Genesis
[1975 - 1981]Evolution
[A History]
Genesis | Growth | Chrysalis | Maturity
His name was Matthias, or maybe Matthew, and that's the only thing he remembers about his mortal life. His amnesia suits him fine. After all, he had changed with the Embrace - evolved - and there was no point trying to go back.
From the beginning, he was different. Some cling stubbornly to human ways despite their Creation Rites; others fling themselves headfirst into the Beast. Still others regress into paranoia and spend their days counting their glories and failures, plotting revenge against others like themselves.
Behavior of humans. Behavior of lesser predators. Behavior of prey.
Or, that's what he would eventually think. At the time, there was only the instinctual feeling that there was something better than all this. And so, he bided his time and waited.
His Sire, a much younger and more ferociously, blindly competitive Constanta Iliescu (then Vivian Riley Abbott), hoped he would take after her and become a Koldun. It was not to be. The ways of the Kolduns were too obtuse for him, too occult, too...boring. He needed something raw, something visceral, something to satisfy the predator that was awakening inside him.
When Nox Veritas left for Mexico in 1977, two years after his rebirth, he did not follow. Constanta was most displeased. Perhaps she hoped then that he would die on his own, or that they would drift apart forever, and her shame would be forgotten. After all, to the Tzimisce, the Childe was a reflection upon the Sire. But neither happened. He wrote to Mother often and in detail, reporting the changes in his life, the things he had learned, the things that had changed. His second letter spoke of an Old World Tzimisce by the name of the Archangel; a name that, the Tzimisce undoubtedly hoped, would strike fear into the hearts of his enemies with its ambiguity, its vagueness, its hints of a hidden threat.
It must've worked, because the Archangel was a staggering two hundred years old - ancient for the Sabbat, many of which did not live past their first birthday. Matthias put himself under the care of the Elder and his pack, Deus Est (a name of some irony, for the only gods they believed in was themselves), trading freedom for protection.
And with that protection came tutelage, as his new mentor began to teach him the ways and traditions of the old world Clan along with its signature power, Vicissitude. He learned to mold. He learned to wield a blade ("You think those peashooters will do any good against ME, boy? Eh?"). And he learned to scheme and plot and lie - but he never learned to like the Jyhad. Ductus against pack, that they would not usurp his position; pack against other packs, that they would not claim their territory; city packs against nomads, that they did not gain too strong a foothold; Sect against Anarchs, that they did not breed and fester.
It was a self-conflicting, self-destructive cycle. The Uroboros, symbol of the Tzimisce, fit well indeed: unity achieved only by devouring the self.
Ultimately futile. There were better ways to spend one's unlife. Soon after Griffin mastered fleshcrafting, the second of Vicissitude's skills, he left Deus Est to join a wandering pack by the rather presumptuous name of Harbingers of Doom, one nominally under the control of a Bishop in Las Vegas, one that traveled from city to city without plan or care, and left destruction in its wake. They were young; they were motley; they were overconfident, and in 1981, they seemed the perfect foil to life in Deus Est.
The letters came less frequently then, as their traveling lifestyle made it difficult to send missives, and nearly impossible to receive them. When word did come, though, Matthias still spoke candidly of his adventurers and cohorts. There was a Country Gangrel from Kansas by the name of Billy McKinney among the Harbingers, and he was, despite the innocuous name, deeply bestial, even monstrous. As he and Matthias rode in the back of the pack's pickup on the long drives from one city to the next, they would swap stories, gossip, and eventually skills. It was Billy who taught him to speak to animals, and Billy who first planted the budding seeds of what would one day become Griffin's personal philosophy.
Still, the seeds had a long way to go before maturity. Billy believed in
living close to nature. He said there was power in the earth: disturbing,
alive, throbbing, wet. He followed the Path of the Feral Heart, and with
each passing year he grew more feral...more primitive. In his quest for
enlightenment, he instead devolved, degenerating eventually into a mindless
Beast that the pack had to put down like a dog in the deserts of Nevada, six
years after Griffin joined the pack.
It was a lesson that would shape the philosophy of his future.
Soon after Billy's death, the pack fell apart. The remaining members drifted off one by one, and Matthias did not make an effort to hold them together, nor join another pack. He deliberately faded from sight, and the letters to Mother stopped entirely.
What happened during his seclusion is hazy and uncertain. Some thought he had returned to Los Angeles with a new face and blended with the undercurrent. Others thought he settled somewhere in the Southwest and spent his nights hunting without regard for pack or Sect, honing his skills and his Disciplines. Still others swore he had defected to the Camarilla. Most simply thought he had died.
And, in a way, he did. Matthias was never seen nor heard from again. Four years after his disappearance, Constanta received a letter written in his hand, signed with another's name. It consisted of three words:
I'm back.
-Griffin
The same night the letter was mailed, a Tzimisce with the eyes of an eagle and a flaming feather tattooed on his arm like some sigil of a fallen seraph descended upon the sweltering nights of Phoenix. Reborn from his own ashes, he called himself Griffin, and set out to carve the future he envisioned from the bones of the present.
Four years of seclusion and contemplation had done a lot for Griffin. From the scraps of the Archangel's teachings and Billy's experiences, as well as a thousand others' along the way he pieced together something wholly different, and wholly his own, and the groundwork for the Path of Instinct was laid. Though nominally of the Path of Cathari, Griffin lived by his rules, which change from day to day as he seeks to the way to his own Path. The philosophy, which is at heart individualistic (which is an euphemism for selfish) and free, appealed to many young American Sabbat like himself. In Phoenix he welded together a pack of his own, Evolution, and after years of careful pruning, fostering and, indeed, molding, led them west again, back to Los Angeles.
They numbered six, and Griffin would allow no more. They were young, but not foolish; headstrong, but not overconfident; diverse, but not fractured. They eked out a place for themselves in the City of Angels and Griffin, following at last the path Constanta had laid years before, led them on raids up and down the rocky Californian coast. Some died. Others were always eager to join, attracted by the freedom the pack offered. Though few truly understood the philosophy behind the pack, its ranks were always full of Cainites willing to give their life and blood for that freedom, and Griffin was, for the time being, content.
Time passed. Letters to Constanta arrived sporadically, the silence sometimes dragging for months, seasons, entire years; sometimes broken by several missives in a single week. The tone had changed, too. No longer were they letters to Mother; they were letters to the Sire, and there was a difference. Always brief and to the point, he kept her roughly updated to his doings - he had acquired partial ownership of Needlez, a tattoo parlor in downtown L.A.; the pack had captured the Malkavian Primogen of Riverside; he was slowly amassing a knife collection - and inquired politely on hers. He wished her luck on her gambles, and congratulated her (sometimes months late) on her achievements.
In 1999, after a particularly animated series of letters, he mailed her a very
brief note:
Growing sick of this city, sick of this pack. Time to go solo.
It seemed he was finally tired of a pack that, while faithful, by and large did not understand what he wanted them to understand - or perhaps the burden of leadership was growing too heavy. It seemed he was finally ready to leave Los Angeles - or perhaps he was simply longing for a change. Either way, he placed the pack under the command of the Priest, severed all ties to Los Angeles but his co-ownership of Needlez, and walked away two short nights after the decision was made.
There was one last letter to Constanta, and then the silence descended again. He had not gone into seclusion this time. There were sometimes rumors filtering through; now he was with this pack, now that. They were scattered and often contradictory, and the reliability of the sources was questionable. He seemed to be heading northeast, and as he went word of his passage grew more and more rare. Either the Sect had lost interest in the capricious Tzimisce, or else he was simply being seen less...
When his Sire was torpored by an assassin in 2001, there was no apparent response from Griffin. Those who knew him to be her only Childe - and they were rare indeed - speculated he had grown bitterly resentful of her success, perhaps even did hired someone to do the deed himself. Either that, or he was dead. They were wrong. Some weeks later, Griffin showed up in his Sire's city of Charleston, South Carolina, alive and well, stronger than before, and immeasurably angry.
Time for a reckoning.