Soulblight Gravelords

The vampires were ancient before the Age of Sigmar had a name. Carried out of the ruin of the world-that-was and seeded through the Mortal Realms, the Soulblight curse runs through a handful of great dynasties the way crowns run through mortal royal houses — and its bearers rule accordingly. From mist-wound castles, palace-cities, and wandering keeps, the Gravelords preside as landed nobility over domains of the living and the dead alike: creatures of exquisite manners and antique titles whose subjects are also, when occasion demands, their larder.

The curse gives with both hands: deathless beauty, strength past every mortal ceiling, and century upon century in which to perfect blade, sorcery, and statecraft. What it takes is simpler. The thirst for living blood sits behind every vampire's thought like a patient creditor, and no refinement of art or empire ever pays it off. Worse still is memory — for the Soulblight forget nothing, and eternity leaves them alone with every broken vow and every drained face they have ever collected. The dynasties fill their endless nights with intrigue, war, and ceremony chiefly so they need never sit in silence with themselves.

No Gravelord marches alone. At a word, the dead of their domains file out of barrow and boneyard to serve: Deathrattle legions of oath-bound skeleton soldiery still fighting for kingdoms a thousand years buried, Deadwalker tides of the freshly risen, and the beasts of the dark between — tireless dire wolf packs, wheeling colonies of fell bats, and shrieking terrorgheists that can empty a battlefield with a single scream. Such armies need no rations, no wages, and no rest; they need only will, and will is the one commodity the vampire aristocracy has never lacked.

Over all of it looms Nagash, the Great Necromancer, who holds that every dead thing in existence is his property — the Soulblight included. The dynasties owe their curse to his necromantic legacy, and their greatest lords serve as his Mortarchs and generals; but vampires are the only dead that still dream, and what they dream of is thrones. Neferata weaves webs even a god cannot fully see, Mannfred betrays almost on schedule, and lesser lords carve out kingdoms of night in the spaces between their master's attention. It is the oldest game in the Grand Alliance of Death: perfect obedience in the god's sight, and empire everywhere else.