The Covenant of the Millions is the name of a formal agreement between the Hierarchy of Stygia and the dybbuks of what was to become the Dark Kingdom of Wire.
Overview[]
The first of the dybbuks that came to Stygia demanded an audience with Charon and the Deathlords. They brought news of the atrocities in central and eastern Europe to the leaders of the Dark Kingdom of Iron. Distracted by a war with the Dark Kingdom of Jade, Charon gave control of the situation to the Deathlords. Rather than think about the dybbuks themselves, the Deathlords simply came up with the Partition Accords which split any groups of Shoah wraiths evenly between the seven Deathlords and placed them into partition communities, where they could acclimate to life in the Shadowlands. Furthermore, Legionnaires would be sent to the sites of these horrors to minimize the effects of Oblivion.
What the Deathlords didn't count on was the sheer number of dead created by the Shoah and the effect it had in destabilizing the Shroud. The partition communities lost their special status, and the dybbuks left, furious that they had not been helped in the least. The fact that Charon himself disappeared after battling a Malfean, throwing the Hierarchy into chaos, didn't help matters much either.
Finally, the Deathlords called a meeting of the dybbuks and high-ranking officials of Stygia; in attendance were also the Ferrymen. The dybbuks decried the Hierarchy, calling their efforts to incorporate the dead Holocaust victims inadequate and almost akin to what they had gone through with the Nazis in life.
Faced with millions of victims who held no respect for their authority, not to mention a very disgruntled Boatmen's Society who threatened to solve the problem for them by removing them from power, the Deathlords decided to create independent cities at the sites of the camps, ghettos, and other areas of dispute and destruction. Stygia had no authority over these areas; the wraiths within were free to live out their own existences. Any dybbuks found outside of the camps could be returned to be reunited with their families and friends. The agreement, called the Covenant of the Millions, was remarkable in that it was one of the few times that the Hierarchy acknowledged the independence of a society from Stygian rule.
Much as the Deathlords might have wished it so, this was not quite the end of the matter. As the Covenant was concluded, the Ferrymen's Steering Committee sent the Deathlords a private message: accept all the victims of European genocide into the Hierarchy - the victims of Armenia, the purges, and millions of others, abandoned for fear of overflowing the ranks of the Grim Legion - or the Boatmen's Society would arrange for the establishment of as many secondary governments as were necessary to protect them, and damn the political consequences. The Deathlords conceded, and took in the genocide-dead.
References[]
- WTO: Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah, p. 28-29, 34-35
- WTO: Ends of Empire, p. 86-87
