The Beginning of the End - Path of the Slayer

"The year unknown, though confirmed to be substantially before the year of our lord, Jesus Christ. Well before the earliest written knowledge of modern man. Our first civilisations had barely appeared in their infancy, the burgeoning race of humanity dwindling lights of the cosmos. Innocent. And vulnerable.

Most of the human race believes that the beginning of our species was a beautifully spectacular event, a creation of the divine. Some whispered theories even postulate our miraculous appearance as stemming from the slow evolution of basic building blocks into the diversity that is our people as we know them today. But the truth, in so far as this Council can ascertain, was not nearly as peaceful or as paradisical as we think.

The world was once a hell, a true hellscape, an unimaginable horror. A place ruled in shadow and smoke and torment by ancient demons known as, "The Old Ones". They roamed the Earth, warring as we would breathe. Endlessly. Ferocious, colossal, unstoppable creatures. They each commanded monumental armies, armies of demonic brethren bred from their own soiled flesh, seeking control over this dimension. Still today our Earth lies at the very centre of all magical energies in the universe. They were drawn to the immense power that lies dormant here; some say they were even created from it. The Old Ones fought to seize dominance of this ancient power and thus rule all creation as they pleased. Beyond magic. Beyond evil. 

They and their vast armies are the ancestors of the demons we have fought and defended the world against these last millennia. They polluted this plane, laying waste to the lands and oceans and anything that dared to try and endure here. Their very existence scarred the core fabric of reality, 

infecting this world as a dark plague. A plague we could not think to imagine in our darkest fears. The ripples of these ancient demons and their endless battles can still be felt through time, and there are places that even today where whispers of the Old Ones true-names can spoil the earth to its core and spread madness amongst men. These places are portents to a past that we cannot escape, an infection that sours even the very soil beneath us so that nothing may ever grow there. A deadness. I dare not attempt to even write their true-names here, for within I feel an unending terror, a tremor from a place outside of time, a whisper from a cavern beyond our reality. An existential and inconsequential horror that makes me struggle to keep pen to paper. From beneath us, it devours.

Eventually, after millennia of war, the Old Ones grew tired of this fighting for a world we assume they realised they would never conquer. One by one they slowly left this dimension. Or died off (although an Old One can never truly be destroyed).

One of the last Old Ones to leave this world mixed its blood with that of primitive humans, thus creating the first true human-demon hybrid. Vampyra. Though not as strong as other half-breeds, vampirism had a huge advantage of what we would ironically call "biological efficiency", and thus spread like hell-fire, creating undead hoards faster than any half or pure blood demon. A walking parasite, they utterly decimated the already minuscule human populations of the ancient world (who had finally begun to proliferate and develop in the wake of Old Ones departures'), converting some to vampiric form, exterminating most. Few survived the conversion process. But these creatures were nothing like the vampires of our modern world. As Neanderthals are to human beings, the Turok-Han are to vampires. 

A primordial Vampyra, ferociously powerful killing machines, as single-minded as animals. Cannibalistic soldiers of death, the Turok-Han consumed human, demon and vampire alike. Grotesque aberrations of nature, they did not drink blood but rather wholly devoured their prey, flesh and bone. They remained unquestionably loyal to their Old Ones masters to whom they were inexplicably separated by space and time. An ancient and entirely different race, they are said to be the vampires that vampires fear. However, these creatures would too, over time, evolve into the demonic half-breeds we know now; diluted by humanity but still incredibly lethal.

At the foundations of our creation, the Turok-Han roamed the earth, unendingly searching to quell the eternal blood hunger cursed upon them. Eventually, they spread to deep within the African deserts, tracing backwards the outward expansion of the first humans from the Dark Continent. There, three powerful "Shadow men", great shamans of their tribe, tried to save their village from the demons. They used all of their combined strength and knowledge of blood magics to steal the power of an imprisoned Old One from the Deeper Well, the graveyard prison where they are forever bound to this Earth, and used its power to corrupt the laws of nature and set about changing history. The shaman became the spiritual ancestors of this Council's teachings. Unfortunately, the location of the Deeper Well has been lost to the preceding centuries, although countless voyages over the millennia have been launched in search of it.

To repel the tiding evil, the three men chose a teenage girl from their village and dragged her to the heart of the desert. A sacrifice. A saviour. She had been born with an innate supernatural power they did not understand. They feared. She was an aberration. Just like these creatures. They chained her to the stony earth deep within the dark of the Ol Doinyo Lenga, the Mountain of the Gods, a place where the goddess Al'kwet is said to have birthed humanity. They bound the girl so that she could not move, could not escape, and summoned to them the pure-blood demon Acathla, the Dark Fire. The Dark Fire is thought a subservient demon to the Old Ones but any knowledge of this creature was long destroyed. Using the power they had stolen from the Old One, the three Shadow men vanquished Acathla by sacrificing a portion of their own souls, and forcefully infused the spirit, power and might of the demon with the very essence of the girl. 

However, this wholly unnatural act was an unforgiving rip in the balance of nature, for the sacrifice and removal of the girls free will. A betrayal to the gods on their most sacred grounds. The spirits raged and demanded a price. A half-life. A cursed life. To willingly split ones' soul as they had is to unshackle oneself from the strings of humanity. And to forcibly bind another to an unending death was to know no peace yourself. For that is what they cursed this girl with, an unending life. An unending death. As punishment, the men became eternally trapped to the desert sands in which they stood, trapped forever between this life and the next, never to leave the demon circle they had bound in blood. Desiccated and decayed and living still to this day.

The girl was released and became the First Slayer, the Primitive. Strong. Powerful. But now something no longer entirely human. She alone held the power and skill to hunt down and destroy the Vampyra, the demons and the forces of darkness. She alone was the Chosen One. In this she had no choice. It became her sacred duty and responsibility. Her birth-right. Her destiny. Her life became as bound to the Slayers of past and present as the Shadow Men to the Sands of Time. Knowing that the power of the Slayer would only be partly superior to that of the demons (due to the dilution of Acathlas power with her humanity), and that her life would be extremely brutal and short-lived, the three ensured that her power would live on. Into every generation since, hundreds of specials are born with the potential to harness this power inside them. When the Primitive eventually died in battle, her power was passed to a special, a Potential. Over the course of the millennia, into each generation, there was one Potential in all the world who received the Power, and when he or she died, another was called, and then another, and then another. An unending life. An unending death. Who these Potentials are or why one is chosen over another is not known. We can only speculate that a Slayer is born into a time and place where they will be most needed and that destiny has a role that we may never understand. The madness cursed on the original Slayer seemed bound to her alone, as no Slayer since has exhibited such wildling ferocity, although thankfully the power itself remains potently undiluted.

The powers exhibited by the Slayer are far more incredible than even the powers of regular specials. Superhuman strength, speed, agility, reflexes, resilience, healing and heightened senses far surpassing that of even the most pinnacle of humans. They have the ability to feel the presence of their undead enemies and they can receive prophetic dreams of things that were and things that have not yet come to pass. They have unconscious access to the entire Slayer line of the past and to fight a Slayer is to fight all those who came before them. This can appear to them in many ways, whether as dreams of warning or whispers during battle or even a preternatural instinct that they seemingly do not even always have control of, as if their Slayer kin work to selflessly protect them. Slayers have shown to deeply care and empathise with the people they are sworn to protect and can cope with an unnatural amount of mental, emotional and physical pain. They need little sleep and seem perfectly adapted to protect humanity from the bowels of evil. 

The unique destiny to each Slayer is to act as the warrior of goodness and fate, a warrior for the Powers That Be. They have a sacred responsibility to protect the world from evil. They are worth every sacrifice we can make for them. They are the pinnacle of our history here and all worlds beyond. For without them, I do not truly long to dwell on the madness and horror that would fall upon the world. To help them prepare and train, I propose the initiation of the newly improved Watcher's Council."

This above Passage of the Slayer was written by Sir Robert Dunne in 1595, who went on to set up the renewed Watcher's Council under the orders of Queen Elizabeth I, with the ruling that Slayers were to be found and trained in the ways of their powers. He set up their permanent headquarters in London, England, and lived under the heading:

"Into every generation, a Slayer is born. One special, in all the world, a Chosen One. They alone will have the strength and skill to stop the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. They are the Slayer."

- Thomas Greene

1864