Giovanni: The Last Supper

 A close knit network of canny spies, whisperers and secret keepers, The Nosferatu are bound together by close familial ties formed in a unique, mutual understanding of what it means to walk the earth encased in their blighted and hideous skin. Members of this clan have been granted the monikers of Lepers and Sewer Rats by their generous cousins - so enlightened and insightful with their blessed lack of visible afflictions.

The Nosferatu are shunned even by other vampires, especially by the clans that are able to hide the reality of their blood’s curse. This fear is connected in part to the revulsion that the Leper’s deformities inspire in the frigid guts of those vampires with a more conventional appearance, but most Cainites would realise that their dread of the Nosferatu runs even deeper if they had the nerve to truly think upon their existence; To see their souls in the same manner in which the Crawlers and Sewer Rats are forced to consider themselves night by night. The Nosferatu bear the mark of the Beast on their skin, a physical representation of everything dark, ugly and twisted about the vampiric condition - it is a rare vampire who has the courage to look into the twisted face of a Nosferatu and admit that all they are observing is a reflection of their own Beast in its fleshy mirror. 

Deprived of the luxury of such denial by their curse, The Nosferatu have grown accustomed to the reality of navigating the world as some of the lowest of the damned. They do not fear the depths of the dark places that they must dwell in to survive. They are no strangers to the despair that comes with loneliness, or the rage that is fuelled by segregation and rejection. Some members of the clan do succumb to the cruelties of their condition but many Nosferatu manage to develop a robust and forbiddable inner strength that is nurtured and fostered by their united blood family. It is the most bittersweet of ironies that the vampires who are the most broken and marred in their bodies are also the creatures who manage to foster the most whole and steadfast of immortal hearts. 

Nosferatu are loyal to a fault and they work together with a level of efficiency and cooperation not seen in any other clan. They form vast, hidden webs of information and subterfuge that spread out into every corner of whatever domain they establish themselves in. Though their status as pariahs, outcasts and spies may be enough for some vampires to draw similarities between the Nosferatu and the Ravnos, the two clans are only alike in that they must learn to operate outside of the bounds of human and vampiric society. 

Nosferatu are not nomadic - once they have burrowed into the underworld of a land that they wish to inhabit, there is no seeking them out. They are not restricted to disguising themselves in illusion and trickery, though their powers do allow them to wear another’s face with just as much mastery as any Ravnos. The Lepers can also use their control over Obfuscate to disappear entirely, rendering them undetectable to all but those with exquisitely heightened senses. Even then, most vampires would agree that it is better to let the Nosferatu remain hidden when they wish to pass unseen - the Lepers are not only wise and secretive but also ferociously strong when they need to defend themselves or their own. It is perhaps a relief for many that they have chosen to stick to their shadow game and other clans fear the thought of a night when the Nosferatu leave their warrens to inflict revenge upon the high clans that have forced centuries of misery and oppression upon them.

Masters of the animal world second only to the Gangrel, the Nosferatu typically exhibit command over the cities' creatures. Nosferatu rarely style themselves as the lords of domains in the wild. Rather, their bestial minions number among the vermin and other repugnant species of the communities of mortals. While a Gangrel might fashion himself as a lord of the wolves, a Nosferatu may proclaim herself the queen of flies or the mistress of rats; the difference is often lost on Kindred of more dignified means, but the distinction means a great deal to those who immerse themselves in the squalor of the cities.

While the Brujah have passions and causes, the Nosferatu tend to have interests, and the only thing that distinguishes the two is the degree of emotional investment the Cainite places in it. Nosferatu favour hobbies, areas of study, schools of thought; their purposes tend toward the practical and even the temporal or secular. To some degree, this reflects their nature - they seek information, after all, or perhaps an outward vehicle that would allow them to avoid introspection. Still, Nosferatu number among the wisest of the vampires (at least, those who don't buy into the old medieval world's revilement of them) in many cases and among the most knowledgeable in others. Nosferatu are often afraid because they know, they actually know, just what is out there in the World of Darkness.

the Renaissance

Warrens

The Nosferatu have always dwelt in snaking dank underground networks called Warrens, sometimes natural (as in the case of existing cave systems) or, increasingly, unnatural labyrinths. The expansion of infrastructure and architecture in the early Renaissance has been a boon to the Nosferatu. Though it may seem counter-intuitive for a clan of obvious monsters to have prospered in the age of illumination, mere intuition has seldom been enough to aid the other clans in pre-empting the ingenuity of the Clan of the Hidden. Contrary to being forced out of human settlements by the expanding population during the Renaissance, the Nosferatu have simply expanded their underground network - quite literally in most circumstances. They have taken hold of newly built catacombs and early sewerage systems, extending them and concealing their warrens with their mastery of hidden places.

The ability to move more freely in urban spaces has widened the cast of Nosferatu’s net of intelligence and enabled them to pass their secrets along their chains of command with increasing speed and efficiency. The less horrifically altered Nosferatu have even found ways to move among nocturnal human society, as frequent bouts of plague, famine and war leading up to the Renaissance has familiarised the lower classes with physical deformity and disability. Some Nosferatu can pass as lepers, victims of the pox or wartime burn victims and can disguise themselves as beggars or street urchins in order to gather information about clandestine human politics and secrets - a sphere of intelligence sometimes neglected by other clans.

Religion and Philosophy

The Nosferatu have long been a spiritual clan, and over the millennia many of them have found a salve for their wounds in the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and more recently Islam. Already deprived of many pleasures of the flesh due to the segregation imposed on them due to their appearance, the rise of the monastic way of life in Christian communities appealed to many Nosferatu on a spiritual level. Some Nosferatu warrens emulated the practices of Christian monasteries and convents, using abstinence and asceticism as a way to control their Beasts and their moral weaknesses. The more troubled and spiritually lost individuals amongst the clan were particularly drawn to practices of self-flagellation and mortification of the flesh, taking out their hatred of their deformities on their own skin with the hope that they would whip their souls into shape even if their bodies still held the semblance of a demon. 

In recent years, the blatant corruption and division within the Catholic church has led many religious Nosferatu to abandon their traditional monastic practices - though their personal faith remains a matter of more complex contention. With the rise of the Renaissance interest in humanism and classical philosophy, many members of this introspective clan are turning to new and developing fields of study to address their spiritual needs. Nosferatu who follow the practices of Judaism - and even those who do not - feel a deep level of empathy with the human Jews who have been driven out of European cities in exile. This callous treatment of an entire section of humanity reminds them only too much of the injustices they face within their own, hidden society. The Nosferatu who follow Islam are smaller in number but staunch in their faith, believing that the time has come for the Holy Roman Empire to bow to a greater Empire with integrity - The Ottoman Empire.

The Omen War 

Alongside the Gangrel and the Tzimisce, the Nosferatu have suffered immensely at the relentlessly grasping hands of the Tremere. As the Tremere became more and more powerful Eastern Europe during the 1100s, many cherished Nosferatu children began to disappear from their warrens - undetectable even to their own clan who specialise in unearthing the hidden things of the world. These disappearance coincided with the arrival of whispers that the Tremere had developed a perverse breed of servitors that they named Gargoyles. Careful information gathering revealed that these Gargoyles shared many abilities innate to the clans of Nosferatu, Tzimisce and Gangrel - the latter two of which had also reported missing childer.

When the extent of the atrocities committed by the Tremere against the childer of these three clans came to light, a bitter battle broke out amongst them. This war, known as The Omen War, still rages on to this night and has claimed many lives on both sides of the conflict. The emotional, psychological and physical wounds inflicted on the Nosferatu through the experimentations of the Tremere are felt throughout the clan - to such a tight-knit group of vampires, the murder of one childe is a loss to all and the secret-hoarding Nosferatu are not exactly known for their capacity to forgive.

Clan Opinions On…

The Embrace

The Embrace of Plagues
Libellus Sanguinis 4: Thieves in the Night

Call it the Embrace or the Becoming if you so wish, but neither summarizes the pure agony of our entry into unlife. Those of Constantinople - before its fall - had a term I believe more appropriate; they called their Embrace the Plagued Kiss or the Black Death. By appearances, the process of the Embrace is simple. The Nosferatu drains her childe of all mortal blood, then deposits a drop of her own noxious vitae into the almost-corpse. Over the next week, the newly Embraced Cainite undergoes painful transformations that eventually marks her as Nosferatu. Ponder this, however: isn’t our Becoming more like the onset of plague in agony and virulence?

The Plagued Kiss is a disease that runs rampant through our body. The ichor that other Cainites innocently call vitae is boiling oil that scours our veins and arteries for seven nights and even longer. Fevers grip us and blood is the only taste we know on our lips. We can no longer stand the sight of food; the very thought sickens us to the pit of our stomach.

Meanwhile, our skin shrivels into hardened wrinkles and our hair falls away in fistful clumps. We decay and atrophy a day in a moment and a month by nightfall. Even our teeth hurt to the roots. Between bouts of agony, during which our muscles constrict almost to the point of snapping and our organs turn soft, we vomit food and excrete waste as though they were poisons. We urinate constantly, expunging almost all the watery humors from our body; perhaps this is why we appear desiccated and drawn. Any ailments that afflicted us before the Plagued Kiss become permanent scars on our already tortured frames.

We are a receptacle for indignities made worse by those noblemen who use our Becoming to punish others. Malachite of Constantinople was promised the Embrace of the Lasombra, but his would-be Lasombra sire forced a Nosferatu to take him instead, all for contradicting the Lasombra masters. This is neither rare nor unusual. Many clans throw away their unwanteds to us thinking it a crueller alternative than death. Balkan Tzimisce keep Nosferatu “pets” to Embrace victims for sport or research — the torturer’s justification for reputability. Parisian Toreador punish wayward ghouls in this manner as well, believing our existence more wretched than death itself. I’ve also heard of Cainite lords in both Sicily and the Western Kingdom who use our Embrace as a method of torture. Truthfully I do not know which offends me more, the presumption that we are so cursed and reviled that death is preferred over our condition, or the Nosferatu Judases who administer the Becoming in service to others.

Sire and Child

There is always a bond between sire and child, though with us, it can degenerate into an antagonistic relationship. After all, it was your sire who Embraced you and set this world upon your shoulders. You’ve become a monster thanks to his Embrace, and unless your life was somehow worse as a mortal, then your sire has damned you forever. Even if you were afflicted with leprosy, the Embrace is still an unfathomable pain. That is why so many Nosferatu are “orphaned” upon the Becoming. Few want the responsibility of educating a childe while worrying about his capacity for vengeance.

When Nosferatu inflict the Becoming upon others, they must be ready to play the role of tyrant father, but temper their austere manner with a modicum of mother’s compassion. Regardless of how much you prepare kine for the Embrace, the scarring process leaves behind anger. Sires must be ready to establish their dominance lest their offspring exact revenge. We cannot apologize for our gifts because there is no returning them. What’s done is done.

In the years following the Embrace, the sire often relinquishes dominance over his childer in small measures. While some are generous with the backs of their hands for decades and even centuries following the Becoming, there comes a point when the child will rebel. It has happened before that Nosferatu elders perished because they subjugated their progeny for too long. Tales from Rome’s final days speak of a multitude of young kinsmen taking advantage of the invading Goth hordes to hide the murder of their sires.

The true master knows when to temper rule with compassion, and when a child is finally experienced enough to explore his existence alone. This is always a tricky time, for ambitions and hopes for revenge may still fill the young Nosferatu’s heart. The sire can only hope he’s instilled his childe with a good road to follow and a tempered demeanour — as I have hopefully done with you.

The Auction

Though the Nosferatu have not publicly acknowledged the Black Dawn or the subsequent rumours about humans born on that date with blood abnormalities, the Clan of the Hidden have certainly been made aware of the many whispers alluding to these events. A deeply spiritual clan on the whole, the Nosferatu were shaken by the unforeseen celestial event of the Black Dawn and immediately put their information gathering skills to work researching the cause and effects of the eclipse. They were able to pick up on the dregs of some information regarding humans with supernatural powers who shared a date of birth coinciding with the Black Dawn but every time a warren felt that they were about to close in on a lead, their ghoulish talons closed in an empty fist. For a clan so united in its practice of rooting out hidden information, that they could not for these humans has lead several Nosferatu elders to draw some very dark conclusions.

It was only when the clan received an invitation to an auction of extraordinary humans from none other than Claudius Giovanni that they realised they had been outplayed. The clan take the ghouling and Embrace of humans very seriously, with childer and sire often remaining in close contact through the duration of their lives. As such, the concept of humans being sold en masse for vampires of any clan to do with as they please is nothing short of horrific to many Nosferatu. The religious members of the clan and those who still hold strongly to their humanity are deeply disturbed by the many cruel and unusual fates that may befall the humans sold at this auction. The clan is sure to put all of their clandestine skills to work in order to gather as much information about the humans and their powers as possible - both in order to try and bring as many as they can under the safety of the Nosferatu and also in an attempt to divert potential power from rival, frivolous clans. They believe that Claudius has made a great mistake in making his acquisition of these humans public knowledge to the entirety of vampiric society, but now that that ship has sailed the Nosferatu certainly don’t intend to be left behind.

Despite being a reclusive clan due to constraints beyond their own control, the Nosferatu still stand to bring a lot to the table at a political event specialising in the exchange of boons - or Claudius Credits as their gracious host is insisting on calling the currency of his atrocious exchange. The clan has a wealth of skills, secrets and boons accumulated over centuries of subterfuge and politics to leverage at the auction. They are also interested to observe the machinations of the other clans, though they generally view many of their cousins as-superficial, petty and prone to becoming tangled in their own schemes that they do not have the connections or resources to execute correctly. The auction offers the Nosferatu a rare opportunity to emerge from their warrens and put their talents to work in a manner which could swing the axis of power for the clan towards the better - though they must take great care to hide the full extent of their aptitude from the other clans lest they are seen as too great a threat for vampire society to tolerate.

Profane Rebirth

"In time, child, you will understand that this is not a punishment. This -" rasps the rough, gravelly voice of the creature standing before you, "is a gift."

It didn’t feel like a gift. You cannot move. You feel sluggish and weak, the life in your limbs drained. Cold sweat beads upon your bare torso as you struggle, but your wrists and ankles have been strapped into thick leather bonds, in turn nailed to the cold slab of stone at your back. Shadows leap at you like phantoms, each conjured from greasy cast iron torches that line this subterranean hollow. You realise you must be deep underneath the cathedral - based on the faint outlines of crypt cavities set into the walls and the vast, arched ceiling. 

The creature speaking approaches you now, and the stink of him makes your stomach roil. The scent of death hangs about him as if the reaper himself stands in his shadow. Rot hooks itself up into your nostrils and thickens your throat with a pugnant, meaty fungus. With mounting horror, you watch as he draws a vicious looking dagger from the depths of his robes, and opens an oozing channel down the length of his fore-arm. You desperately want to look away from that face, but even if you closed your eyes it would be branded into your memory forevermore. Grey, diseased flesh with the texture of boiled leather - criss-crossed with jagged lacerations so deep you can see his blackened molars through ruined cheeks.

You try to twist your head away from him as he stoops to within inches of your face, a shrill note of revulsion or despair escaping your lips as terror gets the better of you. You are little more than a child's doll in his hands as he grasps your chin between those over-long fingers. His touch is clammy, cold and reaching. There is nought you can do - those fingers apply pressure. He angles you to face him just as the now bleeding wrist is pressed, nononsense, against your mouth.

At first you gag, but a second hand cages you, flattens against the back of your skull. In a moment of lucidity, you see the glint of a crucifix dangling between layers of black robes, before a new sensation overcomes your senses. The power of his blood is undeniable, every nerve seems to stand on end before you greedily swallow that awful vitae. More, and faster; surely if your connection to his wrist were to break then you too would be lost - in the moment you cannot imagine a second without the taste of this substance. You take, greedily devouring his essence with all regret rapidly turning to ash - leaving only the fear that this sensation might end.

Then, darkness, and the cruelty of the arm wrenched dismissively from your grasp.

You're not sure how long you were left there, in the dark. Time dissolved rapidly after that once the pain started. It began with your fingertips - a tingling, terrible itch that blossomed outward to the rest of your form and plagued you until you found yourself grinding your half naked body against the stone slab at your back to make it stop. To your horror, you realised that both your skin and subcutaneous layer of fat were sloughing off against the rough stone, peeling away from your body like butter.

It is the last ounce of lucidity you have before agony enters spectacularly. You wrench up, tear out, your spine bowing under extraordinary new energy, as a howl rips from your dry throat. You yowl and sob and convulse your way through your metamorphosis. Your choking screams remain unanswered as your very bones rearrange themselves, twisting into a mockery of the form you once held. You feel your spine coil and break through muscle and skin, extending and resetting before your meat was able to catch up and glove the steaming osseous matter. Your jaw is not built to house your new array of needle-like, multitudinous fangs - so it breaks in four places in order to accommodate them before attempting to fix itself without knowing quite how.

By the time dawn breaks - far away above that hidden, dark place - you are found curled up on the flagstone floor, unmoving and silenced with the remains of leather restraints abandoned on the ground beside you. Despite the agonising hunger that now shakes the frame of your remade body, you can only fall into nothingness as somewhere, the sun rose. You are smeared with the blood and fluid of a mortal shell that will serve you no further. With the dusk, your sire will come and you will face a very different existence - but let no-one say that the clan of rats do not support their own.

❤︎