Chapter One: The Tower of Babel

He limped, then lurched, then staggered as if he were drunk. One foot fell in front of the other, dragging Daniel forward along the long, light-less stretch of asphalt. Once he slid to the side, his feet flying out from under him, and his shoulder smashed into the guardrail - but he clutched at the cold metal for support, yanked himself upright again, and began walking once again.

Occasionally a pair of headlights would sway carefully around a bend in the road, pass across Daniel, then speed rabbit like past him with a shriek of rubber.

Daniel dug his fingers into his temples, as if trying to prevent the sound from reaching. But no blood was flowing under the skin, and there was nothing to cut off. His teeth ground together with the sound of cracking porcelain.

He pressed the heels of his palms into his eye-sockets, grinding them there like pestles, but nothing came of it. He wept blood, and it came away on his hands. Still the pulse of the voice rang in his skull.

It has taken nights - nights upon nights - for me to sift through the visions, the scrawls, the shrieking. Years. Decades. More. Thousands of nights to fashion our story into a rigid form. You have one night to listen. You must listen.

Sobbing tears of blood, Daniel slid down the bank and wrapped his arms around his shins. Quietly and slowly, he rocked back and forth as the pulsing voice rolled round and round in his head.

Of the lot of them, only three define themselves by the blood of their ancestor, even by feeding off the very name of that vile god. Only three choose to answer not to the direct name of their forefather, nor to use a secret word coined by an elder to mask their own names. Only three call themselves true children of their divine progenitor. There are Hassan's childer, who share the disease of their grandfather's blood. There are Set's childer, who share the disease of their grandfather's faith.

We are a sprawling, fractured, decayed family. We are more ancient than any lineage of kings, yet more inbred than any withered aristocracy. We are fragmented, scattered, slivers of a broken mirror that cast bitter reflections. We are children of a mad god. We are Malkavian.

Daniel's eyes snapped open. The shivering stopped. A faint heat, no more than a mirage, circled around the base of his skull.

You know what we are. You know the words, the keys to power - even though you haven't been taught, you recognize them. But you do not know why we are what we are, why we have been blasted with the curse of knowing.

You must learn more. A terrible time is forthcoming, when he - the creature and god in your blood, hiding in your mind - when he will again draw himself together. And you must be ready.

Daniel began to tremble again. Although the unlit road and its surroundings were little more than shifting shades of darkness, a greater blackness seemed to draw over his vision.

The Birth of Madness

Our story, of course, begins with Malkav. Yes. That sticks inside your ribcage, catches at your throat, makes your stilled innards quiver. Malkav. The name of a god made flesh. The name makes you cringe. You and I and all of our brothers and sisters, even those who haven't been told what the name means - we all share a shudder when his name is invoked and it is all his doing.

Listen. We rarely invoke the power of Malkav's name; perhaps you know why already. It isn't for us to discuss him over cocktails as others might speak of Plato or Hitler. What is there for such as us to say? You might as well describe a hunger pang or a burst of half-remembered lust, because that's what he is. Part of him lives in you, deep back in that dark partition dividing your brain - that warm, wet throbbing that can't be addressed or reasoned with, only tolerated. The pulse that echoes with every word I speak, with every burst of imagery that flashes across the veins of our shared understanding. I speak to you through him.

I suppose, though... I suppose he wasn't always that way. No, not at all. The dismembered god was once whole, after all.

Malkav

The story of Malkav Our Father Our Blood begins with Caine. All our stories begin with Caine, damn it all. They have to. Caine was the first creature created with the shackles of human senses who then threw them off and gazed into the next layer of creation. Do you believe in Adam and Eve? Slaves, both of them. Do you believe in Lilith? More fool you. Do you believe in evolution? A clever story, but it cannot explain us, can it?

No, no matter what you believe, it must be that Caine was the first to place one foot in the grave and stand across the threshold of death and look on two worlds at once. Someone had to be first across. Was it indeed the first man to break the virgin earth and seed it and wait for his food to ripen? Was his name Caine, the murderer of his brother? Was his name Utanapishtim, the man cursed with immortality? Or something else?

None of us can remember; none of this saw this time. And it is... probably best that we don't. If his name were spoken, the power of it would cling in your mind and gnaw at...

The First was a beast of ashes, wet with blood, mad with thirst and grief. He was soulless, and he was alone. He was diseased, and he longed to share his disease with others, for he did not want to suffer alone. So he built a city, in lands that had yet to see the great waters of the Flood wash over them, and there he finally rested, and took three childer to his bosom. In time, they too grew lonely, and they took childer of their own.

Malkav... Malkav was more than a man in life, or so the texts say. The records are... conflicted, but there is a tiny thread of agreement that runs through them. Some fragments mention an angel, a messenger, a chosen one - and that is perhaps what he was. He was chosen to bear a vision given to him by his sire, or perhaps he was chosen for his vision.

The records become even more convoluted when discussing Malkav's sire. I have seen it written that his sire was Ynosh the Law-giver, who loved Malkav for his wisdom and seated him at the right of the throne as his vizier. I have read tablets proclaiming that Irad the Strong chose Malkav for his own, selecting a childe of strong soul and heart to match his own strength. I have heard that Zillah the Beautiful saw a light burning in Malkav's eyes that matched Caine's own desire, and so she drew him near to her in Caine's absence. The songs of Malkav speak of love, and of thirst for wisdom, but they do not agree - they do not agree.

I think that, at the last, Malkav's sire must have hated him. Perhaps he knew that Malkav could see what was going to happen. A fragment of verse from Nineveh laid a trail that I traced back 300 years, and the collected shards hinted that one of the Three had taken one of the Thirteen, and was beating or torturing the childe for something that the childe had said... or refused to say. And that, according to this fragment, was when the Thirteen rose up against their sires.

The rest is... uncovered easily enough. The Three were cast down and destroyed; records are unclear whether they were obliterated outright, or if some of their childer managed to drink their essences. And the Thirteen drew up a truce, and they dwelt one next to the other. For a time.

Voices, more of them, rushed into Daniel's bones.
"... he/Caine cursed him/MaIkav, when that one defamed his image
and doomed him to insanity, forever..."
"... Caine learned much under Lilith, but she did not teach him all she knew. When he abandoned her, in spite she went to the firstborn of his grandchilder, and told him a secret that broke him, that destroyed his mind and tainted his blood..."
"... Behold my most foolish childe,
who claims madness for his pleasure.
Let him become mad in truth, so
that all may fear his company..."
"... Then [Malkav], hidden from the sight of his siblings, drank deep of the hoarded blood of the Three. But it was too much for [Malkav's] veins, and his heart was like to burst. His eyes were opened, and the Truth rushed inward..."
"... [Malkav] seized his parent in his hands,
hands that could break stone,
and he bit like a dog into the neck of his parent.
And [the elder] screamed like a thousand jackals,
Like the vulture that dies with an arrow in its breast.
Like the lion that slays its child,
And [Malkav] drew in the scream with his breath,
And he began to weep.
He wept for many nights,
And he wailed, and tore his hair like a woman..."

When was the curse placed? Who struck Malkav with the gift of visions that burned? I would - I have given so much, and yet the answer, the true answer, continues to flutter out of reach. The memories of us all are tainted, washed with fever here. Whatever event slashed into Malkav's mind, leaving this great, terrible, livid wound, it so scarred him that he could never tell the same story to any two of his childer. The only times the stories agree are when a childe's story agrees with his sire's, or when a scholar quotes the Book of Nod - but even the Book of Nod might not be true. Surely if any other of Caine's grandchilder had been with Malkav when the Sight struck him, they would have been stricken as well. The power of the thing...

The power of the Sight is the power of the world itself. It is more than a disease that runs in the blood - it is a connection to the chaos that pools in invisible places. It is the vision to perceive the world's true angles, to pierce illusions.

Many of the myths agree that Malkav had sired childer of his own before the Sight came upon him, and that as his blood burned with the fever, so too did theirs. I believe this. There are other stories -stories of Nosferatu and all his children becoming blasted of visage at once; of the nameless Methuselah offering the souls, or the remnants of souls, of himself and all his childer to the demons of the Pit; of the gnawing obsession that descended on Arikel and all her line at once. The powers that were loose in the old world could easily infect an entire bloodline; the Reawakening is just a side effect of -

The Sight, then, surely came on all of Malkav's childer just as it came on him, and each newbom that they Embraced since then also woke with it pulsing behind their eyes. Malkav's blood, wherever it might be, had been infected with a... closeness to the streams of madness that run through the world. The Sight affected his visions, in some cases making his prophecies more accurate than ever before - but it was a heavy burden as well.

Count yourself lucky, childe, that humans have turned to small mercies in this time. They are proud of their learning, and like to make much of their compassion. In the Western lands, the madman is, if not tolerated, at least not sought out with chains and staves. A lunatic on the street, shouting the gospel of mother Moon, is ignored by his brothers and sisters. When they try to cure him, they do so with medicines and games.

Not so in our grandsire's time. The mad were not "diseased" then; they were "possessed." It was best, they said, to drive the demons from the body by flogging, or to starve the fleshly host so that the demons would grow weak and flee in search of a more fitting vessel.

Such was our lot. Many of Malkav's grandchilder were quickly slain if they wandered too far from his protection. The other king-childer of the Third Generation would have slain Malkav himself - but they did not. Perhaps Caine forbade it. Perhaps it was because the Curse and the vision that assailed Malkav also brought him closer to a few of them, and so Malkav was never completely alone. Truly alone, yes; but not completely.

Two among the Antediluvians were Malkav's brothers. One was Saulot, who in life had loved his body and the bodies of others, and strove to perfect his immortal flesh. One was Set, who in life had lusted for eternity and striven to bestow eternity on his beloved ones, and strove to master his soul of night. As brothers they would come to Malkav, and would strive to console him, though there was no balm for his wound, no elixir to soothe his fever. So, failing in their ministrations, they would instead talk of things, of long nights and the frailness of kine, of life and death and the secrets that lay between.

And so it came to pass that Malkav would say things that angered Set, who would reply with harsh words, seeking to anger Malkav in turn. For Malkav would claim that all things would be revealed, in brief and contradicting glimpses, but revealed as true all the same by the mind and its perceptions, as a flickering torchlight illuminating a rough cavern wall. Yet Set would argue otherwise, complaining that only in the depths of one's soul would the truth be known, and that humans in their imperfections could perceive some of the greatness of the universe, but only through undeath could they perceive the things that remain unseen.

Finally, the two glared long at one another, and turned to their brother Saulot, and demanded that he judge between their arguments. Is the answer not, demanded Set, that man is wisest in the hollowness of despair, and ultimately finds his answers within his own soul? And is the answer not, countered Malkav, that wisdom comes from without, from the eyes that see too much, and ultimately from the mind?

And Saulot scratched at his brow, and he hung his head, and he admitted that he did not know. And he was shamed by that answer, for if the answer was not of his making nor in his possession, then surely would he hunger for it.

So then Saulot rose to his feet, and said, "Though I have no answer for you, I shall find one." So saying, he gave his sword to Set, bidding that he keep it for him; and Set in return offered Saulot a staff of thorn-wood, and wished him safe journey. To Malkav Saulot gave his crown, but Malkav had nothing to offer in return - so he bit into his finger, and drew an eye upon Saulot's brow in his own blood, and wished him safe journey. And Saulot, knowing that no safe journey could ever yield the answer, strode forth to the lightening horizon, and was never seen by Malkav again before Malkav was rent asunder.

The Methuselahs

From Malkav comes nightmare. He had been given the power to create, but like all other Kindred, he could build things only in his own image.

And with his own image broken from what it had been, and his eyes opened to things that his childer could no longer see, he knew that his creations were his no longer. They were no longer in his image.

The blood we know, the gods and heroes and monsters of our kind - all pour from Malkav after his fracturing. Ask the ghosts of the land, listen to the seething pools of Malkav's mind, even question the eldest of any clan, and always you find the same answer. Those who came before were destroyed. Those who came after - are us.

He chose a number for his new children. We don't know which it was. It was eight, or 12, or 20, or 36. It was one of those. And his own childer did not exceed that number, for they were chosen one at a time and all together.

I fear - and you fear, as well, for you must - I fear when the time comes that one of his childer is destroyed utterly. For numbers are sacred, and he may awake then to rectify the count.

Who do we know that are his? Only a few. One is named - without a name, but named - in fragments of lore and memory, a faraway voice that thrums from Mesopotamia.

She was smooth and fair and kind. She was a temple harlot who soothed Malkav just as Shamhat tamed the beast of the wilds. She cooled his forehead with water and oils; she brought him nourishment when he thirsted.

An old song that names Zillah as Malkav's sire claims that Malkav loved Zillah, and that he eventually joined with the others to destroy her. If this is true, then perhaps he saw something of his beloved yet ultimately unattainable sire in this sweet woman. And he took her for his own... and eventually, for such was his curse, he discarded her. Her mind was broken into razored shards by his touch, and he pushed her from him in regret - if indeed Malkav could ever feel regret.

But her story does not end there. There are many tales of our forefather rending apart his own childer in fits of rage. He did not destroy her in like fashion, though. I have touched drifting memories of her face, of her gentleness, and of her hunger. Her voice flits around tales of the Plague-Bride, the Methuselah who wears his fever like a crown.

It was Malkav's sweet harlot who began the creed of infection, you see. She loved our Father terribly, and came to love the portion of him that resides in her, and in all of us. And her sense of charity never dimmed.

She is the Plague-Bride. She appears in our stories and memories as a willing Typhoid Mary, bringing the gift of Malkav's disease to those she takes pity on, though her gift is sure to destroy them. She visits newborn childer at times, and dabs at their brows and eases them through the fit of the Becoming. I hear legends of Crazy Jane, and I wonder if the long-vanished Jane Pennington is the one responsible, or if Malkav's rejected bride is the one stalking our visions. As with all of Malkav's childer, we have never heard of- we have never felt - his bride's death.

Another was a creature of Uruk-of-the-City-Squares, a man who knew Enkidu the wild man and who kept court with Ninurta the warlike and Erra the pestilent. He was a being of great cleverness and humor, prominent among the Igigi, who ruled in the land between the rivers by night. Nissiku was his name, and his name meant "the clever prince."

The name was well-chosen - or perhaps the name chose him. Nissiku was born a trickster, or so it's said. He was a charlatan who feigned oracular ability, or perhaps he was a nobleman who enjoyed playing at fits of delirium, or perhaps he was only a madman with the gift of charm. The songs are so vague, but they agree on too many things...

He came into the family; he was one of the first. When he drank from Malkav and was reborn... perhaps he drank too deeply. His Sight reached beyond reality, and his too-clever fingers were able to follow. I hear tales of the Clever Prince reaching through the skin of the world and drawing forth the cold, sharp-edged things that lie beyond the soft, loving mirage. Malkav abandoned him soon after his rebirth, it's said; I wonder if the father didn't see too much of himself in his childe.

A thousand names and faces bob like flotsam in Nissiku's wake. I hear the Gangrel mutter "Iktomi," and I think of Nissiku. I hear the Nosferatu grumble the name "Malk Content," and I think of Nissiku. Iktomi, Malk Content, Devil Hanse, the Babylonian, Fool-Eater, Old Man Hate - they all catch at the same memory. I am certain that the Clever Prince has survived to modern times; though I have no proof, I can feel the moth-winged brush of his laughter on the back of my vanished neck. Somewhere out there, he is quietly walking to his next destination, his eyes fixed on the back of his next target's neck, ready to seize the Lie with both hands and pull it apart, releasing whatever is straining at the boundaries. He has work to do.

Names. Always, it returns to names. Malkav - the name of madness. Caine - a word for a monster whose name is the name of the greatest curse ever spoken, a name so terrible it would blister your flesh worse than the sun and devour your body with hunger should it ever catch you.

Consider yourself lucky, childe. We are blessed among the bloodlines, for to us names have less power. A thing that has one name to the whole world may have another name to you, or to your cousin. We are more free from names, from being one thing at all times, from being logical and sturdy and imperishable. To be dependent on names such as the others are, that is a weakness.

One of the childer seized upon that weakness, you see. The power he stole, that he ascended to, that he devoured, was the secret of eating names - of swallowing them entirely and feeding on the power they grant. He could eat the name of a person, and that person would falter and die, and everything that lived in that person he would digest and incorporate into himself.

I know that this story is true, for I have heard him. Sometimes, in the silence of the mind that comes on you when you search for a precise word that you cannot quite remember, you could hear him. I did. Others did. We heard him, far away, chewing on things that become forgotten; heard the scrape of teeth like knives against the paper-skin of names.

I haven't heard him in years. Perhaps he caught me listening, and withdrew to continue his feeding more quietly. Perhaps he sleeps now, digesting the power of a name that we should all know but now cannot recall. Perhaps he tried to devour a name too great or wicked for him, and choked on it. There's no telling, of course. No finding him until he chooses to find you. For of course, when he learned this great secret of eating names, of biting chunks of reality itself free from the world and gulping them down - the first name he must surely have eaten was his own.

The Severing of Malkav

Again the dry voices began, fluttering with brittle paper wings.
"... Though this city was as great as Caine's, eventually
It grew old.
As do all living things, it slowly began to die..."

The Chronicle of Caine speaks truly here. Cities are living things, and they grow sick over time. The Second City had taken ill, and the poison in our blood, in all 13 bloodlines, bore fruit. The rulers of the city grew restless, and their kine were slowly maddening under the burden of service. Long cracks grew in the heart of the city... and finally the heart broke. It broke because once more, a childe had risen up to devour her sire.

Such a smell, of blood spilled out, wasted, glutting the earth - of fires burning with fat and skin and hair and dried bones - such a smell, and yet...

The memories are... fleeting, frustratingly vague here. No complete, whole images of the war haunt the weavery. The records do not agree if the Ancients made war on one another, or if the kine rose up against them, or if at last a third party such as the Moon-Beasts cracked open the walls. The Thirteen fled, each in a separate direction. Never again were they to sit and drink with one another; now they were rivals and enemies.

Daniel's world winked out. There was a great, vast, hollowness -
and then the world returned, and the voice with it.

We cannot say whose hand it was that stretched forth and caught Malkav as he fled. Was it one of his brethren - Set, perhaps, or a jealous Toreador, or perhaps Assam experimenting with murder for the first time? Was it the angry Children of Seth? Or the monsters that have since sunk beneath the land in slumber? Impossible to say, for anyone who might have been with him was caught alongside him, and...

He was caught, and he was torn by talons, slashed by bronze knives, torn by teeth. His blood poured out upon sand and stone, for whoever it was that caught him feared his blood, and that which pulsed within his veins, and they were afraid to drink it. But they took his flesh and they pulled it asunder, and then they took the gobbets of his body and drowned them in rivers, hurled them into the ocean, buried them beneath stones.

Of course, anyone literate in the tales of Egypt will tell you that you cannot truly kill a god in that manner.

No, Malkav did not die. His blood pooled within the earth, and it surged with life. I am told that his children came to the rock where he was hacked apart, and they lapped up his blood, and carried it with them. And somehow, he gestated inside them - somehow he gestated inside all of them, all of us. His mind, broken and scattered, took root in the minds of his childer. His nerves, no longer made of tiny fragments of flesh, link those of his blood one to the next.

I have seen this story only in tales, in visions and scrawled ravings. But the tellers often, too often end this tale by proclaiming that Malkav's flesh was never touched by the light of the sun, and thus he can never be truly destroyed. This much I believe - for I could feel him within me when I had a body, and I can feel his touch on my fringes now that I do not. He has not left.

Remember. This is a tale, a legend, a myth. But that does not make it true, and that does not make it untrue. This is a story that was carried to me on the murmurs of ill blood, echoed by black humors. This is a story that pools within you. Remember.

The Growth of the Clan

And that was it. One brutal act, and no longer were they - we a tight-knit family, a handful of children and grandchildren clustered at the feet of our patriarch. Our grandsire, focus of all we knew, was gone: torn apart and scattered. We could no longer rely on our father-god's protection, and many were soon destroyed. This was a pattern that would haunt us forever more - if ever it were possible to choose childer by whatever whim took us, it was no longer so.

And at the same time, the loss of Malkav gave birth to the Family Malkavian. Without a demigod to hide behind, without the central guidance of their - our sire, the Methuselahs rose up as demigods in their own right. One giver of law became eight-12, 20, 36?-and each lawgiver begot lawgivers of his own, each bound by the demands of the tyrant within his own skull. The mirror was broken; the shards vomited forth countless reflections. They heard voices; they followed their visions; they Embraced childer, and they allowed their childer to roam where they might. It was time to go where the humans were - everywhere the humans were.

The Old Cities

More than any other, we are creatures of the cities. I have said before that cities are living things. They are. They beat and pulse like living minds - the streets mapping the neurons, the folds in the brain, as riders and pedestrians hurry like impulses from one place to the next. And the older a city becomes, the madder it grows. They are our places.

There was room for the family in Mesopotamia, along the Mediterranean and in North Africa. The strong grew fat, and the starvelings found what they could. The ones who came before, the ones fresh from the mouth of Malkav and his childer - they squatted outside the beerhalls of Uruk, they wrapped themselves in smoke and watched Sennacherib heap skulls like small white hills, they drew forth shivering secrets from the minds of the priests of Memphis and Thebes. They sang strange tales of the Pandavas in India; they let their shadows fall across the banquet tables of Persian princes. They were few, but they followed the humans to wherever they chose to build cities.

Greece - Greece is a place that beats in our memory. There the kine began to paw at the mud in their eyes, to delve for the truth hidden from them by their lying senses. They cast about them, staring at the universe with new found eyes, questioning the walls of reality itself, wondering if perhaps the Normal, the Visible was instead the Lie. Hippocrates began stalking illnesses within the body, and he even went so far as to suggest that the root of consciousness resided within the brain. It was... I believe it must have been a great temptation to kiss the greatest thinkers of the time with the Sight, and to see what would have come of them. But this was a moon-touched land, where many of Caine's get congregated, and where.. other children of the moon also hid in her shadows to catch prey. There would, logically, have been no opportunity.

We were few then, still the grandfathers and grandmothers-to-be of the clan, but ah! We were terrible.

Who were they - who were we then? There was Cybele, she who wore the earth as a blanket and drank up the blood of her faithful as if it were rain. The Dionysian, too; he claims to have been part of the Eleusinian mysteries of the time, guiding the populace in their rites to return Persephone from the Underworld, although he has been repeatedly known to lie. Lamdiel, the sunblind yet all-seeing prophet, stalked the baked and lifeless wastes so near to Jerusalem. With the strength of the fever burning in their limbs and the wisdom of the Sight shining in their eyes - they were terrifying.

But there were other, older things in the world as well. I have heard faint vibrations, shadows of their shifting coils that shake the earth. You may have heard them turn in their slumber; you may yet hear them do so.

Older things in the earth. They are mentioned in frightened cries that echo along the Cobweb, cries that tell of our flight from North Africa.

I wish that I knew more about the exodus - I fear the knowledge, but I crave it nonetheless. I have heard that in Carthage, a small family of Malkavians vanished, into Baal's fires, it's said. I have remembered that stragglers trickled out of Egypt, muttering in the tongue of nightmares. Their shrieks spoke of something that came on us, that sank bloodied teeth into our skulls as if to devour our diseased minds. Was this - this ancient, this beast - was it something that hated us for our perceptions, that feared that our sight might be enough to pierce its veils? Was it one of the eldest among us - one of Malkav's own, striving to consume all our infection into itself?

I do not know. Nobody I ever spoke to knew. The scrape of long nails in the dark, a soft keening in the back of the throat - we have nothing else of our pursuer. Or pursuers.

Rome

Of course, the family could not keep themselves from Rome. As I said, we are creatures of cities, of the living stone minds. Rome was an orderly mind, a great mind, with a hint of decay lingering in its alleys. The elders among us felt delight in walking the streets, tarrying as they would, watching Rome blaze with thoughts of whatever it is cities dream of.

The smell of blood and smoke choked Daniel's nostrils He rocked back and forth, trying to gag, but his body refused to go through the motions.

The name Camilla surfaces again and again when I dream, or watch, or pry into the time of Rome. Camilla... the prince. His hands were iron-well-oiled to keep the rust away - and his law was the same. But Camilla was sufficiently clever to keep some of the family close to him, and to allow them such freedoms as they required. Like all good princes, he required soothsayers - would that Julius had learned from his example. So we prospered, and we were allowed to take many childer, and so we did. The family did... quite well for itself in Rome.

Whatever a vampire, whether battened on the blood of nobles or lean and hungry as a Colosseum leopard... whatever a vampire wanted, the Empire provided. The citizenry was as strong and flavorful as one could ask from any city full of kine, and more were shipped in from the provinces every night. It was... there are impressions of comfort, before the flashes of ruin begin. It began to chafe only when the kine and Kindred alike became too content in their laws and ways. And... and that was nothing that patience wouldn't cure. A change was due sooner or later.

As word continued to cross the Mediterranean of the city the Brujah and Hassam's brood had built, a grave fear settled on the undying of Rome. Fear... or envy, perhaps. Either one would have been... was enough.

Carthage... Its name drips from the lips of every patronizing Brujah elder who counsels returning to a covenant with the kine, and every rigid Ventrue elder with warnings against the infernal. Over two thousand years have passed, and still they remember Carthage. If was more than a private scuffle between rival clans, rival princes. It was the first of the grandchilder's wars against one another.

Fear, and envy. They clutched at the vampires who nested in great Rome. They pulled at withered hearts, and slowly the premonitions of a terrible conflict drew so thick that even the blindest of Cainites could make out their smoky outline.

Eventually, the Prince of Rome went to a seeress named Tryphosa, who was one of us. Camilla believed greatly in her powers as a sibyl, as well he should have; her sight reached farther than any other's. She received him in her decayed hall; she scrabbled in the dirt, searching for patterns, and finally she spoke to him.

"Woe to you, Camilla, if you remain within your walls and strike not at the hive that is Carthage! There the father's mouth drips with the blood of his children, and the children's hands are stained with the flesh of their mothers! Their gods of Baal-Haamon, Tanit and Melkart demand the lives of Seth's children, offered up unto the flames! Overturn the stones, for if one remains atop the other, then they shall grind out measures of blood that shall drown even Rome itself!"

Her words are all we have. As deeply as I reach, I cannot find her vision itself; perhaps it is mired in the darkest recesses of the weavery where only the eldest's reflections endure, or perhaps it was burnt away with her death.

But her words were enough. Camilla struck as though he strove to destroy Gehenna itself. And the carrion crows of the family Malkavian flew behind him - not before him.

The exception, as I have heard it told, was the Dionysian. If the fragments have it right, the Dionysian came to Carthage long before the war was ended. He may even have entered the walls before the wars ever began. But it was almost certainly his power that bled from one wall to the other, setting loose the furious passions of kine and vampires alike. His was the power to bring an entire city to not - and he used that power. The defenders of Carthage became maddened and frenzied as he walked from wall to wall, and ultimately they fell.

We watched the siege-fires burn; we took food and childer from among the people who had been made slaves, and we rested on the rubble like carrion crows when his soldiers had finished.

Not so Scipio. The leader of Rome's forces was a... a strangely cunning man, one who gladly attacked under a flag of truce when it suited his purposes. His perception was, perhaps, unwelcome at the last. For, as he stood heartsick and weary by burning Carthage, he gazed out over the tumbled, bloodied, burnt stones and murmured to himself, "And someday Rome."

His observation somewhat flies in the face of the presumption that mortals are by nature blind.

The kine were populous, and close-packed, and arrogant. Their sickness was breeding quick and strong; it was far too late to lance the boil without releasing a plague. The empire of the wolf-son was doomed, and its doom was writ on the faces of Tiberius' line.

Those of other... bloods look at us and think they see patterns. Malkav's infection quickens in our veins, and madness festered in the lineage of the emperors; so, they reason, Caligula and Nero and all their kind must have been intertwined with us. They see the pattern, yes, but miss the weave. The crazed emperors and tribunes and soldiers - or had you thought that only the royalty of Rome was fevered? - drew us, but we didn't need to compel them, at least not on any grand scale. There were... games, yes. But it is too simple, far too simple to claim Nero and Caligula as ours. Far truer, I believe - I half-remember - that the others scrabbled desperately to keep hold of the dynasty, only to watch the corrupt, crazed old fools fall away from their hands and into the net already woven by the mere presence of our family.

Caligula. The human blister. He was the first sign of Rome's end; the first of their dynasty to openly challenge the Lie, but to do so without any vision. He was blind, and his blindness was contagious. Nero and the fire were another symptom of the slow, cancerous descent; the year of the four emperors was a third. There was life in the old government yet, but it was waning quickly. The nest of Cainite shadows squabbled to regain control, but their quiet wars were, in the end, but another tumor in the increasingly cancerous empire. The Call beckoned to the family again and again many a time during Commodus' bloody time on the throne, and we quietly watched as the army broke down. More than two dozen emperors dead in a mere five decades, and all but one slam outright! Oh, a spark of hope lit the Patricians' eyes when Diocletian and Constantine almost, almost seemed to have the empire in hand - but no. In the end, it was all useless. I can still taste the futility... like wet ashes resentfully clinging to the tongue.

A few mournful cries echo in our history, lamentations of the final gathering in Rome. The fall of the great city, I have gathered, was cause for a conclave, but it was one that drew a poor fate. The Malkavians who answered that final Call were slaughtered while they held court, seared by fire. Perhaps rival Cainites who blamed them for Caligula, Commodus and the rest finally caught them to enact futile vengeance. Perhaps there were... wolves among the Vandals. That portion of the Cobweb is burnt and dark, and whatever they gathered to achieve, guard or hide has vanished from our knowledge.

The Long Night

As Rome's fires burned out, I believe... I have gathered that some mourned. Some who were outside the family, that is. To think...

They must have been crocodile tears, I imagine. Yes, the sprawling feast of pleasures and resources had all been eaten. But a new time had come on the land. Those who were clever enough to run across the land and find other cities, new and old, the growing, living things dotting the face of the Earth - they became kings, and sometimes even gods. I'm certain the bitter mourners eventually cried themselves out and left their hermitages to join the long time of prosperity that followed.

Prosperity. Not quite the correct word. The Church had power, and it stretched out its long arms to bring its bans to all corners of the continent. But in the shelter of its shadow, our race did well enough for itself.

What can I say of the Long Night? This was my time; my age. It was a time that belonged to all of us. The proud grandchilder of Caine ruled dominions in whatever manner they chose, answering to their sires and none other - if their sires were to be found. There were a thousand domains across the land, and a thousand lords to rule them. I... A lord could make a simple gesture, and kine would turn on their brothers and sisters and children. He could whisper the slightest command, and the torches that lit the night would gutter and die at his pleasure. He could call for his horse and hounds, and the hunts would ride through forest and valley, the blood of our... his prey shining black in the swollen moon's light.

But... That is not a precise reckoning of us. Of our role. We were almost never lords and masters. The torchlight was too intensive, too bright; it has always been our way to rule under the light of our Moon. Why rule openly when one can direct the lords with whispers and riddles and even jests. It was our lot to come to the courts either when called or when unbidden, to move where the other courtiers wouldn't tread, to ask questions the other courtiers wouldn't ask.

And we... we saw so match. They kept us on the outskirts of their courts, fearing to draw too near to our infected blood lest they fall ill with our fever as well. But... as the Lepers will admit if you press them, the outskirts are a useful place to watch the affairs of those within and without alike.

Too many tales... too many tales to sort through. It was my time, ad even I cannot believe everything I have heard of the Long Nights. The accounts of kings in the thrall of unliving courtesans... of entire cathedrals woven of living and unliving flesh that shuddered with the thirst for blood... of iron-toothed crones clutching flayed scrolls inscribed with the secrets of Lilith... of demons sinking their talons into the minds of kine and even Cainites... of heresy cults preaching the world of Caine the Savior... of a cup filled with the blood of Malkav... of ancient gods deep beneath peat bogs, devouring the sacrifices offered them until they woke... of the Old Folk catching and torturing anyone without the iron to keep them at bay...

Enough. Too many legends, and they mix with the facts, both the facts as we remember them and the facts that the kine write down in their texts to paper the walls of their tiny box of perception. The blend is... painful. Confusing.

I heard, match later, that in 1243, a few cousins followed a vary faint call to London, to quietly watch the founding of the Priory of St. Mary of Bethlehem - Bedlam itself. They mast have been very confused at first, trying to puzzle out just why they'd been drawn there. The survivors wouldn't know until the turn of the 15th century, or even afterwards, just why the place was so important. It wasn't much at first - but it grew and it grew. I wonder just when it was that the channels were dug to draw in the invisible fever...

Elmolech the Undying

The Malkavian clan doesn't speak of many brushes with the infernal. Whatever personality drivers a vampire into demonology and the black arts isn't common amongst the Clan of the Moon or so clan wisdom would hold. However, at least one legend from the Long Nights hints that the Malkavians have had encounters with the hellborn, and that the mark is still on the world.

As the story goes, a demon by the name of Emolech chose to pursue a Lunatic for his soul - presumably on a bet with a fellow demon, who wagered that a madman's soul would be a slippery target. In his bravado, Emolech selected as this victim a cloistered nun, Genevieve of Limoge, who was an elder daughter of Malkav's line. He visited her over six nights, tempting her with visions and plaguing her with torments, sure that her already fractured spirit would soon shatter.

On the seventh night, however, Elmolech slipped though the convent's windows - and was confronted by a full gathering of the clan. He tried to flee, but the power of their collected, mad will bound him to the spot. And although nobody can say for certain exactly ho they did it - but surely a Methuselah must have answered Genevieve's Call - the Malkavians gathered their power and bound him into a human's body. That done, they sent him, immortal and insane, into the night.

Those Malkavians who know Elmolech's story say that he still walks the earth, like the Wandering Jew's infernal counterpart. Flashes of visions, ever so brief, flit across the Cobweb with tales of the latest sighting. Murmurs speaks of the broken oncedemon sleeping in a dumpster in Dresden, flinching at children's laughter in Rio de Janeiro, or begging charity from passerby in Johannesburg. Those who actually speak with Elmolech allegedly learn forbidden insights and prophecies from his babbling, insights that can't be found on the Cobweb. However, these Malkavians also - or so it's said - become unable to discuss their newfound lore with others. All they can do is act on his revelations - as if the clan needed any further exhortation to commit seemingly random acts.

I have, perhaps, said too much of rulership and not enough of horror. You must not think that this was a time of nothing but plenty. We list many of our cousins in this time, beasts who grew fat on blood and grossly overconfident. They made too much of their visions, challenged the priests and nobles too openly. The humans caught and destroyed some of them; angered childer of others lines eradicated others. Some were spitted on stakes for the pleasure of Fiends; others strayed too far into the woods, despite the warnings of the hungry jaws that prowled there.

It was... a time when vampires were free to kill as they saw fit. And in times such as that, there are always repercussions.

It is said by some that Malkav foresaw the death of his beloved brother, Saulot the Wanderer. I... I cannot see for myself. The Babel-tongued cries that come from the ancient age, those that speak of him - they can reveal only so much. If ever our father-god spoke such a prophecy, the words he used have burned to ash and scattered. And yet... and yet, I find it easy to believe that Malkav did see death on his quiet brother's brow.

Some of our... histories, our memories, speak of the children of Ceoris. They were a quiet, secretive lot in their infancy. Their eyes burned when they touched our flesh, but they never stared for too long - they were, after all, merely younglings, and we are very frightening to the young. Instead, the clever creatures scented out the tracks of our mendicant great-uncle, tracked him to his bed - a bed where he'd lain inviolate, untouched by the hands of any other bloodline - and then they proceeded to devour him.

Or perhaps they were devoured in the process. The records are... vague, and the voices conflicting.

It seems a contradiction, and yet... I wonder. A few of the echoes speak of Saulot in words and impressions that flood me with unasked for thoughts of the Eater - echoes of Saulot as a devourer, a thing that could feed on the very land itself, or perhaps even on souls. It would seem appropriate if he could devour souls. He was so very hungry for enlightenment.

And the childer from Ceoris? His hunger entered into them, and... and it may be that it has continued to gnaw away at their insides since then. There are... flickers in the Tremere's auras that are inexplicable, even invisible to most. It makes me shudder to think of it, but I cannot help but believe that whatever hunger it was that Brother Saulot had... picked up on his journeys to the furthest East, now our newest sibling had absorbed it in full.

That is why the crime of Tremere and his childer never drove us to war. Though Saulot was almost like family to us all, the family abstained from siding with the Gangrel and the Tzimisce who were howling for the Usurpers' blood. Some joined in the battles, of course; but for my part, and that of a sibling or three, we wrapped ourselves in shrouds and sat on the darkened Carpathian mountainsides, witnesses to the savage bloodshed and nothing more. I... we felt would have been presumptuous to condemn the Usurpers. Creatures of insight that they were, Tremere's brood were in fact the ideal heirs to Brother Saulot's legacy. They are what he would become.

I could be wrong, of course. I could always be wrong. And yet, if the Tremere were really meant to be destroyed for their affront, shouldn't they be no more than a memory by now?

God willed it, or so they said. God willed them to rise up and recapture Jerusalem from the Muslims. God willed them to leave their homes and wander barefoot into death. God willed them to slaughter Jews in the Rhineland as an appetizer for their war. God willed them to sack the Holy City and violate its people.

If God willed it, then perhaps there's some truth to the story of God willing us to be as well.

The fall of Jerusalem in 1099 - the city's screams echo in our minds even now. The bloodshed, the rape, the madness - it all cut bloody stripes into the land itself. And like spilled wine, Malkav's blood, his madness, ran into those channels and pooled there. So much blood, so much insanity - yes, the very earth shrieked out, and we heard it. The Call had come, and we came to see.

The others, children of other clans, they saw us flocking there. To this night, they claim that Malkav himself must be buried under the Holy Land, and that his dreaming, blinding fever is the spark that ignites all the ills of the region. They are... ignorant, foolish even, in believing that Malkav's reach is so limited - but it is undoubtedly a sweet ignorance for them, so it seems only compassionate to leave them there.

A choking stink of rot, of unimaginable putrefaction mixed with the smells of sweat and shit and vomit blasted out of the darkness, swirling in Daniel's mouth and nose and stomach. He tried desperately to vomit, but his body didn't seem to remember how.

No. You should know. The plagues that blanketed all the world we knew - they may yet come again when the moon bleeds and the earth cracks. They came twice already; the numbers demand a third. You should know.

Remember - there are connections, patterns without as well as within. The plague of the 14th century was more than death. It infested the spirit of the kine as well as their bodies. It drove them to flog and flay themselves, mortifying their flesh in the hopes that their penance would stir mercy in the heart of a pitiless God and move him to stay his pestilential hand. It drove them to turn on their neighbors with staves and blades, punishing the outsiders among them for the supposed crime of poisoning wells. It drove peasants to turn on their lords and masters like rabid dogs, only to be savagely put down in return.

Such is the nature of pestilence. Should the third plague come during your time - and I cannot believe that it will not - it might not ravage your body. And yet... it might, if the babbling of my sire is true, and a pestilence which will blast and mortify the flesh of the unliving waits below the earth to be unleashed at the time of Gehenna. It may be the curse of Nosferatu himself...

No. Listen. If the plague comes, you may... you may remain unharmed in body. But the poisoning of the spirit which comes on the kine is far deadlier. I lost servants, companions and even a childe during the Black Death; he drank from a human maddened by the plague, and the fever caught in his brain and drove him into the sun. We are not immune. We deserve to be afraid.

Younglings are so convinced that they know so much. Even if their eyes are sewn shut, they are sure that their youth affords them a clearer perception of the world around them. That - that was the anarchs. Still-cooling childer still learning where best to bite their prey. They shouted to the world that they would tolerate no more of their elders' laws. They pounded one another's backs, congratulating each other on their perspicacity. And they stretched out their hands to us, sure that we angels of illumination and fervor would come and join their side.

We are not a faction. We are not a political unit. We are the Family Malkavian. And never... never have we stood as one with any group or individual, living or dead, since his death. Never.

Remember that. Your own cousins will strike you down and feast on your vitae should it prove necessary, necessary as they see it. The ties that bind us are inescapable; they do not compel our loyalty nor our fraternal obedience, merely our... intimacy.

So. So that is how it ran back then. Yes, there were cousins and nieces and nephews and childer among the anarchs. Yes, there were elder aunts and uncles who looked at the rebels and saw an irritating itch that demanded scratching. But many of us looked at the anarchs, looked at them from the front and from behind and from the sides and from above and below, and we saw an accumulation of angry young Cainites who were pouring all their faith into an empty sack. We - I say we, because I was there, and I did my work alongside others of the family who felt as I did - we tried to take them by the heads, pry open their eyes and show them that their sack was empty.

And... they reacted angrily. They called themselves betrayed. They complained of our hypocrisy - they complained of our hypocrisy - and warned us to confine our attentions to the elders.

That, of course, stirred the fever within me... us. If there is one thing that I - and we - cannot tolerate, it is the belligerent idealization of ignorance. One cannot exist for years with the Sight and remain generous toward the willfully blind.

If written in a textbook, the following years would likely be summarized by some well-meaning historian as a conflict between our family and the anarchs. If you were there, however, it was harder to see such a unity of purpose. How much more difficult it would be for mortals to piece together the larger picture! A thousand separate yet so similar incidents - a mild visitation of visions in Cologne, a more vicious prank involving fire in Bonn. Gradually - too, too gradually - one anarch after another began to tabulate all the tales of Malkavian... criticism they'd heard. One in particular - a filthy Gascon - spat blood and brought a stable down around his ears when he realized just how much energy he and his colleagues had spent on what was, after all, a very small rivalry. Had he survived another three years, he would have been even more livid to see the next thing that came to pass.

I could not see the threads in the pattern then. I couldn't know just how unified the family was then, or why. Even today, I cannot tell for certain. Perhaps it was merely coincidence, a natural resentment for the anarchs' devotion to blindness that many of our family shared. Perhaps there was a group of elders, or even a Methuselah, who sent waves of gentle guidance outward, convincing much of the clan to act as one.

I will never know, for this is where the Tapestry becomes scarred and pitted by fire.

The Burning

Fire flooded Daniel's nerves; his back snapped taut as a bowstring, and he tried to shriek. But there was no air in his lungs, and he couldn't think to draw in more.

Vampires had ruled the night for far too long, and the kine no longer believed that they had anything left to lose. They rose up against all of us, and suddenly the family found itself at the front, with nowhere to hide.

Our suffering was... biblical. What Inquisitor could tell a case of demonic possession from a broken, babbling mind? What Inquisitor would care? The most harmless of idiots were sent to the fire along with the most diabolical of killers. Where once we'd quietly hidden among the broken outcasts, now we were in dire peril. The madmen and madwomen burned, and we burned with them.

The Cobweb, the nerves of Malkav - that was all that saved us. Voices of damnation hurried along the winds of the night, whirling in our ears, calling out premonitions of wood, iron and fire. Had it not been for Malkav's gift, we surely would have been destroyed. But panic filled the weavery, and as it came on us, it compelled us to run. It saved us. Some of us.

And yet, for its charity, the Tapestry burned. Whenever one of the Family, however young, was burnt upon a pyre, one of the weavery's threads snapped forever. Elders died in dungeons and at stakes, and as each one vanished into ash, his scream seared a great wound into the Cobweb. We sobbed at the pain; we tried to hide, but we could not escape the pain that filled our blood.

Birth of the Camarilla

It was impossible to miss the stench of fear that arose from our kind, all our kind. The smell mingled with the smoke of the fires, the incense, the sweat.

Something happened then that very few of us could see. Even I had to piece together the story many years later, and it took as many years to do so. As the elders, in their panic, struggled against the Inquisition in any way they could, and their abandoned or sacrificed pawns began to congeal into the first of the anarchs, a few of rare vision gathered together with a new idea. The new idea, of course, was unity - but you likely already understand how reluctant we undead are to accept the concept.

I can imagine the first meetings. Such terrified creatures, demigods with their temples tumbled down around them, vicious as cornered dogs, forced into each other's company for survival. I wonder just how many "diplomats" died, were ground to dust to mortar the Camarilla's bricks. It must have been a great many, for the Camarilla - the mighty Camarilla - nearly failed. The elders involved were splintered and sharp-edged, and had little reason to trust one another. And because our get, our cousins were so often easily rooted out and sent to the fires, we might almost have been excluded from their cabal of secrecy. Yes, the last of our line (barring his childer, of course) might well have been thrown as a sop to the Church, destroying the family, the Tapestry, all of it.

But it is always a mistake to underestimate the insight granted by the infection.

A faint scent of spice, mingled with the smoke of burning dung, floated around Daniel's shuddering form...

They came from the Orient - a holy man and his exquisite disciple. He was a Brahmin, a seer who nightly mortified his dead flesh to gain wisdom. She was a rajah's daughter, a woman with fires burning behind her eyes. They acted of an accord, whether it was that of father and childe, of soulmates, of lovers - or something greater. They were the ones who called us together.

The two came among the great and terrible of our family, untouched by the thorns of their hosts' fevers, and spoke with them as cousins might. Their words were sweet and bore their vision well. No Western vampire outside our own fallen bloodline could have reasoned with us Malkavians half so well; they cannot understand our very language, they do not see. But Unmada and his childe carried the taint within them. They understood us, and in turn they brought us to understand them. The family drew closer together because of their words. The elder Lunatics of Europe came quietly to the lords of the other clans, and they offered their support. The others were... hesitant, and understandably so. They feared to clasp hands, lest the filth-smeared razors of our Sight slash them and leave them burning with our disease. But better to have the Malkavians with them than against them.

As I heard it, there were... anarchs who watched the new found unity of Malkav's get and were filled with scorn, or perhaps fear, and they swore they'd have nothing to do with anything we had chosen as our own. And yet, blessed be the light of inspiration, for many others heard of our pledges of support.

Perhaps they reasoned that if even isolated, fractured monsters such as ourselves were convinced of the situation's gravity, then there was no other recourse.

An oath of blood and fealty, and it was that simple. The Camarilla was born. The mad cousins of Clan Malkavian, the despairing philosophers of Brujah, the desperate Toreador and Nosferatu, the wild ones of Gangrel, the very much hated Tremere and the faltering Ventrue. A hundred years ago, and the meeting halls would have run with spilt vitae and eddies of ash - now desperate times had forged an alliance such as our midnight world had never seen. As the "Founders," as you will hear them named, called on the Giovanni and Lasombra and Tzimisce and Ravnos to join with them, a sort of... optimism was born. A kind of hope that this new pact would not only preserve us all, but in time offer us full control over the kine once more.

Of course... it would have been too good to be true, and such things can never be real.

Know that for the Camarilla to survive another decade, it was required to catch the anarchs by their withered balls and bring them to heel. War - war in earnest this time, organized steel-hard and knife-sharp. The Camarilla's lords set out a hunting, their hounds at their heels. They scented out the anarchs' spoor and tracked the rebels back to their strongholds, capturing all they could and butchering all they cared to. After... some years of this, the Founders had seized enough of the anarch and Assamite leaders - for the Assamites had been shedding blood and bringing death, too, but this had too little to do with what you need to know to drive to go too much further into this - that they could force a halt to the chaos. The shadow war was all but over, and the only thing left, in quaintly mortal fashion, was to dictate the terms of surrender.

The gathering took place in a tiny English village named Thorns, and the agreement was named for Thorns, and it grew barbed and sharp by nature. Names and patterns, never far from one another. The elders drew up their treaties and offered them to the anarchs (and, yes, Assamites, but as I said, that... matters less). Of course, the treaty demanded that the anarchs bond themselves by blood to the elders. The anarchs had little choice but to agree; they certainly could not expect someone to speak for them.

And yet, someone did. Maybe it was pity that drove her; maybe it was, as some say, enlightenment. But Vasantasena stepped forward and condemned the Convention and its treaty. When the elders prepared to enforce the blood bonding of the rebel anarchs, she stepped forward to address the fledgling Camarilla once more.

"We are a wounded people, and this agreement is no balm to soothe us. This is a thorn in the heart of all Kindred."

The words, born of a different voice, rustled deep behind Daniel's ribcage. The prick of the thorn touched at his own heart, and the lump of dead muscle in his chest almost fluttered.

That is what she said. That, and much more. She spoke of bloodshed that would beget more bloodshed, and the need for mercy that would beget more mercy.

When she finished her speech, blood staining her cheeks and wrists, the elders among the Camarilla looked on her. They did not smile. Cold... the bonfires still burned, but all Vasantasena was offered was cold.

Some say that she vanished from the Cobweb, then and there - that nothing was ever heard over the weavery from her again. I refuse to believe that she could sever herself from the chains of blood; she must still be bound to the Tapestry somehow, however faintly. But she has abstained.

She withdrew from the council, and did not speak up again. But - and this much I did not see with my own eyes, but I caught the shadow-scent of something on the wind on that night - Vasantasena was, after all, a rajah's daughter. She would not be so easily denied. She crept into the dungeons where the anarchs were being held, and she chose a band of disciples from their ranks. They followed her on her flight as best they could, and -

And, yes. They joined with the Lasombra and the Tzimisce, and they were among the first of the Sabbat.

Clan Heraldry

Although the fact is not well-known (some might say "suppressed"), the conventional symbols that represent each clan were chosen, long ago, by Malkavians.

The first of these was an autistic child from Styria, a boy named Pelinka. His sire, Daguienne, took him before his fifteenth year, presumably from pity. Then again, it's entirely possible that she'd already known of his unusual savantism before she drained his blood and gave him Malkav's gift.

He was unlettered and mute, and might have seen a knight's shield twice in his life. But he could draw - from memory, it seemed - marvelous symbols that would have made any scribe weep with envy. His sire gave him paint and paper and ink and blood, whatever he required, and in return Pelinka drew up manuscript illuminations and coats of arms as resplendent as any king could commission.

Finally, as something of a curious jest, Daguienne asked her childe to draw up her own family's coat of arms. His answer startled her. As she looked on the device in question, she saw nothing of her own personality reflected there - instead she saw images that reflected her, her sire and every Malkavian she'd ever met. Somehow, Pelinka had seen her true family by watching her, and had tapped into the symbology of her shared wisdom and madness.

Of course, Daguienne couldn't let an opportunity such as this pass her by. Half of a mind to try a prank and half-consumed by curiosity, she gave her childe an exacting challenge - to draw up coats of arms for each of the clans, as a series of "presents" to her elder allies.

Daguienne visited him once a night for 12 nights, and each time he had a new design for her before sunup. Without ever meeting a Brujah, Pelinka produced a badge of war and broken chains. Without ever seeing even the crudest representation of Egyptian art, he drew a cartouche with unholy Set inside. Each time his sire described a clan in even the most cursory terms, he tapped some unknown font of knowledge and symbolism to produce something appropriate.

When they were all completed, Daguienne took the collection with her to a conclave of elders, and presented it as a whole to the assembly. They were largely delighted, and although representatives of all 13 clans weren't present, those that were present agreed that even the clans in absentia were well represented. The only one who took the heraldic devices personally was the Toreador, Rafael de Corazon, who didn't care much for the idea that a Malkavian had produced a work insightful enough to challenge the work of any of his own childer. But public opinion wasn't with him, and Pelinka's creations were soon popularized throughout much of the clans.

Pelinka's designs finally fell out of popularity after the Convention of Thorns, for the split between "loyalist" and "antitribu" was so bitter that few vampires liked having any reminder of their clans' failed unity. It wasn't until much later that at another conclave, another Malkavian decided to mark the seating arrangement with a broken mirror here, a wilted rose there, and so on. But that's another story...

The agreement may have held, but it could not compel goodwill from beasts such as us. Each childe of our line within the fledgling sect was reminded - scarred - that we were only barely tolerated by our brethren. In some ways, the hatred was almost worse. Now that the Cainites were forced to become the Kindred, to work more closely with one another in the interests of maintaining the Masquerade, many elders who might previously have let a Malkavian be instead found themselves arranging the Lunatic's demise.

Our history is filled with memories of Malkavians who dared too much. The weavery is filled with shallow slashes, wounds remaining from the Final Deaths of foolish neonates. Few elders appreciate a prank that forces them to reexamine their place in the patterns of the world; none of them appreciates a prank that is done poorly. Remember that. A prince of Macedonia - I could not uncover his name - was targeted by a fool of our blood, a fool who went too far. In return, the prince gathered together all the Malkavians he could find in his domain, had them hurled into a well, and then poured fire down on them. For centuries afterward, we shunned Macedonia.

Word passed from one great-uncle to another, and eventually it was decided that some sort of gesture might be required in order to gain further goodwill from the others. We pondered the matter in whispers and visions, all the usual methods of family communication, until finally we came upon an answer.

Now. Some thought that the anritribu developed their powers of infectious insanity as a response to the violence of the Sabbat. Perhaps some still believe this, but they must be much fewer since the... stirring. Others now believe that the Malkavians of the Camarilla deliberately forsook their deeper connection to Malkav's power, letting the delirium atrophy within themselves as a gesture of friendship - that they cut themselves off from this power before joining the Camarilla.

It was a sacrifice, you see. Many of our elders decided that the Camarilla offered a better chance for survival. And for them to survive within the Camarilla, it might be for the best if they were somehow to... dampen the virulence within themselves.

The history of the other clans fails to record the two months in which most of the Malkavians of Europe simply - weren't to be found. They left their haunts and havens to go on pilgrimage, following a great Call that led them to Domazlice. There were so many of them, too - for the elders had sent out the Call, and few could resist hearing it

A wash of heat... a high-pitched, discordant tittering... the slick grating of teeth... firelight and hollow whispering...

The Dionysian had shed the earth he slept under; his laughter drew us to the revel. Addemar, wrapped in his hermit's robe, scowled down on the gathering. Tryphosa rocked back and forth, whispering riddles into the air. Brude's pale skin glistened with sacred patterns and holy script, and the Black Hag squatted in a pile of bones, drawing her teeth across a scarred, fleshless femur. And amongst them all stood the wise one, the mortified one, the Easterner - Unmada.

Six Methuselahs. Six. A great, merciless power, swollen between them, taut and bloated by their proximity. Their fever hung in the air, and it would have flayed any mortals luckless enough to attend the gathering. They pulled at the fabric of the world to release a Call that all of us could hear. Then they gathered their might, drew down the power of the flow of Malkav's splintered consciousness...

Daniel, half-conscious, rocked back and forth as invisible, relentless waves crushed him.

They set blocks in the minds of all the Malkavians gathered there - and it was nearly all the Malkavians in the world. Nearly.

Some... some, of course had resisted the Call - and some had been set apart. We could not renounce the fever entirely, you see, only some of the gifts that spring from the fever. However, we could not let those gifts die. Some of us, the strongest among us, had to retain the Sight in full. And whether they'd been deliberately chosen or had avoided the Call entirely, the unchanged joined with the Sabbat. Those who were altered, who'd received the blocks, joined with the Camarilla.

Impossible. It still seems impossible. The crushing weight of their power, the pain... it still seems impossible that we could have concealed this, that we could have forgotten for so long. And yet, they never noticed. If the Camarilla "true-bloods" tended to use their gifts for more subtle... less splintering effects, the outsiders, in their remarkable blindness, simply presumed the reason to be a newfound taste for subtlety - subtlety - nothing more.

With that great work completed, the bloodline was preserved. The greater portion of us would have better odds of survival until such time as our gifts were needed again, and the smaller portion with the greater Curse would be able to survive if necessary. Eventually, most forgot that the gathering had ever happened at all.

Still, it would probably be best not to be too confident in any one explanation. A few of us share a trickle of doubt - the thought that it may have all been a tremendous prank on the part of Unmada and his childe. Perhaps they are waiting somewhere for us to strike our brows and cry out that we've finally gotten the joke.

In the end, though, whimsical or not, it was an impressive prank. The children of the Sabbat proclaimed themselves the heretics of the clans, the "anti-clans," the creatures dedicated to the downfall of their very progenitors. And they accepted without condition that the Malkavians who joined them were also "antitribu," also rebels - just as the Camarilla accepted that the Malkavians who joined them, apparently free of the infectious qualities that plagued so many of their brethren, were the "true" descendants of Malkav.

And now the jest is revealed. We have yet to see if our distant cousins have learned anything by it, however.

The Great Prank

The feat of replacing Dementation with Dominate, nearly clan-wide, was certainly unprecedented - only the Tremere's curse on the Assamites is comparable, and that involved sorcerous rituals such as the world hadn't seen. It certainly wouldn't have been possible without the presence of the Cobweb linking Malkavian to Malkavian.

Even so, it's entirely possible that the six Methuselahs credited with this work weren't sufficient to work such a massive change. Certain Malkavian apocrypha hints that perhaps the great reworking succeeded because one - or possibly even more - of the Fourth Generation invisibly lent their power to the Methuselahs present, in order to insure success.

The other theory, a theory that is never repeated aloud, is that Malkav himself sensed the six's efforts and willed the change to take effect. But this theory is kept very secret, for its ramifications are terrifying: one, that Malkav has such power even in his current unverifiable "lost" state; two, that he might have been conscious at the time; and three, that he could work such a tremendous change in all his childer while still dreaming. The implications of the last possibility... well, if true, then when Malkav wakes, the entire clan is his.

After the Inquisition

I can... imagine that the Kindred were somewhat surprised when the Inquisition's fires finally guttered out, and the vampires drew back to draw a... figurative breath, and they suddenly noticed that humanity had become most interested in bettering itself. Down in Italy, Petrarch had started asking more and more questions about his country's past, and... and suddenly popes and princes and emperors were all interested in the answers.

I mention the Renaissance... not because it was an important time to the family, but because our more distant relatives as a whole linger over memories of the age, savoring them like a soup bone. The elders who played at sophistication sharpened their fangs on Machiavelli, and discovered that this interesting Alighieri person had been composing some poetry. Most remarkable - most frustrating - of all was the incredible way that they began to claim that they'd been involved in these advances all along - as if they'd been sipping vitae in Boccaccio's studio instead of cowering under bridges, hiding from Inquisitors.

There was something that... left marks, scars on the family in this age, though. The institution of the asylum had gained a certain amount of... popularity by then. It almost seemed as though every fashionable city was in need of one. Cudgels and whips and chains - the medicines of choice. For those who could not see the Normal for the fractures in their looking-glass, the preferred means of treatment were a healthy flogging to drive the ill humors out, and then a prolonged stay in a filthy cell.

The childer of Malkav taken during this time... well, there were those who had never seen the inside of an asylum, and there were those who had. The privileged among us - of the time, of course - were artisans, visionaries with strange preoccupations of drawing forth art from the Sight. They were almost popular in the courts of the princes as something of a novelty. If a childe was selected from the ranks of the refined, then she was welcome to sup nightly with the other luminaries, regaling them with her off-kilter songs of a world beyond the vision of even the greatest thinkers of the time.

The others... the others were savages. Like the worst of the previous age, the ones who were first to burn in the Inquisition's fires. They saw little of princes' courts and Elysia; they skulked amongst the dirt and blood and filth, alongside the more unfortunate mortals of the time. More than a few became shadow-killers, daggers in the hands of their elders, a neat tool to provide an ending to a particular gentlemanly intrigue. Some of them were disposed of when they became inconvenient - others were... kept. I believe they are still in use today.

The Degeneration of the "Antitribu"

So if the Camarilla Malkavians were the "real" antitribu of the clan, and the Sabbat's own were the "true" bloodline, an interesting question arises: Why are the Sabbat Malkavians so fucked-up? Were the Malkavians prior to the split just as psychotic and deranged; do the "antitribu" represent the purest state of Malkav's bloodline?

The answer has something to do with the Sabbat itself. The traditions of the Vaulderie, the Rites of Creation, the suffering of each human at a blood feast - over time, the practices of the Sabbat have fed the Malkavians' madness until it's grown beyond what the clan once was. Too much of a good thing, really.

In a way, this means that neither line of Malkavians in existence today is fully of the same blood as Malkav's own childer; both are in their own way antitribu, even with the resurgence of Dementation among Camarilla Lunatics. But then again, given the virulent nature of the clan, who's to say how many times the bloodline has changed from sire to childe?

And then again, it's entirely possible that among the Inconnu hide the "truest" Malkavians of all...

Were you born after a mortal set foot on the moon, on our moon? Then you cannot conceive what it was like for the kine when they suddenly saw past the walls of what they knew and discovered that there was more.

Europe shook with the news of a whole new land, of immensities beyond their imagination. Oh, and we trembled with excitement as well. Our shared blood boiled into an excitement that hadn't been seen since the Inquisition. It was as if we'd been sharing a small jest, and suddenly all the world was in on the secret. Humans had dared to walk where the dragons were, to look at what they thought they knew and see something else entirely, waiting there for them. To some of us, the worlds they had been seeing all along had suddenly taken physical form. There was a world beyond the senses, beyond the immediate.

Impatient and reckless, a few of us chose to follow the first colonists. The new country beckoned them, a place with so much more to see and touch, and new people to whisper to and pry into. And the temptation was that it was safe, a land where a few vampires could be the lords.

They were right. No vampires awaited them. But the New World was not lacking in wolves.

Come the latter half of the 18th century, human hate and frenzy was calling the madness again, and again the madness pooled in France. Starved kine sliced tender flesh, tore out hair and nails, raping and killing and mutilating and finally executing whomever they could catch - who was born into the upper class, of course. And with that pooling came the Call once more, and we descended on Paris. I was there. I fed well on the corpses that littered the streets, on aristo and peasant alike. I watched the primogen of Paris flee like dogs, and I helped myself to everything they'd left behind. Eventually the fever lifted, and the country returned to... propriety, to order, to the Normal. But the scars are still there. Something of us - of him, even - remains in the City of Lights, and perhaps Gehenna will bring it to the fore once again.

Subconsciously, we - or one of us with superior will - must have decided that it was a superb time for a conclave. Quite coincidentally - of course - a Parisian doctor, amidst all the chaos, resolved that perhaps the poor wretched lunatics under his care might do better if they were allowed some more freedom of movement. He was right, of course. As the Reign of Terror proved, lunatics are much happier and much more sated when allowed to run free for a time.

The 19th Century

"...webs of smoke and steel will smother the heart of the land amidst flames as the people cry out in their labors..."

Faster and faster the wheels seemed to turn. When news of the New World had flooded the courts, the world had suddenly seemed so much larger - now humanity was doing its best to grow into the world. Fury and energy and excitement, cities bloating with mortal life even as other mortals carried the seeds of new cities off into the wilds. The boundaries were being set, and the kine were resolved to fill them.

The childer of the Sabbat and the Camarilla began a dirtier, more energetic feud in the American West and in Mexico; it was only a taste of the bloody wars that drifted in shadow only a century into the future, but their viciousness was... notable at the time. Cousin fought cousin for a space; I felt the deaths of three of my own close relatives, slicing into my consciousness as the Cobweb's strands vibrated. But we were fortunate; we avoided slaying one another en masse. There is no long-standing truce between the "tribu" and the "antitribu" - don't be fooled by my account - but an unspeakable, persistent instinct hangs with us, an instinct to preserve the strands of the weavery. Logic, of course, dictates that one never knows when a cousin's insight might prove useful - but when logic fails in the face of something greater, the instinct is sometimes all we have.

The Industrial Revolution thrust itself up from the ground like an iron oak full-grown overnight. Cities swelled like cancers, like boils fat with oil and smoke and rust. Again, the elders of the other clans were ill-prepared for the frenzied changes that came on the world. Twenty years was no longer an idle time to sleep and outwait a generation - it was enough time for the world to change anew. I could not give a number to the vampires, scions of all the clans, who found themselves taking more and more childer, simply to have thralls who could explain the latest technological and cultural developments to them.

And with the swell of the cities, the lost, abnormal and insane had even fewer places to go. The village idiot had it fairly well off - at least his community was small enough that the residents felt a responsibility toward him, and they might find themselves inclined to listen to his observations now and again. Now the population was too large and too busy to let the touched wander where they would. The world was mad for building institutions - prisons, hospitals, and of course asylums. It was simply necessary, or so they reasoned, to put the troublesome and dependent... somewhere else.

And then, of course, the Dix woman brought the asylums into the public eye. American, oddly enough; who would have guessed that an American woman would change so much where the finest European physicians left off? She was a schoolteacher and a nurse, and finally she decided to be a reformer. Oh, it wasn't as casual as my words might imply - the woman did teach Sunday school to female convicts, and thus she discovered how easy it was for the state to throw criminals and madmen into the same prisons in order to remove them all from the public eye.

She was somewhat unlike the crusaders of previous ages; she actually managed to do the family some good. Her asylum reforms proved beneficial - largely - for diseased humans, to be sure. But her insistence, her advocacy of the notion that the mentally ill required an environment all their own for proper treatment, swelled the number of inmates in each asylum. As each one was refit, it was soon filled to capacity and often beyond.

This proved... convenient, for those of us with interests in the asylum business.

But in England, a strange collection of years had begun, a peculiar time that stays in the heart of the Kindred. Even today, the kine, with their books and moving pictures and nightclubs - even they recognize Victoria's time as a time when vampires emerged into the greater picture, if only, they presume, fictionally so.

Most assume this is all due to a single book. No. Sensationalistic fiction cannot explain the vibrations along the Cobweb's strands that hum with the fevers of the time. It cannot explain why the collective host of vampires, creatures from every clan, lick their chops to remember the Victorian age. It was a vampire's time in fact as much as, more so than fiction. It was a Malkavian's time no less.

First, you must understand that the kine burned - quietly, and furiously, like furnaces hidden in the basement. They had taken the Normal to their breast, and they had nursed it and fattened it until it bloated. The Normal demanded that the kine wall off the animals within them, that they submit themselves to the cold, stony caresses of order and propriety.

But deceive themselves they did. They did their best to wall off their animal sides under a bnck-and-plaster facade of genteel calm - and went astray only when they were certain that the Normal wasn't watching. And when they chose to secretly break from the acceptable - they did so with such fervor that the fever caught at them, played around the edges of their beings like ashes swirling around a fire. The poetry of Rosetti, Tennyson, Swinburne; the writings of Wilde and Pater - mere shadows of the passions that burned beneath the marble like Victorian breast. The pressure... like a stopped teakettle. When the cracks started to appear, and the emotion began to leak out - it was remarkable what the kine would do to themselves, and to others. This is why we remember the time. This is why it sings to us.

So many cracks, fractures, breaks... Spring-heeled Jack did his bloody business, and so many Kindred were convinced that because he was clever and quiet and obviously mad, he must have been one of us. There was a token blood hunt called on a caricature named "Lord Fianna," but it never amounted to more than a sweet little gesture to pacify the drawing-room infants.

God had died, or so Nietzsche claimed. The universe was revealed as a cooling corpse, or so ran Clausius' theories. The bones of great dragons were pulled from the stone, vast and ancient things from an age that common sense - and you know that common is often another word for worthless, with the blindness that...

An age that common sense claimed could not have been real. And so many, so many mortals decided that the things they saw, the bones of the great beasts, were placed by a God to impede their vision, to test their faith in a world invisible - that the true way was to disbelieve their senses, their very logic, and follow what they knew.

Remember this: When Nietzsche died, he was largely considered to be deranged. The laws of propriety rule that a mortal man cannot stray too far from what is acceptable and still be... sane. Despite the knowledge granted them by the transition through death, our distant cousins are still in the grasp of propriety. They still believe that our infection, our Sight is a frailty - that by outstripping what is Normal, even for our kind, we are somehow broken and useless.

Finally, the wheel turned again, but not, perhaps, for the better. It turned to mark a century of wildness, growth and fever; the one last century we had remaining to us. The one last century before... Gehenna.

The words were carried on a rustling, trembling, cold wind. Panic clutched at Daniel, and his legs began jerking. His fingers scraped for purchase, but caught only soft, yielding things that pulled apart. Invisible hands clamped around his wrists, his ankles, his dead heart. He struggled, desperately trying to break free, to flee into quiet darkness, but the grip was unrelenting

He stretched open his mouth and strained, but the scream wouldn't leave - it just squatted in the back of his throat, choking him

Modern Nights

An eye-blink after man created mechanized wings, he was using them to kill. Barbed wire, poison gas, machine guns, shrapnel - the dying cried out in anguish, and their cries echoed across all of Europe. The Cobweb shuddered.

Desperation blossomed. The gold-paved streets of the United States tarnished, and the ribs of the Western world cracked. A world that had thought it had outgrown famine and poverty learned otherwise. As the poets noted, a great hollowness had crept into the heart of America, and it devoured what it found there. Many of your cousins today were taken in this time; sometimes we deemed it a small mercy to liberate them from the demands of their hungering flesh, and sometimes we were drawn, moth like, to the power of their desperate emotion. I have. I had a childe myself from the Depression.

I wish that the part of me who remembered her had not drifted away. All I recall is her thin, pleading face.

Such a short space of time... Even as America fought to rebuild itself, to solder its cracked spine whole again, the pulse of the world beat faster. I cannot fault the New World, or even the elders of the land, for failing to recognize what else was coming.

A small man took power in the Old Country, a small man who might have seemed most unassuming if you met him casually in a cafe. He, like us, was easy to underestimate. When we saw him for the first time, we feared him, not knowing why. We counseled our brethren among the clans to keep well away from this man and his circle, for their hands dripped with blood yet to be shed, and their eyes were lit with a madness that we could not rein in And when the tanks rolled forth and the slaughter trains began to run, we cried out in terror, afraid that his fever, a fever with the power of a demigod, would catch us all alight. We feared for ourselves, for we knew that we'd been proven right. To our Sight, it almost seemed as though Gehenna had begun.

Once more, the Call came - but it was a broken, many-throated voice. So many slaughterhouses, so many lost lives, so much suffering... it was too much sensation, and it burned like the sun. Rather than flock to Germany, we fled. Madness pooled there, but only the strongest could walk amongst the monsters already gathered - the human monsters - and survive.

When the war finally ended, it was in a merciless blast of light. A pillar of white... the sky tore apart, and the earth below... it seemed the beginning of the end, the beginning of Gehenna.

If you were human, you could believe that the sign was premature, for a near-lifetime has passed between that burning and tonight. But you are immortal, and a decade is like a pulsebeat, and you can see.

Reawakening

For a few decades, our communal worries were at ease... somewhat. The world kept turning, more swiftly than ever before, and humanity exploded in fertility. The cities grew thicker and denser and madder than ever before, and it was really all we could do to keep up. Technology spread like an epidemic across the Western world, changing the way people lived their lives every few years or so. None of the Kindred could see the teeth of Gehenna as they began to close.

There was something of a backlash against institutionalization later in the century. The fever to reform was burning again, and once more the conditions of asylum living were dragged into the public eye. The asylums, now, were not the only targets - halfway houses, work-release programs, and so on, all flourished with the new desire to "normalize," to bring the ill-adjusted and unstable back into the "mainstream." Citizens demanded more from their institutions, and not all of those institutions were able to comply. So the criminal, and the retarded, and the unstable began to trickle onto the streets - and it was an interesting thing, adapting to this change.

The true measure of the kine's compassion was taken once the inmates were disgorged from the asylums. Still unable to fully fend for themselves, the mentally ill were shunted into boarding houses and nursing homes, where their caretakers were... much more lax. Those that were less fortunate found themselves on the streets, or in temporary shelters - and there were quite a number of them. In the early 1980s, an American president decided that his country was spending too much on mental care, and so released further waves of the unstable onto the streets. And the madness bred and multiplied.

The outsiders didn't react so well to this. To their way of thinking, every half-wit stranded on the streets was another potential resource for our family. They began to suspect our bloodline of extensive preparations to expand our power base drastically. More than a few princes and archbishops quietly sanctioned their underlings to feed as freely as they liked from the homeless and mad - not only would such people not be missed, but it would hopefully undercut the "grand Malkavian plan."

Given all this paranoia, it must not have seemed quite so coincidental to them when the Reawakening came.

1997. It was if all our minds were so much heaped dry tinder, awaiting a fire. That was when the connections came alive. The conditioning blocks secretly placed after the Convention of Thorns so long ago came loose. The madness flowed from mind to mind, opening the secret eyes in each one. Where the infection had merely lain dormant in the Camarilla antitribu, it now burst forth in full bloom.

We tell those in the Camarilla that it was the fault of the Sabbat "antitribu" that we were affected with this plague. Those few in the Sabbat who noticed any change at all demanded much less explanation. They already look on the family as almost contagious - and rightly so, it seems. Just another outbreak of disease, brought back under control easily enough, that's all. And that's all they need to know.

Why did the Reawakening come on us? Perhaps it had something to do with Malkav shifting in his bodiless sleep. Perhaps Ravnos' death-scream was so sharp that it reached back through time to caress us all...

The Week of Nightmares

... wet, tearing noises like sodden, spongy bones pulled apart...
... cries of ape-throated demons shrieking themselves raw...
... flashes of fire burning against eyelids, outlining a giant of sooty skin who slices nine of his ten heads away and devours each one...
... the stench of blood and butter sizzling in the depths of a bonfire...

Do you remember the Week of Nightmares? Do you remember the reports of hurricanes in India? Or is it your own fevered dreams that linger with you?

The demon god of lies woke hungry in far-off Cathay, feasted, and finally died. When he sprang from the earth, he was thirsty for the blood of his own, he was boiling with fury, and he was mad. Such insanity and such thirst; his shrieks for blood echoed in all of our heads, and we fled from him. The creature we name "Ravnos" had awakened, and there was very little anyone could do to resist his horrible nightmares.

We clutched at our skulls, and we cried out for release from the nightmares. His fever - an echo of his fever - burned across the Cobweb, touching each of us with licks of heat and fire. How much worse his own grandchilder had it, for they died in each other's mad, bloodied embrace. At last the cries and the visions and the pain ended, and we shook with fear. You shook with fear. Nobody needed to explain to you that something terrible had happened.

The Antediluvians are real. One of the Thirteen woke, raged, feasted and finally died, and all his get died with him.

Gehenna

"So, too, our Grandsires will rise from the ground
They will break their fast on the first part of us
They will consume us whole"

The time grows nearer and nearer still. The hideous eye has opened in the heavens, and its awful red light colors our sight. We see crescent moons everywhere - for we are the Clan of the Moon, after all - and wonder which one marks the last Daughter of Eve, and which are deceptions planted to mislead us. The blood runs like water, and the potence in it withers. The time is upon us.

We are haunted by visions. Not a night passes that cousins do not wake from their day's slumber streaked with bloody tears, crying out against the prophetic nightmares that have come on them. The visions catch at you, too - I could never have found you if you weren't marked. Our curse has come on us a hundred fold in these Final Nights, for we are the ones doomed to see what is coming.

The Prophet of Gehenna - he warned of all this. And now he is fallen, eaten, subsumed. The time is coming.

He was blessed with the vision of Octavio, who saw. But alas, the memories that he carried were lost with his Final Death. He was extinguished, and his visions guttered out - they have vanished utterly from the weavery. When we arrived to bear his dust home, we found some of his last scrawls, a few scraps of foretelling that he'd hidden within his writing -

But they are incomplete, and the prophecies that remain are in the possession of a childe of Set.

And as you can see, the patterns are whirling and clicking like gears; and like gears, they fall into place once again.

This is why I chose you. This is why you had to hear all this. You must be ready. The Ravnos were not ready, and they were devoured. The others are not ready, and they will be devoured as well.

You must see the patterns. You must learn from what has come before. You must be able to look into the future, and to divine the final signs. You - we - we have the Sight.

At last, he uncoiled; his stiffened limbs cracked and fought as he pulled them free of himself. His mind was a boil; his movements were strangely, smoothly precise. A faint pulse of heat, some half-remembered ghost-fever flickered in his forebrain. He flexed his fingers reflexively, and was only somewhat aware of the odd stickiness that clung to his skin; a portion of his consciousness then noted that he was greedily licking the still warm fluid from his hands.

Daniel sat quietly, no longer himself. Like some form of fleshy mantis, he meticulously licked each finger clean, then daubed the remains of the blood from his face. Then he lurched to his feet in one swift jerk, and then, like a drunken puppeteer's marionette, he staggered away.