The Ancient blood

The Restless Vein, the Blood of the Ancients

"They drank to endure, not to kill."
Teaching of the Keepers of the Slow Hour

What it is

A long cylinder of glass, set at both ends in pierced gold and hung from an old leather strap. It holds a dark blood through which scarlet threads keep turning, and that blood never stops moving. It belongs to the Aerakhân, the first to seek immortality through a rite that would become, much later, vampirism. They did not kill to feed: sober, slow, almost saintly, they drank to endure. But their rite carried a flaw. Each new siring deepens the thirst a little more, so that their distant descendants must kill to drink. Every vampire on the continent descends from them. The Aerakhân line itself died out, and not by chance.

What it does

This blood still holds what the Aerakhân once were, and each who seeks it sees a different power in it. Turned against itself through the Rite of Severance, it undoes every vampire who shares its ancestry, which is to say all of them. Quenched into the steel of a blade, it binds the blade to the bloodline, and it will kill any vampire it strikes. Used according to the original rite, it could sire a new vampire, as sober as the first ones, who would never need to kill.

What it costs

Every use is final, and none is innocent. Severance kills every vampire in the world in a single night, predators and sober ones alike, ancients and newborns. The blade makes its wielder the weapon of a single war. As for the original rite, no one has performed it in two thousand years, and no one knows whether the flaw the Aerakhân never understood will return with the new line.