Mekhet
Something dead approaches. In its hollowed-out insides, there is an event horizon that swallows light, sound, and all knowing. Why do we find missing items, where we already looked, only after we’ve accused our loved ones? Is there a silhouette on the other side of the shower curtain? We can’t leap out of the shower at every imagined sight. What hides behind that acceptance? Ignore the writing on the fogged mirror. Why are we running, in the streets, from a feeling? This is silly. Cold hands pull us down. We scream. No one helps. They just walk by. What in the Twilight Zone fuck is going on?
The Mekhet are often quiet, often invisible, and yet they see everything. Spies and prophets, they go where they will and learn what they want to. No secret is safe from the Mekhet. “We are the Y incision cut into this dark, dark world,” whispers a voice. “Shall we loosen our stitches?”
They are the Shadows. It is difficult to know where they are standing right now and harder still to know where they’ve been. Decaying pages and sandstone glyphs nervously mutter hints. Stories echo down, out of ancient Egypt, of secret cults and walking cadavers with dissected souls. The Cherokee named the silence ka’lanu ahkyeli’ski, the Raven Mockers, who cut out the hearts of the sick and devoured their remaining years, unseen even as the victim’s fellows sat in the same room. In Eastern Europe, men called dhampir claimed to be half-vampire, traveling from village to village hunting the hungry dead. They gazed through their coat sleeves, like a telescope, then wrestled fiends only they could see. Some called them con artists.
Time passes, first in sighs and then in riddles. The Shadows remain. They flock to mysteries and murk like anti-moths. In the age of information, the Mekhet curse creeps along whole new vectors.
See the magician. There is no schedule. There is no advance notice. His only audience are those who respond to the flyers that enigmatically litter the streets on particular nights. “Tonight!” they say. “Do not fail to see,” they say. His audience stumbles up the steps to the black box theatre. Oh, the wonders he shows them when the doors lock.
See the bookshop clerk. She sits the graveyard shift at the all night adult book store. The lost 3 A.M. souls come to her, off the freeway. She answers their questions with an encyclopedic knowledge of every book, magazine, and DVD in stock. She offers sage advice on sex toys. Say the right combination of syllables, and she will open the secret room, where much rarer books repose.
See the P.I. Perhaps the greatest investigative mind of our time. But you will never meet him or her. The investigator operates outside of the view or knowledge of the client. Instead, you deal through the secretary. She speaks quite fondly of her employer, and her breath reeks of syrupy copper.
See the disquieting silence. No. You don’t. It devoured its own name. It devoured its own echoes. Not even the Kindred remember. It only exists as a series of negative definitions.
Let the other clans tromp through their Requiems like drunk elephants. The Mekhet will…well, no one will know exactly what it is they’re doing. What was that? It was only in your head. Yes. They are inside your head.
Why you want to be us
Go anywhere, see anything, know it all. Some people fear the shadows, but you are the Shadow. Cloak yourself in secrets and intrigue…or just watch. You like to watch.
Why you should fear us
The Mekhet are watching you sleep. No, really, they are. They find your breathing quite beautiful, and the way you turn over to the other side when some fierce dream grips you. One might live in your house, an unseen roommate. Wonder why you’re tired in the morning? Midnight snack. Wonder how your wife found out about the girl from Kinko’s? The Mekhet dropped a little hint.
Why we should fear ourselves
We know ourselves by the way that others know us. The Mekhet become something less by hiding. Our identity loses all context. And what about knowing everyone’s secrets? That means knowing some very bad things. It can be distinctly unpleasant to see what people are like beneath their masks; and for the Mekhet, there are no masks. More than any other clan, the Mekhet know there are things weirder than vampires out there. Ignorance was bliss.
Nickname: Shadows
Clan Bane: The Tenebrous Curse
Whispering shades and forgotten lore lurk in your blood. Secrets and information distill down to a weird substance in your Vitae. Attuned to the otherworldly, vampire banes express themselves more quickly in you. Sunlight, fire, and the long slumber of torpor pull at your dead body with a stronger tide.
Favored Attributes: Intelligence or Wits
Disciplines: Auspex, Celerity, Obfuscate
Comments