length. They called this spell Sight of the Dead Walker. To make the spell work, the recipient of the spell had to drink the blood of the subject, which then allowed them to gather much more intelligence about the enemy than what they normally obtained by tracking their movements through Ma'Ohari's jungles.
| Sight of the Dead Walker is a spell of primordial origins. Created by Maen Grirngrim, it was used to glean information from the slain. |
Sight of the Dead Walker was used numerous times by the six archons that secretly kept up the practices that Silvanus warned would lead to peril. The spell proved very successful, resulting in dozens of very important assassinations and allowing them to undertake missions that would normally have not been possible without knowing intricate details of enemy positions and the surroundings.
When a rumor got around that Silvanus was coming to inspect the unit, an archon named Kezgihr got paranoid and murdered one of his fellow soldiers. He then used the Sight of the Dead Walker and sadly learned that the rumor was false. He quickly fled the company of Zephyr Talon but not so far that Silvanus could not punish him. Silvanus pronounced a curse on him that to live he must drink blood or seek redemption by dying and letting Hades decide his fate. Kezgihr decided to live.
There was a side effect to the curse bestowed upon Kezgihr. At the time Silvanus was still an archangel and did not have the foresight of a god, so the curse he cast interacted with the magic of the Sight of the Dead Walker. The residual chaotic energy of the spell and the curse combined into something more deadly. This caused Kezgihr to not only need blood for sustenance, but to have blood cravings. When he started preying on his former unit, usually by incapacitating them and taking a small, non-life threatening sip, they resolved to put him down. Kezgihr was tracked down and killed. His body was thrown into a pyre and then the ashes spread to the zephyr. The next day Kezgihr rose from the ashes as a very powerful undead, and that night he went after his closest associates, the other five that had participated in the questionable rituals. He charmed them, and then drained each of so much blood that they were brought to death's door. They were then forced to drink the blood of someone they had once called friend. Kezgihr, created five others like him, but well shy of the master. The Forsaken Six became Bal-Kriav's first vampires.
By the end of the God Era, most of the Forsaken Six had been hunted down and slain, but by then they had spread vampirism far and wide. Kezgihr was never found, remaining on the wanted list of such organizations as Ishtu Irrai and the Wardens of Bal-Kriav for thousands of years. He was removed after he ascended to godhood.