Ilyana Ravidovich

Frankly, Ilyana Ravidovich doesn’t know why she was selected for the position of archon. Nothing escapes her detection for long, though, so she has no doubt she’ll know soon. This talent of Ilyana’s may save her, but it has likely doomed her as well, for she suspects it’s the reason she’s still in Russia. The riddles of Russia have teased and stumped the Camarilla for decades. Ilyana, a former chess champion with a brilliant mind and the mental prowess to crack the most complicated of codes, is perhaps the one to finally pierce the fog of Baba Yaga and grasp the plans of the mad geomancer Zelios. Ilyana’s childhood in Belgrade was dominated by chess play and tournaments. Her father was a frustrated amateur, and though he often spoke of his wish for a son instead of the daughter he received, he was eventually delighted to discover Ilyana’s tremendous aptitude for the game. As with many child prodigies, though, Ilyana became bored with her excellence and, after failing to receive parental permission to leave the game, she rebelled and eventually fell in with Gavrilo Princip in the days prior to the Great War. Although she failed to understand the implications of this high school student’s ambitions, she acted as a coconspirator of Princip’s in Sarajevo when the young man killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the shot that set off World War I. Thereafter, still naïve of worldly ways after so many sheltered years, Ilyana was swept into the ranks who supported the Russian Revolution, and after the end of the revolt in 1920, she accepted Soviet citizenship. Finally settling down after years of turmoil, Ilyana returned to her chess, and once her prodigious skill was discovered, she was recruited to teach the game to young Soviets. This appointment began the series of events that brought her to the attention of an ambitious Ventrue in Moscow. Her production of junior chess champions led to her appointment with a code-breaking department of the Soviet military, which led to her Embrace. Her Ventrue sire had copies of communications between a rival and members of the Brujah clan that she hoped were incriminating, but they were so obscurely coded as to prove unbreakable. Only a ghoul for the several weeks the code required of her, Ilyana so delighted her domitor that the vampire decided to Embrace her. Since that time, Ilyana has served Clan Ventrue well, and her apparent reward was her recent promotion to archon. She accepted the position because she fights positional battles very well, and she believes she can do her job and survive to reap even more rewards. A pall descended on Ilyana’s service as archon, however, when she discovered the gravity of the Baba Yaga situation. What she had once thought was merely (!) an elder vampire with vast influence instead turned out to be a veritable god, and Ilyana’s trained eyes soon saw the marks of the Hag’s passage everywhere. This realization, combined with a curious assembly of Eastern European castles along obscure magical ley lines revealed much to Ilyana. These activities were no petty, chesslike game of move and countermove. Rather, they bespoke Jyhad on a global scale. Ilyana discovered the geomantic web had been laid by an ancient Nosferatu named Zelios, presumably with the intent of trapping Baba Yaga. The final piece of the puzzle, a geomantic glyph inscribed in 1998, led to a crumbling Russian castle that had been reconstructed to house a Soviet missile silo 20 years ago. Since the end of Soviet Communism, Russia had balkanized, and no CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT 58 government agency retained any record of the silo or its deadly contents. To this night, Ilyana keeps a watchful eye on the missile and remains ever mindful of those who would use it and their role in Baba Yaga’s Jyhad.