Before History

Before History

No idea, huh? See, you’ve just gone from being ignorant kine (that’s what we vampires refer to humans as, see) to ignorant Kindred. That’s what most vampires refer to themselves as. Yeah, I know. It’s like we’ve got a different name for everything. And by the way, don’t ever use the word “vampire.” It’s stupid.

Sure, Kindred is affected, but if you refer to yourself as a vampire to another Kindred, they’ll probably look at you like you just shouted “motherfucker” in the middle of Mass. Shut up and deal with it. Giovanni can handle the human side of the family remaining in the dark about things; hell, we prefer them that way.

With all the shit that’s going down right now, what we cannot abide is another ignorant Giovanni whelp.

Everything is a little too precarious to have another wet-behind-the-ears neonate Kindred around (neonate means your kind, newbie). So it’s up to me as your sire, the one who Embraced you to bring you, my childe, up to speed. Capice? Good.

We got a lot to cover. On the plus side, though, this story’s got everything — sex scandals, incest, nigrimancy, connections to organized crime. The list goes on and on. So, sit back, relax and enjoy. Just promise me you won’t make this shit into a movie, or I’ll have to kill you.

Before History Now, this is the part of the “Welcome to being Kindred” talk where I’m supposed to tell you about crazy farmers murdering their brothers and ancient cities of Kindred coexisting with mortals and shit like that.

Well, I’m not going to. I’m not going to because it smacks of all that pompous self-satisfaction that the other clans have in spades. Invariably, The Most Auguste Historiye of Our Noble Clanne is a pack of self-congratulatory lies that other Kindred construct to fit their self-images. Believe me, I’ve heard enough tales of Toreador bull-dancer goddesses and marbleskinned Ventrue conquerors to know that you can trust a creation myth only so much as you can trust the teller. And remember, you’re Kindred now — you can’t trust anybody else.

Add to the fact that clan histories are largely propaganda the fact that they’re outright wrong. Ask most of those other motherfuckers about the progenitor and you’ll hear some cockeyed claptrap about Cain-withan-“e” and being cast out of the Land of Nod (or maybe banished to the Land of Nod — I don’t remember) and other sorts of riffs at the Biblical level. Now, I’m as faithful a Christian as I trust you are, but I know as well as any sensible Kindred that the Bible is fucking metaphor. Jesus, if he existed at all, was a man upon whose shoulders the weight of the world fell — in principle.

He’s like George Washington. He didn’t single-handedly bring the Word to a needy people, and he didn’t spring Clanbook: Giovanni from the unsexed loins of a virgin. Shit like that’s just not physically possible. All of the deeds attributed to Jesus are the work of an uncountable number of early Christians, boiled down to the parable that is the Bible.

It’s the same with Kindred — “Caine” is an early manifestation of the Everykindred.

No, the truth of the matter is that there was no “first vampire.” Or if there was, no one remembers the motherfucker’s name. God didn’t look askance at the world and say, “Okay, now it’s time for some bloodsucking parasites to run around and fuck with the Children of Seth” — Seth being another metaphorical personage from the Bible, and the father of the race of mortals as we know it tonight. No, the earliest Kindred were part of the world as it was before the sudario — the wall that separates the dead from the living (and us) — came to be.

Look at some of the concepts of the afterlife that almost universally arise when you get into early cultures.

The Underworld was a place you could physically go. To the Greeks, you could enter the Underworld through caves and caverns; it existed literally below the ground.

To the Egyptians, traveling westward would eventually bring a man to the land of the dead. Certain Native American cultures believe that the soul goes to the “happy hunting grounds” after death. Even some more “modern” conceptualizations of what comes after death involve places: the Christian Heaven and Hell, the Norse Valhalla and Niflheim, Kabbalist Rabbi Joseph ben Shalom’s “abyss of nothingness” that is crossed at the moment of death and Gnostic Awakening. These are all places. They’re all locations. They’re all geographically describable settings that, whether physical, metaphysical or spiritual, are places you can stand and smoke a cigarette.

It only makes sense, then, that if you can go to these places, you can come back from them.

That is what a Kindred is. It is, for better or for worse, a person who has come back from the place known as death. Not everyone can do it. And I don’t think anyone can do it more than once.

Don’t look sideways at me. I’m as Catholic as you are. I know that when I died I should have gone to Heaven or Hell. But I didn’t. You didn’t. Our souls, for whatever thanatological reason you choose to ascribe to it, got part of the way there, said, “Holy shit, I forgot something,” and came back to inhabit our bodies.

I don’t pretend to know why — that’s something the wisest elders in the clan have been studying since before there even was such a thing as Clan Giovanni. But I know that it’s true.

I’m not trying to be all new-age and mystical with you. Fuck that. God has designs for a person, that’s what I believe. It just so happens that God’s designs for those