Heilong Dynasty

The Heilong Dynasty (Heilong: Makmrung; Denwa: Drakonis Melanis) refers to a powerful vampire dynasty that originated in the Land of Jibin and rose to power after the dynasty came to control the area of China in the 20th Century BC until the end of the 17th Century BC. Founded by the Vampire-Tibetan Warlord Makmrung May, the family broke with the vampire magocracy in the Himalayas and began to move east once it became apparent that the species was in the death throes of existance. May and a collection of Vampire mages and witches across the Tibetan Plateau towards China. May and his followers reached the land of Tiensha, before going into hiding and setting up their own small state, the Kingdom of Heilong. May was said to have been killed by one of his associates, another Tibetan vampire by the name of Mtho, who took on the Chinese name of Gao once he carried out his conquest of Xia China. Gao would rule for 200 Years before he was killed by his youngest wife, a Chinese woman of the Yin tribe, named Yu, who would become the Heilong's most infamous leader and the subject of a religious cult that would persist for years. Yu would be killed in a plot carried out by her own tribe at the behest of her step-son, Sui, who would himself be betrayed and killed by the Yin, who would then take his place as rulers of China, declaring themselves to be the Shang Dynasty.

Origins
The Heilong Dynasty can trace its origins back to the first vampires that existed in the land of Jibin (Kashmir) around the turn of the paleolithic age. A sister species to humans, the vampires had adopted many aspects of their neighbors, including the adoption of a Sino-Tibetan language. At the end of the last Ice Age, the species had entered into a massive decline as the highly specialized species began to die out en mass. Splinters of the species, supported by powerful shamans who could utilize magic, began to break off of the main group and began to go out in different directions looking for new homelands. One of these groups was a clan called the Makmrung (Black Dragon). Their founder, a former soldier named Makmrung May, proposed that they head east, across the Tibetan Plateau, towards the fertile east, were humanity had begun to flourish, and use magic to begin parasiting off of humans, and even changing them into hybrids of their species to keep the legacy of the vampires going.

May's group eventually broke from the vampires of Jibin, and made their way to the source of the Yangtze River, and settled there, planning out their way to begin conquering the lands.

Reign of Gao (2035 BC - 1870BC)
May's rule was characterized by a slow, defensive presence, with May unwilling to attack the Xia dynasty directly. May was overthrown after about 30 years of rule, by a close associate of him, called Makmrung Mtho. Prior to his overthrow of May, Mtho had decided to return back to Jibin, having come to see May as incapable of saving their species. Mtho travelled back to Jibin only to find the ruins of the vampire civilization, and finding a heavily mutated vampire mage, called the Progenitor, who had developed the magic of hybridization and had begun to go insane as he hybridized himself with other humans species to try and prolong his death. Mtho killed him before he returned to the Yangtze.

Mtho killed May in single combat and took his position as king before declaring the necessity of conquering China. He led the invasion of Xia China and finally conquered it in 1950 BC, declaring himself Emperor of the Yangtze and Huanghe. Mtho took on the Chinese name of Gao (Old Chinese: Ka:w) and set about stabilizing his rule over the Chinese tribes. Gao began negotiating terms of tribute and entering into marriages with local tribes to legitimize his rule over them, even transferring local power to powerful tribes (such as the Yin, Chu, Qin, Han, Zhou, etc). Gao acquired many wives and associates in his time as emperor. However, Gao was stricken with problems of infertility due to his status as a different species than the humans of China. Gao was only able to produce one son, a child he named Sui. Before Gao was able to produce another heir, he was killed by his youngest wife, the reigning high priestess of Shenlong Shangdi, Yin Yu, who took on the name of Heilong Yu and became the new Empress of China.

Yu's Reign (1870 BC - 1600 BC)
With the death of Gao, who had disinherited his son, Sui, on the basis that he was an unfit ruler, given to unnatural desires such as incest, the position floated to the closest kin that he had, his high ranking wife, Yu. Yu, a born member of the Yin tribe, but a part of the Heilongs by way of marriage, had taken the title of empress, as she was the most accomplished of his wives, holding the position of high priestess of Shenlong Shangdi, the highest religious position in all of China.

Yu started her reign with the conquest of Ordos, a desert region in western China inhabited by the Ordos people, a semi-nomadic Indo-European people. Yu's personal intervention in the battles with the Ordos, and her brutal acts against them earned her the title of "Demon of Ordos". The region was annexed into the Heilong Empire, Yu set out to pacify the Baiyue, a Neolithic people living to the south of China.

Yu saw the constant raiding of lands north of the Yangtze by Yue tribes to be an insult to her rulership and put forth an ultimatum to the Baiyue. She demanded the cease raiding China, or she would retaliate and wipe every trace of the Baiyue from the earth. When the Yue responded by killing her messengers, Yu immediately mobilized her forces to begin waging war on the Yue.

Meanwhile, Yu continued her roles as the High Priestess, carrying out daily rituals for Shangdi, including divinatory magic, as well as animal and human sacrifices in the methods of the previous Xia dynasty. Yu, however, became paranoid of death after her master, High Priest Kong, was killed by a disgruntled peasant. Yu began to experiment with magic, eventually discovering the very nature of souls, and their essences. Yu later came to learn how to bind souls to objects, including the soul of its holder. Thus Yu bound a portion of her own soul to her ceremonial axe, and utilized this axe to kill in both sacrifices and in war, making her effectively immortal, as well as increasingly more potent in magic with each soul she consumed. Yu would eventually cease to need feeding on blood anymore, being able to survive solely on the energy of the souls she stole.

Following the conquest of the Baiyue, Yu summoned all the vassals that had spoken out against her war with the Yue to a ceremony in Yin to celebrate her victory. Wherein, she carried out a ritual to kill all those who doubted her and bound their souls to her axe, gaining immense power from consuming the souls of so many powerful vampires. Other vassals began to become wary of her following this, and a particular group, the Yin, Yu's own birth tribe, made a deal with her dejected step-son, Sui, to kill her.

Yu's final act of power would be crushing the rebellion of a self-proclaimed Yue king, Bak Kue (Modern Chinese: Fujiu; Vietnamese: Phuc Cuu), who organized 9 tribal leagues of the Baiyue into a singular entity under his rule and began to rebel against the Heilong. Yu was personally involved in this war, and led the siege on Bak Kue's fortress, where she had him captured, and paraded around Yin in chains before having him killed by skinning him alive and burning his body. Yu would have his distinctive, heavily tattooed skin used to make a cloak for herself, and a necklace made of his teeth.

Yu would later meet with her kinsman, the Yin patriarch Yin Jiang, to discuss the terms of his tribe's fealty. While there, Jiang managed to get Yu into a heavy drunken stupor on beer and mead, before locking her inside of a sarcophagus, and throwing it into a fire. With Yu's death, her step-son Sui proclaimed himself the new emperor.

Sui's ascension, Fall of Heilong China, and Rise of the Shang
Sui managed to hold the title of emperor for around 2 hours before the Yin descended upon him, and brutally killed him. With his death, the Yin proclaimed themselves to be a new "Shang Dynasty."

With this, the Shang set out driving out all remnants of the vampires from China, pushing them into the far northwest, and killing any remaining vampires in the country or sending them into hiding. Among the artifacts taken west by the vampires was the Axe of Heilong, which, unknown to the Shang, contained the soul of Heilong Yu.

Later Developments
Yu would become the center of a vampire cult that developed first in Greek Crimea, and reached maturity in the Italian Peninsula under various Umbrian Tribes, and would be cultivated in the Roman Empire as an underground movement, before becoming the mainstream, state religion of the so-called Black Empire of Medieval Europe. Yu's resurection marked a huge moment for the Heilongs, though Yu would not reclaim her empire, but go into exile in Armenia. Instead, she would instate a new matriarch, a Greco-French noblewoman named Élysabeth d'Athènes. Lys would go on to compose 7 articles of faith detailing the return of the Heilong from their dormancy.