When the present Queen of Cheliax was just a little girl, which was really much longer ago than most people realize, there was a Count of Egorian who had a daughter and a son. The daughter, the elder of the two, was proud and charismatic, gifted at politics, but cruel, impetuous, and entitled. She considered it her absolute and obvious right to inherit her father’s titles, though both her father and the inheritance law of the time favored her younger brother, of whom history tells us only that he was kind. (This was, even then, already a double-edged epithet in Taldane politics, even in such a backwater as Egorian.) And so it came to pass that the Count’s daughter was married off to one of her father’s important vassals, a widower thirty years her senior, and when a mysterious and handsome sorcerer* somehow secreted himself into her chambers one night, and told her that if she lay with him their line would one day rule the whole Western Empire, she didn’t really even have to believe him to do it.
When the boy that resulted of this union, as might be expected by this point in our tale, began to sprout devil’s horns, his mother had them filed down to little nubs that could be concealed beneath his hair; when he began to manifest sorcerous powers of his own, she ordered him to conceal them, and had him beaten until he complied. But the boy, from the moment that he knew himself for what he was, feared damnation above all else, and hated his mother for having conceived him in its shadow, and the moment he was of age he turned himself in to the Imperial authorities and told them everything. His mother was executed for adultery and diabolism; he was enclericked by Ragathiel upon the spot and then enlisted in the Crusade. The devil that conceived this scheme, we may assume, was punished severely for the embarrassment it had become.
But perhaps not. We do, after all, know how this story ends. Though the first of the Hell-touched Thrunes was eventually welcomed into Heaven, he had had children before he went, and, human nature being what it is, the family of sorcerers granted power out of Hell became gradually more entwined with that power’s source. Diabolism was still illegal, of course, but their magic had bought them wealth and favor with the Emperor, and the law, somehow, was never enforced. When the legitimate line of the Counts of Egorian began to die out in a series of mysterious accidents and vanishings, everyone knew who was behind it, and no one did anything to stop it. Or, at least, not enough.
(*) Was this entity Mephistopheles? NO COMMENT