Introduction
Long before the Barrier divided one world into two, humans and supernatural beings lived beneath the same sky.
Somehow.
Witches had existed for longer than anyone could properly remember.
Wolves came later.
A mistake, technically.
One powerful enough to permanently change what some witches were.
Then came vampires.
Humans altered by witches into something stronger. Faster. Harder to kill.
Something capable of standing against the creatures the witches had accidentally created in the first place.
And for a while, everybody still managed to live together.
Humans.
Vampires.
Witches.
Wolves.
Smaller clans and communities whose names eventually disappeared from the records entirely.
It was not perfect.
Obviously.
Put that many people in one world and somebody is eventually going to have a problem with somebody else.
But there was peace.
Mostly.
Then the plague came.
It moved through human settlements faster than anyone could understand it.
Homes emptied.
Families were buried beside one another.
Sometimes entire households were gone before anyone could even figure out who had gotten sick first.
Nobody knew where it came from.
Unfortunately, people are very good at needing an answer anyway.
And fear is even better at finding one.
The supernatural became convenient.
Humans who had lived beside witches for years suddenly started looking at them differently.
Vampires stopped being neighbors and became things people watched when they walked past.
Old arguments turned into suspicion.
Suspicion turned into accusations.
Accusations turned into violence.
And eventually, because apparently none of that had been enough, violence became war.
By then, the conflict had narrowed mostly between humans and vampires.
The witches stayed out of it.
Maybe because it was not their war.
Maybe because they had already learned what happened when they interfered too much.
Either way, they watched it get worse.
And it did.
The war lasted for years.
Land changed hands.
Communities were invaded.
People pledged themselves to whoever seemed to be winning, then changed their minds the moment that stopped being true.
Everyone involved had a reason.
Everyone had someone to blame.
By the time something resembling peace returned, it was not because anybody had forgiven anybody.
Someone had simply won.
Humans.
They rose to the top of whatever new order came after.
Vampires remained beneath them.
Useful enough to keep around. Dangerous enough to control.
And humans learned very quickly that killing vampires was not actually the easiest way to control them.
Blood was.
Food kept a vampire alive.
Technically.
Blood was different.
Blood was what allowed their altered bodies to function the way they were supposed to.
Strength. Speed. Healing.
Everything that made a vampire a vampire.
So humans restricted access to it.
At first, vampires hunted animals in the forests. Then humans complained there were fewer animals left for their own tables. So the forests became restricted too.
One rule became another.
Then another.
Then another.
Until vampires were expected to survive while being denied the very thing their bodies had been created to need.
People like to act surprised by what desperation does afterward.
They really shouldn't.
Vampires turned on one another.
Some obeyed because they were afraid. Some betrayed their own people because betrayal came with blood. Some disappeared. Some starved.
One of those families belonged to a vampire named Hale.
By the time it was over, there was no family left.
No clan.
No children.
Nobody.
Just Hale.
He survived.
Which sounds merciful until you remember that surviving means you are the one left behind to know exactly who didn't.
Whatever remained of the man Hale had been disappeared with them.
He retaliated. Violently.
Human blood spilled in numbers nobody could ignore. And Hale gave what he took to starving vampires.
That part depended on who was telling the story.
To humans, he was a murderer.
To some vampires, he was the reason they were still alive.
History gets inconvenient like that.
Eventually, Hale was captured.
So were many of the vampires who had accepted the blood he distributed.
Their execution was public.
Humans came to watch. Vampires did too.
Some were angry. Some were afraid. Some looked satisfied. Some cried.
Nobody stopped it.
Hale barely spoke.
After everything he had done, everyone he had killed, everyone he had tried to save, he simply stood there and looked at the crowd surrounding him.
Then someone threw a stone.
It hit him.
A child stood among the humans, crying hard enough that his entire body shook.
"You killed my family!"
Another stone followed.
Hale looked at him.
"You killed mine first."
The boy froze.
For one second.
Then his hands clenched.
"That doesn't mean you had the right to kill someone else."
And that was the problem.
The child was right.
So was Hale.
Hale's grief did not bring the boy's family back.
The boy's grief did not bring Hale's back either.
There was no version of the argument where somebody won.
Hale watched him for a long moment.
Then, before he died, he asked the boy one thing.
If vampires had killed his family first,
would he really have done anything differently?
The boy never answered.
Maybe he couldn't.
Maybe nobody could.
Hale died that day.
The fighting continued anyway.
What followed became known as the Great War.
By then, asking who started it had become almost pointless.
Humans had their dead. Vampires had theirs.
Families on both sides had somebody they could point to and say, They did this to us.
And most of them were probably telling the truth.
The fighting became so brutal that the land where the worst of it happened eventually earned a name.
The Land of a Thousand Souls.
Not because the dead were trapped there.
They weren't.
Their souls were allowed to rest.
The name came from the living.
From people who had buried so many bodies there that eventually counting them probably stopped mattering.
But the souls were not what remained.
The blood was.
Human.
Vampire.
People whose names were remembered.
People whose names weren't.
Years of it had soaked into the earth.
The witches had stayed outside the war for years.
Eventually, watching was no longer enough.
The fighting needed to end.
And by then, the battlefield already held the one thing ancient magic demanded.
Sacrifice.
Magic like that has never been free.
The witches did not kill those people to create the Barrier.
They didn't need to.
The war had already paid the price.
They used the blood that humans and vampires had spilled into the land and cast a spell powerful enough to divide the world itself.
And on the Land of a Thousand Souls, the Barrier rose.
Humans remained on one side.
Vampires on the other.
They had once lived in the same world.
Shared streets. Shared forests. Fought over the same land. Killed each other over it too.
Then the Barrier went up, and eventually children were born who had never even seen the other side.
They knew each other through stories instead.
Stories became lessons.
Lessons became warnings.
Warnings lasted long enough to become truth.
Or whatever people decided truth was after everyone who remembered differently had died.
People like to think wars end when the fighting stops.
They don't.
People leave things behind.
The dead do too.
Names. Families. Promises. Grief.
Choices nobody gets to take back.
Things nobody finished.
And sometimes one story survives long enough to become the reason another one begins.
