The Dark Kingdom of Wire is the region of Europe's Underworld which is home to the dybbuk, Wraiths killed in the Holocaust. While not a true Dark Kingdom, it is independent of the Dark Kingdom of Iron which rules over the majority of Europe's dead.
History
The consequences of the Wannsee Conference were ignored by the Hierarchy in death much like they were ignored by Western Governments in life. Shortly after the Holocaust began in earnest, the Deathlords created the Partition Accords, which divided the wraiths of the Shoah equally among the seven legions. As a rule, the Hierarchy treated the Holocaust Dead as an environmental problem more than anything else. Given the sheer volume of crossings caused by the Holocaust (a single selektion at Auschwitz-Birkenau would result in more wraiths than a generation of deaths in England), the Deathlords found their resources stretched, and resorted to traditional methods with a laxity that repeated the cruelty the dybbuk faced in life.
At least until the Ferrymen informed Stygia that if they didn't do something, then the Boatmen's Society would replace Stygia with a government that would. By that time, the damage was done. The Death Camps were gaping maws into Oblivion and the ghosts of the camps had nothing but contempt for the Hierarchy. The resulting Covenant of the Millions established the Dark Kingdom of Wire, a semi-autonomous region within Europe under the control of the Holocaust Dead.
Society and geography
To this day, the Holocaust Dead are a different society which, while nominally a part of Stygia, operates wholly independently in their own Necropoli. These environments are so hellish and tied to the tragedy of the Shoah that non-dybbuk wraiths almost never travel there. The Covenant establishes the autonomy of the Camps and associated locations (notably Ghettos), and the sovereign right of the Dead of the Holocaust to bring their tormentors to justice - squadrons of dybbuk hunt down the ghosts of Nazis and return them to the camps for punishment.
The kingdom gets its name from the relic barbed wire that encircle these areas. They crackle with a mysterious but immensely powerful charge that will send any wraith who comes into contact with them directly to Oblivion. It grows like kudzu through the camps, choking the few habitable areas left and ensnaring buildings. Many dybbuks have scars on their Corpus from accidental contact with the wire, but some have been brave enough to learn methods to carefully harvest the wire and forge it into weapons and armor.
While nominally located throughout Europe, the dybbuk kingdoms are intimately associated with the death factories that created them in the first place. As a result, even more so than Stygia proper, the Dark Kingdom of Wire is composed of cities and camps. Major sites include:
- Theresienstadt: A Potemkin ghetto set up by the Third Reich to deceive the rest of the world about the intentions of the Final Solution.
- Babi Yar: The ravine that served as the site for one of the first mass murders of Jewish people by the Nazis.
- The Warsaw Ghetto: Site of the fiercest uprisings against the Nazi regime.
- Auschwitz-Birkenau: The most infamous of the death camps, and a gaping maw of Oblivion itself.
