Anno Draculæ 0
In the final months of 1477, the city of Constantinople was in the middle of a siege. Dawn arrived late. Dusk lingered too long. Shadows stopped behaving correctly. Priests prayed harder. No one. No God came to the rescue. Then just before dawn the world was plunged into eternal darkness. Vlad fired an arrow from a corrupted Vessel Bow artifact into the heavens and the sky first rained blood before clearing. The sun never returned, giving all vampires a massive advantage across earth by removing their primary weakness.
As the last stones of its defiance fell and the city finally broke inward, Vlad Țepeș did not show mercy within it. He and his horde slaughtered everything living beyond the walls. They left afield of impaled bodies outside the city’s gates. There they remained long enough for the world to grow accustomed to their presence. There, amid rot, iron, and the slow collapse of mercy, he prepared the final work.
What Vlad performed was not a summoning.
It was a harvest.
When the sun began its final descent, he did not beg for its return or curse its passing. He reached for it. The rite did not destroy the light. It caught it—the last scream of authority as the world’s governing presence slipped away. That sound, that refusal, that final insistence that the day had meaning, was bound into his flesh.
The sky responded.
The heavens did not go dark. They congealed. Color thickened into bruised crimson and deep violet. The stars remained, but they no longer offered navigation or comfort. They watched. Light persisted only as residue—illumination without warmth, reflection without grace.
This was the beginning of the Forever Night.
With the sun’s authority gone, reality loosened. Boundaries that had held since creation thinned. Faith no longer traveled upward. Prayer did not stop, but it began to arrive nowhere recognizable. God did not answer—not in wrath, not in silence, but in absence.
Something else listened.
Hell did not invade in fire or spectacle. It seeped. Old corruptions rose through the cracks left by a missing order. The dead did not surge. Monsters did not blanket the land. Instead, the world learned how to continue without conclusion. Wounds healed incorrectly. Time drifted. Certain sounds carried too far. Certain metals behaved as if they remembered rules no longer enforced.
Dracula understood what the world had become before anyone else.
He declared himself prince of darkness. He declared a new covenant—of shadow and fang, of industry, repetition, and performance. Eternity would not be ruled by terror alone. It would be maintained.
His throne was established in Constantinople, at the heart of the city that had always known how to convert belief into order. Hagia Sophia was not destroyed. It was rewritten. Its dome became a resonant chamber. Its foundations were cut open and fused with the first Haemotic Engines—machines that burned refined human despair into pressure, motion, and sound.
From the Grand Opera, Dracula commands armies.
He puppets every aspect of society and all those below him.
The world did not fall overnight. It reorganized. Christendom fractured into compliance and burial. The Church broke quietly, its true faith retreating underground, clinging to relics and silver that still burned. In the lands of Islam, the sky was named Al-Zulmanah al-Da’imah—the Perpetual Gloom—and scholars argued whether the night was punishment or trial while Djinn and other infernal races walked openly beneath a crimson moon.
Everywhere, power shifted away from the divine and toward the repeatable.
Blood became fuel. Fear became resource. Spectacle became law.
By the end of that year, no one was waiting for dawn anymore.
The sun was not coming back.
It had been taken—harvested at the moment of its refusal—and bound into an immortal body now seated at the center of a machine-city that would never again need to ask permission to continue.
That year is remembered as the beginning of the end times. Dracula is believed to be the Dajjal to the muslims, the Antichrist to the christians and the messiah to the wicked.
It’s a trial of illness for the world and mankind. The world has learned it could be run without light and a cure has been provided with the artifacts.