Qedeshah

A child sleeps. A Mother watches.

The child’s dreams are full of terrors, or so the Mother thinks. The Mother climbs into his bed, and cradles him through the night. She whispers a lullaby, and the child dreams that a monster digs her claws into his spine. In the morning, the child wakes. Someone has been here. Someone is here. His heartbeat rises, he begins to panic, but the room is empty.

The child gets up, eats his breakfast, and walks to school, but the feeling doesn’t go away. His heart is racing. He spends his lunch alone. The bullies stay far away, but his old friends keep their distance too. Their eyes slide off him now, like he’s not even there. The child arrives home to sirens and lights. An ambulance in the driveway, blood on the floor. They load his father onto the stretcher, and wheel him away. The ambulance woman asks if he has any other family?

The Mother steps out of the dark, places her hands on the boy’s shoulders, and says, “He has me.” The child is too scared to scream as the ambulance woman walks away. The Mother kneels. For the first time, he sees the monster’s face. She promises she’ll always take care of him. Always.

Motherhood is a sacred gift, a divine responsibility. The urge to nurture, teach, and protect is the most fundamental human endeavor. Every culture knows this in its bones, but we have forgotten. Look at the Kindred. At us. We are all motherless, orphaned by the Masquerade and the crawl of eons. We trust no one, love nothing but our own ambition, and feed on each other’s suffering.

It does not need to be so. In nights long past, the Queens of Heaven visited the first of our blood. Goddesses of maternal compassion, the Queens gave us three holy precepts: teach love to those who lack it, be mothers to all who need us, and deliver new life unto the Damned. From these commandments we became qedeshah, elevated above other Shadows as guardians of the Queen’s commandments, Mothers to both the living and the dead.

Unfortunately, our Kindred are fearful and blind, and refuse to understand our holy mission. They mistake our love for manipulation, and loathe us for Embracing so many beautiful children. We have learned to tread lightly. One misstep, and their false covenants will tear us apart for speaking against their poisonous Second Tradition — to not Embrace is to deny the Queens.

However, our final precept wills us to become true mothers, and though the Embrace provides some solace, we have yet to fulfill this commandment. We shall use any means at our disposal, and whatever sorceries or sciences our Kindred can provide. For now, we guide our siblings with unseen hands, liberating their secrets and siring hidden childer in the hope that, one night, all Kindred will be united. For though we are glorious, we can be more. They will thank us in the end.

Why you want to be us

You want to love, unconditionally, without apology. You want to fight for a compassionate Requiem and unite all Kindred under one banner, even if the covenants would reward your efforts with scorn or death. But most of all, you want to be a mother, in whatever way you choose. You want to create new life and protect it from the horrors of the world, sire families of loving childer, relish your nature, and rejoice in the death the Queens of Heaven gifted upon you.

Why you should fear us

We sleep by your bed without you ever knowing. We know your guilts and your shames, and we must judge them. We know your lover is unworthy — but don’t worry, we’ve had a little chat. They won’t be coming back. You deserve a mother’s love, whether you want it or not.

Why we should fear ourselves

All children learn their parents are fallible. The illusion always falters. Some chafe under our protection while others rebel. Sometimes we’re just as desperate and hollow as those we seek to fill with our adoration. Love curdles into possession, and our guiding hand becomes a grasping claw, throttling the life out of our children’s eyes.

Bloodline Origin Myths

Long ago in the Kingdom of Judah, a grieving mother and a pious hierodule traveled together on the road to Jerusalem. Near the end of their journey, they received a vision, a heavenly message of motherhood and holy love. However, their mortal forms could not contain such divinity, and so they rose as Kindred when the sun next fell. The two bickered over the nature of their experience. The mother had seen many goddesses, but the hierodule saw only one: Shekhina, wife of Yahweh. Thus, the bloodline fractured as it began, as it would many times again. Those who follow all the Queens of Heaven hold to each precept equally, while those who follow Shekhina put the first above the others. Though they work together from time to time, these cults are far from a unified front.

The creators of this bloodline weren’t Kindred at all, but dhampir. Abused and neglected by their vampire parents, and motherless in every way that mattered, these half-damned souls used their powers of desire and doom to convince a cult of Mekhet they were chosen of the Queens of Heaven. Some did this for petty revenge and power, but others held hope their victims might better themselves with a kinder philosophy. The cult was never meant to spread as far as it did, but the dhampir were successful in ways they did not intend. By the time their Shadow dupes decided the Queens wanted them to tear down the Second Tradition, brick by brick, it was too late.

The Qedeshah don’t know what they truly worship. The first Mothers prayed to a nameless, primordial goddess, a progenitor of all monsters and creatures of the night. She was a cruel beast who bade her children rend and conquer, to take what they wanted and devour the world’s bounty. For a time, they did, but after many years their bloodlust waned, and these worshippers lost sight of their true purpose. Seduced by a need for true familial bonds, they reimagined their goddess as the Queen(s) of Heaven, to better suit this new desire. Though not as she commanded, this pleased the goddess, for she could no longer bear children of her own. She still awaits the Qedeshah’s success and whatever rough beasts they might spawn, with all the glee of a proud grandmother.

Parent Clan: Mekhet

Nicknames: Mothers, Mothers of Heaven, Parents (among forward-thinking neonates)

Bloodline Bane: The Fretful Curse

A Mother worries. If a Qedeshah goes more nights than Humanity without defending her attachment to a Touchstone or one of her anointed (see Bloodline Gift), she gains the Guilty Condition. The vampire can only resolve this Condition by defending an attachment enough to recover all Willpower; some Qedeshah even manipulate circumstances to test their devotion to their beloveds. If the vampire has no attached Touchstones or anointed, Guilty becomes Persistent until she can gain a new one of either.

Disciplines: Auspex, Celerity, Majesty, Obfuscate

Bloodline Gift: Embrocation

All Qedeshah have the inherent ability to forge mystical links between themselves and their chosen families. Called Embrocation, with this bond a Mother can protect her loved ones and draw strength from their affection — or surveil and punish them for failing to live up to her standards. To use Embrocation, a Qedeshah smears a bit of Vitae on the subject’s forehead, invoking the Queens of Heaven. The subject must be willing and free of any blood bond, but once forged, only the anointing Mother can break the link. For as long as this lasts, the anointed is immune to the Qedeshah’s Vinculum, although this has no effect on the addictive quality of her Vitae. Ending this relationship incurs a breaking point at Humanity 3 and higher, and the death of an anointed is a breaking point at Humanity 1.

In the Covenants

The Qedeshah believe the covenants hold back Kindred society, creating needless bloodshed and division as they play at the Danse Macabre. Loyalty to the Queens’ of Heaven should supersede politics… but the lure of organization and community is appealing. Nonetheless, a Qedeshah must share any wisdom she gains with her cult. In their quest to create new life among the dead, the Mothers squirrel away whatever knowledge they can scrape together, trading stolen techniques over whisper networks. If the covenants ever confirmed rumors of these exchanges, the blood hunt would be extensive, and brutal.

The Carthian Movement

The Qedeshah want to remake Kindred society, and the Carthian Movement offers no better avenue. The Revolution appeals to Mothers who believe the Danse Macabre can only change through collective action and social engineering, so Firebrand Qedeshah act as a calming influence to their more hot-headed comrades, serving as den mothers, organizers, and mediators. They work within an inclusive, intersectional motherhood, one that any vampire can be a part of if they put in the work. Many Carthians are wary of the Qedeshah’s religious leanings, but they don’t begrudge them their faith, unless it interferes with the cause.

The Circle of the Crone

The Acolytes attract many elder Qedeshah, especially those most dedicated to Queens of Heaven faith, ancients who remember the roots of their bloodline were built in blood, pain, and loss. These Mothers believe in tough love and fierce compassion — which is unfortunately still at odds with some of the Dark Mother’s teachings. Many Qedeshah are too squeamish to fit in among the rank and file of the Mother’s Army, but they persevere, in part because they hope to somehow restore their mortal fertility with Crúac. However, one ancient sect of Mothers is well-integrated into the Mother’s Army. These bloodstained Qedeshah worship Asherah, whom they call the first goddess. They hold horrific rituals in the hidden places of the world, and make families of creatures even other Acolytes find frightening.

The Invictus

The First Estate has long persecuted the Qedeshah for flouting the Second Tradition and threatening the Masquerade. Relatively few Mothers find a home in this covenant, and those who do take a possessive, authoritarian view of motherhood. They know what’s best for their charges. That said, a handful of Invictus domains realize just how useful the Mothers can truly be. Their ability to watch over and safeguard their children makes them superlative watchdogs and bodyguards, and rumor has it that the Monarch of Sacramento is anointed, with a coterie of Qedeshah bodyguards. Rumor also has it they’re far more open to new Embraces than they’ve been in decades. For some reason.

The Lancea et Sanctum

Devout Christian Qedeshah find their way to the Spear, especially those who believe in Shekhina, the Queen of Heaven. They tend to focus on the divine sanctity of childbearing, and the holy role of mothers in certain branches of Christianity. Regrettably, the Qedeshah are not much beloved among the rest of the Church, many of whom view their beliefs as heresy of the worst sort. Love and compassion are not virtues for God’s holy monsters. Some Mormon Qedeshah adopt a more patriarchal form of their religion, conflating their goddess with the Queen of Heaven in Latter Day Saint doctrine, but even these Mothers find little acceptance. Most Mothers join the reformers, iconoclasts, and heretics among the Lancea et Sanctum, and pray for change.

The Ordo Dracul

Defiant Qedeshah form a counterpoint to Carthian Mothers, hoping to accomplish with science what the Firebrands can’t with social change alone. It might take a little blood, and a few surgeries, but one day they believe the Kindred can rejoin the reproductive cycle of the natural world. These Dragons believe in “aspirational biological interventionism,” shaping their anointed children and childer to become their best selves — just don’t call it eugenics, at least not within earshot. Ordo Mothers specialize in the inherent fertility of Vitae and study the Coil of the Voivode, seeking ways to restore their ability to create life, or to develop new methods of siring.

Related Organizations

• Chicagoland Mekhet
• Unclaimed Shadows