They are their words, Power Incarnate.

The history of House Baal predates any surviving calendar, for they are older than the Paradise Church and the world it created. First generation vampires, they trace their origins to what is known as the Era of Discord, over thirty-five hundred years ago. An unassuming name for what may be the darkest days of human history. Our rampant misuse of magic had reached its apex, and the damage it caused only escalated wars across the continent and beyond. Few records remain of this time, but those that have survived portray a ruthless epoch in which cataclysms were as ordinary as a frontier windstorm.

It should come as no surprise then, that those who prospered did not do so through generosity or altruism. Some rose through cunning. Some through luck. Most, like my own exalted patrons, did so through overwhelming force.

Like most nephilim, the original vampires were created through human exposure to magic. What makes them more unique is just how deliberate the transformation was. A cabal of powerful families put aside their rivalries in pursuit of a shared goal; immortality. What rite and ritual they conducted is unknown; perhaps even to their own descendants. If Lady Baal knows the truth, she has kept it even from me. No doubt it would be counted amongst the darkest of secrets. Whether the result was what they intended, I cannot say, but it was undoubtedly a success. Its practitioners had seen the sun set as sorcerers, but as night fell, they became something more.

The first head of the house was Lady Xera, though I am not sure if ‘Lady’ is the appropriate title. She is not addressed as such in any record, even the official declaration of the nascent Paradise Church. Instead, all documents refer to her as ‘Obliterator’. A bit dramatic for my liking, but eye-catching. Contemporary scholars believe that she was named such for her Entropy; the terrifying magic for which House Baal is now known. This is not the case. Doubtless, Xera was instrumental in its development, but such power was young, then. The vampires of millennia past are very different from those that we know today, still feeling the unintended side effects of the rituals that granted their strength. They had several weaknesses to which they have since evolved past, including a crippling vulnerability to sunlight, if you can believe it! That rare, unobtainable commodity.

Perhaps that is an overstatement, but time has eroded the truth.

 When the ritual was complete, and the cabal unsurprisingly turned on one another, Xera did not waste any time. She took up arms in a battle against her closest neighbors, and a four-way power struggle followed. All houses were powerful, but what set Xera apart was self-awareness more than strength. She understood that she and the other families were subject to certain proclivities; one of which was a prideful attachment to the domains over which they ruled. Rather than sharing that attachment and entering a protracted war, she instead abandoned her ancestral home and launched an all-out offense on her neighbors. It proved effective, as her opponents were not prepared for such a commitment. Xera the Obliterator earned her name by dismantling three of her competing families, wiping out their heads and taking their children to marry into her own. She further secured her dominance with oaths of fealty sworn by a smaller branch bloodline that would come to be known as House Bleakshroud, allies to her family for all time.  

Sensing that the other surviving parties would continue to war over the land that would one day be called Paradise, Xera took her bloodline, prisoners and subjects and set out for the ravaged land that would become the Eastern Frontier. An outlandish decision to some, for that region had suffered much in the wars that had consumed the world. Xera, however, saw opportunity. Knowing that it would take time for the other newly minted immortals to conclude their conflicts, she instead saw opportunity to put down roots and create a strong powerbase. With the spoils of her conquest, she was well suited to do so. She wrested territory from the Fae of House Nero and formed a begrudging respect with the werewolves of Barbarus. She accepted the desolate land for what it was and built an empire that would last for millennia to follow.

That church itself would only bring the Baals into the fold after four hundred more years, at which point Xera herself was still alive and ruling. It was a slow adoption. The centuries had seen many vampires come into her service, fleeing the wars they had started and finding a well-established power waiting for them in the East. Some required convincing. They, or more accurately, their successors, saw it her way, often moments after their predecessors’ demise. Xera was not cruel; she was coldly pragmatic, and it was this pragmatism that led to her accepting the domination of this upstart religion. Her capitulation slow but bloodless, led to relative autonomy, and the Baal’s leadership of the frontier was assured.

That was not to say it was clean. The wardens are named such because what they guard is a danger, and nephilim do not receive respect for their evenhandedness and cool tempers. Xera perished sometime into her sixth century of life, having reigned as warden for over two hundred years. As of today, we have seen no fewer than fifteen wardens officially crowned and recognized by the Paradise Church. The Baal line grew and expanded, then shrank and was cut down repeatedly, as was the case for every nephilim, and stood stalwart in the face of the myriad threats that faced the frontier:

They arbitrated rivalries within their own house and that of their vassals. They contended with plague and famine, for the frontier was never a place of bounty. They struck down scheming sorcerers and the ever-present predations of the nightmares that covered the land. We have never lacked for existential threats, after all. They met every obstacle head-on, though that may speak more to having an all-destroying magic than any inherent strength of character. Still, compared to the usurpation of House Barbarus, and the arrival of the dragons in the north, the Baal empire enjoyed the closest thing to what a frontier could call stability.

That was until the Hell Breach and the rise of Sitri Baal, but that is a longer story.