Where the cursed province of Sylvania sank into a wretched expanse of black mire, the long war of the living against the dead came to its bloody reckoning in The Battle of Hel-Fenn. For generations the Vampire Counts had ruled Sylvania as a kingdom of the grave, and now the last and greatest of that line marched forth to seize the throne of the living once and for all.
The armies of the Empire of Man met him in the marsh, for the count had been driven there by a coalition of Elector Counts who would suffer his undying reign no longer. The ground itself fought against both hosts — knights foundered in the sucking mud, cannon sank to their axles, and the fog off the fen turned the battle into a nightmare of half-seen shapes and screaming men. Skeletons rose dripping from the water even as they were cut down, and the living learned again how heavy a war becomes when the enemy will not stay dead.
Yet the vampire had overreached. Cut off from the deep magic of his homeland and hemmed in by the flooded ground, his legions could not be endlessly renewed, and slowly the discipline of the state troops told. When at last the count himself was struck down and his corpse burned upon the mire, the dark will animating his host guttered out, and the skeletons collapsed back into the black water from which they had crawled.
The Battle of Hel-Fenn shattered the vampire dynasty of Sylvania and won the Empire a peace of sorts, though the province remained accursed. Men would speak for centuries of the marsh where the dead were, for a time, laid to rest.
The chronicle continues
