No army in the Mortal Realms is more thoroughly a lie than the Legion of Night, and none has a more honest master, for Mannfred von Carstein has never pretended to be anything but a schemer. His legion fights as he thinks: the visible battle is a distraction, and the decisive blow arrives from behind at the moment it is least survivable. Feigned routs draw pursuers onto buried reserves; allied banners turn out to belong to no ally at all; ground that seemed abandoned proves to have been the trap's floor.
Such war demands patience, and undeath supplies it in abundance. The Legion will lie dormant beneath a battlefield for a season, seed a fortress with sleeper-dead years before it is besieged, and spend whole campaigns setting a snare that closes in an afternoon. Mannfred hoards his strength like a miser, spends it like an assassin, and reserves a portion of every plan for the contingency he trusts most: his own escape.
That final reservation is the Legion's open secret. Among the Soulblight Gravelords it is understood that his schemes profit Mannfred first and any cause a distant second, and that the surest way to survive his betrayal is never to have relied on him at all.
Soulblight Gravelords
Order of battle
The Legion of Night field the units of the Soulblight Gravelords — a detachment from the roster:
Kindred formations
Other Soulblight Gravelords formations
Kastelai DynastyKnights of the wandering Crimson Keep, a fortress that appears on the horizon at dusk and is gone by dawn. The Kastelai are warrior-vampires who honor courage even as they extinguish it, taking the strength and skill of every worthy foe they slay into their own undying sword-arms.
Legion of BloodThe court of Neferata made into an army — assassins, courtiers, and deathless soldiery deployed with the same precision as her whispers. The Legion of Blood wins its wars in ballrooms and council chambers years before its banners take the field, and battle is merely the signature on a treaty already written.
Vyrkos DynastyThe wolf-blooded vampires of the Shyishan deep-wilds, closer to the hunt and to the mortals they cull than any courtly dynasty. The Vyrkos run with dire wolf packs, keep the old tongues of the villages they shepherd, and practice a patient, generational predation that has convinced itself it is stewardship.