Once, there were Nobles. Or, as the common mass of short-lived humanity called them, VAMPIRES. The world was nearly dead, coughing up blood, poisoned by nuclear hell. It was the Nobles who saved the planet, saved humanity, healed the land, built where mortal man had destroyed. The beings that were Earth's saviours were ultimately remembered by mortals as monsters deserving only fiery death in the light of the sun, or a wooden stake rupturing the heart. They were cursed, spat on, and butchered.
One Noble family was that of Lee.
There was Count Magnus Lee. He saw many thousands of years go by, and it was only within the last century of his life that he sired a child. Larmica was the name he gave his daughter. Larmica, who never knew her mother, only the father who sat on his throne in his citadel and brooded. It was when he awakened from one of his long sleeps, and he became infatuated with the young mortal woman Doris, that Larmica learned her true nature: That she was no true Noble, as she had always believed, but one of those hal-breeds, a DHAMPIR. Like the hunter known only as D who killed her lying father on the eve of his wedding to Doris, whom he had pledged to protect. As the castle of Lee began collapsing around them, D spoke to Larmica, imploring her to come with them, to abandon her past existence. But she had refused, seeking only oblivion. She believed it would be the end of her, of her line, sullied as it was with mortal blood. D and Doris had fled as Castle Lee sank into the earth and was swallowed up in the darkness. It should have been the end, she had wanted it to be...but no. Buried beneath the debris forming her tomb, something had sparked within Larmica, and she cried out "NO! No, I will NOT be crushed; I will NOT be smothered! I will NOT die!" Her body healing, she summoned all her strength and breached the confines of her prison then, locating a cave passage, had commenced following the tunnel up, up...until she tasted fresh air, and the blackness of the cave she had traversed gave way up ahead to the different darkness of the benighted surface.
Clutching her torn, diried garments close about her slender body, Larmica had stood at the mouth of the cave, and pondered. She knew she must have traveled quite some distance from the ruins of Castle Lee. Her thoughts went to those halls of metal and stone, whose shadowy depths had soothed her, been the only home she had known since her childhood...her home no longer; never could she return there now. Which left only the world beyond. Larmica had schooled herself in the ways of hybrids, and knew that while sunlight would not reduce her utterly to burnt cinders dispersed by the wind, she could only walk in it for so long before she would begin to suffer the effects of heat syndrome. She would be forced to find another hole in the earth to hide in, or dig one herself if there were none. Had she made an error turning her back on death, heeding D's words and coming here? Was she simply inviting a different form of death to come to her? Perhaps. Yet she was drawn by the possibility that somewhere out there could maybe be found something more, something better than the home of lies she had been raised in. And so she stepped out from the cave and began walking slowly into the open night and the future.