The Bloodlings are pale, translucent-skinned gnomes who dwell in the dark caves of the Chimean Blood Mountains. These vampiric gnomes maintain an obsessive aristocracy based on the purity of their ancestral bloodlines, with elaborate genealogies traced back thousands of years.
Bloodling society revolves around maintaining and proving the superiority of one's lineage. Every Bloodling can recite their ancestry for at least twenty generations, and social gatherings inevitably devolve into debates over whose great-great-grandmother had the purer blood. Marriages are arranged through complex negotiations that can take decades, as families attempt to preserve or elevate their bloodline's standing. The most prestigious families claim direct descent from the First Bite—the legendary moment when their ancestors first tasted blood and transformed into something more than mere gnomes. The First Bite was a daemon's doing: a daemon founded the bloodling line and bred its blood-gift true into gnomish stock, and since the art of raising a mortal race from daemon-blood died out with no other line to its name, the bloodlings are the whole census of daemon-made peoples, closed at one.
That closure has a cost the genealogies do not advertise. A people obsessed with purity and forbidden to marry out has bred a small pool tighter and tighter for thousands of years, and in the oldest, proudest lines, the ones nearest the First Bite with the least room left to refuse an impure match, a wasting has begun to surface. It runs in the blood, it follows the cleanest pedigrees most reliably of all, and the families it strikes will not name it for what it is, because to name it is to admit that purity itself is killing them. The obvious cure is the one thing their whole order forbids: fresh blood from outside the line. They have found another. In tiny, controlled burns, the decanted sunlight the Aureum left in the deep cauterizes the rot without diluting the line. It is a brutal medicine. Light in any quantity injures them, as it injures most things that live in the dark, but a measured dose scours the wasting out and leaves the bloodline technically intact, which to a Bloodling is the only outcome that counts. This is why the deepest families covet the sealed Aureum hall called Candelum and the reserve inside it, and why they have started taking captives who can reach it. The Aureum resistance of the Last Lamp guards that light; the Bloodlings mean to have it, and would sooner force captive glass-tenders to decant for them than dilute a single pedigree to save it.
Aspects
- My bloodline is pure and ancient
- Blood enhances my power