PROLOGUE:

A FRAGMENT FROM
A HISTORICAL TEXT

In the vermillion-colored tide of the Nobility’s proud history, no period illuminated their eminence more than the three thousand years during which the Nobility contended against the enormous boulder disrupting the raging current.

The Nobility magically manipulated science to their will and confronted this enormous obstacle.

The enormous boulder was an enemy. An enemy from outer space.

Even the Nobles, endowed with eternal life, might let slip a mournful sigh at the mere thought of the endless depths of the constellations. It was from there that the enemy known as the Outer Space Beings—the OSB—came.

These three thousand years—tinted vermillion, stained crimson, marked by death shrouds and bloodshed—glorified the Noble warriors. After enjoying five thousand years of peace, with humanity held in servitude, for the first time, the Nobility engaged in a daily battle that, aside from drinking the blood of humans, might appropriately be called Evil’s calling.

I shall spare you the particulars.

Only to say that the Nobility pitched themselves into battle with a blood frenzy.

Black bats and pale-faced men tore across winter’s moonlit sky. Noble warriors stood against OSB aircraft. The enemy’s thunder tanks and single-seated tanks, their gold-chromed armor protected by some invisible energy force, clashed against the Nobility’s science and magic. In time, traveling troubadours sang their reverence, not for the grand battle, but for the vast wasteland turned burial ground.

The war took place in the Frontier, far from the Capital.

It was there the humans lived. The Frontier, a stark contrast to the splendor in which the Nobility lived, was where these trifling beings had been consigned—nay, allowed—to exist.

Ironically enough, it was because of humanity’s very helplessness that the responsibility fell to the Nobles to protect the humans from the OSB invasion.

Many of the overlords—overseers of the Frontier—forfeited that responsibility, a fact that later became the root of humanity’s distrust and the Nobility’s eventual decline. Distrust joined with hate and turned into a rallying cry for revolt. Humanity left few records of the Nobility during this period. Hatred elected to extinguish rather than to chronicle.

However, humanity preserved the names of a select few in its annals.

Most of the names have already become legend and all but vanished, as if inscribed into crimson-colored history by a zephyr wind. The Nobles were remembered only in fragmentary verses of ballads and sagas. Yet some villagers in remote corners of the Frontier, defying the winds of time, strove to pass on the meaning of these names from generation to generation.

This is a story woven by their chapped lips and shuttered eyes, and also the first name to be spun out of blood, darkness, and moonlight.