Cautionary Tale
The world had ended in a blaze of fire and chaos. Most of humanity perished in the cataclysmic disaster. But a small tribe, forewarned by their elders, had prepared. They constructed a vast ark - a floating self-sustained vessel to ride out the apocalyptic floods.
Within the ark's vaults, they collected and preserved precious artifacts of the old world - books and any information they could find, not technology, as this was from the cataclysm before. Known from stories told and then inscribed in rock were some obscure dark magic practices of sacrifice and drinking blood they were aware of in ancient days.
As the centuries passed adrift, the tribe flourished with their knowledge and people adorned them. Rituals like head binding made them stand out from others as rising seas reclaimed more lands. Primitive humans came to adorn them as gods. They pored over the preserved disturbing wisdom, falling under the sway of its occultic knowledge.
Eventually, the ark dwellers landed on farther older shores with civilizations that had also thrived. Now following bloody rituals and wielding ceremonial power, they stole and sacrificed children. One king spoke up, saying they must stop these evil practices and join his religion. For a while they were defeated.
But the ark tribe simply adapted, taking to creating and manipulating religions to regain strength, filtering in their dark ways over time. They chose one widespread faith and over generations, subverted it into a Satanic rendition through infiltration of the church itself. Devout followers were turned across the world under their subtle influences.
With this growing Satanic movement behind them, the ark tribe's agents began taking over countries, businesses and government agencies, ruthlessly killing any who got in the way of their pursuit to uncover further relics from the ancient world. Their searches led them to artifacts and data caches buried under the Antarctic ice.
Absorbing these arcane discoveries, their Satanism became a universal force. An oligarchic orthodoxy arose, their elite presiding over an apocalyptic doctrine pledged to the dark forces first excavated from the ark's archives.
Now styling themselves the Lords of Darkness, they expropriated the globe's wealth and resources to realize their diabolical vision - by slowly killing off the "unworthy" over years through a vaccination program to take over the world. When this didn't work and there was an awakening of souls against them, the Lords did everything in their power to eradicate the opposition - spreading starvation, ruining environments, and ensuring economic ruination. They would stop at nothing to achieve their goal of global domination of the chosen.