History: 1824 - 1862

Embrace (1824)

Nikolaus did not live to pay his respects to his late father.  Twenty miles from his ancestral home in Doenhoff, he was set upon by a band of brigands who moved faster than even his eye, his pistol could follow, and struck harder than he could have previously imagined.  It was the most lopsided victory he could have ever imagined: in a matter of seconds, no more, he was subdued, flat on his back, bleeding from three or four fatal wounds and a hundred minor ones, his mind yet reeling with the speed with which it had all happened.

Then his assailants ceased to move, and resolved into a single assailant – one who had moved so fast that his mind was unable to comprehend such speed, and registered several men in the place of one.  And this one stood over Nikolaus and pulled his hood from his head, his mask from his face.

It was not a man.  Nor was it a woman, in truth.  It was the one who called herself Ilse Kohlerkall von Stauffenberg, and a hundred other names across the spread of history.  And she crouched, bent fluidly over him, drank the blood from his wounds without hesitation, without remorse, without so much as a pause.

Drank, and drank him dry.

And as he gasped and flailed in his final agony, he was aware of her critical, impersonal gaze, studying him, measuring him.

You are dying, she told him then, and he had not had the strength to answer.  She unfastened her sleeve and tore open her wrist, and as her blood splattered across his lips he heard the words unbelievable: but you will live again.

He thought of Elschen as the gray veil of death closed in.  He thought of his father, and he thought of the battlefield, and he thought of hunting in the early morning, and the bright sunlight.  He thought of Liandrée, who had never really been his just as he had never really been hers, and he thought of the fire glistening off the polish of his violin, glistening off the suppleness of her skin, glistening off the snow in winter, glistening like powdered mirrors, like a blade.  He thought of these things as gray turned to red and his heart ceased to beat, and ceased to exist.

Yet that is not where the story ends.  Not by a long shot.  For you see, death was not the end.

Sometime – perhaps as little as a minute, perhaps as much as an hour – after his awareness left him, it returned: suddenly and completely.  Life, or some imitation of it, was still his.  His body jolted upright; his eyes snapped open, and ebon-haired Ilse was the first thing he saw with his newly undead eyes.

You are dead, she said, but alive, also.  You are Kindred.  You are Brujah.  A predator.  And those that you once called friends, enemies, lovers – now, you call them prey.  Remember my name, Childe, and remember it well: Ilse Kohlerkall, Gräfin von Stauffenberg.  That is the name of your Sire, she who gave you the Embrace of darkness.  Obey me, and one day you will triumph.  Oppose me, and you will die.

Now come, she finished.  There is much to be learned.

For the second time, Nikolaus found himself without a home, without a purpose, without an aim.  And for the second time, he followed another’s path west.

Die Gräfin (1824 - 1834)

Ilse Kohlerkall was what most would call an Individualist Brujah, but her philosophy, in truth, was deeply Idealistic.  She sought to recreate Carthage, but she believed Carthage was never a place but rather a state of mind, a belief system that was shattered when the pressures of the outside world, of the frivolous world of politics and intrigue, intruded.  Carthage, then, would never be recreated en masse; it was a state of being that must be achieved by the individual, for the individual.

In concrete terms, Ilse lived by a strict code of honor fully known only to herself.  She prized honor and truth and strength in all its forms – physical and emotional and psychological.  She believed in self-discipline, and ultimately, she believed the basic goals of the Camarilla were good, even if the carriage was flawed.

These were the ideas and ideals Nikolaus’ sire lived by, and doubtlessly, these are the ideas and ideals that bled into his still-unformed Kindred mind and, at least in part, shaped his future self.  And the shaping was a slow and arduous process.

For ten years, Stauffenberg, land and Sire, was the center of his newfound life.  All else evaporated.  The outside world was contacted only when he hunted.  Life became no more than a dream, and this: this which came after life – this was the only reality left.

He was the Gräfin’s only Childe, and she set about teaching him the ways of their kind.  First came the basics: thou shall not walk beneath the sun.  Thou shall not prey upon thy brethren.  Then came the Disciplines; the supernatural strength that was already his tempered, and slowly augmented; the speed that exceeded that of gods; the allure, the blood-given presence that brought mortal and Kindred alike to their knees in awe.

Their relationship was never ambiguous.  She was the master, he the disciple.  And Ilse was a good mentor, patient and dedicated, just as he was a good student, driven to succeed.  As bright as he had always been, he learned quickly, and learned well.  Clan Brujah was a clan of warriors and philosophers, Ilse said.  They were kings and scholars, not idle artists and aristocrats like their cousins the Toreadors, with whom they shared their passion, and little else.  At her urging he put away the violin and took up the sword, the gun, the pen and the paper again.  He read the classics; he fenced; he fought; he improved his marksmanship; he debated the philosophies of the Enlightenment with his Sire until the night crept away and the dawning light chased them into their beds.  He hunted deer in the forests, and he hunted men in the cities.  With a mixture of dread and delight, he found that there was a pleasure in the latter that could not be found in the former.

The years passed.  Despite his quickly mounting power and knowledge, he grew bored and restless.  Nikolaus never did take well to being caged, and that was probably one reason Ilse chose him for Embrace.  Nevertheless, his hotblooded spirit was now clamoring for freedom and, ten years after his Embrace, his Sire unlocked the gate and unleashed him on the Kindred courts of Erfurt.

As the Nikolaus that Paris knew in 1815 was different from the Nikolaus his ancestral home knew in 1812, so too was the Nikolaus of 1834 different from those that had come before.  A warrior, but not quite a soldier, he was well-read and intelligent, sharp-witted and capable.  He was a planner and a strategist, and though his Sire never endorsed the Jyhad, he could hold his own in the battleground of the Elysium.  True, he would never be a Prince, but nor would he be the laughingstock of the night.

The harpies looked and, finding no obvious faults to capitalize off of, grew bored and moved on.  And so, having escaped their exhilarating, devastating attention, the young Brujah set about carving his own way.  

The Sabbat Wars: Europe (1834 – 1849)

Nikolaus’ military background quickly plotted his path for him.  Within a few months he became involved in the neverending struggle with the Camarilla’s sister and dread enemy sect, the Sabbat.  He began little more than cannon fodder, but the leader of the operation in Erfurt quickly recognized the potential in the Brujah and set him on bigger and better trails.  Before long he was part of a wandering coterie, the Ritter der Klinge, that roved from city to city hunting and disposing of Sabbat with the local Kindred’s aid and assistance.  His missions soon took him far from his Sire, and she did not try to stop him.  After all, the Brujah were like eagles.  The Sire will rear the young, but when he is ready to fly, he will fly on his own.  She had done her part.  It was his life now.  His decisions, his fate.

They were never close in the way he and Liandrée were, once upon a time.  But he respected her, and it could be said she was proud of him, the fruit of her blood.  They kept in touch through letters and occasional visits, treated each other with the distant fondness of noble relatives.

It was a relatively peaceful time in his tumultuous life, despite the constant war.  As the years passed he began to gain some renown of his own as a Sabbat-hunter and a tactician, and she became the Brujah Primogen of Erfurt.  As the years became a decade, she became Primogen of the great city of Frankfurt while his reputation grew and his circles of operation spread ever wider.  In 1848, the year revolutions all over Europe rocked society on its foundations and the Sabbat momentarily gained the upper hand, the leader of the coterie died in an unlucky mission.  Nikolaus took over.  Brilliant as before, twice as ruthless, he was still the military genius he was in life, and the coterie gained instant fame playing a crucial part in the reclamation of Barcelona a month later.

After that, talk began of moving the Ritter to the New World, where a good anti-Sabbat force was desperately needed.  Once mocked as uncouth, heathen, hopeless and futureless, the New World was rapidly becoming the prodigal, prodigy son.  Alas, the Sabbat that had ridden the first tide over had already made too deep a foothold…and now that the Camarilla was finally taken notice, they already had a foe to deal with.  So it was that young, promising battle-coteries like the Ritter were needed, and so it was that Nikolaus crossed the wide gray Atlantic into the harbors of Manhattan in the spring of 1849.

The Sabbat Wars: America I (1849 – 1862)

What a change America was!  Young, vibrant, and bursting at the seams with energy on one hand; fraught with class tension and racism on the other, it had everything the jaded, gilded courts of Europe did not have.  The Land of Opportunity and the enemy’s deepest homeland both, it brought him out of his vampiric adolescence and into maturity better than any way in Europe could have.  There, a safety net always existed – centuries-old networks of boons and debts of favor could be called in; allies were always near; the majority of the cities were still Camarilla.  Here, it was different.  They were the underdogs, the losing side; they began with nothing but their lives, and could very easily lose even that.

It was a hopeless battle, and because of it, America was in some small way truly the land of equality for the Camarilla.  They were all young and headstrong, seeking to eke their own mark into the world.  They were hounded at every turn, forced to run and hide, to fight a guerilla war.  Gone were the harpies, fled from the heat of war.  Gone were the bells and whistles, the whispers and the backstabbing.  There was no room for internal quarrelling, no time.  Unite or die was the truth of the American Camarilla.

Nikolaus loved it.  Out where the Elders did not dare stray, he found freedom again for the first time in decades, and he realized just how much he had missed it.  Out where the law was blood, he bloodied his hands in the blood of enemies and Kin.  Young and brash, he and his brethren screamed their battle cry against impossible odds, and survived.  Fearless and tempestuous, they waged war on everything around them, and sometimes even won.  Society was not a matter of long-term plots, slowly coming to devastating fruition, but of staying alive.  Status was not measured by etiquette and behavior, but by battle prowess and mental acumen.  Life was edgy and fast-paced.  The future was never certain.  The now was all that mattered.

Perhaps it was then that he first became addicted to the drug called danger.  She was a friend, a dangerous and seductive mistress.  Danger was what made all this possible.  Danger was what made life worth living.

It didn’t last forever, of course.  By the late 1850s, the tension between the North and South grew to be unbearable.  In 1861, the Civil War was declared, and the pandemonium in human society reflected upon vampiric society.  The Camarilla, ever the self-declared bastion of order, began to lose their fragile victories back to the encroaching tide of the Sabbat.

Perhaps it was boredom.  Perhaps it was survival instinct.  No matter the reason, Nikolaus left the Ritter in 1861 and returned to Europe.  A turn in Spain reminded him too much of the fearfulness of New World living, with none of the freedom; a turn in France, too much of Liandrée.  So he returned to his native Germany, which was still a mass of principalities then.  He visited his Sire in Frankfurt.  She received him, and he attended her; she a noble of the Clan, he a rising star of some repute already.  He gifted her the bone sword of a mighty Sabbat lord, and she gifted him with a pair of revolvers.  It was a brief visit and a pleasant, if unexciting one, and a few days later, he departed Frankfurt for Amsterdam.  Never would he have guessed it would be their last meeting.

Two short months after, he received word from an old ally of Ilse’s that a struggle for Primogeniture had left his Sire on the losing side.  She had died with her sword in hand, a poem on her tongue and courage in her heart, the missive went on to say, and she had died well.

He burned the letter in the last light of dusk the next night, and when the last of the ashes had drifted away, he found his eyes were wet.

Afterwards, he spent a few months in Amsterdam, uncertain of what he came for, uncertain of where next to go.  Tensions between Prussia and Denmark were growing.  A man named Otto von Bismarck was gaining political strength, and he had a formidable mind coupled to an equally formidable nationalism.  Prussia, which had been eyeing the lands of Schleswig and Holstein since 1856, could well become a potent invading force if Bismarck were to take the helm.  Denmark was nervous, and a Prussian man was not always well-received, even by its Kindred courts.

Which was fine with Nikolaus.  He resented the politics that had killed his Sire.  She may have died well, but she deserved a death in service of her cause – not this.  While he had been off risking his life in the New World for his Sect, it had turned on him, destroying his maker.  Confused and angry, he withdrew from Kindred society and left Amsterdam, wandering southwest across Europe, masquerading as a mortal.  And, one not-so-extraordinary day, he began to look for Liandrée.

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