Schwarzmeer

Schwarzmeer is also known, depending on time, place and person, as Heinrich von Kalw, Drachenberg, Meester van der Graaf, Messire, the Master, Il Signore, Il Svevo, Suebus, Sieben... and doubtless many others. Schwarzmeer nonetheless appears to be his favourite name. It probably is not the true name, but it is one more commonly used when you get closer to his inner circle.

According to Jacob London, Schwarzmeer is a Millenial, similar to Dr. Methuselah and just as inscrutable and powerful. Other accounts certainly corroborate the idea that Schwarzmeer had been active for centuries in the past before suddenly disappearing in the 16th century. In the past he had been a powerful and sinister sorcerer, alchemist and artificer, who, in his different identities, had littered Europe with magical artifacts and research in the pursuit of ultimate power.

In 1914, very shortly after the Saint Haven Incident, Schwarzmeer returned, as abruptly as he had disappeared. Immediately he acquired a vast network of contacts and struck at the League of the Hidden Covenant as one of the few groups equipped to stop his plans as they began to unfold. It has been suggested by some that this was possible in part because the descendants of his retainers in ages past have all been marked in a way that bent them to his will to some extent, enabling him to infiltrate countless unlucky organisations as quickly as he wished; even this, however, might not account for the speed with which he took over much of the occult underworld of Europe. He and his followers did not stop there either, infiltrating and manipulating companies and revolutionary organisations as well as esoteric cults, and using all those to pursue various goals all over Europe, with the two main objectives appearing to be spreading chaos and recovering artifacts. In this he was greatly assisted by the Great War; if he had not caused it, then he certainly had helped prolong it, making it impossible for the Century Club to respond to him effectively.

Whatever he may have been now, his current nature, if the brushes some few had with its manifestations in France are anything to go by, is something thoroughly inhuman and monstrous. A shard of his essence, trapped in a magical sphere, has been found to lead to a world that is nothing but a hideous and soul-crushing black sea; a copy of this shard has been projected by Schwarzmeer cultists in the French Army during the Battle of Verdun using a complicated system of magical radio transmitters, creating a thick, moist dark mist full of repellent energy that turned French pilots (and their planes) that were trapped within it into monsters. Meanwhile, his ultimate goals remain a mystery, though it seems that there is one event central to his plans: a ritual that is supposed to involve the ascent of something called the Black Moon (or sometimes the Black Sun). Recently his main base of operations has been narrowed down to "somewhere in European Russia".