All images copyright Alex CF 2014. Please credit and attach a link if used outside this website. 

Species: Succubi

Biped, Carnivore

The cleric Abramo translated two texts from the Library of Thenis. It was his lifes work and was possibly the most difficult task he had ever undertaken. The books were written over a period of 6000 years by the great thinker Gholu, one of the first Vampyr. His words were the basis of the language of the Vampyr, known as Esot. Over the millenia the language evolved and so any system of decoding would have to be rethought every few chapters, and left alone in his task, Abramo struggled a great deal in his attempts to finally unravel the ideology of this secretive culture.
His greatest and perhaps most frightening discovery was reference to Gholu’s attempt to establish a psychic link with the “shared sentience of the earth”. Gholu believed that energy had form and function and that sentient life tapped from this rather like a radio receiver. He believed that quiet contemplation would allow him to finally hear the voices of the planet. He wished to find another great mind with which to converse, and a tower was built for him, deep beneath the earth, a room sealed from all sound and light. Here he sat for 100 years, listening to the silence.
It is recorded in the first volume that Gholu did indeed establish his psychic link, but that the mind he encountered was so vast and so very dark, it terrified him. His words on the entity are few, but so very grave that it rippled through the nations of the Vampyr.
‘I came upon a thought, a thought that I knew was not my own. It said to me ‘we are at rest, we lie as time ebbs, i feel you watching, old man, I feel you and know you. we are the prism, through which you seek, we shatter the light, we riddle the world and seek only one thing, to sleep and to cleanse, like the light’ The presence was as real to me as the dark before my eyes, and for the first time in so many millenia I felt pain. I felt a hollow sensation within me that I knew to be fear, and I feared this mind. Somewhere in the earth, there is a sentience greater than all others, and she sleeps. If ever woken, we would see the end of our epoch, we must never wake her.”

4000 years later, Vampyr explorers found a series of cave systems to the north of Thenis which appeared to have been made by intelligent hands. They were so very old that tectonic shifts had broken and blocked many of the winding hollows – like that of a hive – sealing huge sections from exploration. There was no sign of civilization, no glyphs and trappings left by any culture and It was assumed the cave systems were built by early Hemophage when they descended into the bowels of the earth to escape the movement of humans above. When Gholu was told of this discovery, without warning he was plagued by a vision, a single image that would haunt him for his entire life time. He said he saw the face of the entity that he had contacted in his retreat, and knew immediately who had built the tunnels. He asked for them to be avoided, and left undisturbed.

In the late 18th century, an oil prospector in Texas found a series of caves below his land. He cursed this bad luck but decided to attempt to drill beneath this unfortunate void. Within the caverns, he found no sign of oil, but a faint orange light that seemed to phosphoresce in the dark. On closer inspection, the light emanated from huge stone masses that descended from the ceiling in conical forms. The lights were very faint, but sure enough, scattered the entire surface of the cones. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he noticed that these strange stone growths were actually collections of ossified bodies, hundreds of small childlike figures, huddled together, and the light seem to come from their chests, two oblong amber shapes beneath the leather like skin. He dug his pic into one and watched the liquid drain from the corpse. he dipped his finger in the resin and felt a bizarre sensation, one of great invigoration, a sense of well being and strength. He collected a little of the substance and ingested it.

Two weeks past and he had harvested an entire column of the strange mummified creatures that hung like stalactite mausoleum from his cave ceiling. His addiction to the substance which he called “Furnace” had got the better of him and its physical effect was noticeable. To all intents and purposes, Furnace was a form of adrenaline, with the qualities of a steroid. He was now collecting barrels of the glands from the presumed dead creatures and selling it at a huge price to towns folk. It was soon common knowledge that a far greater wealth than oil could be found beneath the plains of Texas, and soon he was offered more money than he could ever wish for, for the land he now owned.

But what he had found was not a boon. The creatures themselves were not dead, but in a state of suspended animation, and the glands stored a substance that would not only allow them to awaken but also to power their first flight. Four times this creature had awoken since the dawn of life on the planet. in 280 million years, they had changed very little, existing in a state of serenity and peace as they slept, all of them part of cerebral network of thought that transcended our own understanding of existence, and all of them aware. And at the apex of their culture, the Matriarch, the one Gholu feared – the great receiver, through her the universe sings its agonizing song. They wanted only for two things – to sleep and be part of the lattice of thought – and to feed. And when they fed, they would gorge until there was nothing left, and then descend into the bowels of the earth and dream again for eternity.

They are the Succubi, and they will awaken.