An Apprentice's Travel Diary

Czere Ubireg

Quote

Shall we begin like David Copperfield? 'I am born...I grew up.' Or shall we begin when I was born to darkness, as I call it? That's really where we should start, don't you think?... -- Interview with the Vampire (1976)

The Prelude Arcana

Given the quote from above, clearly I won't be elaborating upon my mortal past. And why should I? I was a mundane enough specimen of humanity, and trust me, you should take my word for that. So where will my story begin? I think we can both agree that Louis de Pointe du Lac was right and that I should begin the narrative with my introduction to darkness. The year was 2012 and I was 43 years old. I awoke a few minutes past midnight on December 22nd in a snow bound alley close to downtown Denver.

...

My first conscious thought was: "it must be Capital Hill, because it smells like alcohol and piss and something undefinable like despair and or desperation..." My clothes were soaked through and I was chilled to the bone. Having grown up in Colorado, I knew the danger inherent in hypothermia and got to my feet. I felt groggy and disoriented with no recollection of how I might have come to be in this particular alley. Despite the dim lighting and my fuzziness of mind, I recognized the building as the Scottish Rite Temple. I have no idea how many times I walked past the place and never once walked inside, but its a memorable building.

The alley lay on the east side of the building and had once separated a particularly dingy apartment building from the temple. To my surprise, the nasty old apartment building was simply gone, in its place was a mostly empty, snow covered parking lot. There were signs of bums having recently been here, empty bottles of cheap malt liquor or bottles of inexpensive hair-spray for the truly desperate wino, broken light-bulbs and blackened copper scrub-pads for the crack addicted, single occupancy housing units otherwise known as cardboard boxes serving as the sleeping place of Denver's lowest caste.

I stumbled out of the alley towards 14th. The traffic was heavy for this time of night as I turned towards downtown. A few yards away, one of the main doors of the temple opened and disgorged a bulky looking man in his middle fifties. His gray hair was slicked back and he wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, a expensive dark gray three-piece-suit, a black overcoat of heavy wool and an old fashioned walking stick. For a moment I debated walking the other way, there was just something about the man that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up - he exuded a cold menace. But then, barely formed words tumbled past my numb unwilling lips and I said: "Excuse me, do you have the time?" Thereafter, for a solid ten seconds he just stared at me and I stared back. Then he looked down and produced from under his voluminous greatcoat an antique gold pocket-watch and replied the time, precisely. I started to turn in the direction of my old apartment at the intersection of Washington and fourteenth, when he introduced himself as Professor Charles Cipher. Automatically, I returned my name and offered my hand. It was then that I realized just how grubby I really looked as I saw the filthy glove with the fingers cut out covering my hand. I have no doubt the professor noticed, but he didn't even hesitate in shaking my hand. To my utter surprise he then offered me a ride home. Normally, I would have politely refused, but when you realize that you just woke up half-frozen in a filthy alley and a total stranger shows not only good manners, but also kindness, good sense dictates not looking too deeply in the gift-horse's mouth. Had I looked, really looked, I would have seen the flash of fangs, but obviously I didn't.

The professor gestured with a hand gloved in black leather to join him at the curbside and not wanting to seem rude, I joined him. It was about this time that my body began to try to compensate for the loss of heat, the onset of hypothermia, and I began to shake uncontrollably. Despite the cold and disorientation, there was a suddenly sense of being in the right time and place, perhaps of belonging, as I stood with the professor on that snowbound corner waiting for who knows what in the midnight dark. Then that perfect memory, which will be with me always, came to an abrupt end when a 1935 Buick slide up to the curb like a black shark coming in for the kill, as it did so every little detail stood out. In a detached way, I understood that I was slipping into shock, but in another way, my senses were heightened or so it seemed at the time. Because just before the professor opened the right rear door, he called my name and as I looked towards him, I could see his lips moving as he spoke, but in the obviously freezing temperatures his breath never formed even the slightest vapor. But as our eyes connected, I felt something through the shock and his words reached me as if they came from a absurdly great distance. "Get in the horseless carriage". Without thought or hesitations, I did as I was told. I did not become conscious of my surroundings again for some minutes and when I did so, I found someone, probably the professor had draped a wool blanket around me. It was not warm inside the vehicle, but seemed so because I was slipping into a kind of comforting lassitude that washed away my cares and offered the sweet serenity of oblivion. I might have died there, had the professor not slapped me across both sides of my face with his expensive leather gloves. As I opened my eyes, the professor was gesturing over a set of antique silver tea service. It was ridiculous that such a thing might be present in the backseat of a vintage 1930s four door, but then I could see the steam rise from the glittering teapot and smelled my favorite aroma - Bergamot - in Earl Gray tea. As the professor placed a steaming cup in my numb hands, he had to help me drink the sweet hot tea laced with brandy, that went down with a hint of saltiness. Warmth spread through my body bringing life and pain, for one can never have one without the other.

When my chattering slowed enough for me to speak, I asked where we were going? The professor replied that he was taking me back to his 'rooms'. As the black Buick four-door pulled up to the curb in front of the three story brownstone off of east Richthofen Parkway, I thought I knew how Edmund must have felt as he rode with Jadis the White Witch of Narnia in her sleigh towards a castle made of ice. Stupidly, I asked the professor if this was his house. As he dragged me out into the cold night, he replied that no, the house belonged to some people he had known, but they were not due to return anytime soon. It wasn't until then that I caught a glimpse of the the driver as he exited the vehicle, a Australian aboriginal man wearing a black chauffeur's uniform and greatcoat. The professor led our trio up the snow-dusted steps to the house's medievally arched entry and produced a ring of keys from one of his great-coat pockets. As we entered a large, night darkened antechamber, the only illumination came from the verdant glow of the security console as the professor deactivated it. Then the massive wooden door seem to just swing shut and lock all by itself. Clearly neither the professor, nor the chauffeur thought anything of such a strange event, but then through the chill and weariness, I began to instinctively add up the odd events and something like fear began to seep into my mind at last.

Then the professor vanished into the dark interior of the house without another word to me. When we were alone, the aboriginal manservant introduced himself as: Dural Howell. But, before I could say anything, he went on to inform me that he preferred to be called by his aboriginal name: Dural. Naturally, for me, the first question that came to mind was to question what Dural meant in the aboriginal tongue. Dural explained that it meant: a hollow tree that is on fire. Thereafter, he asked if I would come upstairs and let him draw me a bath, while he found clothing suitable for a man my size. Numbly, I agreed as he turned without another word and went up the dark stairs without even bothering to turn on the lights. Somehow, recovering from hypothermia, hunger and what felt like the aftereffects of a serious drinking binge, I managed to follow him upstairs and as he activated a standalone heater, I took off the filthy, half-rotting rags that had been my clothes. There was a tremendous shock as I stepped into the steaming water, but as I lowered myself into the hot, sudsy water - I felt an intense lassitude come over me, as I drifted off to sleep. Later, I awakened when Dural entered with a cup of tea, sweetened with honey and demanded that I drink. I did so and with the infusion of caffeine, I began to feel a little bit more like myself. The next step of course, was to wash myself and I did so. Once clean, I rose from the filthy water and rinsed off in the shower and then dried off with a thick towel. Wrapped in the very same towel, Dural sat me down in a hard wooden chair and cut my hair with barber's tools, and then he shaved me by hand with a strait razor. These are luxuries forgotten or unknown to the masses of modern people virtually everywhere, but I felt certain it was something I could become accustomed to with a bit of effort. Thereafter, I was provided a variety of men's toiletries and when I emerged from the bathroom, a seemingly new suit awaited me. I no longer questioned whether it would fit me, such mundane questions obviously meant nothing in the house of the professor.

As I was still a touch unsteady on my feet, Dural graciously aided me in dressing. Never in my life had anyone helped me dress before, save for my parents, but its truly amazing how quickly we can adjust to the quiet assistance of a well trained household servant. I was struck by the strange sense of being out of time, except for the fabulously wealthy, house servants and their careful ministrations or their quiet presence like a beloved piece of furniture are an unknown experience. Clearly, I was becoming used to Dural and his quiet commands well obscured to seem like polite requests, when in reality they were not. His next suggestion, that I join the professor for a meal, was suddenly and more clearly a command as he held the door to the landing open for me. For the first time, I was alert enough to size up Dural, an aboriginal man in his early sixties, I would guess, he stood tall without a hint of weakness and beneath his starched white shirt I could see considerable muscle straining against the fine fabric. I nodded my assent and went down the stairs with a nonchalance that I certainly did not feel.

I found the professor in a large dinning room off a antiquated kitchen. The table was already set for one, as I seated myself. As a first course, Dural ladled out a fabulous soup, followed by a tasty salad, and fresh baked bread. The meal consisted of seven courses and I managed to eat each and all of them without seeming effort, I must have been starving. Through the whole meal, the professor just watched me eat, which is an unnerving experience. As I ate, I looked about the dining room, it was well appointed with a number of sideboards and china hutches, and an antique grandfather clock in the corner. It was nearly four in the morning and I was dressed for and having dinner, my body clock was having trouble keeping up. Its not that I haven't had a nocturnal schedule before, there were plenty of times in my life when I went to sleep with the dawn and rose in the late afternoon and I had worked nights before at the store. But this was somehow different, as if day and night had been reversed and this was all perfectly normal. I won't describe dessert, but it was delicious. The professor then led me into a kind of study, where we sat in fine chairs of soft leather and watched Dural as he poured out more coffee and a brandy for me, and then tended the cheerfully flickering hearth. It might have been my imagination, but the professor chose to sit farthest from the fire-light, while I gravitated towards it. I had begun to notice the pattern, that the professor would watch me while I ate or drank, while he himself had nothing to consume. I briefly remember him mentioning that he had already dined while I was 'freshening up', but somehow that sounded dishonest or hollow, but I had yet to pin down why I believed that. Yet, I had long ago learned to trust my instincts when my rational mind had less information than necessary to come to a calculated strategy.

Save for the crackle of the flames, silence held sway, as the professor and I both waited for the other to speak first. Then, considering all that I owed the professor, I set aside my innate obstinate competitiveness and offer my sincerest thanks for the professor's generous hospitality. He casually dismissed this gratitude with wave of his thick fingered hands, it was then that I noticed that he had calluses on his muscular hands. How had such an obviously wealthy man come to have callused hands? Its not completely unheard of, but it is rare and I sensed that whatever work the professor did, it did not involve physical labor and yet he was clearly quite athletic for a man his age. While pondering these things, I suggested that I should take my leave and try to reach my friends and family. The professor quietly considered this while looking at the complicated face of his antique pocket-watch. Then he simply offered that I was obviously tired and that a day's worth of sleep would do me good and that my friends and family weren't going anywhere in only a few hours. As I nursed my coffee and brandy, I realized that he was right, it made sense that a few hours of sleep wouldn't cost me anything. And that when I woke up, I would be prepared to resolve the mystery of why I had been sleeping in a filthy alley in late December. How such a thing had come pass was beyond me, I had known people whose vices put them in those sorts of positions, but it had never happened to me before. So without further discussion it was decided and the professor informed Dural that I would be staying in the guest bedroom that it should be made ready, at which Dural nodded and seemed to vanish into the depths of the house once more. While we waited, the professor suggested we play a game of chess and as there was board already on the table between us, I accepted. While we played and the professor trounced me, we discussed a number of subjects including history, science and oddly, the occult. It was this final subject that the professor seemed to be quizzing me upon, so rather than be rude, I played along and surprised myself along the way with my own knowledge of such an obscure subject. By way of congratulations for knowing so much about an unusual subject, the professor offered me cigar from a beautiful box. I felt a sudden urge to accept, as if I were a smoker and needed a cigarette, then my natural revulsion for smoking kicked in and I politely declined. The professor explained what a treat I was missing, they were Cuban cigars and quite expensive, I countered that I wasn't a smoker, but I understood the compliment. His apparent indifference surprised me and we spent the next few hours playing chess. I proved myself just good enough to keep him from winning until near the end of the mid-game and I learned a lot about him from his style of play which was very unconventional. Then near the end of another game, Dural made himself know and explained that the guest quarters were ready and that I should accompany him. Once again, I offered the professor my thanks and wished him a good day's rest, which provoked a genuine smile. The guest room turned out to be an entire suite and better appointed than any hotel I had ever stayed in, not that I had time to appreciate it, I was almost asleep before I undressed.

I have no recollection of any dreams from that first night, but when I awoke only a weak cindery light came through the small window high up upon the western wall. I slowly roused myself from beneath the fine sheets and down comforters and realized how quiet the house was, it seemed abandoned. I quickly showered, shaved and dressed, making my way downstairs, I found Dural in the kitchen making a late afternoon meal. I greeted him and he seemed surprised to see me, but he quickly pulled out a chair for me and prepared another plate. When he started to take it into the dinning room, I declined, preferring to eat in the warmth of the kitchen. There was of course another reason entirely, I didn't want to eat alone and Dural's company was preferable, but it also gave me the excuse to strike up a conversation. While it was a novice approach to finding out more about my host, I was surprised by how successful it was, perhaps no one offered to converse with Dural as an equal very often or he too was lonely. The meal was pleasant, and informative, I learned that the professor and Dural were from Australia, specifically the city of Melbourne and that the professor was someone of great importance to one of the city's universities. Dural explained that the professor was extremely well educated and a expert on numerous subjects, a true polymath. While he would extol professor's many virtues and successes in the field of science, he actually revealed precious little of importance at the time. We were, in fact, still discussing the professor and Melbourne history when the great man himself made his entrance. I hadn't noticed the passage of time as Dural and I talked, but it was quite dark outside the kitchen windows when the professor made a coughing noise to announce his approach. The old boy wasn't just fit, he was positively stealthy, for I had not heard even a floor board creak, nor the opening and closing of doors upstairs to herald his arrival.

The professor inquired after my day's rest and I replied that I was quite refreshed and once again I thanked him. If it pleased or irritated him that I continued to thank him, he did not reveal it, if anything, he seemed entirely uninterested in my gratitude. When Dural offered to prepare a plate for him, he declined saying that we had much to accomplish tonight and he simply did not have time to eat. Although, he seemed willing enough to await and watch me, as I finished eating. Tonight he was dressed all in black, which made him look more serious and something like an undertaker, or perhaps my imagination was running away with me. At the professor's direction, Dural when to warm up the car and within minutes we were ensconced in the leather bucket seats of the 1930s black Buick. The professor said he had business downtown, and that once he was dropped off there, Dural would drive me wherever I needed to go. Before long, we were parked in front of a shabby little nightclub called: 'The Broadstreet'. I had never seen it before or even heard of it and there was a time when I had found most of Denver's many dive bars. Nevertheless, the professor wished me good luck in finding my loved ones and without further politeness he walked away. Dural loitered on the street until the professor entered the club, and then he asked me where I wanted to go. My first stop was a house I shared with three friends at the intersection of 14th and Newport street. I was lost in thought and more than a little nervous, and I didn't pay much attention to the drive from downtown to my house. But from the moment the car came to a stop, I noticed things weren't right. None of the cars that my friends drove were present in the driveway, but there were unfamiliar vehicles in their place. Uncharacteristically, I ask Dural to wait for me, as I exited the Buick. The snow crunched beneath my fine leather shoes, which come to think of it, I had no idea where they were from. As I approached the house, I began to notice a number of little differences about the exterior of the house. My heart was beating fast as I knocked upon the door and when it finally opened I was confronted with an angry biker who didn't appreciate how hard I had been beating on the door. I tried to explain that I was looking for a group of people who lived there, but he wasn't interested in my questions and threatened me. As I started to back up, fear and rage mixed deep down in my gut in an unfamiliar way and before I knew what was happening I was on top of the biker, beating him senseless as I frothed at the mouth like an animal. If it hadn't been for Dural, who pulled me off the bloody biker, I might well have killed him. As I struggled to gain control of myself, Dural restrained me like a child. When the fit had passed, I noticed several of the biker's friends had emerged from the house, they looked like a rough lot, but they didn't seem eager to avenge their friend so much as try to get us to leave. I remember a somewhat attractive blond biker woman, crying and screaming that she had called the police. Honestly, I had no idea what to say or do and Dural led me away to the car and once I was locked in back, he drove us away. Shortly thereafter, he handed me a cloth for my hands which were covered in the biker's blood. I was in shock again, or so it seemed, I had no explanation for such a loss of control. Dural pacified me very effectively, blaming the situation on the biker and his crude language, which despite the faulty logic, made me feel much better. As I washed the blood off, I noticed that I hadn't even bruised or scraped my knuckles, which didn't seem right somehow. Despite these wild thoughts, Dural kept me calm by asking what the next destination would be. Just then, I had the strangest feeling that it simply didn't matter and I gave him the next address, but the result was similar if not the same.

Address after address revealed that my friends and acquaintances had all moved on, even all the phone numbers that I had memorized were wrong-numbers or didn't even exist anymore. I am ashamed to admit it, but it took me all of these experiences to convince me to really think and pay attention. Around midnight, I asked Dural to take me back to the 'Broadstreet', ostensibly to pick up the professor, but in truth, I needed a drink. Once again we parked on the sidewalk, and I entered the club. It was smoky and dark inside, there was this sense of walking into room filled with wild animals, more a smell than anything else, beneath the fog of cigarette smoke and the raw odor of hard liquor, I smelled something else, something familiar, but out of place, like a slaughterhouse. I approached the bar, but hesitated to sit or lean against the worn wood which was filthy with spilled booze. I caught the bartender's eye and asked for tequila, he didn't even blink as he handed me the bottle and a shot glass. As I was turning away looking for someplace clean or at least cleaner to sit and drink, I noticed a newspaper on the bar. The guy closest to it was obviously passed-out and wouldn't miss it, so I took it with me. A couple of goth-wannabees looked me over pretty hard, and at my approach, they vacated their little table, so I sat down. The kaleidoscope of lights from the stage should have made it hard to read, but the opposite was true, I could read the fine print as if I were in a brightly lit library. The headlines meant little to me, the names were unfamiliar and the subjects uninteresting, but the date reached out and really hit me. It was December 23rd...2012! For a very long moment, perhaps minutes for all I know, I just stared at the numbers as if they lied, but as I was soon to learn, the numbers never lie. By my last recollection, and it seemed like yesterday, it had been sometime in the second week of December in 1997. In an inexplicable Rip van Winkle way, I had lost fifteen years of my life. I had no memory of those lost years, not a glimmer. Was I suffering from retrograde amnesia? It might explain why I was in that filthy alley, but if so, why couldn't I remember the intervening years? It wasn't as if I remembered living a totally different life as a bum in Capital Hill.

The first shot was to collect myself, the next fifteen were for each of the years I had lost. I didn't lose consciousness so much as I lost my sense of time and place. It was a stupid thing to do and by the time I realized that, it was far too late. Someone, more than one someone was dragging me from my chair and 'helping' me to the men's room. As I was surrounded by the sudden smell of raw urine, someone, a woman I think laughed wickedly and then there was pain and pleasure mixed together like chocolate and peanut-butter. It felt so good, like the best drug, I was floating and then as the slurping noises began to fade, so too did the light. My mind must have been starved of oxygen, because I think I giggled when the screaming started. Then once again, I was floating, and there was shouting in a foreign language, I think, that or I was dreaming. Sometime later, even the shouting faded or I passed-out, which is far more likely considering the trouble I had gotten myself into, but it would be almost a day before I would begin to realize just how seriously I had bungled things.

Lost somewhere in a sea of surreal dreams, I remember seeing familiar faces in strange places, of a juxtaposition of actual memory and what could or must be a tequila fueled fantasy. Years later, as I look back, I am not so sure anymore. But, then there was a perfect moment of crystalline pain as someone forced acid down my throat. At the time, I thought it must be acid for it burned like nothing else I had even ingested including stomach acid as it tastes at the moment you vomit. No, it was so much worse, because, once it burned its way down my esophagus, it ignited my stomach and began to fan its way outwards into the rest of my body. Terrifyingly, I couldn't move enough to even scream and how I wished I could scream. I had been lucky in my life, when it came to personal injury, there hadn't been many, nor had they been serious for the most part. There were only a couple of times that I had cried from pain and I had never screamed from injury. In a sane world, I would have been flopping around like a fish or like a fool who has grabbed a live-wire. But I had entered a world that was far from sane and in my dream, I languished like Odin on the World Tree, for what seemed like days. Eventually, for reasons I wouldn't understand until later, the nightmare ended.

One Drink Too Many

During my college days, I had drunk to excess many times, so much so that I probably did some permanent damage. Had I lived a lengthy human life, those problems would eventually have revealed themselves because cause and effect are always in play and what you do always has consequences that eventually come home to you. But, somewhere along the line, someone had made a crucial decision for me and while I did indeed die, I did not die completely. Not that I would be conscious of that momentous circumstance until the following nightfall.

And it would be decades before I would finally heard the story second hand from Natalia after she had fed a little too heavily from a group of Australian coeds at a party aboard a houseboat in Melbourne harbor. I had accompanied her, in part because it allowed me to avoid Seth who would have found some difficult and demeaning chore for me to fail at so he could deride me without incurring the professor's anger, and because I was in love with Natalia. The occasion was a summertime Christmas party, in the southern hemisphere, the Yule season is a hot one and there were scantily clad teens and twenty-somethings all around us as she told me what the professor had told her in confidence. I had gotten completely trashed in the most dangerous bar in Denver, the Broadstreet was a bar where Kindred congregated largely to hunt for their next meal and to socialize without enduring the stuffiness of most Elysium gatherings. The club was owned and managed by Edward Williamson, the thousand year old Toreador prince of Denver and it served as one of the Rack's best venues for feeding. Those mortals, so unlucky as to look for an alcoholic escape from their lives or searching for a few hours of companionship usually paid a high cover charge, always in blood and sometimes with their lives. I paid with both when I became the object of attention for a group of rebellious and thirsty neonates who saw an easy mark, unaware that I might be accompanied by a ghouled chaperon whose Kindred master was even then searching the bar for me.

Of course, the professor found those same neonates draining me dry on the filthy floor of the mens-room. Apparently, he was more than fair when he commanded then to drop their prey and flee, they being the rebellious youth of Denver's night-society offered sneering derision in return and were rewarded with thaumaturgically conjured fire. Had it been Elysium, the professor might have joined me in death, but the club was not and as the screaming neonates fled the scene, the professor made a fateful decision. Under normal circumstances the professor has a seemingly endless array of sorcerous tricks up his sleeve and might have saved me with a number of them, that is if I hadn't already died. While the professor and the neonates squared off, my heart had stopped and I had been dead for several seconds before he could inject me with his blood. That decision would have profound consequences for both of us.

For the professor that would mean negotiating with the ancient and angry Toreador prince of Denver at a significant political disadvantage for having Embraced a neonate without permission in the prince's own club. Luckily, for the Professor, the local regent, a man named Gideon Londoner was in attendance at the club as the Professor's liaison to the court of Denver. Between the two Tremere regents they were able to purchase permission for the Embrace at a steep price, part of which was that the neither the professor nor I could ever return to Denver. While Natalia did not specifically know the cost of the Professor's rash act, she shared her suspicion that our sire owed two life boons to Edward Williamson. After her drunken confession, Natalia swore me to secrecy and if the Professor ever suspected I knew the story of my Embrace, he has never shown an awareness of my lack of ignorance.

Like so many things in my life, I had foolishly chosen a course of action that favored me, without ever knowing what the outcome would be. As my first day as a vampire passed, I missed out on the experience of the transformation from mortal to Kindred. As I slept the day away somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, Dural cleaned my torpid body of its final filth, for mortal's defecate themselves upon physical death. Luckily for him, I had not had anything to eat since dinner and my Kindred attackers had relieved me of most of my bodily fluids. Still, formerly useful organs were shriveling into vestigial inconsequence while I was growing a shiny new set of canines and my body was aging. Yes, I said aging. You see, when I had awakened in that filthy alley in Denver, I had been twenty-eight years old in body and mind. But for reasons that seem to defy rational explanation, upon receiving the Embrace, my youthful countenance began to age until I seemed as old or older than the Professor. Of course, the appearance of being physically older was a shock, but one that I came to accept relatively quickly. Banishment from my home, friends and family, that created a profound sense of isolation that would never really fade until I left Melbourne for the last time.

The idea that vampires are sleeping during the day, is an entirely human notion, a mortal description for something they have never experienced and cannot understand without having been Embraced. The closest human concept to the day triggered quiescence that vampires suffer, would be hibernation, a complete paralysis of both body and mind. Only in very rare or stressful circumstances can a vampire dream, although there are techniques for triggering the dreaming state, its an entirely conscious process that requires years of practice to successfully initiate. And when Kindred do dream, it is their supernatural minds throwing off the effects of the sun while still being trapped in a completely paralyzed body deprived of even sensory input. Mortals do occasionally suffer a similar kind of experience, but its a aberration of their normal sleep state called: Parasomnia. Since parasomnia is the default condition of vampires during the day, all vampiric dreams begin as nightmares. This circumstance is likely bound up with the Curse of Caine, and while it would be superstitious to attribute this circumstance to a vengeful deity, the specific mechanism and the rules that govern it remain nebulous.

So as the sun began to be eclipsed by the curvature of the Earth, my newly mutated vampiric mind became fully active, but my undead body was still subject to what is called: recurrent isolated sleep paralysis. The fear generated by this kind of temporary paralysis is similar but less traumatic than that engendered by being staked through the heart. Still, for the uninitiated or weak-willed, it can be extremely unpleasant and for fledglings like me, it is a kind of waking hell. As I reflect back upon that first night, I am sure it was the turbulence that jolted the balance related centers of my mind and initiated a full blown day-terror. The nightmare, for lack of a better word, began when I found myself on an ancient battlefield, it was obviously night, and I was a soldier in the legendary lost 9th Roman legion. As I said, I was fully awake and aware of the screaming of men and horses, the snarling of the war-dogs and the howls of the pack of lupines descending upon the square Roman encampment. I could smell the sweat of the men on either side of me and the smoke of the campfires. The werewolves easily leaped over the wall of wooden stakes and the man deep trench that encircled the Roman campsite. They were terrifying beasts with pale fur that burned like silver in the light of a full moon. A trio of them landed only a few dozen feet from my squad and being battle hardened Roman legionaries we attacked even this supernatural threat with cries of 'Roma Invicta'! I was splattered in the face with the blood of the men in the first rank, but rather than react with terror, I reached deep down inside of myself and shaped a terrible fire of Oblivion with my will and the fast evaporating life-force of the men dying just in front of me. When the eldritch emerald fire exploded in their ranks the creatures reacted with an animal terror that they must have forgotten they could experience and my squad took full advantage by moving forward in formation and spearing those three werewolves with plenty of Roman iron. Despite the surprise of my necromantic attack, two of the creatures managed to escape into the Caledonian night, while the third was hacked by my brothers in arms into small chunks of gristle and hair.

As the scene began to evaporate, I became aware that I was laying prone on what felt like a bed, and I was fully dressed. As I opened my eyes, I felt the last tingling numbness flee my extremities and I nearly frenzied. For several seconds, I truly thought I was still in the midst of a battle between a legendary Roman Legion and a band of werewolves, all of whom had been dead for nearly two-thousand years. Luckily, it was the Professor who was sitting there awaiting my awakening rather than Dural. The Professor easily restrained me by animating the bedspread which cocooned me until his calm voice could pacify my beast-ridden mind. When the terror finally subsided, he waved a hand casually and the bed linens released me, allowing me to sit up and look around. I was indeed in a bedroom, but it was cabin shaped without any windows, but there were two doors, a desk with a bookcase and table with two chairs. My senses seemed to become very sharp as I looked around the room seeing intricate little details that I would have been incapable of seeing yesterday. It was as if someone had focused my eyesight down to a narrow beam that swept the room and its sole other occupant like a laser beam scanning for motion. There were other sensations as well. I could feel the sharp new canines in their recently extended position, that would have allowed me to bite like a canine or some other predator. There was a taste of human blood in my mouth. My hearing picked up the chatter of the pilots in the cockpit and the electronic chatter of the communications gear over the scream of the wind outside the plane's hull as it traveled at great speed. And I could smell the numerous cleaning agents used to sanitize all the surfaces of this cabin, the Professor's expensive cologne and the anticoagulant saturated blood contained in a plastic bag sitting in an ice bucket normally reserved for champagne.

The Professor's voice cut through the sensory overload to focus my attention on one question: "What do you remember of your dream of Roman Britain?" My first thought was, how could the man have known I had been dreaming about that? But, uncharacteristically, I replied as if I had been trained since birth to respond to his questions or commands. "I remember a battle between the lost Roman 9th Legion and a group of pale werewolves in Caledonia, ...I mean Scotland." This time, his smile was genuine and he said "Good! Now, describe the dream to me in complete detail and leave nothing out, no matter how insignificant it might seem."

I talked and the Professor listened for most of the night. Near dawn, our plane, a custom built Dassault Falcon 7X long range trijet dubbed the Hermes Falcon began its descent over the Island of Fiji. Apparently, we were running low on fuel and with over 2000 miles left to go before reaching our final destination of Melbourne, Australia - we need to land. And Fiji's capital city, Suva was the only place within thousands of miles of open water where we could rest and refuel. It was a thrilling experience as our plane landed at Nausori International Airport, a grandiose name for what could best be described as little more than a small city airport. Of course, as the capital of Fiji was less than 100,000 people this made sense.

My newly heightened senses picked up countless things that I had no name for, the speed of the plane, air turbulence and that sudden dropping sensation you get in fast descending elevator or when your custom built corporate jet carries out a high speed landing at a runway too short for said maneuver. The pilots must have been first rate because despite the sensation that we were going to crash, the landing was picture perfect. Its naive notion that if your aren't an expert at something, that you cannot really gauge a given endeavors success, this is because that innate faculty called intelligence allows you to imagine what success or failure looks like and our flight team knew their business. All this I observed from the only cabin with windows, the observation lounge the Professor called it, set directly behind the cockpit. The remainder of the Falcon's interior had been divided into small conference room with all the amenities, the bedroom in which I had originally awakened and small detention room at the rear of the plane for transporting unwilling passengers.

Once on the ground, the Falcon taxied towards a series of hangars where it was refueled and serviced. No one including the pilots exited the plane and strangely, no representatives of Fiji tried to board the plane or inspect its contents. I mentioned this to the Professor and without looking up from the book he was studying, that the plane had diplomatic immunity and the officials of Nausori International Airport could glean that from the Falcon's registry. I nodded my assent and the Professor seemed to sense this as he further explained that the Island of Fiji was a dangerous stop for us, over the last couple centuries numerous Kindred, the preferred term for vampires among their own kind, had gone missing on the island and while it was sometimes necessary to stop here for fuel, no intelligent or informed vampire would stray beyond their ship or airplane. We spent the remainder of the our time on Fiji discussing the mythology of Fiji's Polynesian background and what could possibly be behind all those missing Kindred. While I happen to enjoy intellectual exploration of speculation, I was to learn that the Professor did not, in fact guesswork and speculation were two of his pet peeves. To the Professor's mind, that speculation led to preconceived ideas, which in turn could lead to a costly or fatal error and he began right there and then to intellectually correct that illogical habit of presumption.

Near dawn, the Professor escorted me back to the bedroom cabin, where he strapped me into one of the two chairs and took the other one for himself. I nervously asked if we would be able to sleep in this position, to which the Professor gave a genuine chuckle. Even in the minutes before the sun would rise he lectured me on the Kindred condition, explaining that once the sun had crossed the horizon it would not matter what position our bodies were in, we would be utterly unconscious until the sun sank in the west. In this only, the Professor was wrong, for I dreamed often of things I had never personally seen, of conversations with strangers who yet seemed familiar but without an identifiable point of reference. These dreams would eventually begin to diminish over the coming decades and the Professor encouraged to keep a dream diary and once a week we would have a session wherein I would recount what I had dreamed and he would act as a kind of guide. There were two consistent things about these sessions that always bothered me, one - that neither Seth nor Natasha were ever present or even in the building and that the Professor always knew what the dreams were about and if I ever left anything out, he would point out the discrepancy.

Apprentice of the First Circle

More than anything, I would have liked to have seen Melbourne from the air, but as we arrived during the day, I missed out on that experience. When next I regained consciousness, I lay on a old fashioned four-poster bed in a well appointed Victorian room measuring about thirty foot square. There was a strong, but momentary sense of disorientation as my mind jump-started into full wakefulness and as my heightened senses fed my consciousness all sorts of unorganized data: several smells - of dust suggesting the room had not been in use for some time, the recent use of some kind of citrus furniture polish, the familiar odor of camphor from the mothballs in the closet and beneath it all, the reek of old blood sunk deep into the floor boards from long ago feedings.

As I sat up, I took in the room, and found I was completely alone. The room had three doors, two based on their size had to be interior doors, and the third might exit outside or into another part of the building. Close to hand, I could sense movement in another part of the building, although I couldn't tell exactly what manner of activity it might entail. Further out, I could hear numerous conversations, but they came to me only in pieces as the wind would shift first this way and then that. There was also music and more distant still, the roar of early evening traffic so familiar and reassuring in its normalcy. The bed was covered in a traditional quilt and the pillows smelled like goose down. As I rose and explored the room, I found I was right about the two interior doors, one led to a walk-in closet filled with clothing decades out of date, the other door led to a lavatory outfitted in 19th century tile and brass.

It was then that I stopped before an antique mirror and looked at the new 'old' me. In just 24 hours, I had aged over forty years. I guessed that I would pass for my late sixties, a grandfatherly face with white whiskers looked back at me through blurry lenses. I took off my glasses and the distortion vanished immediately. In stunned realization, I understood that I would never need glasses again, one of the pluses of my new condition for which I was imminently grateful. But it did raise certain questions: what other surprises lay in store for me? Would they all be good? Common sense suggested that all circumstances had negatives to go with the positive points, I would have to be wary of those as I became aware of them.

I do not know for how long I lingered there gazing into the mirror like Narcissus, but the sound of a skeleton key in the exterior door lock snapped me out of my fugue. I found Dural waiting for me with a clean cloth and a shaving kit. Once again we went through the ritual of shaving. Dural said nothing, so I prompted him with basic questions, yes we had arrived in Melbourne around noon or so. Yes, we were 'home', whatever that meant. Home was a old dormitory of Queen's College called "Old Wyvern Hall," itself a lesser school of the University of Melbourne.

I must have brightened visibly, because Dural asked if that pleased me and I realized that it did indeed make me feel better. I explained that I had spent a handful of years at a small American college, and living on campus would be return to the familiar in an altogether unfamiliar world. He nodded, and began to cut my hair with a old pair of scissors. When he was done, he bade me bathe and he would return with new clothing and he left. There was no shower, just a porcelain bathtub and a oval curtain ring hanging from the ceiling, but I made do. When Dural returned, he came lugging in a half-dozen trunks, as I was standing around in a terrycloth robe, I helped him and found lifting the trunks no effort at all. To my surprise they were completely full of clothing in my size, obviously not new, rather used and discarded apparel - hand-me-downs. I knew this shtick all too well, but I knew better than to look a gift horse in the mouth. And I disrobed right there and dressed in whatever he handed me. When I was done, he removed all the old clothing from the closet and repacked it into the empty trunks, save for a few items I saw and asked about like an old silver headed walking stick and antique gold pocket watch with a jeweled fob. I asked who had stayed in this room last, Dural shrugged and said that numerous apprentices had stayed in this room, though none recently. Despite his native stoicism, he seemed pleased by it having a new occupant.

While Dural and I were talking, a woman entered the room on silent feet, it was her perfume that gave her away, a scent of sea-salt and hyacinth, she stood there in skin-tight black athletic apparel, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. And then she spoke,welcoming me to "Old Wyvern Hall" and introducing herself as Natasha. Just as I was about to reply, the Professor's voice carried from the doorway making an official introduction between Natasha and myself. But, the Professor named me Czere Ubireg, a Turkish national emigrated to the United States when I was very young. Caught in momentary hesitation, I was speechless and then the moment passed and I was Czere Ubireg. Natasha just nodded in blithe acceptance, clearly whatever the Professor said was as good as gospel. Then as she turned to go, her eyes became misty and seemed to lose focus, and to me, she said: "Tonight you are Seven, lesser and incomplete, but as you are winnowed away, all the stronger you will become until only one remains. The question is - what face will you wear?" Without another word, she turned upon her heel and pushed past the Professor as if he weren't even there. Dural, myself and the Professor were all struck silent, each of us looking from one to another, trying to make some sense of such a strange pronouncement. Finally, the Professor cleared his throat and asked me to come downstairs and meet Seth, the other apprentice I would be working with. He turned without waiting for my acquiescence, as if my assent were already a foregone conclusion and as I fell into step behind him, I understood that of course, it had been.

We found Seth in the laboratory located approximately a hundred feet below "Old Wyvern Hall". The Professor had led me down to the ground floor and then into the basement where the Professor approached a plain wall of red brick mortared together with slowly crumbling concrete. As he stood before the wall, the Professor waved his hands in some sort of arcane pattern and mouthed some words that might have been Latin. Then he stepped into the wall as if it were insubstantial. Faintly, from the other side, I could hear the Professor calling me to hurry through. While I was hesitant, I knew the Professor must be obeyed, so I stepped forward into the wall. As my face entered the wall first, as if I were trying to look where I was going, I could feel myself passing through what should have been solid brick, but which felt closer to cool, dry dust suspended in a layer a few inches thick. When I opened my eyes, I could see into a old stairwell constructed of that same red brick and concrete spiraling down into the dark earth. The impassive face of the Professor was illuminated by a cold sphere of light that floated just above his head. The landing upon which he stood was just large enough for the two of us and as I stepped through slowly, he turned away without further fanfare as if this were an everyday occurrence, and as I was soon to learn, it was just that.

Several turnings later, we stood before a closed set of double wooden doors. Half inscribed upon each door and forming a whole only when the doors were closed as they were now, was a strange geometric symbol painted in gold. The figure was a perfect hollow circle containing a hollow square that touched it with its corners and a solid right triangle mounted at about fifteen degrees pointing north-east, or so it seemed to me. The Professor said: "Behold, the sigil of the Clan and House Tremere." For a couple of moments, we both just stood there gazing at its perfection as it glittered in cold metallic hues from the Professor's conjured ball of light. Then my sire, pointed out the line of glyphs that ran all the way around the doors, its rust colored paint was matted, seemingly incapable of reflecting the light. But as I looked harder at it, there was a sense of something familiar about it, as if I should know what it meant. I stepped closer and it felt like a faint breeze had picked up in that small threshold and was blowing faintly in my face. The scent that the inscription gave off was one of dust, death and slaughtered beasts. A shiver passed through me, both of fear and anticipation as I turned to the Professor and voiced the obvious question: "Is this blood painted around the frame of the door?" Professor Cipher nodded and proffered: "Blood is all to the Kindred, sustenance, an intoxicant, and a source of power. For most Kindred, that power translates into fuel for their Disciplines, the powers that the curse grants them based on their clan or lineage. But for those of Clan Tremere, your clan, blood can be channeled like other natural forces, such as electrical current to fuel ritual workings and path magic."

Follow me, Seth is within and the night is wasting. Then he uttered another string of Latin phrases and pushed the double doors inward. The scream of rusting hinges in need of oil, greeted us as we entered the laboratory. We stepped into a domed room approximately twenty-five feet in radius, with seven walls and in each wall an arched doorway. Seven Roman arches held up the dome a good fifty feet above us and on the floor were inscribed seven concentric circles forming a round labyrinth. Cold white light, steady enough to be electricity, illuminated the chamber and emanated from seven magical orbs similar to the one conjured by the Professor, but far larger as they floated equidistantly about the room just before their respective archways. The Professor pointed out the labyrinth of concentric circles on the floor: "These are the seven circles of initiation, as you circumnavigate each, you must find passage from the outermost circle to the one it enshrines. Do you understand?" For the space of several human heartbeats, I just looked at the labyrinth trying to puzzle it out like a maze. Then I realized it was a symbolic matter and obviously Clan Tremere was like a cult; the word cult, has taken on a negative connotation in the modern world, but in the ancient past it simply denoted a small group of adherents who shared the same faith. So the circles were steps of initiation, gained through sacred knowledge passed from teacher to student like the Mithraic mysteries. Unlike Christianity and other monotheistic faiths, which required the acceptance of the unprovable as a necessary truth - in other words faith, gnostic religions brought their members into progressively deeper truths through experience. The Greeks had a special word for such knowledge: Gnosis. I explained my supposition to Professor Cipher, who smiled, nodded and offered a small compliment: "Most Excellent!"

Then the Professor pointed to a spot, gesturing for me to walk to the space, and I quickly complied. When I turned to face him, he said: "You have passed through the first of seven gates, the gate of blood and immortality, primordial and elemental, without passage through the first gate, you could not hope to be able to understand or control the mystical energies that bind our world together. You must now prepare yourself to walk the first and outermost circle of mystery. With my help, as your sire and you regent, you will learn to master those lessons and techniques that we call the discipline of Thaumaturgy. At the moment, you are nothing to the Clan and House of Tremere, just a rude vessel that demands to be filled with sacred knowledge and the wisdom of the ancients."

Somewhere along the way to meet the more senior apprentice Seth, I had entered into a ritual of initiation for a vampiric mystery cult. I stood there dumbfounded, uncertain of how to act and what I should be saying, doing, or thinking. As the unnatural florescence began to dim all around the exterior of the room, a single large orb above us, enshrined in the dome, began to glow brighter casting illumination over the Professor who stood at the center most point. From the archway directly behind the Professor a sinister figure swathed in black approached my unsuspecting teacher. I tried to alert him to its presence, but he ignored my warnings and stood patiently with his back turned to the figure. Then the figure stood directly behind the Professor, holding a black cloak out for him to pull over his western style business suit. Once my sire had donned the black robe, another black cloaked figure emerged from a different archway and brought a bejeweled golden chalice to the Professor. Then the same figure came towards me, holding forth another black robe, this one meant for me and its outstretched hands guided me into the velvet cassock. My attendant's touch was feather light, but the scent of sea-salt and hyacinth gave Natasha's identity away, and that meant the attendant who aided the Professor must be Seth. Natasha drifted away to stand slightly off to one side and behind the Professor, opposite Seth.

Then as one, they approached me. When the Professor stood directly before me, he commanded me to kneel and I did so. The cold stone floor should have hurt my knees, but didn't. As I waited patiently, the Professor held the glittering chalice at the height of my head between us and chanted again in Latin, this time, it seemed I could almost understand what he was saying. He held the cup with his left hand and gestured in strange ways over it with his right hand. I felt a growing buildup of energy in the air, as if lightning were about to strike, then the Professor grew silent. Then in a grand and formal voice, an exaggeration of his normal deep baritone, he commanded me to repeat after him, a sacred litany. In truth, the "Oath of Tremere" as it was called, seemed more like a courtroom document chanted in archaic English than what I had imagined as a sacred oath. But, despite the dry and dusty pronouncements voiced by the Professor, I understood the grave character of the oath I was being administered. The initiation ended with my paraphrasing the final part of the oath: "I, Czere Ubireg, swear this oath on this night of December 25th, in the year of 2012. Woe to they who try to tempt me to break this oath, and woe to me, if I succumb to such temptation."

Once more the Professor spoke in that grand, but dread voice: "Czere Ubireg, you have sworn the Oath of Tremere, now you belong to the Pyramid forever more until your final death. Within this chalice is the commingled essence of those who lead the Pyramid and take guidance only from great Tremere, the Seven Councilors." In order, he named them each with all their titles: Abetorius, Elaine de Calinot, Etrius, Grimgroth, Meerlinda, Thomas Wyncham, and Xavier de Cincao. I know that I heard and registered the names of the final two councilors, but with the utterance of the name Meerlinda, the room seemed to disappear and I could see her face, so beautiful and so cold. Somehow, impossible as it might seem, I knew her, the sound of her voice, the scent of each of her carefully calculated perfumes, her long luxurious dark chestnut hair and eyes like emeralds frozen or fiery as suited her mood. I knew then, somehow, that it was my sacred duty to kill this woman who was one of a kind, ancient and powerful. She had broken one of the highest laws, but which one and those who had given me this impossible mission, were just shadowy figures out of distant memory. This sudden purpose changed everything, my focus snapped into being like a sword crisply drawn from its sheath to glisten coldly in the light.

Of course, in just a few nights word would come telling us that Meerlinda's chantry in Dallas had fallen to the vile forces of the Sabbat and the great lady was dead at the hands of the traitorous former councilor Goratrix. Instinctively, I knew it for the lie it was, because deep inside me, I could feel that she still existed out there somewhere and she was waiting for me. I was fully cognizant of the necessity of absolute secrecy, I dared not even think about this except when I was totally alone and somehow I must never, ever dream about it. Then time resumed with a sudden stutter and the Professor said: "Drink of this cup and become one with all Tremere everywhere." And with his cold left hand, he forced my lower jaw open and with his right hand, he poured the essence of light and fire past my lips, igniting my body and opening my mind to mysteries undreamed of...

I must have lost consciousness...for when I did wake, hours had passed. By the antique clock on the mantle over my bedroom's small and immaculately clean fireplace, it was near to three in the morning. While I heard nothing unusual, I knew that I wasn't alone in the room. When I opened my eyes and sat up, I saw the Professor sitting in one of the bedroom's two antique brown leather clad wingback arm chairs. I expected him to be reading, but he was watching me over his steepled fingers. With just a small gesture he caused mystical flames to fill the grate, throwing flickering illumination across the room, but I didn't like the way the flames seemed to reflect in the lenses of his tortoise shell horn-rimmed glasses.

"Czere, please take a seat and join me." With this utterance the Professor gestured towards the other wingback chair. The note of command in his voice suggested I hurry and a quick mental calculation on my part made me realize that it was only few days after the Summer solstice in the southern hemisphere. In other words, very short nights, and a very limited activity cycle for the undead, including myself. I immediately slid off the bed and took the proffered seat as the Professor began to speak. "Czere, I have been called to Vienna to attend to some necessary administrative details that must be handled in person. Do you understand?" I nodded my understanding and I took his immediate silence as a opportunity to ask questions. The moment he spoke of Vienna, my anxiety spiked, I wasn't certain why, but the name evoked images of nineteenth century intrigues carried out from elegant cafes to the opera and personal palaces befitting royalty. "how long will you be gone?"

The Professor studied me for several long moments, long enough for me to become distinctly uncomfortable under that cold gaze. "Of that I cannot be sure Czere, likely a week or two at most. I should be back shortly after the start of the new year." I hesitated and then pressed forward. "What am I to do with myself while you are gone Sire?" The Professor smiled at the previously unused title and gently corrected me. "My title is Regent, and from this point forward you will address me as Regent Cipher or just Regent." I quickly nodded. "Among the other clans, the title of Sire is common parlance, although, it has been falling out of fashion for the last century. Despite that, Clan Tremere uses that term far less often and usually only under informal circumstances. You will follow suit." Once again, I nodded.

"While I am gone, senior apprentice Natasha is in charge. I have given her instructions on what your duties are to be and I have drawn up a syllabus of subjects I would like you to study." The folder he handed me was as thick as the Denver phone-book. As I scanned through the extensive body of scholastic material the Professor had drawn up for me, I noticed several of the primary works were in languages I did not know, primarily Greek and Latin. "Um-mm, Regent, I don't have any background in ancient languages. How should I proceed?" He looked at me as if I had just sprouted two heads and replied. "Czere, you will need to adapt quickly to your new existence and if you find that there are circumstances wherein you are short of proficiency, then you will need to make greater your efforts and expend as much time and effort as may be required to complete the scholarly regimen I have assigned you. Clan Tremere has no room for lallygagging or laziness, the course of study I have given you is meant to bring you up to snuff with your peers and is far from advanced course work. Am I understood." I replied in the affirmative.

"Excellent. Then I need to make ready for my journey. I would like you to exercise special caution with Seth, he has been the least senior apprentice of the chantry for many years and he might try to take advantage of you in this regard. While I am absent you can turn to Natasha for advice and aid in dealing with him. However, he is your senior in the pyramid and thus you are bound by your oath and laws of the pyramid with obeying his orders, unless they violate the Code of Tremere. Do I make myself understood?" I stood for a moment processing that one, then offered a slight nod, which he took for assent. "One more admonition, the chantry is filled with mystical items and texts that have been enchanted or curse to protect them, most of the dangerous items are set aside in the restricted section of the library or are under lock and key in the repository below, but this chantry has been active for over one hundred and thirty years, so there are likely to be a few lost items that might make it into your possession. Not all my apprentices have taken the correct attitude in dealing with certain kinds of knowledge that I would deem dangerous for anyone short of a true master of Thaumaturgy. As this chantry has had dozens of apprentices in its thirteen decades, some prohibited works or items are likely hidden away in the building somewhere. You have received fair warning from me, something I only provide once. If harm should befall you in your explorations of the chantry, the results are of your own making. Any unidentified items are to be brought to my attention or handed over to the most senior apprentice, in this case, Natasha. That is all the instruction I have for you tonight. See Natasha tomorrow evening about your duties to the chantry and advice on your course work."

As he was about to walk out the door, he turned back and locked gazes with me and said. "Czere, I want you to make a special effort to learn Turkish, to further the deception surrounding your past." And then his eyes seemed to draw me in, as if they were infinitely deep pools reflecting me. "You are forbidden to leave Old Wyvern Hall under any circumstances, until I deem you worthy to explore the campus." I momentarily lost awareness and when it resumed, the door was shut and I was alone in the dark.

I did not hear the Professor's retreating footsteps, nor his descent down the great stair of dark wood, with its spear-like posts located at every turning of the steps. As I sat alone in my room with my eyes closed to the darkened room, I pretended to be calm. It took me a few seconds to realize what had just happened, then rage and fear washed over me in equal parts. Why had the Professor done this to me? Had I done something wrong? What should I have done? Without realizing it, the Professor had somehow filled the void of the father figure that I had never had, and all I wished to do was please him.

But his callus use of compulsion to make me a prisoner to the four walls of this old house made me feel like he was arbitrarily punishing me. I racked my mind for what I could have done to displease the old man, but then as separation anxiety and self-loathing tore at my insides like two poisonous snakes, I realized that something was fundamentally wrong with me. Why was I so emotionally dependent on the Professor? Yes, he had rescued me from hypothermia in Denver, and then shown me further kindness by taking me in, even giving me the Embrace rather than letting me die the fool's death I had earned at the Broadstreet. But, that just did not explain my sudden love for the old Tremere. So, what was going on? Was I under a spell? Would the Professor have used some kind of medieval love philter on me to guarantee my good behavior? I must have lost control, for a red haze rose up in my mind and all I could think of was destroying whatever I could get my hands upon.

When the fit of anger finally subsided, I heard a hesitant knock upon my door, then a feminine voice chanted soft and sibilant until the door lock gave an audible click. My reason must not have fully returned, because the fact that the Professor had wizard locked my door struck me as hilariously funny. And when Natasha entered what remained of the chamber, she found me sitting on the floor chuckling to myself like a madman amid a jumble of broken things. Natasha stood there in the doorway, highlighted by the hall lights, he face in shadow and her expression unreadable. "Czere why?" And because such an emotional outburst had left me momentarily empty of feeling, including shame, I told her.

For a few minutes, she just stood there, then she shut the door leaving us both in the dark. Despite the lack of light, she managed to pick her way through the mess with nary a misstep, until she stood next to me. Then she knelt down and put her arms around me until the shaking subsided. On the first floor, I could hear the Professor's final instructions to the chantry's subservient house staff and their meekly murmured assent. Then the front door opened and with the change in pressure within the house, a draft passed close enough to my room carrying with it the sounds of far off traffic and closer by the energetic sounds of young people dancing to unfamiliar music. I could also hear the distinctive purr of an old fashioned V8 engine as it pulled up just outside the front door and the sound of luggage being loaded, probably by Dural. Then I heard the car door slam and its engine revved up as it pulled away to eventually blend seamlessly with that far off sound of traffic.

When all traces of the Professor's conveyance had diminished to nothing, Natasha took my grizzled old face in her soft young hands and I felt her thoughts as they searched my mind for the reason for my destructive tantrum. I was so startled, that I did not know what to do, rather I sat there paralyzed with indecision, until she telepathically explained what had happened to me. "Czere, for reasons unknown, the Professor has bound you to him with the blood blood. It is an ancient method by which one vampire can make another love and obey them. It was used by ancient vampires to control their progeny long before the wizards of House Tremere decided to become vampires themselves. And as members of Clan Tremere, we are particularly susceptible to its effects. Where most Kindred need to taste the blood of another vampire three times, we can be bound with only two tastes, its our curse. I don't know why the Professor would do that to you, but there must be a rational reason. The Professor would never do that to you unless it was absolutely necessary, in part because it violates the Code of Tremere and because if it were revealed to his superiors, he could be punished quite severely. You must never speak of this to anyone, not to Dural or the other servants and never to Seth. Do you understand?"

"I understand, Natasha." I spoke the words aloud and left the question of how she could read my mind and project her own thoughts into my mind as an unvoiced question. Her thoughts whispered to me that it was one of the many higher gifts of Auspex and that in time, I too would be able to do such amazing things. As my rational mind took over, I asked how she knew such things about the blood-bond and the history of the vampires. Her reply to me was that there were books about it in the library and that if I kept this conversation between us, she would show them to me some night soon. With so many dark miracles in play, how could I refuse her? I was a babe in the woods, a fledgling, a fetal supernatural being, immortal but virtually helpless before the powers of older vampires. Of course, I readily agreed.

Then, with little more than a whisper and a snap of her fingers, a pale globe of light cast cool illumination over the mess that was my room. This time, Natasha spoke aloud. "Seth left the Hall shortly after your induction ceremony. He avoided the Professor, but stopped to tell me he would be back soon. We need to clean this up before he returns or he will expect me to punish you for making such a mess. According to the peripheral code, I should, but luckily for you, I am not a fan of rules and harsh punishments. But Seth will want to put you in your place, so we had best hurry." Together we removed every trace of broken furniture from the room and replaced it with odds and ends taken from several different rooms filled only with dust and old memories. When Seth did return just before dawn, there was no evidence of my first frenzy and his rude entry into my chambers came as no surprise, nor was he any the wiser and I kept the Professor's dark secret to myself as Seth took me deep below the chantry to indoctrinate me.

Old Wyvern Hall

The following night, as those too real dreams came to their appointed conclusion and my mind became fully conscious, I had yet to open my eyes. As I lay there, I sensed...something indescribable. I suppose the best way to describe it would be as a vibration. It seemed to reverberate through the house and while it defied the usual five sense, despite their heightened state, it persisted none-the-less. I sat up and opened my eyes, but the only thing I perceived was the chamber's light-less state. As yester-eve returned in total to me, I recalled where each of the furnishings were and flicked on the lamp on the left bedside table. It was a 1920s Miller table lamp, with six shades of caramel slag glass under filigree with a bronze metal base. As the light chain cast a dangling shadow upon the floor, the room was dowsed in warm caramel light.

Each piece of furniture that now filled the room was mismatched, odds and ends from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the hand-me-downs of a unknown number of older apprentices. For a moment as I looked about the room, from one furnishing to the next, I wondered who they had been, had the Professor made them or were they the childer of other Tremere regents who had been assigned to train with my sire. The previous night, Natasha had revealed to me the evolutionary steps of our various disciplines, that in time with the discipline of Auspex I would soon see the spiritual auras around people, places and things. As my skill with Auspex increased, I would be able to touch objects and feel the emotions of their previous owners, even see memories associated with them, if I was talented or lucky. And eventually, I would be able to read minds and loose my spirit into the astral plane, whatever that might mean. She had even told me that vampires as powerful as the Professor could manifest unique abilities with the psychic discipline.

But that was not all she told me, as her thoughts poured into me, I could see myself looking other people in the eyes and compelling them as the Professor had compelled me. Initially, I would be limited to a single word, but that with practice, I could squeeze just a little more detail out of such a command by artfully placing the compelling word in a carefully constructed statement. In time, I could stretch the force of my will out into a command a sentence long, then add and remove memories, and then reduce some poor wretch to a drone who could only follow my commands, and finally I would be able to joyride in a human body by turning another human-being into a sock-puppet. Her mental images came with a scary warning that chilled me to my bones, the discipline of Dominate was addictive and could quickly turn a normal person into a soulless monster; I had been warned.

Most intriguing were the images she showed me of the ritual magic we the Tremere were infamous for, the hermetic shapes, the strange ingredients and complex recitations needed to achieve the proper state of mind and the honing of the will in order to make changes to the world around us. She did not show me any of the deeper mysteries, but she did show me enough to wet my appetite for more. In those few minutes that we shared one consciousness, I saw the occult library where the lores of this dark world were found and actual manuals of magic were kept on what seemed like endless shelves. I also saw the laboratory where I would soon labor as the custodian and the mystical vault that housed strange and dangerous artifacts. But clearly, there were places Natasha had never been, for they were shadowed rooms that her mind feared to visit or she had been warned not set foot in on pain of punishment.

But in the last few seconds of our link, I saw bits and pieces of Natasha's life. I do not know whether she meant for me to see them or if in some way I had reversed the flow of her psychic link. I saw her walking barefoot on the beach in the bright sunlight of some earlier decade, there were flashes of her making love to Seth and the bitter end of things between them, of her first meeting with the Professor and her own journey into darkness. I felt blessed to see such personal things and in return I opened my mind to show her some of my life and in doing so I revealed the first pangs of my love for her. When it was over, I suddenly felt hollow, lonely as if without her thoughts melded with mine, I was an empty vessel. It was a very personal and intense experience that left me in shock, but then I was not alone in this for I could see tears in Natasha's eyes. But she did not let either of us linger on these things, rather she got me up and moving and within the hour all the old furniture was disposed of and we moved all the odds and ends into my room. We were barely finished when Seth entered without knocking and demanded I accompany him into the subterranean sanctum below the chantry.

Al this I recalled as I looked about my room. And then I forced myself into motion and as I did so, I felt first light pains that I would find normally accompanied the hunger. I tried with little success to ignore it, so unlike human hunger, the sensation was of the constricting of tiny blood vessels all over my body, a kind of itching that started in the skin of the hands and feet and worked its way deeper into the flesh and bone as it moved towards the trunk of my body. From the start I established nocturnal rituals of shaving and showering, an attempt to reconnect with my lost humanity. When I emerged from my shower, I found a completely new wardrobe, shirts, pants, socks, underwear, shoes, ties, everything I would need. As I dug through all the boxes and bags, I realized that someone had ordered seven sets of exactly the same outfit. I laughed out loud as I stood before a beautifully engraved and frosted oval mirror in a hand carved wooden frame. The outfit veritably screamed "Welcome to Old Wyvern Hall, this is your new uniform, wear it with pride." And that is what it was, a school uniform, how ridiculous it seemed to me, at the time.

In the final minutes of the previous night, Seth had warned me, that my room must be kept spotless or he would heap additional work onto my already lengthy list. So my first task was to put away all my new clothes in a orderly fashion, then I threw away all the boxes and bags that had been delivered from fashionable Australian boutiques to cloth me. I took all the trash downstairs to disposed of it in the basement furnace room. Then I returned upstairs and sorted the room out, made the bed, cleaned the bathroom and polished the furniture, etc. Once these personal tasks were completed, I decided not to press my luck with the "Hunger" as I was starting to feel the first faint beginnings the more severe cramping that followed the intense itching of the flesh and I made my way to basement once again, but rather than visit the furnace room, I entered the cold storage room.

The cold storage room was actually a hermetically sealed and refrigerated room that contained months worth of blood bags stored in glass cases according to blood type, the date of the blood draw and its degree of rarity. There were only three pieces of furniture in the room besides the glass cases, all made of perfectly clean, shiny stainless steel: a long steel table, another table with a triple sink and a trash receptacle that looked frighteningly like a Dalek. As I entered the room, I felt the cold but in a rather distant way, as I looked around I saw a temperature gage in metric of course and with a quick calculation realized it was only a few degrees above freezing. Only nights before, I had been reduced to helplessness by such a cold temperature. But now, as one of the undead, I barely noticed it other than to register the difference.

On the long steel table in the center of the room lay three bags of blood in a steel tray with my name engraved upon it. The message was clear enough, so I stepped over and lifted the first bag to my mouth and before I realized it, my fangs had descended. As I bit through the plastic, the cold blood entered my mouth, setting off orgasmic little shocks through the muscles of my mouth and traced its way down my throat and into my stomach. So amazing was the taste, it took a few seconds to realize all the bags were empty. And yet, each bag had been a memorable, sensual experience unto itself, I immediately sensed that I need more. I did not feed the blood bags to the Dalek until I had ripped them open and licked them clean.

Then I proceeded towards the glass cases that actually turned out to be made of Plexiglas. Just as I reached out to open the nearest case, I felt a disturbance in the air before my hand. I only hesitated a moment and then grabbed the crystalline knob and drew my hand back in agonizing pain, it had stung me! As I sucked my throbbing fingers, I noticed for the first time, the crimson sigils painted on the inside of each case. I had read about such things in Dungeons & Dragons, but never imagined I would encounter them in real life. They were wards, or mystical symbol of protection versus a variety of supernatural things, apparently this one worked against vampires - including me. I could immediately see the Professor's hand in this, another lesson learned. I cursed silently to myself, but turned away and licked clean the table and tray where I had splattered blood. Then I washed my hands in the industrial sink and went downstairs to begin my night's labor.

I approached what appeared to be a random section of the old red brick wall that surrounded the basement of "Old Wyvern Hall", it lay on the same wall as the basement stair but at the opposite end of the building, in a largely abandoned corner of the basement. There were no windows anywhere near here, and no rooms either. Just a empty corner, but the floor here was far too clean, in a real basement, especially in a building this old, there would be lots of dust and cobwebs. I raised my hands and began the complex gestures used by the Professor only last night, it seemed so much had happened since then. Then I began the chant in Latin, I had no idea what it meant, but then I felt that vibration from earlier like a special little shiver or someone was walking over my grave. As I felt that strange vibration, I stepped forward and through the wall. There I stood on the landing, in the darkness, but I had used the mystical passport correctly the very first time. I was so proud that at first I did not notice the light rising upward through the stairwell to ever-so-faintly illuminate the landing where I stood. Instinctively, my senses had attuned themselves to the low-light conditions and as they did so, my other senses seemed to kick in as well. The light from below was a combination of cool, steady illumination and a faint flickering. Accompanying the light, was a scent of sea-salt, hyacinth, and dust? My ears picked up a low sibilant chant in Latin, the dulcet tones were those of Natasha. She must be "casting" a spell or ritual. Not wishing to disturb her, I walked as silently as possible down the stone steps and into the main sanctum chamber.

At the bottom of the winding stair, the great double doors with their inscribed seal of Clan Tremere lay open revealing the great sanctum chamber with its seven arches and the circular labyrinth upon the floor. All was I remembered it, the seven magical globes floated above their respective arches casting a dim illumination upon the chamber floor. But as I entered, I felt that shivering moving through my body in time to Natasha's recitations. What was she casting? I could see that her ritual space occupied the three innermost circles of the labyrinth, and that tracing that outer circle -- actually the fifth circle of initiation, was a circle of white sand and just inches beyond its border another circle of water. Which struck me as strange. What kind of ritual would require both sand and water?

Unconsciously, I had drifted across the breadth of the room and stood before the circle of water as Natasha gestured in extremely complex ways as she seemed to stalk about a large brass hourglass. The little shiver had evolved and my whole body seemed to tremble with the rhythm of her cadence. While I am sure she was aware of my presence, she barely spared me a glance for she seemed totally absorbed in watching the ghostly figures that moved and spoke within the circle. It struck me that there was something strangely familiar about the tableaux that was playing itself out in front of me and then it hit me like lighting from Zeus' hand, she had cast a ritual that allowed her to see into the past. In this case, she was watching the events of last night, of my initiation into Clan Tremere. Why would she do that? She had been there herself and surely remembered all that had occurred. I felt cold watching the figures of myself, the Professor, Natasha and Seth as they went about their predestined actions. I could ever so faintly hear myself replying to the Professor in that ritualistic way and then he poured the contents of the cup into my mouth. I have always found it strange to hear recordings of my voice or watch video tapes of myself saying and doing things, probably because I have never seen myself the way others do. But what came next was something else entirely.

As my spectral self finished drinking the blood from the chalice, a voice or should I say, a multitude of voices rose up out of him. A chorus of masculine voices, blended together, speaking at great volume in a totally unfamiliar language. I could not truly understand what I said at that moment and I definitely did not recall anything so surreal as this scene that could have been edited from a horror film. While I could not understand the words spoken, it evoked in me a sensation akin to that of my strange dreams. My strange outburst did not last long, and then my spectral self collapsed on the floor, exhausted, but conscious. What was going on here, I specifically recalled losing consciousness after drinking the blood from the chalice and yet, my sensed seemed to reveal a different truth. As the temporal recording played itself out, the Professor lifted me up and holding me close spoke to me. As I stood there watching the scene from the outside, I could not hear what my sire said to me, but I did not miss the overly long eye contact or my own dazed expression. I had been dominated. Something ugly like rage stirred itself inside me, the compulsion to stay inside "Old Wyvern Hall" had not been the first time he had compelled me. In that moment, the beast had control of my motor functions and involuntarily I stepped forwards with my hands stretched forward like claws to rend the Professor for stealing my freedom from me.

Distantly, I heard Natasha's scream for me to stop, but it was far too late. As I moved forward in a rage to grab the spectral Professor, I came into contact with the circle of water on the floor just outside Natasha's ritual space. I heard myself scream and then I smelled the stench of my own burning flesh, for inadvertently, I had crossed a ward versus the Kindred. The results were not pretty, my hands, chest and face immediately blistered as if I had been exposed to open flames. And the pain, the pain was like nothing I had ever experienced as a mortal. The moment I took injury, a terrible fear leapt up from some deep recess of my mind and I fled that place for the dark upper reaches of the winding stair. It was as if those parts of me that had been burned by the ward were still on fire, as if I could still feel the ward's searing touch even minutes later. Seth and Natasha found me at the top of the stair, crouching down in a corner hugging my burnt arms close to my chest and screaming still. It was a powerful lesson, that I would never forget.

Seth cursed me for a fool even as Natasha tried to calm me with soothing words. Neither strategy seemed to work. But then Seth hit upon a tactic that did work, literally. I never saw his fists and I would not have had the presence of mind to try to evade his attack if I had detected it. As I slid into the soothing bliss of unconsciousness, I had reason to thank Seth for the first and only time. I did not dream and awoke to a mixture of sensations, pain and pleasure in equal measure. In a detached way, I was sure I had been to this party before. But as full awareness asserted itself, the memory of mistake and the pain of my burns returned fully to me along with the strange disconnected sensation of feeding which sent shudders of ecstasy through my body, making me wish Natasha would lay down with me.

Upon opening my eyes, there was just a moment's disorientation and I realized that I lay on the cold steel table in the cold storage room. An I.V. was inserted into my chest and I traced the plastic tube to two bags of dark fluid that resembled blood. They were feeding me, but in a very unconventional way. I caught the tail-end of a argument between Seth and Natasha. The moment they realized I was awake, they ceased their squabbling and walked over together to gaze down at me. Seth was the first to speak to me: "Well-well, Old Man, you are a fool, but a lucky fool, it could have been worse." As he laughed to himself, he walked out of the room, closing the door upon Natasha and I. Natasha was beautiful as fear and anger warred with each other upon her face. And she said: "For once, I agree with Seth, you are a fool. What were you thinking of entering my ritual space as I cast my working?" I lay there, my body feeding from the bags as I tried to process everything at once. Natasha's scorn and beauty accentuated my body's ecstatic response to blood and the terrible pain inflicted by the ward. I just wanted to lay there gazing at her forever. As she studied my reactions, she let out an unattractive snort and leaned down to look me in the eyes. Next she said: "The curse has already healed all the damage it can without your conscious participation. To heal your more serious burns, you must focus your will upon the Curse of Caine to push the healing process further tonight." When I did not immediately respond, she very rudely ripped the I.V. from my chest and as I gasped at the loss of my blood-source, she repeated herself.

In a effort to comply, I focused my will in the only way I knew how. I took a deep and unnecessary breath and thought about the blood inside my body where it pooled close to my heart and spine. The Professor had already drilled into me the necessity of consciously controlled imagery as a tool in aiding the manipulation of mystical processes and forces. As Natasha spoke, I focused on her words rather than her intoxicating presence and imagined the blood flowing through the arteries, veins, and capillaries on its way to the sites of injury. As the exercise took hold of me, the room fell away and my only awareness was of my body. It was as if, I as a vampire were innately equipped with electromagnetic resonance imaging. I could sense the damaged areas of my body and what they should look like as opposed to when they were damaged and I just made the millions of tiny blood cells repair the damaged tissues. Time stretched out into infinity and flickered past at light-speed and then I opened my eyes as the last of the pain vanished with an equally vast wave of itching that made me want to rip my own skin off. But I just willed my body to remain utterly still as the healing process completed itself. Even as I heard Natasha's involuntary intake of breath, I knew why she was surprised. I had healed myself, completely.

As I sat up on my elbows and then swung my legs over the edge of the table, the last of my burnt skin was turning pink and taking on my normal sallow complexion. No trace of the burns remained, not even scars and as she watched it happen, she spoke to me in her uncertainty. "How are you doing that? You have healed all your burns completely!?!" Then when I said nothing in response, she looked me right in the eye and demanded I tell her how I did such a thing the very first time. Her compulsion was was not subtle, but I did not resist it either. "I am not sure exactly how I did it, I just followed your suggestion, but it was as if I had done it a thousand times before." Every word spoken was the truth and she knew it. She threw my clothes at me harder than was necessary, but I could tell her anger was gone, it had been replaced by an entirely different emotion. As she left the room without looking at me again, I realized what that emotion was...fear."

I Stood there naked in the cold-storage room, feeling cold inside, but not from the temperature as I had forgotten all about it. But rather from Natasha's reaction to my success at healing myself. Had not that been the exercise she wished me to complete successfully? Intrinsically, however, I realized she had never expected me to succeed fully the first time. Why? Did not all vampires innately know how to heal themselves of all injury, folklore suggest that was why they were so hard to kill. I had missed something critical in our last conversation and I knew I needed to talk to Natasha again to understand what that thing had been. However, I could see she would need time for her fear of me to fade, whatever its source, it had been all too real and going to her now would only make matters worse. That left me with a growing familiar sensation, the hunger for blood was upon me again and if anything, it was worse than when I awoke this evening. I polished off the remnants in the blood-bags that had been left for me, but that wasn't nearly enough to satisfy this new thirst.

After disposing of the blood-bags in the trash, I realized that I was still naked, so I dressed on my way to the door out into the basement. It never crossed my mind to go to Seth for aid with Natasha or in satisfying my thirst. Between his native arrogance, caustic response to everything I did and the little voice screaming at me not to trust him with this new information, I set upon a entirely different course of action.

I was barely dressed as I emerged into what felt like the tropical warmth of the basement. In reality, it was probably quite a bit colder down in the musty old basement than upstairs or outside where summer and subtropical heat held sway. I noted with curiosity that my new clothes were completely undamaged. The ward had destroyed my flesh as if by fire, but the expensive cloth showed no signs of being exposed to either extreme heat or a caustic substance. It was something worth noting and happened to give me an idea. So I went upstairs looking for the household servants. To my surprise, all were locked in their rooms tonight, all save the security guards that protected the front door and fire-exit. Was I the reason for that? Was it my imagination or what I getting paranoid? I concluded that the Professor or Seth or Natasha had ordered all of them to stay in their rooms tonight for their own protection, from me. What did they think I was going to do, exsanguinate the household staff? As I thought back to earlier tonight, I realized that was exactly what they thought I would do. I was a addict now, my drug of choice was blood and I would be a addict for the rest of my life. It was an emotional moment for me. But the "thirst" was growing on me again and I instinctively knew I could not tarry if I did not want to add murder to my list of tonight's mistakes.

I found the fire-exit guard reading a fantasy fiction series I had never heard of. Fire and Ice, whatever. As I approached his security booth, of all too modern construction, with a inch of Plexiglas between us. I smiled and nodded to him. He did not smile, but he nodded back and he did not avert his gaze as he looked at me, thankfully. As our gazes locked, I focused hard on his eyes and willed him to do my bidding. "Leave the security booth." I stressed the word "leave" and to my shock he did as commanded. As he stepped out of the booth, I was feeling giddy with success and failed to anticipate the danger my thirst represent for this guard's life. When I stepped closer to him, I could hear the steady throb of his heart, its rhythm erotic and hypnotic. Worse still was the smell of his blood, just below the surface of his skin, warm with a human heat as it rushed here and there through his veins, its metallic scent salty in a way that just about triggered a bestial response from me. I knew he sensed his danger as I felt my fangs descending, but as he reached for one of his weapons I caught his eye again and command him to stop. Once again he complied, but I could sense resistance starting to build in him as he tried instinctively to avert his gaze. Fearing that I might kill him before either Seth or Natasha could stop me, I settled for the direct approach.

"You know what I am, yes?" Without looking at me, he nodded. And suddenly I could smell his fear, an acrid scent that somehow made the moment almost unbearably erotic. I was running out of time and resistance to my own animal instincts, so I said: "I am so thirsty, and rather than try to feed upon you my friend, I need your help getting into the blood stores found in the cold-storage room. Will you help me?" His surprise was palpable as he readily agreed to help me. I know we were both relieved, but neither of us was out of the woods yet, so to speak. I brushed past him, leading the way to the cold storage room, in part to put him at ease and for myself, to avoid his alluring scent.

When we entered the cold-storage room, I half expected Seth or Natasha to be there to admonish me against raiding the blood stores, but the room was empty. The guard whose name was Sean Hunt, I almost had to laugh at the irony there. Did not hesitate or wait for further instructions, he opened the first storage cabinet and pulled out a half-dozen bags and tossed them down on the table between us. He wisely stepped back as I snatched up the first bag and tore into it like a lion ripping into a gazelle on the African savanna. I feasted and when I once again became fully aware, he was gone. But he had thoughtfully emptied a couple more cabinets for me. I did not stop feeding until I had emptied more than a dozen blood-bags. As I sat there on the freezing floor, blood smeared on my new clothes, on my hands, my face and on the floor where I had dripped -- I began to laugh uncontrollably. I was a messy eater. But as hysteria started to take hold of me, another thought immediately sobered me, this could have turned out entirely differently, two or three of the household staff could be dead right now. The upside was that I had resisted my urge to feed long enough to compel the guard's assistance in bypassing the wards versus Kindred. The downside was even more thought provoking, neither Natasha, nor Seth had anticipated this most obvious result of my mistake downstairs. An older vampire would have seen this coming and been prepared, neither of them had experienced babysitting a neonate before. As illogical as it might seem, I was a better judge of how to conduct myself in dealing with my fledgling instincts than either of them. Why was that? Was it tied to my innate understanding of how to heal myself of even grievous injuries? How could I know these things when I had been undead for all of two days? Questions that would haunt me for years to come.

Of course, I cleaned up my mess, disposed of all the evidence and got washed up. Then made my way to the main sanctum. I found a uncommunicative Natasha cleaning up her ritual space. Remembering an incident from you mortal youth, my grandfather was a stoic old man and if asked would say he needed and wanted no help in whatever endeavor he happened to be working upon at that moment. At first I had taken him at his word and gone off to do my own thing, until one of the women of my family explained it to me. Never ask, she had said: "Just walk up and start doing something, your grandfather will be pleased and if you do something wrong then he will correct you." For my part, I never did like this method, but I found that it did in fact work, especially with those individuals who thought of themselves as particularly capable. Natasha and Seth, I was to find belonged to this same group of strong willed individuals, the difference being that Seth would readily command me to aid him as a matter of course, whereas Natasha wanted me to volunteer my assistance. So, as she was sweeping up the sand, I made a loud approach and stated that I would take care of all the remaining sand if she would give me the specifics of its disposal. Initially she was terse, but warmed up fairly quickly. I in turn familiarized myself with all the duties of a Apprentice of the First Circle, obviously Natasha had been one decades ago and knew the ropes, so I asked for instruction got my start as an immortal custodian.

The remainder of the night went smoothly enough, discounting Seth's constant barbs. I did not know it then, but in this regard, he would be as constant as the Northern Star. The next evening was a different matter entirely, as Seth was the first to notice and investigate the number of missing blood-bags, which he promptly brought to Natasha's attention. After a brief interrogation, I confessed and was duly punished with more work. While Seth took great pleasure from my suffering, it was the servants that seemed most put out by the situation. You see, I was taking away all their work and house's majordomo felt this was an unacceptable situation, which he presented to Natasha forthwith. In a manner rather unlike her, Natasha brusquely told him to deal with it and not interfere again, offering a nonspecific threat as motivation. He was angry and left their meeting, which I had spied upon while cleaning carpets. Its true what they say about servants being invisible, everyone except Seth ignored me, in time even the servants began to do so.

In imitation of the damned of Tartarus, I was forced to repeat my nightly labors with minimal variation or the vain hope of cessation. Ever so slowly, the long dark hours added up to nights, which in turn piled up into nocturnal weeks and the weeks seem to merge becoming long months of darkness. With constant mind numbing labor to be done, my duties as janitor and repairman kept me busy without any real sense of achievement. However, I became all too familiar with the layout of "Old Wyvern Hall." Compelled as I was, I could not really imagine what the Hall looked like from without, but its gloomy and austere interior became the whole of my world.

The foundation of "Old Wyvern Hall" was laid during the winter solstice of 1887. Officially the hall was meant to serve as the original dormitory to one of Australia's first colleges. In reality, the Tremere Clan of vampires used the excuse of its creation to establish a chantry in Melbourne. It took three years of constant construction to finally realized its regent's vision. But in 1890, the newly minted "Wyvern Hall" opened its doors to the young men of Australia who did not necessarily reside in the fast growing metropolis of Melbourne or whose homes lay far away in the vast reaches of the Outback. Little did the Methodist founders of Queen's College realize that they had invited a monster to teach their young men and that their sons slept within the very walls of that monster's sanctum. While the original first class of 1889 scarcely required a dormitory of such magnitude, as there were only twenty-four students, Melbourne was in the grip of a population explosion and the college's founders believed they were acting with foresight when in reality they were simply following Professor Charles Cipher's hypnotic suggestions. The period of 1897 to 1920 saw almost daily expansion of the college complex. By the "Roaring Twenties", Wyvern Hall had gained its title of "old" and could scarcely house the male student body. Other dormitories were constructed and it was believed that "Old Wyvern Hall" was razed to make room for a number of other important campus buildings. Somehow the faculty and students of Queen's College simply "forgot" that the Hall was still there. While references to the Hall still remained in countless college ledgers, old photographs and the original blueprint for the campus, it simply vanished from the awareness of the campus residents. Over time, a grove of trees grew up around the chantry, providing shade from the hot Australian sun and screening it from public view. Yet some other otherworldly mechanism must have come into play for a three story Jacobean mansion built of quarried gold limestone and containing a hundred rooms to simply vanish and remain unseen decade after decade.

One of my first big "projects" took me to the Hall's dusty and cluttered, rough timbered attic. After my catastrophic interruption of Natasha's "Past Watch" ritual, she give me the unpleasant and herculean task of cleaning out the attic, of sorting through the last hundred years worth of old clothing, antique furniture, memorabilia, outdated gadgets and trash. While I had sheepishly accepted my punishment, I was astounded at the sheer clutter I found with my first visit to the upper reaches of the Hall. The attic was two hundred feet long, about forty feet wide, with a deceptively low ceiling space at just twelve feet and every inch of space seemed to be filled. I took a flashlight the first time and in the windowless gloom, the attic seemed far more like a long low dusty wooden cave.

At first glance, the jumble was without reason or rhyme, but as I began to explore by climbing over furnishings and random boxes or luggage in successive waves, I began to see that there was a kind of mad order to the layers of forgotten items left to gather dust over the last century. The farthest reaches of the attic from the hidden stair that led up from a third floor bedroom were where the oldest items had been initially stored. Items from the late nineteenth century...

Over the coming nights I explored every room in "Old Wyvern Hall." And as the nights became weeks and the weeks turned in months, I learned about the Hall's other architectural features. Its secret rooms, similar to the priest-holes of the counter-reformation, and the hidden passages that allowed the Tremere to move from floor to floor without ever being seen. The rooms below the Hall constituted the main sanctum with its great dome, seven Roman arches, and labyrinth inlaid floor. Off of the Great Sanctum lays six other rooms reached through their respective archways, one of which was the alchemical laboratory where Seth carried out his most dangerous experiments. Another was the Mystic Vault that contain dangerous or unpredictable enchanted items, and about this room and its contents I was especially curious, but the turn-or-the-twentieth-century bank vault of which it consisted, along with a long list of wards, discourage my interest somewhat. There was also a scrying room, where Natasha did much of her work in the area of divination and dream magic. Of course the Professor had his own personal laboratory where he carried out his own secretive experiments, and although I was occasionally asked to enter and clean up a mess, he never told me what he was working on and I was not foolish enough to ask. Despite this, on certain occasions I would pass the door to the private lab and through the door I would feel that old shiver and I knew that he was tinkering with temporal magic, a truth I could neither confess nor discuss with the other apprentices. The last two rooms were fairly practical in nature, if a touch grim in their intended purposes. One of the rooms was meant to detain certain mortals or animals used for specific rituals or in case a difficult mortal managed to breach the Hall's elaborate security and the other was a vault that served as the panic-room of "Old Wyvern Hall."

Five Years of Indentured Servitude

The Professor did indeed return after the turn of the new year, although it was near the end of January. Unfortunately, he was spot on about Seth and how he would respond to my presence in the chantry. It was almost classical sibling rivalry, except that by the time I was Embraced he was eighty-two years old and had been a vampire for fifty-seven of them. Still, the month the Professor was gone to Vienna was easily the worst month of my unlife. The moment the Professor and Dural left for the airport, he came to my room and demanded I accompany him, which I did. We went directly to the sanctum below "Old Wyvern Hall", there we passed through the Vault of Sevens as I called it, through another archway into a hall I had yet to visit. The hall was about fifty feet long and only illuminated at the end, before the thick metallic double doors which were thickly inscribed with arcane symbols that I wasn't prepared to decipher.

Seth stood before the doors with purpose and began to chant in Latin while gesturing in strange ways with his hands. "This is the laboratory where the Professor, Natsha and I do our research. Watch what I am doing carefully, its called a passport, as in a mystical phrase, gesture or both that will allow you to bypass mystical effects like wards or curses. You need to learn how to utilize the passport if you are going to get started on your chores...'boy'." If his terminology hadn't been enough, his tone of superiority said it all. There would be no physical hazing, the Professor would never permit that, but Seth was allowed to use me as menial labor to his heart's content and no one would interfere provided it was something legitimate. And over the next month, he found a backlog of legitimate 'chores' that he needed completed, including a complete scouring of his personal chambers, which were far larger and more lavish than my own.

At first, I thought it was just a form of hazing, but nights of unremunerated drudgery turned into benighted months of the same, then years of it. The best way to describe those long, dark, monotonous years is for you to image an endless, light-less, groundhog day. I was an indentured servant in all but name. Over the next five years, my time was taken up with either study or apprentice-work, a delicate phrase for any disgusting, menial or mind-numbing chore the Professor, Natasha or Seth needed doing. For five years, I never stepped outside the walls of "Old Wyvern Hall", long after the Professor's mental command had faded, I was forbidden to go outside for any reason on pain of more drudgery. Learning the mystical secrets of the universe was to come at the price of heavy labor. In numerous books, I had read that in many chantries there were creatures called gargoyles who did all the heavy lifting, if not, sometimes there were other types of animations like the Golem which came in a variety of forms for the same purpose. But I was to learn that it was a tried and true tradition handed down through the hallowed centuries from before House Tremere had become a clan of vampires, that apprentices paid for their education with menial labor. This fact in itself wasn't so bad, after all, it made a kind of sense. It was tangible proof that the initiate was serious about staying the course and dedicated to whatever tasks were set before him or her by those who held the sacred knowledge to dispense as they saw fit.

What bothered me most was that Seth took such pleasure in using me as his personal serf, for him I cleaned beakers, scrubbed the scorch marks off the marble of the casting chamber, disposed of dead animals and mortals, you name it. If he could have learned to defecate again, he would have done so just to force me to empty his chamber pot for him. I cannot lie, after a month, I hated him. After a year, I considered suicide by sunlight, but it was the Professor and Natasha who convinced me otherwise. She showed me compassion, which was in rare supply in "Old Wyvern Hall." And, in the Professor's case he was just too cold and intellectual to offer anything like emotional comfort, but where his humanity failed, he understood the concept of risk and reward. So every so often I was given a free night, I still couldn't leave the chantry, but my time became my own and Seth would have to wait until the following night to punish me with more labor. On those rare, free nights, I would watch television, read newspapers or surf the web, for while I was an ageless servant of nocturnal blood magicians, time was passing and the world outside was changing.

My adjustment to unlife went smoother than most, for I did not seem inclined to make all the little mistakes that fledglings do, like trying to eat food, testing the effects of sunlight/fire and or binging on blood. The last was perhaps the most difficult, for as a mortal, I had definitely enjoyed eating a little too much. However, for the first five years I fed exclusively from blood-bags, the taste of cold blood saturated with anticoagulants made over-feeding highly unappetizing. But I was pleased to discover a new-found slimness, likely do to the atrophy of my vestigial internal organs. And all the extra physical labor was bringing out the definition in my musculature, ironically, it was Seth who unwittingly helped me in this department.

On one of my free nights, I was chatting with Natasha and she was complimenting my physique. He must have been passing her room, randomly of course, when he heard her comment. A moment later, he leaned against the door-frame, as an apprentice of lower station he needed to ask permission to enter he chambers, while he could enter my chambers at will. Since the door was open and he was not about to ask Natasha's permission for anything, he leaned there and derided every compliment she had just offered. As he did so, he pulled off his wife-beater and barred his magnificent chest for both of us to admire. While I did indeed hate Seth to the core of my being, it did not stop me from admitting he had a nearly perfect body.

Its not that I find men appealing, but rather that I can appreciate the sheer hard work and effort that must have gone into developing a superb physique. As he was deriding me in a lecturing fashion, Natasha pointed out that he had not always possessed a perfect form, as a mortal he had been good looking and fit, but not perfect. For a moment he was pole-axed by her commentary, I took that moment to smile, not to further embarrass him, but just to see his expression. But he took it a entirely different way, seeing the need to prove himself, he lectured me on my foolish assumption that the vampiric body was anything like the human body, it wasn't the labor that built undead muscle, at least not labor alone, but rather the expenditure of blood into the correct muscle groups while performing said labor. He explained to me in excruciating detail how I was wasting blood by using it to accomplish heavier labors, without gaining the benefit of expending it into the specific muscle groups correctly.

Like wisdom freed from the rotting corpse of a dead Greek philosopher, or the Greco-Roman tradition of consulting ventriloquists as interrogators of the dead, I gleaned a bit of gold from the night soil of Seth's lecture. While I had not been blessed with the angular features needed to possess the face of Adonis, the long years of surfing necessary to be so tan, I could have a physique as good as Seth's with the proper study of anatomy and the micro-infusions of blood focused upon the specific muscle groups necessary to look like Hercules. Later, much later, I was to discover that this same technique could be used to infuse another set of masculine muscle groups and that constant application of this method led to a permanent increase in size as well...the phallusy of magic.

Still, it was a most valuable lesson, the realization that in unlife there are no friends or enemies, just teachers - a lesson well worth what I paid for it, many times over.

Perhaps this apprentice thing was not a complete crock. As the years progressed, the Professor steadily piled up the workload in mundane academics, but he did not stop there. He tested my psychic potential, discovering that in addition to the usual powers of Auspex, that I possessed the raw ability of mystical awareness. This talent was rare outside Clan Tremere and uncommon even within its ranks, but the Professor saw potential in it and thus compelled me to practice it by handling a vast assortment of mystical seeming items, honing my senses towards these things. In time, I became quite adept at picking out items of a supernatural character and distinguishing them from the mystical seeming, but ultimately mundane objects.

When I first came to “Old Wyvern Hall” my memory was about on par with your average American, after all, in the modern world why would one need to commit anything like an entire book to memory? However, Clan Tremere had strong ties to Hermes Trimegestus (Thrice Great Hermes), the Greco-Roman name for Thoth, the Egyptian god of scholarship and magic, via the ancient Hermetic orders of the dark medieval age. As a former history student, I had read about the Sack of the Library of Alexandria and that many of the librarians had committed more than one book to memory and were able to recreate them in total because of this skill. Thus, the Method Loci and Hermetic philosophy were both born in or around ancient Alexandria and the mages of the later Order of Hermes often committed entire volumes of rare occult lore to memory via this method. The method itself was pretty simplistic if a little unusual. The essential idea behind the Method Loci, is that the practitioner must pair a place (imagined or real) with an idea, at first simple ideas are best, but in time entire books could be added to the user's memory palace. The Professor was quite taken with the old Order of Hermes and its practices and put me through constant memory exercises, slowly building up my capacity until I could memorize pages of text at a single sitting. The benefits of this constant practice would prove quite useful and sped up the process of study, retention and interpretation of the most ancient works.

I was to find that the Professor was equally serious about his commandment to me to study Turkish to further the deception surrounding my past. I could only speak a few phrases by the time he returned from that trip in late 2012 to Vienna. At odd moments he would quiz me on my vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar; he went so far as to bring in native tutors with which I could practice, though never when Natasha or Seth were around. One night, about a year into my studies, I was working my way through a Turkish children's book in the library when I noticed him looking through some volumes of ancient Latin. I decided to gather my courage and ask the one question that had plagued me for months: “Why Professor, must I, pretend to be of Turkish ancestry and speak their language?” Unfortunately, at the time, the Professor demanded that I phrase all questions to him in Turkish; it was his way of speeding my command of the language, that in retrospect, I believe worked.

Curiously, I was to realize, the Professor spoke no more Turkish than I originally and he had to struggle to make himself understood. “Czere, you were born special. Think back to when we first met. You know its true. Natasha and Seth are older, more skilled and talented members of the clan than you. But in a way, you were born of magic. Its a fire that lights your way, but it can burn you if you handle it wrong. No other Tremere, but I can accept you for what you are. Do not ask me about this again, ever...”

When I was able to workout the Professor's reply, for it was already of a more advanced level of Turkish than my own elementary capacity, I was chilled. Every language has its nuances, in Turkish, the Professor's reply seemed to hint that first meeting with him in Denver had been the result of dark magic. Of course, I understood the implicit threat behind his directive to never ask about the subject again, but that did not erase my curiosity, rather it inflamed it. However, all my further investigations into that subject would require the utmost caution and a high level of subterfuge.

Despite that one instance, I was encouraged to pursue any and all linguistic interests, but only if I was dedicated to studying them at a conversational capacity. The Professor was especially critical of my English, he loathed my American pronunciation and constantly corrected me, expecting only the Queen's English from me. I often wondered what queen that might be? How old was the Professor, he had never given even a hint. In any case, as I studied other languages: German (a familial interest), Greek and Latin of the ancient variety and of course modern Turkish, my capacity with new languages improved immensely. Yet, the Professor was never satisfied and always demanded greater proficiency.

In other areas, I was drilled on the history of the House and then Clan Tremere, as well as the history and lore surrounding mortal mages of the Hermetic Orders. In tandem with these subjects the Professor constantly lectured me on the limitless manifestations of the occult: mythology, rites and rituals, curses, demons, ghosts, werewolves, the fae and most importantly, the arcane principles behind the workings of Thaumaturgy.

I was told to learn as much about the mundane sciences and after five years, I had the equivalent of a Bachelors degree in the subject. I was given leave to study other subjects as well and I devoted myself, for aforementioned reasons, to studying medicine, specifically anatomy.

It was near the end of my fifth year after the Embrace, that my studies in Thaumaturgy were initiated. Honestly, I had come to the conclusion that the Professor had written me off as a true apprentice and that I would spend the rest of eternity, or as much of it as I was lucky enough to get, as a highly educated house servant. What were they called in the world of Harry Potter, a Squib?

Welcome to the Second Circle

Five years had passed, but for the undead the passage of time is a far different thing than it is for the living. For mortals, five years is enough time to grow from childhood to young adult, or to master a degree, build a romantic relationship or create a career. From the mortal point of view, time passes quickly, minutes blend into hours, and hours into days and then months into years. Humans trapped in the brevity of a limited lifespan gloss over little details, often forgetting the specifics of day-to-day life in their quest to reach specific goals and it is this glossing over of minutia that allows them to live their lives, forget past wrongs, move on, grow and eventually die with some sense of the finality of mortal existence.

For the Kindred, memory of past events and the narrative of consciousness is perceived of as one long infinite moment only divided by recurring lapses of consciousness, that register the passage of an entire day as nothing more than a barely remembered hallucination. In the mind of the unliving, that first night upon which they were cursed and failed to die, is the same night in which they dwell years or even decades later. An insult offered centuries ago is still fresh in the thoughts of the vampire, past successes and failures hold ever present sentiment for the Children of Caine, because the singular night of undeath possesses countless hours. While the past merges almost seamlessly with the present, the future seems to rush forward at a steadily advancing pace like a roller-coaster slowly building speed but never slowing; this point of view creates a unconscious genetic fear of sudden changes that might herald the final hour of the endless night which is the sum total of undead experience.

And so it was, on that long-ago summer night in December, in the still humid air of Old Wyvern Hall's attic, upon my habitual perch before the attic's small double casement window, I ruminated upon these recently realized truths. An old vacuum-tube radio left behind by some unnamed apprentice from in the 1930s and tuned into a local Melbourne music station poured out the latest songs by bands whose names I barely recognized. The singer's soft baritone lulled me into the old hypnotic habit of reading to the beat. The attic was dark except for those bars of light generated by the sodium vapor bulbs illuminating the campus green far below. In that queer chemical light, I perused the first book of Herodotus' nine volume 'Histories' titled 'Clio', named thus to honor the muse of history.

That particular night, the muse of history was with me as I tried to work my way through the book of Clio. My mind kept returning to the events or lack thereof of the last five years while before my eyes Io, her descendant Europa and the witch Medea were abducted by the Persians and subsequently raped. According to Herodotus, these three crimes, it part or in whole led the Trojan prince Paris to seduces the Spartan queen Helen and elopes with her, thus triggering the Trojan War and framing Herodotus' historical account of the struggles between the Achaemenid Empire and the Greek city-states in the 5th century BC.

Perhaps my inability to concentrate was a function of my profound boredom, I had devoted five years of my existence to academic pursuits and while I was unquestionably educated in both the modern and classical sense, I couldn't celebrate my successes. In Clan Tremere and specifically in Old Wyvern Hall, success in any endeavor simply earned one the right to another title, deeper courses of study and progressively more complicated tasks.

When I was young, I had always enjoyed social gatherings and intoxication, the two always seemed to conjure a heightened sense of camaraderie and filled me with a sense of family or community, later I came to understand on an emotional level that intoxication provided a euphoric unity with the divine. But the Bacchic rites had been denied to me, the Hermetic ideal did not allow for such things, the will to power, study and constant discipline were the touchstones of that oh so dry philosophy. Perhaps that is why I failed to obtain an academic degree in my mortal lifetime.

As my mind wandered over all of these things and I continued to read, a strange juxtaposition occurred in which I was like Io, Europa or Medea, abducted from my mortal life and raped by the Professor. The Embrace had stolen something essential, elemental, and ephemeral from me that I could not define. The subconscious grief of that unnameable loss left me bereft and in the vacuum created by its absence my attention lay with those people close to hand, the Professor, Natasha and Seth.

In so many ways the Professor was the father figure I had always needed, he was not particularly kind, although on a rare few occasions he did show me unexpected kindnesses, rather he provided two important things in a father, the first being a strong role model and secondly, a dedicated task master who never let me slacken in my pursuits. In some ways, I loved the Professor for saving me from a early death and giving me immortality, two debts not easily repaid. But any attempt to form a emotional relationship with the Professor was doomed to failure as he was a distant figure who shared not the slightest of his thoughts or feelings with his apprentices.

Natasha was another matter entirely, what had begun as little more than a crush had grown into unrequited love. It was a pattern to the few romantic experiences of my existence, Freud would have said this was in part due to a poor relationship with my mother, a difficult woman whose life had contained more than her share of personal tragedies. Or perhaps is was due to a stunted childhood and a lack of early social experiences. Either way, Natasha was aware of my feelings, and alternatingly discouraged them as inappropriate between colleagues of different stations and subtly encouraging it because it created a pseudo-sexual rivalry between Seth and I for Natasha's attention. That Natasha was my only friend in a very small chantry must have played its part as well. But I believe our friendship was something of real importance to her and in those times when she struggled emotionally with her own demons, my attentions granted her a sense of being fought for, of being desired, of being a woman.

In the five years following my Embrace, Seth gave me no end of reasons to hate him. Ironically, I don't think Seth hated me so much he was divided in how he felt about me. As the chantry's newest apprentice, my arrival signaled a long overdue rise in Seth's status, at least in Seth's mind. My presence also allowed him to finally divest himself of all those onerous chores that the Professor and Natasha were able to foist off on him. I was the new beast of burden and that was good, but as the newest apprentice and the Professor's latest childe, I was also taking the Professor's attention away from Seth. In time, I believe Seth came to see this as a double edged blade. On the one hand it allowed him more opportunity to pursue his own research and more free time in which to court Natasha. The downsides, largely the product of Seth's narcissistic personality, lay in that I was 'stealing' the Professor's sacred tutelage and that Seth's extra research time was having positive results that the Professor would then appropriate for his own uses, thus blunting Seth's ambition. In the end, Seth's ego would not allow him to see me as a true opponent, I was just the 'hired help', lower in many senses than Dural as the chantry's chief ghoul and beneath contempt.

For five years that was the dysfunctional state of the chantry's relationships and despite its less than ideal circumstances, it was a safe and stable arrangement. But then, a turning point was reached. It is hard to say exactly when it came upon us all with any real certainty, but I believe it came with the approach of summer.

It had been warm wet spring, monsoon season in Melbourne and the constant downpour darkened moods, shortening tempers and confining all of us to Old Wyvern Hall. The weather being what it was, the students were all cooped up in their dorm rooms and that made hunting difficult for the Professor, Natasha and Seth. Thus we were all raiding the cold storage room for meals and while I fed exclusively on the cold vitae from the chantry's blood bank, the others obviously despised feeding in this manner and that did not help the situation any.

The Professor took the opportunity to intensify my studies in arcane principles and thus I found myself in his study undergoing rigorous examination upon the four major thaumaturgical principles: blood, will, knowledge and identity. The test lasted a week, the first night began reasonably enough with the principle of blood, which is in short the power source for thaumaturgic workings. The second night was spent on the principle of will, the essence of which is just that no mystical working can function without the presence of intent on the thaumaturge's part. On the third night, the Professor grilled me on the principle of knowledge which is the means by which a blood magician shapes a sending, this is because magical energy like all natural forces seeks the simplest course and without the proper manipulation it can go awry with devastating consequences. Night number four was spent in exhaustive testing on the principle of identity, the core concept of which is that all things have a unique essence which can be used to target the effects of blood magic.

When I had exhaustively recited all that I knew of these principles, the Professor moved onto the lesser principles and their application: sympathy, inherency, and contagion. The major principles are axioms used to define the creation of thaumaturgical works, both paths and rituals, the four principles are the underlying foundation of thaumaturgy. While the lesser principles are used as a framework which upholds all blood magic.

It is worth noting that all the lesser principles are more specialized functions of the major principle of identity. The fifth night covered the lesser principle of sympathy which simply states that once something is a part of something, it is always part of that thing. Interestingly enough, this can also mean that items have have emotional importance and have regular contact with a subject take on that individual's identity and can serve as a tangential means of targeting a subject. On the sixth night the Professor pressed me on the lesser principle of contagion. A variation on the use of proximity in thaumaturgical paths, contagion serves to communicate the sending to a subject through contact, seemingly 'infecting' the victim. It is primarily used in creating arcane traps and can be used to refine triggering conditions in such a way as to exclude certain individuals from a specific casting like a ward. And while rare, the principle can be used in reverse to attune certain workings to trigger for a single individual or a small group.

On the seventh and final night of this exhaustive oral test, I was pressed to explore all the permutations of the lesser principle of inherency. Unlike the other two lesser principles, inherency is not a method of directing a blood magic sending, but rather uses the essence of a given ritual's components to describe the qualities those ingredients possess to create the desired effect and focuses it through the thaumaturge's will.

The conclusion of the week long thaumaturgic test was strangely anticlimactic. The rain finally ceased, with its end the students of Melbourne University were either attending various beach party barbecues or hitting the city's club scene. As such, both Natasha and Seth had left Old Wyvern Hall and were presumably out for the night. The test had begun on a Saturday night and had ended at almost dawn on the following Friday morning. That night after I arose, the Professor sent one of the acolytes, a potential apprentice, a young woman with strawberry-blond hair and eyes the color of jade to the attic to ask me to attend the Professor in his study on the second floor. I showered, dressed in my university uniform and descended two floors via the servant's stair.

Four years before, after completing the Herculean task of cleaning up the attic, sorting a century of other people's cast offs and furniture, I took one wing of the attic as my residence. When I had initially made the request, the Professor had seemed dubious about granting an apprentice so much space, from his point of view it was a luxury that apprentices had to earn. But after a night of reflection, he changed his mind and granted me permission to move. Of course, Seth, ever jealous, was the one to complain for now I had far more space than he had. The Professor in his pragmatic way acknowledged the complaint and asked Seth when he would be moving into the attic? Seth, of course did not want to move out of his luxury apartments on the second floor, he just did not think it proper that a lowly apprentice of the first circle should be given so much space. Once again the Professor pointed out the lack of amenities to found in the attic, and effort that would be required to make it comfortable, and whether Seth was going to take the attic as was his privileged? Seth in a huff, declined and I was allowed a wing of the attic, but I was also made responsible for it upkeep in perpetuity.

The study was a large room on the second floor, it was windowless and near the center of the building. The only obvious entrance was single Tudor style arch door, the wood was almost black from numerous applications of stain and it was varnished to fine sheen. It possessed eight panels depicting scenes from mythology, arcane symbols of protection and obfuscation were deeply carved into the top and bottom rail, along the vertical and horizontal muntin and completely around the door sills and across the threshold. I could not imagine why the professor would need a mystically hidden and warded door, but I knew better than to ask. The door nob was a beautifully polished piece with the sigil of Clan Tremere deeply etched into it. Indeed, the lock-plate was also inscribed with a shield over the key-hole, curiouser and curiouser. Of course, I had seen all this the first time I entered the Professor's study eight nights ago.

Not a sliver of light betrayed the door's location and there was no movement of air before it, nor did vibrations giving away the presence of someone walking or working within. As I approached the door, I felt a strange vibration deep down in my bones and it seemed as if the mythological figures of the door panels were looking directly at me. And for the eighth time, as I reached for the door-nob, the door just opened all by itself, as if it were the door that were expecting me. Perhaps it was, after all.

Just as it had been the previous seven nights, the room was immaculately neat and tidy as if the Hall's servants spent time in here everyday. But I knew from having walked the corridors of Old Wyvern Hall for one thousand, eight hundred and twenty-five nights, that simply was not the case. The servants never went near that door and most did not even know it was there.

I hesitated to enter until I was bade do so. Candle light from a trio of chandeliers illuminated the room in a rosy-gold light whose flickering lent the room an otherworldly air and granted the Professor a almost human coloration. The room was rectangular, thirty feet deep, sixty feet wide and nearly every inch of wall space is covered in beautiful bookshelves of dark mahogany. But those goreous shelves held more than books, there were an abundance of curiosities and most numerous of all were the clocks – antique clocks from all over the world all ticking away in perfect synchronization. The only space not covered by bookcases were the entrance, a mirror opposite it, a fabulous replica of the Antikythera mechanism crafted from brass and crystal plates situated upon an ornate stand in the middle of the east wall and the Professor's 18th century Abraham Roentgen writing desk to the west.

The door opened in the middle of the south wall and directly opposite it, hanging upon the wall is a antique Italian glass mirror resting in a grotesque rococo black walnut frame. Before it stands the Professor in a black silk robe sewn with thread of gold in arcane patterns about the sleeves and collar. At his nod, I enter as he removes the ritual robe and sets aside implements recently used in casting, placing them into match cabinet resting just below the mirror.

Once more he is dressed in his usual tailored double breasted suit of navy blue, simple but elegant. I realize again how strange it is for him to wear horn-rimmed glasses when he has not the slightest need of them, a pure affectation. That is when he notices my interest in the mirror. “The Eldritch Glass, it has a long bloody history, I chased it for many years before I found it in an auction house in North America. In many ways, the glass and I have moved through history together, its fitting that it should now hang in my study, but I wouldn't spend too much time looking into it, you might not like what you see.” As usual, the my sire and teacher was correct, however I am not at all sure which of us is more unsettled, the Glass or I. Each of the previous seven times I entered this room, the mirror revealed a different version of my face and form. Was it mocking me? Testing me? Or was it in its own special way offering some kind of sick praise?

I drew breath to speak. “Its a Spontaneous Talisman is it not?” The Professor stares hard at me for several minutes, and then when I think I am about to be scolded, he smiles his cold smile and says: “Czere, the bestiaries are much too advanced for an apprentice of the first circle. How did you come to study the Folio of Gideon Nils? Did Natasha let you look at it when she check it out of the restricted section? No? Ah, perhaps Seth left the folio in the library again?”

I shook my head. “No Professor, I found a hand written copy with illustrations in the attic when I cleaned it out five years ago.” I could not tell if he was angry or what emotion if any he might have been feeling. With barely a perceptible inclination of his head and I realize that I am neither in trouble, nor required to give up the treasured folio.

“Czere, as a apprentice of the first circle, you cannot have access to any bestiaries. However, as you passed your oral examinations this week, I am promoting you to the second circle. Let me be clear from this point forward, should you find any other arcane items, grimoires, reference works or other occult miscellanea in the course of your duties, I expect you to present them to myself or Nastasha immediately. This is as much for our protection as it is for yours, these items may seem harmless but they can be treacherous if mishandled. Am I understood?”

I offered my meekest ascent and the Professor presented me with a thick book bound in red leather, my test result from the oral exam. “Czere, I will present your results to my my Lord this week and you should expect to undergo the ceremony of investiture before the winter solstice. As I have other matters to attend to, you will excuse me and let yourself out and take the remainder of the night to do as you will. I expect you to return to your regular schedule of duties tomorrow night. Good night." And without further ado, he sat down behind his desk and began leafing through a thick stack of notes. I offered a murmured “Good Night” in return and moved to the exit. Just as I was about to leave, from the corner of my eye, I noticed the mirror reflecting something different yet again, the image reflected there was of a younger appearing version of myself in a late 19th century suit and glasses. I had not needed glasses since my Embrace and why would the mirror display me in retro-style clothing. Yet the mirror's trickery was far from finished, for as I continued to gaze into it, I noticed that my chest rose and fell. Something that simply could not be.

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