Order of the Abyss

The First Order — the "Grandfather Order" from which every other Blood Hunter order descended. Vanished without explanation; their stronghold, Castle Umbra, remains a mystery.

Overview

Dark, mysterious, and morally grey by their own admission, the Abyss drew power directly from the Abyssal plane and its demons, casting in Abyssal (the language every order originally used, in inheritance from them). All were Profane Soul Blood Hunters. Their sigil was a black circle containing a bleeding eye.

They considered themselves the lesser evil: frightening and secretive, but genuine hunters of monsters, evil mages, and profane things. A single grandmaster held immense authority over the order's secrets, philosophy, training, and membership, choosing their own successor each generation. Novices were taught that knowledge itself was dangerous — "revealing Hemocraft secrets could get people killed" — and only the grandmaster ever knew the Hunter's Bane's full extent. Records and secrets were kept in chained vaults deep within Castle Umbra, whose lowest levels supposedly descend into the Underdark, though "nobody knows for certain."

History

A few generations after the Abyss's founding, splinter orders began forming — each etching their own sigil onto armor in imitation of the Abyss, each developing its own philosophy and methods (see Blood Hunters and Hemocraft for the full list). The orders remained loosely connected, consulting and collaborating with the Abyss as their unspoken root — until the Order of the Abyss simply vanished. Castle Umbra went completely silent: no bodies, no blood, no explanation. This vanishing precipitated the Schism, the ideological split that eventually doomed most of the other orders.

An unverified rumor (per Farrow, in Older Trout Stories.md) holds that the Order was "dragged down by demons, to the literal Abyss" after bargaining with them for too long — but this is explicitly just a rumor, not confirmed by any authoritative source. See Contradictions and Open Questions and Unresolved Threads.

Sources

• Additional Materials/Blood_Hunter_Lore.md
• Older Trout Stories.md (Farrow's unverified rumor)