The hungry blade of the guillotine was ready, the hand holding it just as eager to watch it fall. The people cried out for freedom and for all that was lost to the dominion of their usurper and tyrant king. Their uprising had been long in the making. Their rage was everything which stood for justification. 'No more!' They bellowed, hands wielding torches to light the night and ere the night ended, they would see it burn. 'No more!' They had cried until they were hoarse, fists clenched around their pitchforks. Children who had lost their parents, orphans who wore the scars of their emaciation like armor, cried out. 'No more!' Their small fingers clasped rotted vegetables that flew towards the once regal blood.

So it was with the upheaval of society that the ruling king, a tyrant, was the first to feed that glittering blade. His daughter had wept, a terrified scream ripping from her lips as the decisive snap! of the lever and twine had ended his reign of terror over his own people. She too would follow soon after, the townsfolk of Lavalles wishing for no chance for this house to ever rise to power again.

The old house was restored to power. Scholars searched through the last known lineage, tracing the single heir to a female noble. Émilienne of the Kaplan bloodline ascended the throne. She had resided for quite sometime in the peace and wealth of her family's countryside mansion, and so in retrieving her, the Kaplan Hall was closed from the public and she moved to the center province of The Royal Seat. Unbeknownst to the good people of Lavalles, the Kaplan home and family bore a dark and wretched secret, one long lost and purged from the pages of history.

The true reason for their slip from power?

Vampirism.

Émilienne had remained the same beautiful, graceful creature for nigh on a century, her age and experience more than fitting for her manipulative shadow work. Hers the first stone cast at the recently deceased ruler, though none were the wiser. After all, they were at the brink of war, and her people needed to feed. So in obscurity she had ensured this path carved through the present so that she and her kinsmen could once more rise to their proper seat: the throne.

It was on the day she was crowned that the whole of Crue Efros was bled once more. The day that the unholy blight upon the mortal man began in earnest. Men replaced cattle in holding cells. The common farm hand that had once raised in rebllion was shackled to the side of a vampiric master. Now, under this new stifling rule, no human walks freely under the banner of The Red Queen.

Oliver cradled the lifeless form of his son within his arms. The echoes of his heart wrenching calls for the lad to open his eyes, to speak to him falling upon only the listless ears of the dead and those of his closest council. The assassin had been quick, but barely the blink of an eye given before the next in line for Vufrein's throne lay dead in a growing pool of vermillion.

In the following days, all opinions lay one in the same. The instigations from Crue Efros could no longer be denied. Borders between the two nations had been beyond tense for years, only worsening with the arrival of their new monarch. The Red Queen - many of the men called her. Oliver could no longer deny the savagery of their neighbors. The fault for his son's death lay obstinately upon their shoulders, a certainty that he and every man and woman in Vufrein believed. So it was that the oars of war began to steer forward the massive ship of House Kürschner.

An age old feud erupted with violence befitting a volcano. The avarice and hunger of the vampires knew no bounds, their bloodlust sweeping every free land until it crashed like a crimson sea against the walls of the werewolf nation.

The streets of Lavalles trembles with howling cheers of victory. Soldiers hoist their flags, vagrants tip their mugs. Drawn, harrowing days of war approach their end as we claim our sovereignty over the esteemed city of Dunmeath. Within its halls secured enough humans to feed the ravenous peoples of Crue Efros, and it was naught but a taste of what was to come, promised the Red Queen. She spurs her proud kin forward, her thirst for conquest matching the ever growing need for fresh... cattle.

However, the residents of Vufrein have dug in their heels, sinking within their bastion for a final rebellion of what the grand order of fate had already ordained would come to pass. Regardless of how they would struggle, fight and perservere, there was only one true outcome for the slavering mutts.