#vampire.

they are often compared to vampires, and while they are almost the same, there is one specific difference. instead of just feeding on blood, they also feed on its essence. the khanas, three of them, represent the ways the nisnas have chosen to live with their "fallen" state.

varshakhan khana:

     ◦     they have embraced angra mainyu's lie: that the universe is fundamentally flawed and only the strong have the right to reshape it. they believe their hunger is a gift, a tool to consume the flawed creation of ahura mazda and build a new, perfect world from the ashes— a world of eternal night (zhulmat - e - abad) where their hunger will be the only law.      ◦     note: they draw on the imagery of the varengan and the daevas.      ◦     they feast on the highest essences: the urvan  (soul), the fravashi  (divine guardian spirit) and khvarenah  (the divine royal glory). consuming these utterly destroys the victim.

khashayar khana:

     ◦     they are the ultimate fatalists. they see themselves as children of neither light nor dark, but of the void in between. they follow the path of the pari - khan, the "fairy king," a mythical nisnas who taught them to drift like sand on the wind. they believe no path, redemption or domination, matters, for the sundering cannot be undone.      ◦     note: they are inspired by the jinn and the peri who were cast out of heaven. they are masters of illusion and subtlety, like the aal of persian folklore.      ◦     they are connoisseurs of experience, feeding on potent emotions (veyseh): a warrior's courage, a lover's passion, an artist's inspiration. they leave their victims alive but emotionally hollowed, their creative spark gone.

shahravar khana:

     ◦     they follow the path of shahravar, a nisnas prince who was enlightened by the teachings of zoroaster himself. he taught that the sundering was a test, not a damnation. their hunger is a sacred fire that must be controlled, and they must use their power to protect the creations of ahura mazda, thus earning their way back towards the light. they are the keepers of the atash - e - vahram, a sacred spiritual flame they protect in a hidden fire temple.      ◦     note: they embody the zoroastrian virtues of good thoughts, good words, good deeds. they see themselves as the spiritual successors to the sassanian dragon - slayers and the simurgh.      ◦     they practice ethical consumption. shams feasts on raw energy (zhor), which is replenishable. others in her khana might feed on spent emotions (like grief after a catharsis) or physical pain, acting as unseen healers who take suffering away.

the magic system (or what the nisnas call the art of half - being):

nisnas magic is born from their duality and their connection to cosmography.

     ◦     the seven bounteous creations (haft khan):  each khana has an affinity for one of ahura mazda's creations, which they can both draw power from and corrupt.       ◦     sky:  control over winds, limited weather influence.       ◦     water:  influence over emotions and dreams (as water is connected to the subconscious).       ◦     earth:  strength, resilience and communion with stone and plant.       ◦     plants:  healing, poison and control over vitality.       ◦     animals:  shapeshifting into specific totemic animals (wolves for varshakhan, birds of prey for khashayar, moths or foxes for shahravar).       ◦     humankind:  the power of illusion (nairang) and persuasion.       ◦     fire:  the most dangerous and holy. the ability to manipulate spiritual energy (zhor) and, for the shahravar, to wield the sacred fire itself.      ◦     the daevic arts (varshakhan sorcery):  the varshakhan practice forbidden arts, invoking the names of daevas to curse their enemies. the dagger used on shams was inscribed with the true name of the daeva bushyasta, "the procrastinator," who brings lethargy and decay, and was imbued with the venom of the sag - did, the "death hound" of folklore.

the nisnas body houses daena— the embodiment of their conscience and actions. then there is the fravashi— their divine, pre - existent spirit, which is normally a guiding, unseen force. if it has been made manifest and trapped in a fragile form, this will be an abomination, as the fravashi is meant to be eternal and untouchable.

⊹ PRE EVENTS.

the story begins with shams, the heir to the shahravar khana, participating in a truce gathering with the other khanas at a hidden ateshkadeh  (fire temple) in the mountains of shiraz. the gathering is shattered by a varshakhan ambush. during the chaos, shams is dueling a varshakhan elder when he produces the dagger of bushyasta. instead of a killing blow, he plunges it into her shoulder. she expects death, but instead feels a violent, soul - rending tearing. as the sun rises, her body collapses, and her consciousness erupts from her chest in a burst of light, taking the form of a solitary butterfly. she is trapped, unable to control her torpid body, forced to watch her khana retreat in disarray and confusion, believing her lost.

weeks later, shams has learned the rhythm of her existence. by night, she is a nisnas, but weaker, her energy constantly draining. by day, she is a butterfly, her human soul exposed and vulnerable. she discovers her butterfly form can sense the flow of zhor  (energy) and perceive the spiritual decay left by varshakhan feeding grounds. she realizes the attack was a precise, magical act. stealing ancient scrolls from her own now - cloistered khana, she vows to uncover the reason she was made this way.

shams' research leads her to the legend of the tree of weeping souls, said to be a primordial tree poisoned by angra mainyu's tear. her butterfly soul is instinctively repelled by its mention. tracking its lore, she travels to the ancient hyrcanian forests near the caspian sea. there, in a hidden grove, she finds a single, petrified branch— proof the tree exists and that the varshakhan have access to it. she learns the dagger's magic is one of "preparation," not destruction. it doesn't kill but rather it unmakes and prepares the soul for a greater ritual.

her next clue points to the khashayar heir, a nisnas named ramin. she tracks him, finding him just as a varshakhan hunting party arrives to "collect" him. she intervenes, using her unique nature to her advantage— her butterfly form distracts the attackers with blinding flashes of pure spiritual light and sees the truth from him. in fact, the varshakhan have promised the khashayar a permanent domain in the new world order, free from their endless wandering. he was a willing participant until he learned the full cost. he tells shams of the zhulmat - e - abad, the eternal night, a ritual that requires the three heirs as living keys. the varshakhan heir represents the body, ramin the spirit, and shams, the soul. her transformation was necessary to make her soul "harvestable."

and thus comes the revelation. if her butterfly is her fravashi, perhaps it can feed her daena. in the ruins of a sassanian - era observatory, she conducts a dangerous experiment. as the sun rises and her butterfly form emerges, she guides it to the center of a powerful, natural ley line convergence. instead of drawing blood, she has her fravashi draw pure, unaligned zhor from the earth itself. it works. the energy is raw and difficult to process, but it sustains her. for the first time since her curse, she stops weakening. she begins to feed directly from the cosmos, no longer reliant on human essence. this makes her stronger than anyone anticipates and completely outside the varshakhan's predictions.

they pinpoint the ritual's location: the mount of the two thrones (kuh - e do takht), a site sacred to both mithra and ahriman in zoroastrian lore, a place of perfect duality. they arrive on the night of the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. the summit is a terrifying sight. the varshakhan khana, led by their heir ardeshir, has assembled. ardeshir and ramin are chained to two ancient altars, their essences being drawn into a swirling vortex of darkness above the mountain— the nascent zhulmat. a third, empty altar awaits shams. her own shahravar khana, believing her dead, is launching a desperate, seemingly suicidal assault to stop the ritual.

shams realizes that destroying the ritual from the outside is impossible. she must break it from within. she makes a choice: she just surrenders. she walks onto the empty third altar, allowing the ritual magic to seize her. inside the spiritual vortex, she confronts ardeshir's consciousness. he gloats, believing they have won, but she does the unthinkable. instead of letting her two souls be torn apart, she uses the ritual's own immense power to reforge them. embracing her duality, she forces her daena and fravashi to merge, becoming, for a fleeting moment, a complete being— a new saam - ghul. the influx of this whole, balanced energy is anathema to the dark ritual. the vortex destabilizes, the energy running wild.

the zhulmat - e - abad collapses in a cataclysmic explosion of light and shadow. the mountain is scarred, but the eternal night is averted. ardeshir and many varshakhan elders are consumed by the backfire. the surviving varshakhan flee, shattered but not destroyed. shams survives, forever changed. her curse is not entirely broken, she still transforms at dawn. but now it is a choice. she has mastered her duality. she can be a nisnas, a butterfly, or, for brief moments, the whole one. her khana see her as a messianic figure, the fulfillment of their founder's prophecies. the remnants of the khashayar, led by ramin, swear a new oath to the shahravar.

five years have passed since the battle. shams has embraced her role as the "vas - e - do - jahan"  (the bridge between two worlds). she leads a newly unified khana, a fragile alliance of the reformed shahravar and the loyalist khashayar, now called the "khan - e - noor"  (the house of light). they operate from a hidden headquarters beneath the historic naqsh - e jahan square in isfahan. the varshakhan are scattered, but not defeated. they have become a shadowy insurgency.

⊹ POST.

suddenly a new threat emerges. nisnas from all khanas, beginning with the most ancient and powerful, are falling into a catatonic state. they are not dead, but their essence is fading, as if their very connection to existence is unspooling. they call it the "sokut - e - javidan"  (the eternal silence). it strikes without pattern, affecting varshakhan, khana - e - noor and unaligned nisnas alike. one day, shams' soul is drawn to a strange, dissonant energy in a remote desert. she finds a crater holding a fragment of a meteorite— but this stone is cold, black, and seems to absorb light and sound. it is "sang - e - nemudar"  (the omen stone). when she touches it with her spiritual form, she is flooded with a vision: not of the future, but of the past— a perfect, agonizingly beautiful memory of unity from the perspective of the first nisnas, saam - ghul,  before the sundering. the vision ends with a wrenching tear, and a single, echoing whisper:  "find the other half."

her investigation leads her to the true mastermind:  behnan, the sole surviving elder of the varshakhan. but behnan is no longer a mere warmonger. he has become an ascetic of annihilation. he believes the sundering was the first flaw in a broken universe, and the only path to true peace is not to rule a corrupted world, but to un - create it entirely. he sees the eternal silence not as a threat, but as a divine mercy, and he seeks to accelerate it. it turns out he's hunting for the legendary "golestan - e - makoos"  (the garden of reverse miracles), a mythical place said to hold the "memory" of the world before the sundering. his goal is not to heal the nisnas, but to use the garden's power to perform a "counter - sundering"— to broadcast the "memory of non - existence" across the spiritual plane, erasing every nisnas at once, returning their collective essence to the void to restore cosmic balance.

so now she has to race him to the garden. her goal is the opposite: to use its power for reintegration, to find a permanent cure for her people's fractured state.

the garden is not a physical place, but a pocket dimension housed within the oldest living cypress tree in abarkooh. to enter, shams must use her duality, having her body and butterfly soul step through simultaneously. inside they find a garden of events, emotions and lost moments, all frozen in crystal clarity. at its center hangs the "mehr - e - gomshodeh"  (the lost sun), the crystallized, dormant heart of the original saam - ghul. behnan is already there. he begins the ritual of the counter - sundering, preparing to merge with the lost sun and broadcast the signal of un - creation. she realizes she cannot defeat him with force, so her final move is to do what she did on the mountain, but in reverse. instead of merging her two souls, she splits them willingly and completely, projecting her daena and her fravashi as two separate entities.

the lost sun responds to her and begins to flares with light and offers a choice to every nisnas simultaneously: to embrace the silence or to embrace the struggle.

the catatonic nisnas awaken, forever changed by the psychic choice they were offered. most chose to live. behnan willingly walks into the dawn and turns to dust. but the victory is profound and complex. the lost sun is now dormant within shams, a burden of immense power. shams is no longer just the heir to a khana, but the living steward of two worlds. one moment she is a nisnas, the next a butterfly superimposed over her form. the work of building a new destiny for her people, of learning to live with the gift she seems to have been given, has just begun. the final image is of her butterfly soul taking flight, not away from her body, but dancing around it in a perfect, harmonious orbit.

⊹ SOME NOTES.