Genocide

Timestamp Mizar - Shrine-City of Vastad - 150 years ago

They came for them in cover of darkness. Not just in the Shrine-Cities, but across all of Mizar. It had been a year in the making. The largest plot implemented by the Inquisition since the last days of the war in the Forsaken Lands. A single night that would be known among a selected few, as the Night of Reverence. A night that would change the Inquisition forever, shift the balance of power in the world, and lead to the erasure of a whole race from the pages of history.

They were known as the Vaux, the Children of the Void. A decade prior, running from Torkaus; Jihad, thousands sought refuge in Mizar and Salos. But the old fears and hatred for their kind followed them to where they hoped they would be safe. They did their best to adapt and help their would be saviours but by the time they realised they were seen as nothing more than tools, it was too late.

What the Vaux were to endure in the coming years was like a crack in the surface of the world through which hell could be seen. A crack in the surface of people's common humanity through which could be seen their capacity for enduring suffering and inflicting it.

In that night they were taken from their homes, agents of the Inquisition coming for them in silence, going from building to building. Most that had lived through the Jihad knew the fate that awaited them once again, and some women threw themselves from upstairs windows with their babies, killing themselves as the last desperate way to avoid the round-up. The Vaux's abilities were of incalculable value to the crusade against magik. Especially since the end of the war at the gates of Murontomaga and the blood-spell released that decimated the lands.

That night hundreds were brutally killed and hundreds of more families transported to monastery camps across Mizar. Led to their doom, destined to be subjected to horrifying experiences to try and unlock the secrets of their magik annulling powers. Women were kept as breeding captivities, to try and replicate their abilities. Men and were flayed, bled and de-boned as chirurgeons, chymists and physicians poured over their entrails, searching for what made the Vaux. The secret of what made the Vaux remains a secret to this day, but the minds of the Inquisition found other uses for them.

Voah Sahnsurr witnesses a blacksmith forging a mighty blade. Priests and acolytes circle the man a few feet away, chatting and praying as his black hammer pounds the glowing steel. Weeks of work are poured into the sword. An experiment that can change everything in the fight against the Maleficium. One day an emaciated child is dragged into the forge. He can't be more than ten years old. There is fear in its eyes. And tears. It cries and begs for its mother. He is ignored. A masked priest of Vastad slits its throat letting its blood fill a nearby vessel as the blacksmith bangs the final blows on the metal against its anvil. He is bled slowly but exsanguinated from every drop of blood from his fragile body, where the white-hot steel is plunged in the still warm blood for quenching.

Later a long piece of his spine his cut from his corpse and mounted on the hilt of the blade. A sword that would not only negate most magik but also protect its wielder from it. A new weapon born from genocide, forged from the bones and blood of the Vaux. The Inquisitions' best kept secret.

Similar stories were repeated across Helias. In Salos, Garrah and Torja until the Vaux were no more and the candle of their light almost extinguished forever.