History: 1862 - 1919

Interlude (1862 – 1866)

He began in the most logical place to begin – Icibas – but it did not surprise him to find her manor empty and long-abandoned.  When he broke in, everything was the way they had left it decades ago when they departed for Vienna.  He wandered the halls for a long time, awash in memories and thoughts, nearly overwhelmed by the conflict of doubt and long-buried desire.  Was love falsely born of blood therefore a false love?  Was love born of blood false at all?  Was it even love?  Does it matter?

At last, he thought to ask the populace what had become of their Comtesse.  The elderly still remembered her, though not a single one had seen her since 1824.  And good riddance, they huffed.  She was a devil-woman, anyway, far too intriguing for her own good.  They had lost many good young men to her dark appetites.  She still owned the land, but her chancellor, whom Nikolaus suspected would look very much like the man she introduced as her husband in Paris years before, managed her affairs.

Nikolaus left Icibas then, retracing his steps taken twenty-seven years earlier to Vienna.  There he sought an audience with the Toreador Prince, who after three months of delays and refusals finally deigned to send the young Brujah a card.  Within, a single word was penned in flourishing ink: Lyon.  So to Lyon he followed, and from there, to Nice, to Madrid, to Granada, to Cambridge.  There, on a rainsoaked night, he knocked on the door of a townhouse overlooking the river.  When the door opened, it was as though he had never walked out at all.

Three years passed in the blink of an eye.  Though she never drank from him, he tasted her blood straight from her vein, tasted it often and regularly, and it was like nothing he had ever tasted before.  Whether or not the damned knew love, they did know passion, and Toreadors and Brujah better than most.  Passion consumed him.  She was as necessary as blood.

He took up the violin again and found neglect had not leeched his fingers of their skill.  She composed, and he played.  He played like a madman, with the experience of decades and the passion of the young; he played, some might say, like a Toreador.  For the first time, he wondered if he had been Embraced into the wrong Clan.

Then, one night, it was over.  He woke up and found her gone without word or warning.  There was nothing left behind except a note given to him by the Keeper of the Elysium when he finally thought to seek her there:

Cher,
Other matters demand my immediate attention.  Do not attempt to find me.  I will seek you out when my business has been resolved.

It was signed in her fluid script, and that was all.  Suddenly rudderless, he made up his mind before he could change it when news that Bismarck had used a dispute over Holstein to declare war on Austria, Prussia’s once-ally, reached his ears.  He set out for his homeland once more.

Bismarck (1866 – 1871)

It was a fascinating time in history.  Bismarck was a ferociously nationalistic man, Prussian first, German second.  He dreamt of a Germanic empire, but not one led by cultured and civilized Austria.  One led by Prussia, it would be powerful, militaristic, and indestructible.

Some might say Bismarck paved the way for the first world war the way that paved the way for the second.

In some ways, the five breathless years that catapulted Prussia from a small military state into a position as a world power taught him a sense of nationalism and unity with the mortal world that he had not felt for some forty years.  He watched as Bismarck waged war on Austria, borrowing the land that he had allied Prussia with Austria to win as an excuse – and he watched as Bismarck gained the support of France.  The German Confederation, a relic of the war Nikolaus had fought in as a mortal and a young man, was disbanded, and a year later, the victorious Prussian led its own North German Confederation.

Three years after that, when the North German Confederation allied with the southern Germanic states and declared war on France over the Rhineland, Nikolaus found himself drawn into the vampiric reflection of the mortal fray.  German vampire lords, many Brujah, Ventrue, and Tremere, were using the Prussian advance as cover and excuse for a massive coup, sometimes in words and gestures, often in blood and smoke, on the cities in the Rhineland.  One French Prince after another fell ingloriously under the slaughtering hands of warlords and generals fighting alongside, and sometimes even commanding, divisions of the Prussian army which struck under the cover of night.

The politics of it all mattered little to Nikolaus.  It was war, bloody and gruesome and terrible, and he was in his element.  Into the case went the violin; out of the chest came the guns and the saber.  He became a warleader, head of a small pack of Germanic vampires come to war in the name of progress and Prussia, come to depose of the decadent, spoiled nobles of the French vampiric aristocracy.  Like his father before him, he rode into the madness the fertile Rhineland had become.

Ages-old chateaus fell, and then ages-old elysiums burned.  Anarchy tore loose of its bounds.  It was a no-holds-barred attack, German against French, vampire against vampire.  Diablerie happened; Final Death was a fact of life.  For a year war raged on and on – and then, in 1871, the Franco-Prussian War was over.  The German Empire was founded, notably excluding Austria, and a nobleman by the name of Wilhelm became Kaiser Wilhelm I.  A good Kaiser, they say, but mostly a figurehead, forever in the shadow of his Prince, chancellor and brilliant tactician, Otto von Bismarck.

With the war ended, the Kindred free-for-all ended overnight.  Suddenly Diablerie was once again a dread crime.  Suddenly the murder of one’s Elders again violated traditions.  The foot soldiers and the commanders of this war, the ones that planned the individual assaults and bore the brunt of victory’s cost on their shoulders, became the scapegoats as the newly-crowned Elder Princes turned against them, pointed them out as murderers, held them up to be burned.  After all, the Elders rationalized – those of them that still had conscience enough to require rationalization – someone must pay for the mayhem, and better the younglings that fought for us than ourselves.  Besides, if they could turn against their Elders with such ferocity, who’s to say they won’t turn against us?

In that sense, the Prussian wars taught Nikolaus a great deal about mistrust and the constant vigilance one would need to develop – physically as well as socially – to survive in the piranha pit of Camarilla life.  Just as Bismarck had turned against his allies, played them one off of another for the power of his own nation, so too had the Elders turned against their followers, played them like a deck of cards for their own personal power.

Nevertheless, it was merely the second time Nikolaus learned to beware the world of Elysium.  The lesson would not sink in so easily.  He fled Europe then, fled across the sea to a safehaven.  America, land of opportunity, land of the free: while far from a world paved in gold, it was, at least, a comparatively wild and lawless place where the strong banded together and survived.  This time, when he set out for the western continents, he went with the intention of staying.

The Anarchs (1871 – 1919)

Alas, things had changed in the New World.  New York had fallen even more deeply into the hands of the Sabbat, and to eke out a living there was more dangerous than Nikolaus wanted.  He had not escaped from one death-trap to get caught in another.  So he began to wander, first to Boston, then westward on the new railroads that were beginning to web the nation.  He crossed the Great Plains, oceans of flatlands, more grain than he had ever seen before.  He crossed the Rockies, towering mountains of stone and snow; in the vast empty deserts between the Rockies and the Cascades he spent but a few days, passing quickly on to the Pacific Railroad’s western terminus.

San Francisco.  A mission that human greed for the yellow metal had turned into a booming harbor city.  Now that the initial wave of prospectors had drifted off or diluted into the stream of settlers, San Francisco was receiving some faint stirrings of culture.  Universities were springing up: first the University of California, then railroad tycoon Leland Stanford’s tribute to the memory of his son.  Yet land was still cheap, and land was abundant.  The radical idea that the working man should be able to rise and own land had become commonplace.  America was a cradle of revolutionary ideas, and the westernmost seaboard most of all.

So it was that the Camarilla, with its age-old traditions harking back to the feudal ages, did not receive much welcome here.  Yet the Sabbat had not penetrated so far, for the most part.  Thus the vampires were few and far between, mostly young, and largely of the more freedom-minded clans: Brujah in particular, Gangrel Malkavian to a lesser degree.  Those that were there lived by their own rules.  Anarchs, as the Camarilla would label them; free Kindred, as they called themselves.

For the most part, Nikolaus coexisted with the Anarchs.  When a bandwagon of Camarilla rolled through and the ideals of the Old Sect burned fierce for a moment, he took up his guns and warred with his brethren against the Anarchs; when Camarilla interest died out, or simply died, he returned to his usual policy of ignoring them whenever possible, killing them whenever necessary, and briefly allying with them whenever it proved beneficial.

Thus the years passed.  It was an idyllic time, really.  The Kine that passed through were spirited things of all sizes and shapes, ages and backgrounds.  The Kindred company was nearly as diverse.  The more time passed, the more he found himself tolerating, if not flat-out befriending, the Anarchs.  After all, many were his clan-brothers, and their ideas were seductive: to never again  be the pawn of an elder; to live here far from their prying eyes and their clawed hands; to hunt to survive, and to gather to rejoice.  Wasn’t that really why he left Europe?

Thus the decades passed.  It was in the last days of the 19^th century and the first of the 20^th that Nikolaus began to truly feel a bond common to all Brujah.  They were children of the everlasting revolution.  They were passionate and headstrong, unified only in their diversity; they were fierce warriors and individualistic thinkers, idealistic in some cases, but never lost in the clouds.

Thus the century in which he spent most of his life passed into the next, and Nikolaus realized he was well over a hundred years old, and no longer a fledgling vampire even in the eyes of the elders of Europe.  Funny, that he did not often feel it; his body was arrested in time, and in some ways, so too was his mind.  Yet at the same time he recognized in himself a change: a desire to do something with his ever-increasing strength.  To accomplish something.  After all, he could be alive for a very long time yet – and this existence, while exciting from night to night, was ultimately pointless.  He could stay here forever, watching time turn around him – or he could make a mark on the world.

Still, he stalled, balking at the idea of returning to Camarilla society with all of its trappings and traps, pitfalls and venomous smiles.  Or rather, it is better to say he waited.  Sooner or later, the Camarilla will awaken to the promise that America held.  Sooner or later, they would need warriors and strategists like him to plan and execute the retaking of the American nights.

In 1911, the steadily strengthening German Empire launched an attack on its neighbors.  This act of war triggered a chain reaction that led to the first war so big, so terrible, that it had no name other than the Great War.  Humanity was naïve then, to believe it would be singular: the one, the only great war.  But whatever the name, it decimated Europe and strengthened America, which, indeed, dealt the final blow that ended the war. 

When the catastrophe was over and the dust had settled, all eyes settled on the new nation suddenly ascendant.  And at last, the European Camarilla took notice.

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