History

The Shame of Both Races

I will make no excuse for the unmentionable crimes my people and I have committed. There is no redemption for my kin and I for the sins we have performed, like twisted, degenerate actors at a play held for Lucifer himself. Whatever punishment that has come their way, my brothers and sisters deserve. If there is any justice in this world, their sentences are eternal. I know my own is. But, for those who have forgotten, we were only humans. This a warning to mankind. For you bleed the same color as us. You are human too.

All we ever wanted was to get out of the Great Depression. To put food in our children’s mouths, and to reclaim the glory of our ancestors. Much of society today, spoiled, has forgotten what it is like to be a parent and have to look in a starving child’s eyes and tell them they can do nothing to sooth the pains in their stomach. All of society, especially Americans, have forgotten the wounds inflicted by the Great War and it’s aftermath, the Great Depression. 

The Feurher had not. Though, if I were to meet him in the street, I would, with a sense of fulfillment, squeeze the life from him, when I first saw the Feurher speak in Hannover, 1937, I had fallen in love with Germany’s supposed savior. In his passionate speeches, with cries for justice and the rise of our homeland, my people and I were swept up in the spirit of hope and our lust for revenge was sedated with his promises. The Nazi party offered many Germans a new future and scapegoats for the fall of our nation. Thus, I joined the Nazi party, as a Christian mind you. Embraced in a prison of war camp, rotting with disease, I was nothing. One night, when the shame is bearable, I will maybe divulge on the events that transpired between my time as an idealist to my day as a nihilist. For now, I will tell you of my own sentence, for that is all anyone is ever interested in...

The skyscrapers of the cities in America remind me of the great fir forests of the Mannerheim line in Finland, or those towering trees in the Black Forest of Germany during the war. Over sixty years ago, those monoliths were the grave for the soldiers, just as these towers are grave for the same marching dead, soldiers of the Jyhad. As than, when frozen corpses dotted the white ground, fodder for those in power, bodies line the garbage strewn alleys and streets, nameless pawns for those who orchestrate this ongoing, never ending war. There were dissidents and others who refused to take arm to fight for the Allies or Axis, but found they took part in the war anyway, using pen and paper, rock, or through the work in a factory. Just as then, there are those who refuse to take sides, the Inconnu and Independents. Just as then, they find they take part in the Jyhad. There is no way to avoid it when bombs and bullets kill even civilians, just as when the blood spills everywhere. Unlike World War II, though, there are no treaties in the Jyhad.

As a neonate, I migrated to America during the seventies with the hope to escape the battle lines of Munich, not aware of the fact that no matter how far I traveled, I could never evade my curse and the ancient despots it forced me to fight for. Arriving on the shores of the northern continent, I found quickly that here the Jyhad was full ablaze, it’s inferno scorching the vast continent, a rising holocaust. No shelter could be sought here with the Sabbat a constant thorn in the side of the Camarilla and the Anarchs revolting. Still, I continued to travel west, like a migrant worker, serving Prince after Prince, looking for a master worth serving, a city that offered some peace for my beleaguered mind. 

During my travels, I met a Kindred named Louis whose mental capabilities seemed to be tottering. He claimed to be a messenger of Caine, and taking pity upon him, developed what I sometimes refer to, with a smirk on my face, as a friendship. Louis, in his unintelligible chatter taught me the history of my heritage and his search for the resting place of our forefather. Back than I took his gibberish as the by-product of the tainted blood renowned to pollute his clan’s line. The decrepit, unkempt books he kept with him, written in various tongue’s also peaked my interest. Much of the writing I could not understand, not knowing the language, or from being unable to decipher the complicated riddles that the words of the authors created. At times, Louis would try to explain, but his passionate speeches were as convoluted as the text. 

In time, Louis and I parted, as he headed for Montreal while I headed south to my current home, Dallas. Out of noticing the interest I had taken in his antiquated books, Louis gave me one as a token of our friendship. Unfortunately it is Latin, but I at times scroll through the pages, wondering what hidden secrets Louis had discovered in the text, and it fills me with a sense of foreboding, for maybe Louis is not mad and the upcoming events he prattled about were true. Maybe my mad companion Louis really was Nostrodomous, the man he claimed to be. 

It is something I try not to think about, for dark thoughts of the future are only keys to open the doors to the dark past, as though no matter how far man kind believes he has advanced, they are only repeating tragedies of the past, just in new forms.
But back to my current residence, the grand dame of Texas, Dallas. As a little boy growing up in Kiel, I remember reading stories about the cowboys in the Wild West, and the tales of their shoot outs with outlaws in black in the dirt streets outside of the saloons of Dallas. There are no noble cowboys in Dallas now. Though there are plenty of the outlaws in black, though they now at times don the color blue. 
Hanson Blake, Ventrue, rules the city. Despite the strife that has harried the city the past few years, Hanson has remained on his throne. He is just, for a Vampire, and has treated his citizens well enough. Still, the tide is rising, with more and more uprisings and call for heads to roll in this conspiracy or that. Anarchs plague the city and a Kindred was recently punished with the Final Death for treason. Not that it is not to be expected. But in a city that I once found somewhat distanced from the warring, the Jyhad has now gripped the city by it’s throat and is squeezing.