Editing Shadowwalkers: Setting (section)

==Premise==
In a time before time when vampires dwelt openly among men, worshipped and revered, there rose up certain among them with far reaching designs who imprisoned a select number of their kind in a forced sleep in sarcophagai of sorcery, silver, and stone, buried for an eternity in sightless unmarked tombs across the globe.

It is not known which among them did this heinous thing or why, but the powers they called on and the glyphs they wrought held their victims for time beyond time. As intended, the legend of the vampire faded into myth as they removed themselves from the world of men.

In that time the five courts were established and divided the globe between them, bloodlines queued up in a complex hierarchy, and the creatures of the night who fed on men began manipulating every force and power on the earth to their own ends.

It is unknown when the first shadowwalker woke and broke free of their imprisonment, but rumors of a Lost Court began to circulate about the time an unknown plague wiped out most of the Court of the Southron Sky, and stepping foot on the shores of Australia and the great and small isles beneath it became a death sentence for vampires. 

In the modern world more and more prisoners of the Lost Court walk among their brethren, seeking those who did this thing to them if they yet live, or vengeance on their scions if they do not. Though they are grossly out of place in time, they do not consider themselves Lost at all, and in secret refer to themselves as the Shadowwalker Court, or just Shadowwalkers.

In the thousands of centuries that they were locked away from the world they gained nothing of the power that such vast oceans of time would normally have granted them. Next to their elder kindred, the shadowwalkers remain babes in comparisson. Nevertheless, much was lost to the new courts in that time, shades of the Echo that they could no longer reach as their bloodlines became narrow and inbred. Power that the shadowwalkers still weild.

Still, all else set aside, the power structure and factions and etiquette and secret laws of the courts put the shadowwalkers at a disadvantage as precarious and eternal as time itself and they are forced to work within those structures as they seek their goals among the brethren who so long ago betrayed them.