The Rise and Fall of Goths.

Some hundreds of years ago, in a secluded corner of the lush landscape, there was a young librarian, whose original name has been lost to history. Raised from peasantry by virtue of her voracious intelligence, she was tasked by the Parliament of Bones to catalog the archives of Count Osrogoth, whose holdings belonged to them after his mysterious disappearance. Deep beneath the Count's castle, in the twisting corridors that held his readings, she found his hidden sanctum, his dark and terrible prophecies, and his secret blasphemy. He wrote of a great calamity of the sun, Ewachol's final punishment against mankind, one that would only be escaped by embracing darkness as well as death. Her mind was opened as she grew thin and pale in her work. So she abandoned her mission and her old name, taking on the name Gothitelle, and started sending letters to colleagues with open minds. And so the era of Goths began.

The Parliament of Bones, naturally, excommunicated her, and sent the renowned bounty hunter Aszra Katchara to bring her back for punishment. He spent many years stalking her through the Velvet Underground, a group of tunnels, catacombs and portals beneath the Empire that the Goths used to avoid the sun. Meanwhile, the Goths began their work. They took in the predatory undead, especially vampires, and used them for missions to further the Liberation of the New Night. They stole valuable records of history from the Parliament, stole valuable corpses to be turned into predatory undead, and engineered the deaths of many sun worshippers. Eventually, fifteen years into the hunt, Aszra tracked Gothitelle down and captured her in a rare moment where her followers were not attending to her. But he did not turn her in, not immediately. He held her in a dried-out well for thirty days and thirty nights. In the days, he would send down food and water, and in the nights, he'd listen as she read the stars and the moon and spoke of events across the Empire as if she saw them firsthand. When he finally pulled her up, the first thing he did was kiss her. The first thing she did was stab him with a rock she had spent the last month sharpening. But lo, Aszra's corpse fell towards her, knocking them both into the well. Soon, there were tales among the peasants of a strange woman, tall and thin with no breath and glowing eyes, who walked the wastelands with a handsome, loyal ghoul.