Blake

Lasombra Antitribu -L- Leeds -L- The Seven: A List of known Vampiric Temporal Doppelgängers

Watch your tongue or have it cut from your head
Save your life by keeping whispers unsaid
Children roam the streets now orphans of war
Bodies hanging in the streets to adore

Royal flames will carve the path in chaos
Bringing daylight to the night
Death is riding in the town with armor
Because thail take all your rights

Hail to the king, hail to the one
Kneel to the crown, stand in the sun
Hail to the king (hail, hail, hail, the king)

Blood is spilled while holding keys to the throne
Born again, but it's too late to atone
No mercy from the edge of the blade
Thail'll escape and learn the price to be paid

Let the water throw it's shades of red now
Arrows black out all the light
Death is rotting in the town with armor
Thail've come to grant you your rights

Hail to the king, hail to the one
Kneel to the crown, stand in the sun
Hail to the king (hail, hail, hail, the king)

There's a taste of fear (hail, hail, hail)
When the henchmen call (hail, hail, hail)
Iron fist to tame them (hail, hail, hail)
Iron fist to claim it all (hail, hail, hail)

Hail to the king, hail to the one
Kneel to the crown, stand in the sun

Hail to the king, hail to the one
Kneel to the crown, stand in the sun
Hail to the king (hail, hail, hail)

-- Hail to the King, Avenged Sevenfold

File:Lasombra Blake.jpg

Quote

Every life is a riddle. The answer to mine is knowledge, born of darkness. It wasn't always so. In the beginning, I still had questions. In the beginning, my mystery still remained. -- The Order (2003)

Sobriquet

Reeve (the expected form of address), Tiberius (for friends and family only), Keeper (the departed's last words)

Appearance

Reeve Blake stands just short of 6 foot - 2 inches tall and likely weights 300 pounds. He dresses his bulky form in expensive hand tailored bespoke suits of varying shades of purple from those that are off-white to near black. All of his clothing and accessories are handmade and usually conceal secondary properties, like suits with a ballistic cloth lining or an exquisitely crafted poisoned ring. He wears his dark brown hair extremely long, and he now sports a Mephistophelean Van Dyke beard. On those few occasions when he has been physically wounded in public, the blood that seeps from the wound is pitch black and this feature alone unnerves many of the Kindred of Leeds.

History

Mortalitas Mea

First of all, since my embrace I have used many aliases to protect my mortal family until the eventuality of their natural and collective deaths. I was born in Phoenix, Arizona to a middle class American family of artisans and educators in 1969. I grew up in rural Georgia, about 70 miles north-west of Savannah, in the care of my maternal grand-parents.

When I was nine, I moved with my mother, a registered nurse to Denver, Colorado to become a family. The next five years were particularly hard on me as my mother often worked long hours and rarely had time to raise me. Mostly I grew up on the eastern plains and spent much of my time alone, exploring the extensive and wide open properties that surrounded my home.

When I was fourteen, my entire family moved to Colorado, to a little town just outside of Colorado Springs. I spent my first couple of years of high school there and then moved to an equally small town on the Western Slope of Colorado, where I finished high school. Despite rating extremely high in personal I.Q., I wasn't a very good student and could only afford to go to a local college with financial assistance.

I went to school for three years at Mesa State College in Grand Junction, Colorado. At that time, the school had just managed to qualify as a state college and had only a few thousand students. Until college, I had been socially stunted and began to rapidly evolve.

I initially majored in Business and minored in international studies; as I had decided I wanted to enter the American Foreign Service. Though that idea remained my goal for all three years of study, I did change my major to history in my second year.

My downfall, at least scholastically was the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons which opened up many new friends and also distracted me from my studies. By the middle of my fourth year, I couldn't maintain the grades necessary to continue my education and went to work. Initially, I took a manufacturing job at my family's insistence and after seeing several industrial accidents, I moved back to Denver.

I had friends in Denver that I had made in college and I stayed with them while looking for work. Eventually I found a decently paying job and moved out on my own. By my mid twenties, I was ensconced in a mainstream job, not a career, but I had found a full measure of independence. Once again it was Dungeons & Dragons that brought me into contact with a new group of friends and also led me inevitably to undeath.

Winter Solstice of 2042

On the Winter Solstice of 2042, Blake experienced a crisis of faith as he was overwhelmed by the dark Typhonist faith of his dying Setite doppelgänger Seker-Aamon. He struggled for a few nights on his own and then sought out his confessor and teacher along the Road of the Abyss, Nystor the Black, at his temple on Sicily. There in the ruins of a Etruscan temple, Blake confessed to being a doppelganger and how he has been changed by Seker-Aamon's death. After hearing the entire story, Nystor helped guide Blake through his crisis of faith, a truly dark night of the soul not unlike an intellectual exorcism wherein the two dark religions were compared. Ultimately, the perfection and unknowable grandeur of the Abyss easily won out against the perverse idolatry of the Typhonian faith. The process took several nights, but Blake once more possessed clarity of mind and was able to grow from the experience, thereby moving closer to the dark truth at the heart of the Road of the Abyss.

Thereafter, Nystor counseled Blake to journey to Cairo in order to discover precisely what had happened to Seker-Aamon, for whatever this woman had done to the Setite doppelgänger, it most certainly wasn't diablerie. Nystor's reasoning lay in personal experience, diablerie he explained was the vampiric consumption of another Cainite's soul and thus the deepening of the diablerist's own curse by taking on the sins of his or her victim -- a kind of sin-eating and intentional self-damnation. The death of Seker-Aamon seemed to have worked in quite the reverse, releasing his memories, spiritual essence, perhaps even his sins and passing them on to Blake and in all likelihood his fellow doppelgängers.

If this hypothesis were true, he further reasoned, Blake and his other selves were getting stronger and would continue to grow stronger with each doppelgänger's death. Also, from Blake's description of Seker-Aamon's death, two other things were clear. The first was that all the doppelgängers were intrinsically connected, whether they were aware of it or not and that in some manner, it should be possible to trigger that awareness allowing Blake to keep tabs on his other selves. Furthermore, the woman who was killing the doppelgängers understood what they were, perhaps how they came to be, but not every permutation of their supernatural nature as she had clearly believed she was going to consume Seker-Aamon's soul and be able thereafter to track all the doppelgängers. His final postulation was that the murderess was obviously a knowledgeable occultist, if not a skilled sorceress and that despite her obvious failure to diablerize the Setite doppelgänger, she could in all probability still find a way to track the transmigration of Seker-Aamon's soul to his other doppelgängers.

This presented three very important questions that couldn't be easily answered, but that must be researched in order to stop the killer before she destroyed all of the doppelgängers. The first question then was: "Who was the killer and why did she want to kill the doppelgängers in the first place?" To answer that question quickly and efficiently, Nystor was willing to undergo the ritual of abyssal communion called Whispers in the Dark in order to discover the who and why of these killings, but of course there would be a price that Blake would eventually have to pay.

The second question was: "How had the doppelgängers come into being in the first place?" To that end, Nystor urged Blake to travel to Cairo in order to find out more about Seker-Aamon and how exactly he had died. While Nystor admitted that it was possible that this move was exactly what the murderess wanted Blake to do, that might not change the necessity of this strategy, because the dead doppelgänger's story held useful information that couldn't be easily acquired elsewhere and despite the likelihood that this action was something the killer had originally wanted, she might not feel the same tonight as diablerizing the doppelgängers didn't seem to work to her benefit. In fact, this miscalculation by the woman who killed Seker-Aamon could have been a fatal error that Blake could use to his advantage, because each of the other doppelgängers, regardless of how many there were, would be drawn to Cairo for the very same reason as Blake himself, in the primal goal of survival at all costs.

Obviously, the last question was: "How to stop the killer before she figures out how to successfully diablerize the doppelgängers?" This last question would prove the most difficult, to Nystor's way of thinking, but his theory was that the answer would become obvious once the doppelgängers had gathered together to work towards mutual survival and the first two questions had been successfully answered. To hasten the process, Nystor cast a ritual of the Abyss called Into the Chasm to teleport Blake and his childe Ahmal ibn Rawaid directly to Cairo.

Blake and Ahmal walled hand-in-hand into the swirling vortex of supernatural darkness and emerged into the 'Abyss'. They stepped onto what appeared to be a bridge connected to numerous other bridges stretching into infinite night. Ahmal, deeply shaken by the experience tried to pull away from his sire, but as the pair of magisters materialized in the dark, Nystor's warning seemed to carry to them from afar: "Speak the name of the place you seek and do not turn loose of one another...". Blake refused to release Ahmal's hand and uttered his destination boldly into the light-less air: "The Khan al Khalili marketplace of Cairo, Egypt". The words were barely spoken when there was the intense sense of suddenly falling from a great height, the darkness split asunder as otherworldly shadows writhed in the faint illumination of a dark hallway of the great marketplace...

• -- Blake's Statistics