W ramach prezentu z okazji otwarcia nowego forum, zespół WW zamieścił w jednym z tematów krótkie fragmenty pochodzące z Nosferatu: The Beast That Haunts The Blood oraz Night Horrors: Immortal Sinners. Powielamy je w rozwinięciu niniejszej wieści.

Miłej lektury.

Nosferatu: The Beast The Haunts The Blood

This was not how it should have gone. Forces are working that I do not understand. I thought to meet this girl, this Alice, a young Savage who has been compiling her own book for—you? For some other? A competing volume or just another chapter for your library, my dear employer?

I thought, this is where she will deliver it. I will play the Armonium for her, and while she is staggered by the shapes from beyond the veil, I will gently take the book from her and go. A delicate effort. So simple.

It did not turn out how I envisioned.

Someone has already been here. A killer. A tormentor. Dead thralls downstairs. A dead boy and—his mother?—upstairs. Who did this? The Masquer, I wonder? That dread killer or someone worse? Some different fiend?

Alice shows. This is not what she expected, either. The horror radiates off her in waves. She weeps tears of blood, I can… taste them by their smell, I can hear them fall and strike the floorboards of this old tilted house.

I follow her in shadow as she kneels before the bed where the boy’s corpse waits, but then—I hear the bubble of blood pop from the tiniest breath from his nose and I know that he’s not dead, no, not at all, and she does not intend for him to die. She intends to give him the second life, to fill his ears with the chords and strains of the Requiem. A cruel gift for a boy, an abuse I cannot abide. In the shadows, in my pocket of darkness, I slide behind where the Armonium is placed and I wet my fingers and I play its song.

The strangest thing happens.

I see the shapes. The Hidden Ones. The walls are gone. The darkness is absolute.

But Alice—if this is even that girl—does not see them. Her head doesn’t turn in horror at the pale thing that twists in its tortuous coils next to her.

She only whispers a word, spoken not to the child or to myself, but I can hear it:

“Surrender.”

She seems ready to follow her own command. But it’s too late. The boy is lurching up, feeding from her wrist; she pulls it away and… numb, simply leaves. The boy cries out. It’s enough to jostle me, to force me to stop playing. The song ends. The walls have returned and the shapes behind them are gone.

I pull the boy to me, and I let him taste a bit.

He is not mine, of course; I did not make him.

Shall I take him as a childe? A surrogate of sorts? He can be my eyes.

We go to the window and watch his new mother shuffle into the forest. There comes a moment when she turns and looks up at us, and the boy waves.

I pull him away, and wonder what to do next. I have no books. But I still have the Armonium and its otherworldly harmony. And now I have a friend.

His name, he tells me, is Little Jack.

Night Horrors: Immortal Sinners

The Golden Mask

Birch possesses an ornate ceremonial mask made of solid gold (which means it necessitates substantial strength to wear it, as solid gold is far heavier than one might expect). It affixes to the Bishop’s head via two leather straps (long blotched with old stains, stains that are surely blood).

Birch uses the Mask as a symbol of his power in the Covenant, and claims that its power is for the Sanctified alone. Whoever controls the Covenant wears the Golden Mask; it’s that simple.

It’s something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the Mask itself radiates an aura of authority, conferring a preternatural potency to one’s words as they are spoken. The origins of the Golden Mask differ depending upon whom you ask: Birch has in the past claimed it is an Artifact of the Dark Father himself, and some translations of the Testament seem to back this up. Others, though, point to the styling of the Mask and note it’s quite clearly Greek in origin, and if Longinus did have it, he took it from a Greek. One popular and perhaps lunatic rumor that gets bandied about is that somehow, Longinus “stole” the Golden Mask from a pagan deity like Zeus to confirm Christ’s supremacy on Earth.

Birch is either wrong or lying about the Mask’s true purpose. He claims it’s a Sanctified relic that is bound only to the “true” members of the Covenant, but that’s false information. In fact, any vampire can wear it and gain the powers of the Golden Mask.

To use the Mask, one must first don the Mask, which necessitates three dots in Strength to wear (the mask is easily thirty pounds; while that’s light for someone to grab with her hands, it’s heavy when worn on the front of the face). Then, one must spend a point of Vitae; the blood literally seeps out of the face and into the Golden Mask itself.

For the following scene, the vampire character may double the Social bonus that comes as part of her Covenant Status Merit. It works only upon those of her Covenant, of course, but her words confirm the truth of that Covenant by dint of her speaking them through the Mask’s downturned, almost-screaming mouth.