Lancea Sanctum - A History
In the oldest nights, the Damned did not know their place. Brought into darkness seemingly without purpose, they were as nothing more than feral wretches, driven solely by a ravenous bloodlust and a fear of those things that could bring a swift end to the cacophony that was their existence. Ignorant, bestial and truly alone, they could claim no semblance of community, no rules or laws to govern themselves and no understanding of their divine importance. Faith, if they knew it at all, was naught but a broken thing left with them from their mortal days, unsuited for such as they had become and unable to offer meaningful guidance to them through the emptiness of damnation. Because God had not yet offered salvation to the Canaille to illuminate their path to Heaven, He was unready to reveal to the Damned their special place in Creation. Until the time came for that revelation, there was no Requiem for our predecessors, only a loathsome and desolate dirge punctuated with violence and madness. Even as the Almighty graced them in their damnation, they remained blind to their sacred place.
At the time of Christ lived a man who indulged sin of every kind. Born the bastard child of a Roman prostitute in Jerusalem, his was a life of debauchery and cruelty. Still young, Longinus gambled away his mother’s meager earnings and struck her when she complained, publicly declaring her a dog fit only for mounting. Sodden with wine he later raped her and bragged of the exploit to his equally depraved companions, asking “for who among you has had his pleasure with so comely a whore as my ripe mother?” He brawled with any who earned his ire, leaving a shopkeeper Crippled and his own cousin bereft of a hand. It is said that there was nothing too wanton for the tastes of Longinus. Although his actions earned him the enmity of his neighbors, he came to the attention of a particularly foul Commander in the legion garrison who offered him a job serving Rome as payment or a lost bet. Longinus was unfit for soldiering, however. Prone o violence and venality, he frequently disobeyed orders and abused his power on the streets, enjoying the fear he was able to instill on the citizens he was supposed to protect. To his dismay, he soon discovered there was a price to pay for his behavior. He received frequent reprimands and spent a majority of his time assigned to menial tasks intended to both punish him and keep him from corrupting his fellow legionnaires. When he was charged with murdering a supposed friend who had recently surpassed him in rank, he was brought before the city’s procurator. His should have been a swift trial followed by a swifter and serious punishment, but the Hand of God intervened and dissuaded Pontius Pilate from making such a judgment.
A month prior to his arrest, Longinus had been instrumental in locating a young man wanted for robbing and molesting the favored servant of Pilate’s wife, Claudia. When the procurator’s wife discovered Longinus’ situation, she persuaded her husband to dismiss the charges against him and to allow him to serve their household in reward for his service to the family. Longinus did not learn from his close brush with death, however. Installed at Pilate’s house, he conspired to have his superior accused of lusting after Claudia and within two years found himself iven the title of centurion and command of Pilate’s personal guard. None of this was luck, of course. Longinus’ crimes marked him for a long-preordained role. Only one so sinful was it to serve as the agent of destiny necessary to complete part of God’s plan. When the moment was right, it would be Longinus’ place to commit an act of such blasphemy and portent that the seal of ignorance that had lain for so long upon the Damned would be shattered and, for the first time, their place in God’s Creation would be revealed to them.
Ultimately, the Spear of Destiny found its way into the hands of a Galician merchant named Phaecus, who came into possession of the artifact by way of trade with a Tyrean ship captain. The wooden shaft of the weapon did not survive the years, but the tip remained unmarred by the passage of time and circumstance, protected by God’s Hand. When Pilate took Phaecus to task on charges of avoiding bonding taxes on the wares he wished to sell in Jerusalem, the canny merchant understood the game and paid a handsome bribe to the procurator to avoid an even more onerous fine. He made even fatter the offer by giving to the eager Pilate a handful of trinkets that the judge might find fitting as gifts for his wife and household. Among these baubles was the point of the lance, something that Phaecus deemed more a curiosity than a thing to earn him a profit. When Pilate distributed the items as a sign of his graciousness at the next festival feast, he rewarded Longinus with the unusual blade, saying only that it was an ancient weapon that once adorned the Spear of a king. This tale was, so he believed, merely the product of the exaggerated imagination common to merchants like Phaecus; he could not know how true these words were. Although meant to be a ceremonial gift only — the blade was not of a design in fashion at the time — Longinus’ sense of pride would not allow him to put it in some chest until the next feast. He had it affixed anew to a sturdy length of firehardened wood and bore it always as a symbol of the stature he held in the procurator’s house.
When the man mockingly vilified as the “King of the Jews” was pronounced guilty of crimes against Rome and sentenced to death by crucifixion by Pilate, Longinus took no part in the contentious proceedings. Increasingly afflicted with a painful swelling of the eye that caused his vision to weaken notably, he had taken to doing as little as was necessary to carry out the duties of his station, and so was glad to make the punishment of Jesus the responsibility of others. Aside from enjoying a few jokes at the Nazarene’s expense, he had little interest in seeing another troublesome Jew put to death anyway. Certainly he had heard the tales of the carpenter’s son and of the strange things he preached, but this seemed no different from the numerous other charlatans and agitators who had come and gone over the years. He did not quite understand the significance the Jewish leaders gave to the Nazarene, guessing only that it had something to do with the particularly absurd things he preached on the street: how women and the poor were equal to wealthy and successful men in God’s eyes, and especially how every man, woman, and child was promised eternal salvation in some Olympian paradise. While his subordinates tormented and humiliated the miscreant Jew, forcing him to bear his own cross like an animal down the avenue toward Gethsemane as citizens harassed him and enjoyed his agonies, Longinus paid no heed. Instead, he supped on platters of pork and grapes, and flagons of expensive wine from Pilate’s private stock, in the comfort of a serving girl.
For any procurator of Jerusalem it was important to ensure that the peace was maintained in order to please Rome. Recent troubles among some Jewish quarters worried Pilate, so he listened closely to the advice of the Pharisees when they cautioned him of the possibility of outrage if the body of the Nazarene and the thieves sentenced with him still hung openly from crosses when the sun rose on the morning after the crucifixions, the Jewish Sabbath. Pilate sent word to Longinus to have the bodies taken down after sunset, when most of the curious would have already had their fill of the spectacle, ordering him to hasten their deaths if necessary. When he came to the hill, few onlookers remained, aside from a few grieving family members and friends, kept from disturbing the bodies of the victims by a single soldier on duty. Longinus ordered the soldier to break the legs of the three men with a club so that death would come more quickly, unwilling to wait longer for them to die. After meting out this last cruelty to the two thieves, the soldier proclaimed that the Jew was already dead, and so withheld his blow. Atop his horse, Longinus moved close to the Nazarene to be sure, unwilling to trust the word of a subordinate, and put his ear to the ashen and bloodied face of the Jew. To his dismay, he could still hear a shallow breath, despite the fact that his punishment had been especially barbaric; nails were used in place of the usual ropes to secure the convict to the cross.
Cursing, he thought to order the soldier to finish the job, but at that moment Jesus of Nazareth opened his eyes the smallest bit and gazed upon Longinus with a look that was as unexpected as it was devastating. Fixing his wounded eyes upon the sinful centurion with a strength of purpose that belied his long suffering, and without any need for words, the dying man imparted to Longinus something terrible for which he was unprepared. There, in the eyes of a Jew, Longinus saw a compassion and understanding that was beyond mortal comprehension. In that moment, he doubted his own convictions and feared that the stories of this man’s divinity may not have been entirely wrong. Shocked from what he saw, Longinus was overcome by an almost irresistible urge to flee as quickly as possible, to hide from the painful truth revealed in those knowing eyes. Like a frightened animal he cast about for means of escape, but was confronted by the faces of the mourners who remained, begging for mercy to be shown to the Nazarene. Forgetting the soldier and too prideful to allow the other onlookers to see the cowardice that now consumed his black soul and caused his hands to tremble, Longinus raised his lance and without pause thrust it with all his might into the side of his tormentor, desperate to put out the light that seemed to emanate from Jesus’ eyes. Accompanied by the gasps and cries of those watching, a gout of blood and other humors spurted from the wound, splashing Longinus’ face, and the Jew’s eyes went dim as his last breath passed his broken lips.
The death of Christ in this manner had been destined since before the Great Flood. With His mortal fall came the elevation of all mankind. The sacrifice of God’s Son was the key that unlocked the Gates of Heaven for all those descended from Noah. Christ’s divinity was also revealed by the act of Longinus and the cruelty of the Spear of Destiny, for as the blood of Jesus fell into his sickly eyes he found his sight restored to a clarity that surpassed that of a mortal man; nothing could escape his Perception now. God wished him to see things as they truly were, for Longinus had not completed his service to the Almighty.
He had only just begun, and clarity was necessary for his mission.
No longer blinded to God’s plan, Longinus was struck as if by thunder, for the full meaning of what had just transpired came clear. By his action he had willingly chosen to remove himself from the Illumination of God, to flee from the promise the Light offered him and to instead set himself apart from those Jesus had come to save. As the Son of God ceased to be a man, so too did he, for he never again drew another mortal breath. For him there was no hope of redemption and no promise of salvation. Longinus would never pass through the Gates of Heaven and would never find peace. As much as the Children of Noah were saved, he was Damned for all eternity. Longinus could not help but voice the truth he now knew. He proclaimed Christ’s divinity to those still horrorstruck at what he had done, and then seeing their expressions and feeling the full weight of his guilt bear down on him, he spurred his horse to action and fled Golgotha.
As with many people of his time, Longinus was no stranger to tales of jinn, ghosts, giants and other fantastical entities. Even so, the differences between the stories told and the truth of the matter is wide, and for a time Longinus did not completely comprehend the precise nature of his damnation. The number of vampires in Jerusalem was small compared to the numbers tonight, and in the time of the Camarilla one’s lineage was given great importance. Being little more than an uneducated bastard who sought to feed from the same Herd his elders perceived as theirs, Longinus was forced to make his own way, to struggle with the thirst for blood that forever haunted him, and to learn to survive in the shadows of Humanity as best he could. All that once held meaning for him — wine, women, food, money — were now as dust, replaced by an emptiness that threatened to savage his sanity. The only thing that saved him from descending into madness was the surety that God sought something more from him. If his work was completed, he might as well be allowed to burn in the morning light or destroyed by those fearful of his predations. He should be allowed to burn in Hell with the enemies of God, forever removed from the earthly realm and unable to experience even for a moment the pleasures of God’s Creation. Instead, as much as his existence was difficult, he found himself possessed of strange new powers beyond the ken of mortals — powers that enabled him to do the miraculous and only made it easier for him to prey upon man. Surely, he still had some purpose to fulfill, some divine task that God wished him to undertake that would be better served if he were more able to survive the rigors of damnation.
However, as he turned to leave, his hopes for further knowledge seemingly dashed, a brilliant light appeared, blinding him and sending him hurrying into the darkest corner in order to avoid its fire. Within the light stood a figure of unsurpassed beauty. He declared himself the Archangel Vahishtael, and told Longinus that he had come to reveal to him the divine purpose of the Damned. Although denied salvation and damned to a difficult existence, it was their place to show mankind the price of sin. They were to make men understand that the world was only a brief, brutal, and pitiful presage to the glory of Heaven. And it was for them to take the blood of man, as Longinus had taken it from Jesus, in order to show them both their mortality and the divine salvation that awaited them in the next life. Vahishtael ended by telling Longinus that it was his mission to pass on this message to all the Damned, to make them know what God demanded of them. With that, the archangel was gone and once more Longinus was left in darkness, only this time he was no longer lost. He had been shown the divine road set for the Damned and was determined to show it to others like him.
Longinus set himself to his holy task at a time when proselytizing anything resembling Christianity met with swift and severe punishment in Rome. Even among the Damned this tendency was popular, for most of the civilized Damned were drawn from the Roman class and took pleasure in the plight of the early Christians, who they saw as even more deserving of contempt than the restless Jews. Longinus’ words were received with amusement at first, but his persistence in seeking to persuade others to see things his way was soon met with outright repudiation. He was threatened with destruction and most assumed he was destroyed during the Jewish revolt that soon shook the city to its foundations.
Despite his failures, Longinus did not abandon his mission. Instead, he concluded that he had two obstacles to overcome if he were to succeed. First, he had no classical education and had difficulty conveying his message to those who spent their spare moments reading classical literature and debating complex philosophy. Second, so long as he alone sought to spread the word, he would find it hard to convince others that his message was worthy of serious consideration.
As the Christian faith came to flourish, even if still given no official recognition and marred by a stigma that continued to bring persecution, a number of men made themselves known by their writings on the theologically revolutionary faith. One came to capture Longinus’ attention, a scholar whose eloquent discourses with fellow believers seemed to touch on the very things that had continued to vex Longinus about his own understanding of God and his mission. Pretending to be just another curious believer, he held his own private conversations with the scholar, using these opportunities to not only fortify his own religious comprehension, but to also discover everything he could about the man.
One night, Longinus came to him and told him all that had happened and all that had been revealed by God and the archangel. The man listened raptly, his acceptance of these truths in no doubt. Before the sun rose, Longinus offered him a choice: to die the death of a mortal and be welcomed into Heaven or to bear the burden of damnation and join him in spreading The Message of God’s purpose. The Embrace was a sacred thing, even as it was a damning one. When sunlight spilled over the city walls, Longinus and his childe found Haven and slept the sleep of the Damned.
For a score of years, the sire taught his progeny all that he could. In return, the childe educated Longinus in all things he knew. When this period was over, Longinus released his childe from his patronage and bade him go forth and spread the word among the Damned. He gave to his childe the only possession he valued, the hallowed lance that he had kept since that fateful night nearly two centuries before, so that his childe would feel its weight in his hand. With a final blessing that anointed his childe his rightful heir and disciple, Longinus departed the city and never again saw what he had wrought. He would walk the road set for him alone, truly damned among the Damned.
On the other hand, if Longinus has no ability to Embrace, that condition automatically exempts him from the Second Tradition, which is an unlikely position for such an icon of the vampiric condition.
No one knows the answer, and theories vary wildly throughout the covenant. Orthodox belief is that Longinus did indeed sire, even if the specifics of that Embrace elude The Lancea Sanctum. Other theories include the supposition that any of Longinus’ childer would have been adopted, perhaps with him acting as a sort of Avus to them, or that Longinus had disciples instead of literal childer, and that the familiar term was used to signify the intimacy of those relationships. Some Kindred even draw parallels between Dracula, himself known to have been unable to sire childer, and Longinus, as both are believed to have been cursed by God in some fashion. Naturally, this last comparison raises a few eyebrows among the Sanctified, but even the most hard-line member of the covenant must accept certain similarities between the origin stories.
Although the tome as it is now known did not exist in full for centuries, the formative parts were completed by the early third century, when Longinus’ childe began his ministry. He explained that while forever denied the Light of God, the Damned are at the same time Sanctified by virtue of their place in Creation and, more importantly, their acceptance of that place. It is God’s will that the Damned willfully acknowledge their fate and carry themselves accordingly. As they are no longer mortal, the concerns of mortals are no longer theirs. Rather, they are dark angels whose acts glorify God even as they terrify the living. Against doubters the childe of Longinus proved a capable orator and soon a small group of believers had gathered to his side, convinced of the truth of his startling revelation. Together the Monachus and his five disciples — revered tonight as the Five Martyrs — forged a covenant, swearing the tenets of their new faith upon the Spear of Destiny, which they had been entrusted to keep safe. In 232 The Lancea Sanctum celebrated its first Midnight Mass in a cavern near Jerusalem once used by priests of much older faiths. From that night forward, the scions of Longinus dedicated themselves to the road of damnation and sought to bring The Testament of Longinus to all Kindred.
The first great challenge to the covenant came swiftly. The Sanctified took to their new faith with a fervor that caused great concern among the city’s other Damned. In Jerusalem, as in most cities, the Camarilla was staunchly pro-Roman and so viewed Christians and their upstart religion as a danger that should be stamped out. They supported the numerous acts of persecution perpetrated by Rome on the Christians and even allowed the Jews to vent their dissatisfaction with their Roman masters upon the followers of Jesus; better that than another Jewish uprising that might do real damage to their traditional power. In their cold eyes, The Lancea Sanctum was just a vampiric perversion of Christianity, and therefore a direct threat to the Camarilla.
Although some converts were made, the Sanctified met with far more opposition and in 241 they were finally forced to flee the city or face certain destruction. Their own beliefs had contributed to this rout, for they cleaved to the words of Longinus that forbade the wanton destruction of other Damned, leaving them at a distinct disadvantage when confronted with Camarilla vampires far less concerned with such things. The eldest of the city’s Damned, led by a figure named Nephele, declared the covenant outlawed and ordered the Monachus and his followers to be exiled or destroyed. Two of the Sanctified went to ask for clemency and convey upon the misguided elders the error of their ways. For this, St. Adira and St. Gilad were set upon crosses and left to face the rising sun as a sign of the Camarilla’s conviction. Unable to face their persecutors with so few numbers, and sure that any further delay could mean the destruction of the covenant, the Sanctified departed Jerusalem. So began the exodus of The Lancea Sanctum.
Three years after leaving the Holy Land, the surviving Sanctified arrived in Thebes, once the most sacred city of the Egyptians, now a place of magnificent temples abandoned by the Pharaohs. The place was not filled with ghosts alone, however. For nearly a century small bands of Christians fleeing persecution from Rome had been coming here, occupying some of the temples and smaller structures and breathing a semblance of life back to the wide avenues on both sides of the Nile. Following suit, the Monachus and his three remaining disciples installed themselves below an ancient Temple in the great Necropolis, sustaining their hunger on the blood of the Christian community above and further developing the rituals and ceremonies still practiced tonight among the Sanctified.
Of all its achievements during the covenant’s stay in Thebes, the most important was the discovery of a hidden chamber located in the labyrinthine depths of the Temple it used as its Haven and church. Protected from interlopers by traps that would bring sure death to any mortal, the cavernous hall was closed forever to those who still clung to life. For the Sanctified, however, its secrets were revealed in all their terrible glory. The angel Amoniel appeared before the Monachus and led him and his disciples down into the underbelly of the earth. The apparition showed them a door that had been invisible to their eyes before, one that opened into a vast cavern of marvelous beauty. Scribed on the massive walls were murals and hieroglyphs that spelled out things meant only for The Lancea Sanctum: dreadful miracles, secret knowledge of damnation, and powers entrusted only to those who bore the Spear of Destiny. God had led the covenant out of Jerusalem and to this place so that these secrets might be known to them and used to protect them from all obstacles that challenged their faith. Amoniel gave them the key to understanding the divine glyphs and entrusted them to keep this knowledge from all who would deny God His place. The Sanctified devoted themselves to this holy task, leaving only to feed, eager to show Longinus and the Almighty their worthiness.
When the all-Christian legion garrisoned at Thebes was ordered to march on Gaul under the command of Emperor Maximian in 286, St. Daniel felt compelled to join the campaign despite the obvious dangers. St. Daniel was beginning to have doubts about his faith, in part because he struggled to master the sorceries revealed to him and his fellow followers of Longinus. Amoniel came to him and told him that if he went with the Theban Legion a miracle would occur that would erase any lingering concerns. Traveling with the army, St. Daniel was protected from harm by Mauritius, the Coptic captain in charge of the legion who was made the Saint’s ghoul. In Gaul, the emperor’s troops set upon the rebellious Burgundians and a terrible battle ensued.
On the first day of the fighting Mauritius’ personal tent was overrun by enemy forces and St. Daniel would have been destroyed, but Amoniel appeared to him in his dreams and told him to awaken and trust in his faith. He did so and found that the magics he had previously been unable to master now came easily to him. He summoned a great cloud of darkness that protected him from the sun and with an awesome display of miracle drove back the assault. That night he laid a blessing upon the Spear of Mauritius, bestowing upon it the power of the Spear of Destiny, a blessing that enabled the captain to lead his forces to victory alongside the other legions.
When the conflict ended and the rebellion was no more, the emperor ordered his legions to make a sacrifice to the Roman gods as thanks for their aid in battle. However, having witnessed their captains’ divine fury against the enemy and recognizing the miracles of St. Daniel, the Theban Legion were unwilling to bow down to any god but the Almighty, and so they refused their emperor. Even when a number of them were summarily executed before their comrades, the surviving legionnaires continued to stand firm in their objection to pagan sacrifice.
When St. Daniel arose that evening, he was shocked to discover the atrocity of the emperor. Every last man of the Theban Legion was butchered for his piety, their blood turning the hills red and filling St. Daniel with frenzy. He went among the Romans that night and wreaked holy havoc, showing them the power of Theban Sorcery and the fury of The Lancea Sanctum. It is said that among the Roman legions were other Kindred, and these returned to tell of what they saw to other Damned, who trembled in fear at the telling. The night of the massacre and St. Daniel’s subsequent retribution is remembered each September 22 as the Miracle of St. Daniel and celebrated in many dioceses with solemn prayer and often a ritual reenactment.
Although Theban Sorcery was powerful, it was not a panacea for all the dangers the covenant would continue to face. Along with the Roman occupation came the Camarilla, whose members made it their mission to cleanse the vicinity of the nascent Lancea Sanctum. The use of Theban Sorcery against these heathen Damned did help the covenant avoid complete destruction, but survival was not without its costs. St. Pazit sacrificed herself in order to protect the Spear of Destiny from capture, and it was only by virtue of their faith that the Monachus and his remaining disciple were able to sail north without further incident. For nearly 50 years the pair traveled from city to city in Northern Africa and Southern Europe, preaching The Testament of Longinus and seeking a place where they would be undisturbed by the forces of the Camarilla. St. Maron was nearly destroyed while ministering to the Damned of Alexandria, so strong was the reaction of the local Damned to The Message of the Sanctified. The last of the Five Martyrs, he finally departed the earthly realm in 329 when savaged by barbarians — a Lupine witch said to be among them — in the Italian foothills.
In 335, having lost each of his pious companions to adversity, the Monachus came upon a simple monastery in a desolate land where the snows and rains were heavy. Driven by hunger as much as faith, the first childe of Longinus set upon the house of God like a ravenous demon, sating his thirst on the blood of the monks, for their faith was too weak to stave off his attacks. After 12 nights of such feasting, he approached the last of the men, and proclaimed to him the Testament, holding aloft the Sacred Lance and revealing himself as the heir of Longinus. The man, the most learned of his community, was allowed to taste of the damnation of the Monachus and became his ghoul and first Vicar of the covenant. The monastery was consecrated to The Lancea Sanctum with the Spear of Destiny spilling the blood of three mortals and the Testament being read in its entirety. For a time the two dwelt alone in the Black Abbey, but soon other Damned came to set their eyes upon the childe of Longinus, touch the Sacred Lance, and hear the truth of the Testament. They came by Providence alone, led by signs and drawn by the piety of the Monachus and the Sanctity of the holy relic. The Lancea Sanctum was now planted in the rich blood of Europe and from this soil it would grow and spread across the world.
The second element in the covenant’s success seems oddly a terrible setback. The Black Abbey had come to be a place of great importance among the Damned, and while only a relatively small number had ever visited its holy grounds and witnessed the Spear of Destiny, many more were aware of its significance to The Lancea Sanctum. Other congregations of Sanctified had surfaced throughout Christendom, seizing power as the Camarilla crumbled under its own anachronistic weight. Even where it could not lay claim to political authority, it was not without power. The rising Invictus, populated with Kindred used to exercising dominance over their peers, saw a benefit to an alliance with The Lancea Sanctum and found in its beliefs numerous arguments that supported their rule. As it strove to proclaim itself the First Estate of the Damned, The Lancea Sanctum became the indisputable Second Estate, providing spiritual support to The Invictus in order to secure its own hold on power and better fight off any of the numerous pagan sects that fought for the cold hearts and disquiet minds of the Damned. The Monachus did not declare himself the official leader of The Lancea Sanctum, but he was regarded as such wherever there were Sanctified. While this worked to unify the covenant, it also made the Black Abbey and its priesthood increasing targets of those who wished to tear down or supplant the Second Estate.
On a particularly ominous August night in 947 The Lancea Sanctum received a lesson that would shake it to its foundations. One of the Monachus’s closest apostles and a cabal of vile traitors had organized a conspiracy. The group had secretly renounced God and Longinus, and had instead given their loyalty to the Ruler of Hell. With the name of the Adversary on their treasonous lips, they stole into the tabernacle to steal the Spear of Destiny and deliver it to their infernal master. The Sanctified, fearsome in their righteousness, beset them, but the traitors’ Perfidy was discovered too late. The brood of Luciferians put the sacred fane of Longinus to the torch, and the fires of the Abyss rose swiftly. A great battle raged in the nave of the Black Abbey even as flames enveloped it, but it seemed the diabolical forces would prevail. The Traitor called upon the might of his infernal lord and brought down the Monachus, committing the foul Amaranth, as is the way of true sinners.
When the Traitor and his surviving comrades closed the doors of the Black Abbey behind them, consigning the Sanctified to a fiery doom, they had all but succeeded in their plan. But to their outrage, they could not find the Sacred Lance. Savoring that part of victory they could claim, they left only after the last of the monastery had fallen to ash along with the most holy of The Lancea Sanctum. What became of the Spear of Destiny has never been determined. Some claim that the Vicar was able to take it and some of the Monachus’s original writings out of the conflagration before he could be discovered, perhaps at the sacrificial behest of the Monachus. Others put a more miraculous spin on the fate of the Sacred Lance, suggesting that God or Longinus directly intervened, pulling the relic from the fire. Still others suggest something darker. Since the Vicar had been privy to the secrets of the monastery since its construction long before the Monachus’s arrival, he may have known of secret passages that he later used to secret out the Spear of Destiny. If so, was he also part of the conspiracy, his mortal mind bent to the purpose of the Devil, causing him to open the passage so the Traitor could more easily launch his diabolical assault? Whatever may have been the case, there is no verifiable report of the Spear of Destiny surfacing, either in Sanctified or Adversarial hands.
From the earliest nights after the Crucifixion, devout Christians in Jerusalem revered a lance believed to be the Spear of Destiny. Until the early seventh century it supposedly remained there, an artifact that did for the Christians what the real relic did for the early Sanctified: it gave them something to rally around and enabled them to actually touch the weapon that spilled the blood of the Christ, bridging the gulf between the spiritual and the physical. The object fell into the hands of pagans with the occupation of the Persians, after which the tip and the shaft were separated. According to Church legend, the blade was taken to Constantinople and the Church of St. Sophia. In 1244 Baldwin had it placed in an icon and presented it to King Louis of France, who put the treasure with what was believed to be the true Crown of Thorns in the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris. The lance pole apparently remained in Jerusalem longer, where it was put on display at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Some stories say it also went to Constantinople, where the Sultan later gave it to Pope Innocent VIII in exchange for his imprisoned brother. This is the shaft supposedly placed within one of the columns of St. Peter’s.
Things become more complicated in that the blade now in Vienna — often referred to as the Lance of St. Maurice — was supposed to have been used in 1273 for the Emperor’s coronation ceremony. St. Maurice is the Catholic Church’s name for the captain of the Theban Legion, St. Daniel’s ghoul, martyred in 286. Christians believe the faithful of Caesarea gave the weapon to St. Maurice as a symbol of fellowship, but how it came to Vienna after the slaughter is unknown.
Other tales place the Sacred Lance in the hands of the Saxon King Heinrich when he defeated the Magyars and at his son’s christening as Holy Roman Emperor. The defeat of the Mongolians in the Battle of Leck and the victory of Constantine at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge are also attributed in part to the Spear of Destiny. A full score of legends of how the relic fell into the hands of Justinian, whose touch poisoned it and instilled it with a dark power, continue to circulate. Adolph Hitler was said to have been drawn to this darkness, and he is rumored to have carried it in order to improve his prospects for battle. One story says that General Patton was aware of this and was terrified of the Spear of Destiny, fearing that it would fulfill its destiny with atomic force.
Despite the tales, mortal man has been deceived. The various lances in the stories and now resting in museums and churches have been thoroughly examined by the Damned, and none have been shown to be anything more than artifacts possessed of some residual spiritual emanations, the consequence of the great faith given them over the long years. Of course, this does not stop some Sanctified from still pursuing the Lance stories to their ends, hoping to be able to touch the potent relic and perhaps use it to begin a Crusade capable of toppling the other covenants and forever establishing The Lancea Sanctum as the only authority among the Damned. Although the vast majority of the trails are dead ends, none can refute the fact that the real Spear of Destiny is out there somewhere, waiting for the right moment in history to be reclaimed by the heirs of Longinus.
In the aftermath of the Night of One Hundred Martyrs, there was great instability, of course. As word spread of the destruction of the Black Abbey and the Monachus, some lost their faith, having tied it too closely to these icons. Most did not abandon the covenant, however. The earliest visitors to the Black Abbey had come as unbelievers and skeptics and left as pious missionaries, carrying their own personal testament of what they had experienced there along with the Testament of Longinus back to their domains. Their zeal and piety were unassailable, and even the great loss at the hands of the Traitor and his conspirators could not diminish their purpose.
The Rule had always made plain that the highest spiritual authority among the Damned lay with the Bishop of the domain, not with the Monachus. Such being the case, instead of being left leaderless and without direction, the most devout of the Sanctified reaffirmed the Rule and looked within to protect and nourish The Lancea Sanctum. Although contact between Sanctified in different domains never ceased entirely, each congregation now saw itself as a monastery of sorts, an independent community that need look no further than its own house for spiritual and political guidance. Where a question of faith should arise, the Bishop would be the final arbiter, with the Testament and her own religious convictions as her authority. This change saved The Lancea Sanctum from dissolution and provided it a structure that was far more resistant to attack in the future. No longer could enemies of the covenant strike at a single place or figure; from this point forward, the church had as many heads as there were Sanctified, and that was no small number.
As with all faiths that experience widespread acceptance, diffusion, corruption and outright heresy are a constant and expected threat to orthodoxy. This is especially the case with The Lancea Sanctum, given its decentralized organization. In every domain The Testament of Longinus is interpreted differently, sometimes because of ignorance, sometimes because of personal motives of the Bishop or other scriptural scholar, and most often due to an honest inquiry and examination of the theological underpinnings and ramifications of its corpus. In most places, these interpretations do not radically deviate from the norm, though it does happen at times. Rarely indeed will a dangerously unorthodox view become not only adopted by one congregation, but spread beyond the domain and become the creed of Sanctified elsewhere. Such is the case of the most troublesome of all the covenant’s schisms, the Icarian Heresy.
In the fourteenth century, even as the Great Schism tore the Catholic Church apart, The Lancea Sanctum found itself facing its own unrelated crisis. In 1388 the eldest Sanctified in Naples, revered by his congregation as the first vampire to seek out the Black Abbey and later become anointed by the Monachus, was slain by a power-hungry Daeva. Archbishop Icarius had punished the Succubus for her flagrant disregard for The Traditions. In return she sent her agents to seize the sleeping Ventrue by day and bring his helpless body to her. Paralyzed with a stake through his heart, the Archbishop could do nothing as the Daeva drained him of his ancient Vitae and left him as a true corpse. She proclaimed herself Prince and quickly sought to consolidate her power, but she was unprepared for the outrage that her act inspired in the Sanctified.
Three nights after the Amaranth of Icarius, The Lancea Sanctum rose up and tore down the new Prince and her supporters, declaring the city theirs by divine right. The Archbishop’s progeny assumed leadership and, by virtue of their descent from Icarius, proclaimed that it was their sacred duty to ensure that the domain was never again stolen from their grip. Within a hundred years the fervor that brought Icarius’ childer to power spread beyond Naples. The Icarian bloodline grew and as it did, its members traveled from the holy city in order to replicate their founders’ usurpation of power elsewhere. Surprisingly canny politicians and Proselytizers, the Icarians largely succeeded in their campaign and by 1500 more than a dozen cities in Italy and neighboring lands had yielded to their dynastic ambitions. In these places The Lancea Sanctum was now subject to the authority of the Icarian bloodline, whose members were deemed the only Sanctified worthy of speaking for the covenant.
Not every domain gave into this unorthodoxy, of course. While the Mediterranean came under its sway, the bulk of Europe did not and denounced the Icarians and their creed as heresy. For two more centuries the Icarian Heresy remained a very serious threat to those Sanctified who would not accept its dynastic tenets. Only in the early eighteenth century did the zeal of the Icarians truly die down, with the last known attempt by a scion of Icarius to seize power in The Lancea Sanctum occurring in Avignon in 1724.
The danger of the Icarian Heresy as well as others — in Spain during this time, the Banu Shaitan promulgated their own divergent flavor of faith and adopted the Moorish-influenced Iblic Creed — brought with it the rise of The Lancea Sanctum’s Inquisitors. Taking their cue from the Catholic Church’s response to heresy in its ranks, the Sanctified created their own inquisition dedicated to rooting out and destroying any threats to their spiritual survival. Early Inquisitors were rarely appointed, taking canon law into their own righteous hands in order to protect the covenant. In some cases this created Hysteria and some of these self-made Inquisitors had to be destroyed, so far did they go in seeking heretics. This overkill led to the practice continued tonight, where it was the sole privilege of the Bishop to name Inquisitors and bestow upon them the authority to carry out their necessary investigations.
When Charles Emerson declared the Westminster Creed at the height of the mortal faith’s Great Awakening, Inquisitors played a prominent role in successfully limiting its influence to the British Isles. Not every unorthodox practice saw an inquisition, however. In Jerusalem the Acharit Hayami sect met with little opposition when they formally affirmed their faith in the uniquely Jewish Dammatic Creed, one better suited to their cultural traditions than the widely accepted Monachal Creed.
Stories of a Mekhet ancilla here or a Nosferatu neonate there whose Requiems were cut short by the unwanted attentions of a Church Inquisitor, unaware until the end of the true nature of his victim, are not uncommon among the elders. These stories serve as valuable lessons to younger Damned who have yet to truly understand the serious trouble posed by kine of blind passion and faith. On the whole, the Damned did not suffer terribly from the Inquisition, but in some places its reign of terror is not forgotten even tonight.
In such domains, the Damned continue to regard the Catholic Church with extra caution and usually give it a wide berth. The Lancea Sanctum recalls the Inquisition with more respect than most covenants; the Sanctified understand the danger of heresy and while they may not share the Church’s beliefs or interests, and certainly do not wish the Inquisition to rear its ugly head ever again, they cannot argue its effectiveness. If not for Torquemada and the Crusade against heresy that he marshaled, The Lancea Sanctum might have been unable to preserve the doctrinal unity and political power that it can still largely claim to possess.
Individual Damned, including some notable Sanctified, did choose to explore the barbaric landscape, however. To these adventurous few, it was the promise of herds of kine ignorant of the existence of vampires that motivated them as well as an insatiable urge to simply discover new things, perhaps as a way to combat ennui and world-weariness. In the New World they could establish their own domains and feed from an unspoiled population with little fear of organized retribution. Word from Columbus and his peers about the primitive beliefs of the so-called Indians they encountered only reinforced the dogma among these Damned that the risk was indeed worth the reward. By the late 1600s the first Kindred had crossed the Atlantic and walked among the exotic people of these strange new lands, availing themselves of all they could.
Arguably the first Sanctified to make a name for herself in the New World was Sister Almudena Marina Garcia, the childe of an Old World Inquisitor. Only a neonate when she arrived in Mexico in 1712, she had an immediate impact. Soon after her arrival, Garcia wrote to her sire in Iberia that she had heard tales among the locals of a figure that she came to believe was Longinus. According to her telling, this person was clearly one of the Damned, and had already been on the continent for more than five hundred years, if the folktales were to be believed. The stories she recounted told how Longinus had passed through the region, working dark miracles before continuing his journey northward. She even claimed to have in her possession proof of Longinus’ presence: a Roman coin dating to the time of Tiberius and struck in Judea, supposedly left behind by the Dark Prophet. The news passed from Sanctified to Sanctified and ignited for the first time in The Lancea Sanctum a significant religious interest in the New World.
Within a century the Sanctified were at least as well represented in the New World — in particular in its northernmost settled regions due to the belief that this is where Longinus had been going — as any other covenant. As the Spanish pushed into what is now the southern United States, The Lancea Sanctum was there, albeit in small numbers. Some of the most renowned missions served as havens for those Sanctified willing to expose themselves to the myriad terrors of the wilderness that seemed to have no end. Still, it was not until the mid-1800s that the Sanctified would make their real impact on the New World.
Throughout North America, by the early nineteenth century the Damned had already established themselves in the multitude of towns and cities that continued to spread across the land. In most of these places, The Lancea Sanctum was of little real consequence, its Old World attitudes meeting apathy from Kindred uninterested what they felt were ideas unfit for Requiems shaped by the new ideas prevalent in the vibrant American domains. Its members served their fellow Damned primarily as spiritual advisers, taking what influence they could in this fashion, careful not to alienate the other covenants that held greater political power. These Sanctified were not necessarily disrespected, but their covenant’s sway in the Old World was an obstacle to their advancement here. Some of the Damned, the Carthians in particular, were overtly fearful of seeing the Americas become the spitting image of Western Europe, where The Invictus and Lancea Sanctum historically held the lion’s share of authority. The Carthians and others wished to build new Kindred societies modeled more on the philosophies that had led to the revolutions of the previous two centuries, and The Lancea Sanctum was an obvious hindrance to such plans.
Strangely, what saved The Lancea Sanctum from playing no more than a peripheral role in North America was the action of a simple neonate. Inspired by the ideas of the Great Awakening and the revivals of New York’s Charles Finney, a pragmatic Mekhet named Adolphus Pym organized what amounted to the first vampire religious revival on an abandoned farm in the American Midwest in 1836. Taking his cue from the kine preachers he had heard and adopting the mien of the consummate showman, he delivered his sermon with all the fire and brimstone he could. Given his substantial supernatural gifts, as well as his own innate talent and unshakeable faith in the righteousness of his beliefs, Pym’s revival proved far more successful than he had hoped. The few who were lucky enough to attend the first revival were so moved by the evangelist’s passion and fury that word of the reverend and his mission spread.
By 1839 one of his revivals near Philadelphia is supposed to have drawn more than two hundred Damned, eager to witness the spectacle and experience the kind of spiritual rejuvenation and enlightenment that Pym was offering. His achievement encouraged other Sanctified to emulate him and by the end of the American Civil War, smaller-scale Lancea Sanctum revivals were not an uncommon occurrence. At first, neonates were most susceptible to the charismatic message of the evangelists and the soulful appeal of their message, but ancillae also soon found themselves drawn to these unorthodox events and listened in increasing numbers to the dramatic preachers, finding in The Testament of Longinus the truth they had been hoping to find. Only the eldest remained unfazed by the Evangelical Movement, to whom the revival’s flagrant reliance upon stage tricks seemed crass and artificial. The few true elders who existed in North America had spent most of their Requiems in the Old World.
To those not Sanctified, these Sermons were nothing new. At least in the Old World they could respect the solemn piety and tradition of the Sanctified, however misplaced or overdone in their opinions. In their minds the evangelists deserved no such respect. They were merely entertainers and rabble-rousers, little better than the unbound wearing a façade of religiosity.
No matter the private views of certain influential Damned, the Evangelical Movement was a watershed for The Lancea Sanctum. Converts to the covenant were numerous and by the turn of the century the Sanctified could boast nearly as many members as any other covenant. The Lancea Sanctum did not wear the same face that it did in the Old World, however. Certainly some domains of the Sanctified clung to the orthodox traditions and creeds established on the other side of the Atlantic, but these places were in the minority. Instead, all manner of deviations took root as Sanctified adopted practices and beliefs popular with the locals. Rather than seeking to eradicate unusual rituals or divergent interpretations of canon, the American Lancea Sanctum incorporated them. What they sacrificed in purity of faith they gained twofold in converts, giving them the strength necessary to assert their authority throughout the continent. No longer could The Lancea Sanctum be sidelined or relegated to effectively ceremonial power. The revivals had brought real gains to the covenant where traditional approaches had failed.
The widespread unorthodoxy of the covenant in North America did not go unchecked forever. In the 1940s a wave of localized conservatisms occurred, with the intent to save The Lancea Sanctum from what individual dioceses saw as a very real threat. They believed that the majority of American Kindred who called themselves Sanctified were in fact nothing more than up-jumped “protestants” whose false claim to know the Testament was an insult to Longinus and God. Two members of Clan Nosferatu struck their first blow by convening a Synod in the Northeast and proclaiming themselves ecclesiastical judges invested with the authority of the Black Abbey to eliminate heresy and bring the faith back to its Monachal roots. Of course, how they could make such claims greatly troubled the Sanctified they summoned to their court, but against such obvious age, theological wisdom, and certain martial prowess, few dared to interrogate them on these questions.
Terrifying in aspect, the Syndics made quite an impression on the Sanctified. Although their inquisitions did result in the destruction of some Damned, for the most part it served their purposes by simply putting the fear of divine retribution into those they judged. They forced those who came before them to learn and recite The Monachal Creed and be reborn, as it were, into The Lancea Sanctum. When the Synod was ended, the pair moved elsewhere and setup a second Synod, and then a third and a fourth. For two decades they held court, bringing The Lancea Sanctum back to its orthodox origins.
As suddenly as they came, they were gone, their work apparently complete. After 1966 they were not heard from again, at least not in North America. Some are unable to accept so neat a conclusion and more than a few rumors have suggested that the Syndics were destroyed while traveling between domains, taken down by diabolical vampires, or instead slipped into Torpor and continue to sleep beneath the American soil.
Such deviations grew not only in America, but in Europe and elsewhere also. The Exotheist Manifesto — a document elevating each Sanctified as his or her own Bishop, in essence — gained numerous adherents and there was no guarantee in a given domain that the faith would be preached or practiced in the same manner as in a neighboring city. The Icarians secured at least one city in the Americas they could call their own, while phenomena like the eschatological Crimson Cavalry and other small, radical groups rose up, testament to the variety of creeds and causes the Sanctified cannot agree upon.
Some argue that this diversification was precisely what the Monachus had hoped for when he laid the foundations for the covenant, a religion that he intended to be independent of an overarching hierarchy and that required no authority under God and Longinus but the word of the local Bishop. For better or for worse, this is largely how The Lancea Sanctum has survived into the modern nights.
At the time of Christ lived a man who indulged sin of every kind. Born the bastard child of a Roman prostitute in Jerusalem, his was a life of debauchery and cruelty. Still young, Longinus gambled away his mother’s meager earnings and struck her when she complained, publicly declaring her a dog fit only for mounting. Sodden with wine he later raped her and bragged of the exploit to his equally depraved companions, asking “for who among you has had his pleasure with so comely a whore as my ripe mother?” He brawled with any who earned his ire, leaving a shopkeeper Crippled and his own cousin bereft of a hand. It is said that there was nothing too wanton for the tastes of Longinus. Although his actions earned him the enmity of his neighbors, he came to the attention of a particularly foul Commander in the legion garrison who offered him a job serving Rome as payment or a lost bet. Longinus was unfit for soldiering, however. Prone o violence and venality, he frequently disobeyed orders and abused his power on the streets, enjoying the fear he was able to instill on the citizens he was supposed to protect. To his dismay, he soon discovered there was a price to pay for his behavior. He received frequent reprimands and spent a majority of his time assigned to menial tasks intended to both punish him and keep him from corrupting his fellow legionnaires. When he was charged with murdering a supposed friend who had recently surpassed him in rank, he was brought before the city’s procurator. His should have been a swift trial followed by a swifter and serious punishment, but the Hand of God intervened and dissuaded Pontius Pilate from making such a judgment.
A month prior to his arrest, Longinus had been instrumental in locating a young man wanted for robbing and molesting the favored servant of Pilate’s wife, Claudia. When the procurator’s wife discovered Longinus’ situation, she persuaded her husband to dismiss the charges against him and to allow him to serve their household in reward for his service to the family. Longinus did not learn from his close brush with death, however. Installed at Pilate’s house, he conspired to have his superior accused of lusting after Claudia and within two years found himself iven the title of centurion and command of Pilate’s personal guard. None of this was luck, of course. Longinus’ crimes marked him for a long-preordained role. Only one so sinful was it to serve as the agent of destiny necessary to complete part of God’s plan. When the moment was right, it would be Longinus’ place to commit an act of such blasphemy and portent that the seal of ignorance that had lain for so long upon the Damned would be shattered and, for the first time, their place in God’s Creation would be revealed to them.
The Spear of Destiny
If it was by virtue of free choice that Longinus committed his sins and so became the chosen agent of God, it was by dint of predestination that the instrument of his final mortal sin was unveiled. Longinus’ role in the slaying of Christ and the revelation of his divinity was determined only in his lifetime, but the weapon he would use to open Christ’s side had been set upon the earth long before, waiting the ages to fulfill its sole purpose. Before the Great Flood had been loosed upon the children of Adam, the guilty lance had been made by a smith to appease a wicked king named Lamech, hoping the gift would save the life of his only son, found guilty of speaking against the monarch. The point of the lance was forged of an unnatural stone that had fallen from the heavens when the sun was black, and it was of a hardness unprecedented in its time. The king accepted the spear-tip with the fire of greed burning in his raw eyes, for never before had he seen a weapon so fit for a ruler of the land between the rivers. Testing its weight in his hands, he let the lance taste its first blood, piercing the guiltless heart of its maker. With the lance King Lamech rode against his enemies and purged his city of dissidents, proclaiming dominion over all. No army could stop his assault upon the peoples of his day; only forty days and nights of rains were able to halt his limitless cruelty. For many ages the lance was lost to the world, the memory of its existence washed away with all else that pained the souls of men before the Flood. An artifact of such purport could not remain hidden forever, of course. When God was ready for it to play its intended role, destiny saw that the lance found its way into the hands of the man chosen to bear it.Ultimately, the Spear of Destiny found its way into the hands of a Galician merchant named Phaecus, who came into possession of the artifact by way of trade with a Tyrean ship captain. The wooden shaft of the weapon did not survive the years, but the tip remained unmarred by the passage of time and circumstance, protected by God’s Hand. When Pilate took Phaecus to task on charges of avoiding bonding taxes on the wares he wished to sell in Jerusalem, the canny merchant understood the game and paid a handsome bribe to the procurator to avoid an even more onerous fine. He made even fatter the offer by giving to the eager Pilate a handful of trinkets that the judge might find fitting as gifts for his wife and household. Among these baubles was the point of the lance, something that Phaecus deemed more a curiosity than a thing to earn him a profit. When Pilate distributed the items as a sign of his graciousness at the next festival feast, he rewarded Longinus with the unusual blade, saying only that it was an ancient weapon that once adorned the Spear of a king. This tale was, so he believed, merely the product of the exaggerated imagination common to merchants like Phaecus; he could not know how true these words were. Although meant to be a ceremonial gift only — the blade was not of a design in fashion at the time — Longinus’ sense of pride would not allow him to put it in some chest until the next feast. He had it affixed anew to a sturdy length of firehardened wood and bore it always as a symbol of the stature he held in the procurator’s house.
When the man mockingly vilified as the “King of the Jews” was pronounced guilty of crimes against Rome and sentenced to death by crucifixion by Pilate, Longinus took no part in the contentious proceedings. Increasingly afflicted with a painful swelling of the eye that caused his vision to weaken notably, he had taken to doing as little as was necessary to carry out the duties of his station, and so was glad to make the punishment of Jesus the responsibility of others. Aside from enjoying a few jokes at the Nazarene’s expense, he had little interest in seeing another troublesome Jew put to death anyway. Certainly he had heard the tales of the carpenter’s son and of the strange things he preached, but this seemed no different from the numerous other charlatans and agitators who had come and gone over the years. He did not quite understand the significance the Jewish leaders gave to the Nazarene, guessing only that it had something to do with the particularly absurd things he preached on the street: how women and the poor were equal to wealthy and successful men in God’s eyes, and especially how every man, woman, and child was promised eternal salvation in some Olympian paradise. While his subordinates tormented and humiliated the miscreant Jew, forcing him to bear his own cross like an animal down the avenue toward Gethsemane as citizens harassed him and enjoyed his agonies, Longinus paid no heed. Instead, he supped on platters of pork and grapes, and flagons of expensive wine from Pilate’s private stock, in the comfort of a serving girl.
For any procurator of Jerusalem it was important to ensure that the peace was maintained in order to please Rome. Recent troubles among some Jewish quarters worried Pilate, so he listened closely to the advice of the Pharisees when they cautioned him of the possibility of outrage if the body of the Nazarene and the thieves sentenced with him still hung openly from crosses when the sun rose on the morning after the crucifixions, the Jewish Sabbath. Pilate sent word to Longinus to have the bodies taken down after sunset, when most of the curious would have already had their fill of the spectacle, ordering him to hasten their deaths if necessary. When he came to the hill, few onlookers remained, aside from a few grieving family members and friends, kept from disturbing the bodies of the victims by a single soldier on duty. Longinus ordered the soldier to break the legs of the three men with a club so that death would come more quickly, unwilling to wait longer for them to die. After meting out this last cruelty to the two thieves, the soldier proclaimed that the Jew was already dead, and so withheld his blow. Atop his horse, Longinus moved close to the Nazarene to be sure, unwilling to trust the word of a subordinate, and put his ear to the ashen and bloodied face of the Jew. To his dismay, he could still hear a shallow breath, despite the fact that his punishment had been especially barbaric; nails were used in place of the usual ropes to secure the convict to the cross.
Cursing, he thought to order the soldier to finish the job, but at that moment Jesus of Nazareth opened his eyes the smallest bit and gazed upon Longinus with a look that was as unexpected as it was devastating. Fixing his wounded eyes upon the sinful centurion with a strength of purpose that belied his long suffering, and without any need for words, the dying man imparted to Longinus something terrible for which he was unprepared. There, in the eyes of a Jew, Longinus saw a compassion and understanding that was beyond mortal comprehension. In that moment, he doubted his own convictions and feared that the stories of this man’s divinity may not have been entirely wrong. Shocked from what he saw, Longinus was overcome by an almost irresistible urge to flee as quickly as possible, to hide from the painful truth revealed in those knowing eyes. Like a frightened animal he cast about for means of escape, but was confronted by the faces of the mourners who remained, begging for mercy to be shown to the Nazarene. Forgetting the soldier and too prideful to allow the other onlookers to see the cowardice that now consumed his black soul and caused his hands to tremble, Longinus raised his lance and without pause thrust it with all his might into the side of his tormentor, desperate to put out the light that seemed to emanate from Jesus’ eyes. Accompanied by the gasps and cries of those watching, a gout of blood and other humors spurted from the wound, splashing Longinus’ face, and the Jew’s eyes went dim as his last breath passed his broken lips.
The death of Christ in this manner had been destined since before the Great Flood. With His mortal fall came the elevation of all mankind. The sacrifice of God’s Son was the key that unlocked the Gates of Heaven for all those descended from Noah. Christ’s divinity was also revealed by the act of Longinus and the cruelty of the Spear of Destiny, for as the blood of Jesus fell into his sickly eyes he found his sight restored to a clarity that surpassed that of a mortal man; nothing could escape his Perception now. God wished him to see things as they truly were, for Longinus had not completed his service to the Almighty.
He had only just begun, and clarity was necessary for his mission.
No longer blinded to God’s plan, Longinus was struck as if by thunder, for the full meaning of what had just transpired came clear. By his action he had willingly chosen to remove himself from the Illumination of God, to flee from the promise the Light offered him and to instead set himself apart from those Jesus had come to save. As the Son of God ceased to be a man, so too did he, for he never again drew another mortal breath. For him there was no hope of redemption and no promise of salvation. Longinus would never pass through the Gates of Heaven and would never find peace. As much as the Children of Noah were saved, he was Damned for all eternity. Longinus could not help but voice the truth he now knew. He proclaimed Christ’s divinity to those still horrorstruck at what he had done, and then seeing their expressions and feeling the full weight of his guilt bear down on him, he spurred his horse to action and fled Golgotha.
As with many people of his time, Longinus was no stranger to tales of jinn, ghosts, giants and other fantastical entities. Even so, the differences between the stories told and the truth of the matter is wide, and for a time Longinus did not completely comprehend the precise nature of his damnation. The number of vampires in Jerusalem was small compared to the numbers tonight, and in the time of the Camarilla one’s lineage was given great importance. Being little more than an uneducated bastard who sought to feed from the same Herd his elders perceived as theirs, Longinus was forced to make his own way, to struggle with the thirst for blood that forever haunted him, and to learn to survive in the shadows of Humanity as best he could. All that once held meaning for him — wine, women, food, money — were now as dust, replaced by an emptiness that threatened to savage his sanity. The only thing that saved him from descending into madness was the surety that God sought something more from him. If his work was completed, he might as well be allowed to burn in the morning light or destroyed by those fearful of his predations. He should be allowed to burn in Hell with the enemies of God, forever removed from the earthly realm and unable to experience even for a moment the pleasures of God’s Creation. Instead, as much as his existence was difficult, he found himself possessed of strange new powers beyond the ken of mortals — powers that enabled him to do the miraculous and only made it easier for him to prey upon man. Surely, he still had some purpose to fulfill, some divine task that God wished him to undertake that would be better served if he were more able to survive the rigors of damnation.
The Course of Damnation
In the 33rd year after the Crucifixion and the Damnation of Longinus, the former centurion paid a visit to the tomb of Christ. He had not dared to approach so holy a place since he was cast down by God, for in his pursuit of blood he had discovered that he was unable to drink from those who had accepted the Son of God as their Savior. The Light of God was so strong in some that he was unable to even come near them, but was instead seared by pain and forced to find refuge in the darkness. Eventually, however, curiosity and an unbearable desire to discover his purpose drove him to risk all. He came to the crypt when no one was present and the moon was hidden behind heavy clouds, the better to mask his approach. He entered the chamber to see for himself if indeed the body of Jesus was gone, for stories had circulated that he had risen from the dead three nights after the Crucifixion and ascended into Heaven. The lack of a powerful force keeping him at bay seemed to support this story, and when inside he knew it to be true.However, as he turned to leave, his hopes for further knowledge seemingly dashed, a brilliant light appeared, blinding him and sending him hurrying into the darkest corner in order to avoid its fire. Within the light stood a figure of unsurpassed beauty. He declared himself the Archangel Vahishtael, and told Longinus that he had come to reveal to him the divine purpose of the Damned. Although denied salvation and damned to a difficult existence, it was their place to show mankind the price of sin. They were to make men understand that the world was only a brief, brutal, and pitiful presage to the glory of Heaven. And it was for them to take the blood of man, as Longinus had taken it from Jesus, in order to show them both their mortality and the divine salvation that awaited them in the next life. Vahishtael ended by telling Longinus that it was his mission to pass on this message to all the Damned, to make them know what God demanded of them. With that, the archangel was gone and once more Longinus was left in darkness, only this time he was no longer lost. He had been shown the divine road set for the Damned and was determined to show it to others like him.
Longinus set himself to his holy task at a time when proselytizing anything resembling Christianity met with swift and severe punishment in Rome. Even among the Damned this tendency was popular, for most of the civilized Damned were drawn from the Roman class and took pleasure in the plight of the early Christians, who they saw as even more deserving of contempt than the restless Jews. Longinus’ words were received with amusement at first, but his persistence in seeking to persuade others to see things his way was soon met with outright repudiation. He was threatened with destruction and most assumed he was destroyed during the Jewish revolt that soon shook the city to its foundations.
Despite his failures, Longinus did not abandon his mission. Instead, he concluded that he had two obstacles to overcome if he were to succeed. First, he had no classical education and had difficulty conveying his message to those who spent their spare moments reading classical literature and debating complex philosophy. Second, so long as he alone sought to spread the word, he would find it hard to convince others that his message was worthy of serious consideration.
As the Christian faith came to flourish, even if still given no official recognition and marred by a stigma that continued to bring persecution, a number of men made themselves known by their writings on the theologically revolutionary faith. One came to capture Longinus’ attention, a scholar whose eloquent discourses with fellow believers seemed to touch on the very things that had continued to vex Longinus about his own understanding of God and his mission. Pretending to be just another curious believer, he held his own private conversations with the scholar, using these opportunities to not only fortify his own religious comprehension, but to also discover everything he could about the man.
One night, Longinus came to him and told him all that had happened and all that had been revealed by God and the archangel. The man listened raptly, his acceptance of these truths in no doubt. Before the sun rose, Longinus offered him a choice: to die the death of a mortal and be welcomed into Heaven or to bear the burden of damnation and join him in spreading The Message of God’s purpose. The Embrace was a sacred thing, even as it was a damning one. When sunlight spilled over the city walls, Longinus and his childe found Haven and slept the sleep of the Damned.
For a score of years, the sire taught his progeny all that he could. In return, the childe educated Longinus in all things he knew. When this period was over, Longinus released his childe from his patronage and bade him go forth and spread the word among the Damned. He gave to his childe the only possession he valued, the hallowed lance that he had kept since that fateful night nearly two centuries before, so that his childe would feel its weight in his hand. With a final blessing that anointed his childe his rightful heir and disciple, Longinus departed the city and never again saw what he had wrought. He would walk the road set for him alone, truly damned among the Damned.
The Embrace Quandry
One point of contention hotly debated among theologians of The Lancea Sanctum is the actual relationship between Longinus and his childe (or childer). While the accepted history of the covenant makes Longinus the sire of at least one Kindred, some among the Sanctified doubt that this is truly the case. If Longinus was made Kindred by divine curse instead of Embrace, what would that make his clan? Would God choose a clan for such a Kindred? Can such a Kindred Embrace of his own choice, and if so, to what clan would those childer belong?On the other hand, if Longinus has no ability to Embrace, that condition automatically exempts him from the Second Tradition, which is an unlikely position for such an icon of the vampiric condition.
No one knows the answer, and theories vary wildly throughout the covenant. Orthodox belief is that Longinus did indeed sire, even if the specifics of that Embrace elude The Lancea Sanctum. Other theories include the supposition that any of Longinus’ childer would have been adopted, perhaps with him acting as a sort of Avus to them, or that Longinus had disciples instead of literal childer, and that the familiar term was used to signify the intimacy of those relationships. Some Kindred even draw parallels between Dracula, himself known to have been unable to sire childer, and Longinus, as both are believed to have been cursed by God in some fashion. Naturally, this last comparison raises a few eyebrows among the Sanctified, but even the most hard-line member of the covenant must accept certain similarities between the origin stories.
A Covenant is Born
Each great religion has a book of its own, one of divine inspiration that defines the faith as distinct from every other, a book that grants all who read it the essential truths as revealed to its holy author. The Lancea Sanctum has its book too, written after the departure of Longinus, when the Monachus, as his first childe was later known, put down as scripture the words spoken by his sire. He penned the most important ideas and lessons so that should his own mission fail, others would be able to continue his work, sure that the things they preached remained true and not corruptions stemming from the fog of eternity. The Testament of Longinus was the result of this work, a collection of five manuscripts detailing not only the role of the Damned, but also providing some insight into the person of Longinus the Dark Prophet and an examination of what might lay in store for those who accepted his revelations.Although the tome as it is now known did not exist in full for centuries, the formative parts were completed by the early third century, when Longinus’ childe began his ministry. He explained that while forever denied the Light of God, the Damned are at the same time Sanctified by virtue of their place in Creation and, more importantly, their acceptance of that place. It is God’s will that the Damned willfully acknowledge their fate and carry themselves accordingly. As they are no longer mortal, the concerns of mortals are no longer theirs. Rather, they are dark angels whose acts glorify God even as they terrify the living. Against doubters the childe of Longinus proved a capable orator and soon a small group of believers had gathered to his side, convinced of the truth of his startling revelation. Together the Monachus and his five disciples — revered tonight as the Five Martyrs — forged a covenant, swearing the tenets of their new faith upon the Spear of Destiny, which they had been entrusted to keep safe. In 232 The Lancea Sanctum celebrated its first Midnight Mass in a cavern near Jerusalem once used by priests of much older faiths. From that night forward, the scions of Longinus dedicated themselves to the road of damnation and sought to bring The Testament of Longinus to all Kindred.
The first great challenge to the covenant came swiftly. The Sanctified took to their new faith with a fervor that caused great concern among the city’s other Damned. In Jerusalem, as in most cities, the Camarilla was staunchly pro-Roman and so viewed Christians and their upstart religion as a danger that should be stamped out. They supported the numerous acts of persecution perpetrated by Rome on the Christians and even allowed the Jews to vent their dissatisfaction with their Roman masters upon the followers of Jesus; better that than another Jewish uprising that might do real damage to their traditional power. In their cold eyes, The Lancea Sanctum was just a vampiric perversion of Christianity, and therefore a direct threat to the Camarilla.
Although some converts were made, the Sanctified met with far more opposition and in 241 they were finally forced to flee the city or face certain destruction. Their own beliefs had contributed to this rout, for they cleaved to the words of Longinus that forbade the wanton destruction of other Damned, leaving them at a distinct disadvantage when confronted with Camarilla vampires far less concerned with such things. The eldest of the city’s Damned, led by a figure named Nephele, declared the covenant outlawed and ordered the Monachus and his followers to be exiled or destroyed. Two of the Sanctified went to ask for clemency and convey upon the misguided elders the error of their ways. For this, St. Adira and St. Gilad were set upon crosses and left to face the rising sun as a sign of the Camarilla’s conviction. Unable to face their persecutors with so few numbers, and sure that any further delay could mean the destruction of the covenant, the Sanctified departed Jerusalem. So began the exodus of The Lancea Sanctum.
Three years after leaving the Holy Land, the surviving Sanctified arrived in Thebes, once the most sacred city of the Egyptians, now a place of magnificent temples abandoned by the Pharaohs. The place was not filled with ghosts alone, however. For nearly a century small bands of Christians fleeing persecution from Rome had been coming here, occupying some of the temples and smaller structures and breathing a semblance of life back to the wide avenues on both sides of the Nile. Following suit, the Monachus and his three remaining disciples installed themselves below an ancient Temple in the great Necropolis, sustaining their hunger on the blood of the Christian community above and further developing the rituals and ceremonies still practiced tonight among the Sanctified.
Of all its achievements during the covenant’s stay in Thebes, the most important was the discovery of a hidden chamber located in the labyrinthine depths of the Temple it used as its Haven and church. Protected from interlopers by traps that would bring sure death to any mortal, the cavernous hall was closed forever to those who still clung to life. For the Sanctified, however, its secrets were revealed in all their terrible glory. The angel Amoniel appeared before the Monachus and led him and his disciples down into the underbelly of the earth. The apparition showed them a door that had been invisible to their eyes before, one that opened into a vast cavern of marvelous beauty. Scribed on the massive walls were murals and hieroglyphs that spelled out things meant only for The Lancea Sanctum: dreadful miracles, secret knowledge of damnation, and powers entrusted only to those who bore the Spear of Destiny. God had led the covenant out of Jerusalem and to this place so that these secrets might be known to them and used to protect them from all obstacles that challenged their faith. Amoniel gave them the key to understanding the divine glyphs and entrusted them to keep this knowledge from all who would deny God His place. The Sanctified devoted themselves to this holy task, leaving only to feed, eager to show Longinus and the Almighty their worthiness.
When the all-Christian legion garrisoned at Thebes was ordered to march on Gaul under the command of Emperor Maximian in 286, St. Daniel felt compelled to join the campaign despite the obvious dangers. St. Daniel was beginning to have doubts about his faith, in part because he struggled to master the sorceries revealed to him and his fellow followers of Longinus. Amoniel came to him and told him that if he went with the Theban Legion a miracle would occur that would erase any lingering concerns. Traveling with the army, St. Daniel was protected from harm by Mauritius, the Coptic captain in charge of the legion who was made the Saint’s ghoul. In Gaul, the emperor’s troops set upon the rebellious Burgundians and a terrible battle ensued.
On the first day of the fighting Mauritius’ personal tent was overrun by enemy forces and St. Daniel would have been destroyed, but Amoniel appeared to him in his dreams and told him to awaken and trust in his faith. He did so and found that the magics he had previously been unable to master now came easily to him. He summoned a great cloud of darkness that protected him from the sun and with an awesome display of miracle drove back the assault. That night he laid a blessing upon the Spear of Mauritius, bestowing upon it the power of the Spear of Destiny, a blessing that enabled the captain to lead his forces to victory alongside the other legions.
When the conflict ended and the rebellion was no more, the emperor ordered his legions to make a sacrifice to the Roman gods as thanks for their aid in battle. However, having witnessed their captains’ divine fury against the enemy and recognizing the miracles of St. Daniel, the Theban Legion were unwilling to bow down to any god but the Almighty, and so they refused their emperor. Even when a number of them were summarily executed before their comrades, the surviving legionnaires continued to stand firm in their objection to pagan sacrifice.
When St. Daniel arose that evening, he was shocked to discover the atrocity of the emperor. Every last man of the Theban Legion was butchered for his piety, their blood turning the hills red and filling St. Daniel with frenzy. He went among the Romans that night and wreaked holy havoc, showing them the power of Theban Sorcery and the fury of The Lancea Sanctum. It is said that among the Roman legions were other Kindred, and these returned to tell of what they saw to other Damned, who trembled in fear at the telling. The night of the massacre and St. Daniel’s subsequent retribution is remembered each September 22 as the Miracle of St. Daniel and celebrated in many dioceses with solemn prayer and often a ritual reenactment.
Although Theban Sorcery was powerful, it was not a panacea for all the dangers the covenant would continue to face. Along with the Roman occupation came the Camarilla, whose members made it their mission to cleanse the vicinity of the nascent Lancea Sanctum. The use of Theban Sorcery against these heathen Damned did help the covenant avoid complete destruction, but survival was not without its costs. St. Pazit sacrificed herself in order to protect the Spear of Destiny from capture, and it was only by virtue of their faith that the Monachus and his remaining disciple were able to sail north without further incident. For nearly 50 years the pair traveled from city to city in Northern Africa and Southern Europe, preaching The Testament of Longinus and seeking a place where they would be undisturbed by the forces of the Camarilla. St. Maron was nearly destroyed while ministering to the Damned of Alexandria, so strong was the reaction of the local Damned to The Message of the Sanctified. The last of the Five Martyrs, he finally departed the earthly realm in 329 when savaged by barbarians — a Lupine witch said to be among them — in the Italian foothills.
In 335, having lost each of his pious companions to adversity, the Monachus came upon a simple monastery in a desolate land where the snows and rains were heavy. Driven by hunger as much as faith, the first childe of Longinus set upon the house of God like a ravenous demon, sating his thirst on the blood of the monks, for their faith was too weak to stave off his attacks. After 12 nights of such feasting, he approached the last of the men, and proclaimed to him the Testament, holding aloft the Sacred Lance and revealing himself as the heir of Longinus. The man, the most learned of his community, was allowed to taste of the damnation of the Monachus and became his ghoul and first Vicar of the covenant. The monastery was consecrated to The Lancea Sanctum with the Spear of Destiny spilling the blood of three mortals and the Testament being read in its entirety. For a time the two dwelt alone in the Black Abbey, but soon other Damned came to set their eyes upon the childe of Longinus, touch the Sacred Lance, and hear the truth of the Testament. They came by Providence alone, led by signs and drawn by the piety of the Monachus and the Sanctity of the holy relic. The Lancea Sanctum was now planted in the rich blood of Europe and from this soil it would grow and spread across the world.
Conflict and Power
The centuries that followed were not absent of struggle and danger for the Sanctified, but despite sometimes devastating losses, The Lancea Sanctum would continue to expand its power and establish itself and its teachings as unprecedented in influence among the Damned. Central to its success were two things that have shaped the covenant in every way and are essential to its identity. The first was the great theological work of the Monachus and other Sanctified scholars. The Monachus reworked and expanded the Testament’s five books for more than three centuries in order to present Longinus and the revelations of Vahishtael as truthfully as possible. The Rule of Golgotha was especially important, as it defined for the Sanctified the precise manner in which they were to conduct themselves as the Damned and servants of God. The Rule contains a number of canons that address the specifics of the Requiem, and clearly sets the Sanctified apart from those Damned who refuse to accept the covenant’s dogma. One of its tenets, similar to the ideas put forth by the mortal St. Benedict, is that The Lancea Sanctum is not just a faith, but a community of vampires dedicated to holy works. The Sanctified must be obedient to the most pious among their number, and it is this abbot’s responsibility to watch over her fellow Damned and counsel them with the words of Longinus. (In later years, Bishop replaced the title of Abbot, as the size of congregations grew.) The introduction and formalization of The Monachal Creed was also instrumental, for it established a clear and easily understood declaration of faith that quelled confusion and served to make identification of unorthodoxy simpler.The second element in the covenant’s success seems oddly a terrible setback. The Black Abbey had come to be a place of great importance among the Damned, and while only a relatively small number had ever visited its holy grounds and witnessed the Spear of Destiny, many more were aware of its significance to The Lancea Sanctum. Other congregations of Sanctified had surfaced throughout Christendom, seizing power as the Camarilla crumbled under its own anachronistic weight. Even where it could not lay claim to political authority, it was not without power. The rising Invictus, populated with Kindred used to exercising dominance over their peers, saw a benefit to an alliance with The Lancea Sanctum and found in its beliefs numerous arguments that supported their rule. As it strove to proclaim itself the First Estate of the Damned, The Lancea Sanctum became the indisputable Second Estate, providing spiritual support to The Invictus in order to secure its own hold on power and better fight off any of the numerous pagan sects that fought for the cold hearts and disquiet minds of the Damned. The Monachus did not declare himself the official leader of The Lancea Sanctum, but he was regarded as such wherever there were Sanctified. While this worked to unify the covenant, it also made the Black Abbey and its priesthood increasing targets of those who wished to tear down or supplant the Second Estate.
On a particularly ominous August night in 947 The Lancea Sanctum received a lesson that would shake it to its foundations. One of the Monachus’s closest apostles and a cabal of vile traitors had organized a conspiracy. The group had secretly renounced God and Longinus, and had instead given their loyalty to the Ruler of Hell. With the name of the Adversary on their treasonous lips, they stole into the tabernacle to steal the Spear of Destiny and deliver it to their infernal master. The Sanctified, fearsome in their righteousness, beset them, but the traitors’ Perfidy was discovered too late. The brood of Luciferians put the sacred fane of Longinus to the torch, and the fires of the Abyss rose swiftly. A great battle raged in the nave of the Black Abbey even as flames enveloped it, but it seemed the diabolical forces would prevail. The Traitor called upon the might of his infernal lord and brought down the Monachus, committing the foul Amaranth, as is the way of true sinners.
When the Traitor and his surviving comrades closed the doors of the Black Abbey behind them, consigning the Sanctified to a fiery doom, they had all but succeeded in their plan. But to their outrage, they could not find the Sacred Lance. Savoring that part of victory they could claim, they left only after the last of the monastery had fallen to ash along with the most holy of The Lancea Sanctum. What became of the Spear of Destiny has never been determined. Some claim that the Vicar was able to take it and some of the Monachus’s original writings out of the conflagration before he could be discovered, perhaps at the sacrificial behest of the Monachus. Others put a more miraculous spin on the fate of the Sacred Lance, suggesting that God or Longinus directly intervened, pulling the relic from the fire. Still others suggest something darker. Since the Vicar had been privy to the secrets of the monastery since its construction long before the Monachus’s arrival, he may have known of secret passages that he later used to secret out the Spear of Destiny. If so, was he also part of the conspiracy, his mortal mind bent to the purpose of the Devil, causing him to open the passage so the Traitor could more easily launch his diabolical assault? Whatever may have been the case, there is no verifiable report of the Spear of Destiny surfacing, either in Sanctified or Adversarial hands.
The Many Spears of Destiny
The Lancea Sanctum possessed the blade of the Spear of Destiny since Longinus passed it to his childe, and from that time until the Night of One Hundred Martyrs. The Monachus discarded the shaft of the relic during his travels after leaving Thebes, so that the blade — the truly sacred part of the weapon — was easier to transport without drawing unwanted attention. However, if this is true, how did the pole end up embedded in a column in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and the blade find its way to the Treasure Room of the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, where it still rests in glass? Simple: They didn’t.From the earliest nights after the Crucifixion, devout Christians in Jerusalem revered a lance believed to be the Spear of Destiny. Until the early seventh century it supposedly remained there, an artifact that did for the Christians what the real relic did for the early Sanctified: it gave them something to rally around and enabled them to actually touch the weapon that spilled the blood of the Christ, bridging the gulf between the spiritual and the physical. The object fell into the hands of pagans with the occupation of the Persians, after which the tip and the shaft were separated. According to Church legend, the blade was taken to Constantinople and the Church of St. Sophia. In 1244 Baldwin had it placed in an icon and presented it to King Louis of France, who put the treasure with what was believed to be the true Crown of Thorns in the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris. The lance pole apparently remained in Jerusalem longer, where it was put on display at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Some stories say it also went to Constantinople, where the Sultan later gave it to Pope Innocent VIII in exchange for his imprisoned brother. This is the shaft supposedly placed within one of the columns of St. Peter’s.
Things become more complicated in that the blade now in Vienna — often referred to as the Lance of St. Maurice — was supposed to have been used in 1273 for the Emperor’s coronation ceremony. St. Maurice is the Catholic Church’s name for the captain of the Theban Legion, St. Daniel’s ghoul, martyred in 286. Christians believe the faithful of Caesarea gave the weapon to St. Maurice as a symbol of fellowship, but how it came to Vienna after the slaughter is unknown.
Other tales place the Sacred Lance in the hands of the Saxon King Heinrich when he defeated the Magyars and at his son’s christening as Holy Roman Emperor. The defeat of the Mongolians in the Battle of Leck and the victory of Constantine at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge are also attributed in part to the Spear of Destiny. A full score of legends of how the relic fell into the hands of Justinian, whose touch poisoned it and instilled it with a dark power, continue to circulate. Adolph Hitler was said to have been drawn to this darkness, and he is rumored to have carried it in order to improve his prospects for battle. One story says that General Patton was aware of this and was terrified of the Spear of Destiny, fearing that it would fulfill its destiny with atomic force.
Despite the tales, mortal man has been deceived. The various lances in the stories and now resting in museums and churches have been thoroughly examined by the Damned, and none have been shown to be anything more than artifacts possessed of some residual spiritual emanations, the consequence of the great faith given them over the long years. Of course, this does not stop some Sanctified from still pursuing the Lance stories to their ends, hoping to be able to touch the potent relic and perhaps use it to begin a Crusade capable of toppling the other covenants and forever establishing The Lancea Sanctum as the only authority among the Damned. Although the vast majority of the trails are dead ends, none can refute the fact that the real Spear of Destiny is out there somewhere, waiting for the right moment in history to be reclaimed by the heirs of Longinus.
In the aftermath of the Night of One Hundred Martyrs, there was great instability, of course. As word spread of the destruction of the Black Abbey and the Monachus, some lost their faith, having tied it too closely to these icons. Most did not abandon the covenant, however. The earliest visitors to the Black Abbey had come as unbelievers and skeptics and left as pious missionaries, carrying their own personal testament of what they had experienced there along with the Testament of Longinus back to their domains. Their zeal and piety were unassailable, and even the great loss at the hands of the Traitor and his conspirators could not diminish their purpose.
The Rule had always made plain that the highest spiritual authority among the Damned lay with the Bishop of the domain, not with the Monachus. Such being the case, instead of being left leaderless and without direction, the most devout of the Sanctified reaffirmed the Rule and looked within to protect and nourish The Lancea Sanctum. Although contact between Sanctified in different domains never ceased entirely, each congregation now saw itself as a monastery of sorts, an independent community that need look no further than its own house for spiritual and political guidance. Where a question of faith should arise, the Bishop would be the final arbiter, with the Testament and her own religious convictions as her authority. This change saved The Lancea Sanctum from dissolution and provided it a structure that was far more resistant to attack in the future. No longer could enemies of the covenant strike at a single place or figure; from this point forward, the church had as many heads as there were Sanctified, and that was no small number.
As with all faiths that experience widespread acceptance, diffusion, corruption and outright heresy are a constant and expected threat to orthodoxy. This is especially the case with The Lancea Sanctum, given its decentralized organization. In every domain The Testament of Longinus is interpreted differently, sometimes because of ignorance, sometimes because of personal motives of the Bishop or other scriptural scholar, and most often due to an honest inquiry and examination of the theological underpinnings and ramifications of its corpus. In most places, these interpretations do not radically deviate from the norm, though it does happen at times. Rarely indeed will a dangerously unorthodox view become not only adopted by one congregation, but spread beyond the domain and become the creed of Sanctified elsewhere. Such is the case of the most troublesome of all the covenant’s schisms, the Icarian Heresy.
In the fourteenth century, even as the Great Schism tore the Catholic Church apart, The Lancea Sanctum found itself facing its own unrelated crisis. In 1388 the eldest Sanctified in Naples, revered by his congregation as the first vampire to seek out the Black Abbey and later become anointed by the Monachus, was slain by a power-hungry Daeva. Archbishop Icarius had punished the Succubus for her flagrant disregard for The Traditions. In return she sent her agents to seize the sleeping Ventrue by day and bring his helpless body to her. Paralyzed with a stake through his heart, the Archbishop could do nothing as the Daeva drained him of his ancient Vitae and left him as a true corpse. She proclaimed herself Prince and quickly sought to consolidate her power, but she was unprepared for the outrage that her act inspired in the Sanctified.
Three nights after the Amaranth of Icarius, The Lancea Sanctum rose up and tore down the new Prince and her supporters, declaring the city theirs by divine right. The Archbishop’s progeny assumed leadership and, by virtue of their descent from Icarius, proclaimed that it was their sacred duty to ensure that the domain was never again stolen from their grip. Within a hundred years the fervor that brought Icarius’ childer to power spread beyond Naples. The Icarian bloodline grew and as it did, its members traveled from the holy city in order to replicate their founders’ usurpation of power elsewhere. Surprisingly canny politicians and Proselytizers, the Icarians largely succeeded in their campaign and by 1500 more than a dozen cities in Italy and neighboring lands had yielded to their dynastic ambitions. In these places The Lancea Sanctum was now subject to the authority of the Icarian bloodline, whose members were deemed the only Sanctified worthy of speaking for the covenant.
Not every domain gave into this unorthodoxy, of course. While the Mediterranean came under its sway, the bulk of Europe did not and denounced the Icarians and their creed as heresy. For two more centuries the Icarian Heresy remained a very serious threat to those Sanctified who would not accept its dynastic tenets. Only in the early eighteenth century did the zeal of the Icarians truly die down, with the last known attempt by a scion of Icarius to seize power in The Lancea Sanctum occurring in Avignon in 1724.
The danger of the Icarian Heresy as well as others — in Spain during this time, the Banu Shaitan promulgated their own divergent flavor of faith and adopted the Moorish-influenced Iblic Creed — brought with it the rise of The Lancea Sanctum’s Inquisitors. Taking their cue from the Catholic Church’s response to heresy in its ranks, the Sanctified created their own inquisition dedicated to rooting out and destroying any threats to their spiritual survival. Early Inquisitors were rarely appointed, taking canon law into their own righteous hands in order to protect the covenant. In some cases this created Hysteria and some of these self-made Inquisitors had to be destroyed, so far did they go in seeking heretics. This overkill led to the practice continued tonight, where it was the sole privilege of the Bishop to name Inquisitors and bestow upon them the authority to carry out their necessary investigations.
When Charles Emerson declared the Westminster Creed at the height of the mortal faith’s Great Awakening, Inquisitors played a prominent role in successfully limiting its influence to the British Isles. Not every unorthodox practice saw an inquisition, however. In Jerusalem the Acharit Hayami sect met with little opposition when they formally affirmed their faith in the uniquely Jewish Dammatic Creed, one better suited to their cultural traditions than the widely accepted Monachal Creed.
The Catholic Inquisition
The 600-year campaign to purge the Church of unorthodoxy, best remembered tonight for its brutal excesses and ignorant fanaticism, did not go unnoticed by the Damned. Certainly, the fires of the Inquisition left many parts of Christendom untouched, but in those areas that were most affected, the Damned faced a very real danger. The inquisitors were not searching for vampires, of course, but their unprecedented thoroughness and their undeniable zealotry were more than enough to pose a threat to those Kindred unwilling to take the threat seriously.Stories of a Mekhet ancilla here or a Nosferatu neonate there whose Requiems were cut short by the unwanted attentions of a Church Inquisitor, unaware until the end of the true nature of his victim, are not uncommon among the elders. These stories serve as valuable lessons to younger Damned who have yet to truly understand the serious trouble posed by kine of blind passion and faith. On the whole, the Damned did not suffer terribly from the Inquisition, but in some places its reign of terror is not forgotten even tonight.
In such domains, the Damned continue to regard the Catholic Church with extra caution and usually give it a wide berth. The Lancea Sanctum recalls the Inquisition with more respect than most covenants; the Sanctified understand the danger of heresy and while they may not share the Church’s beliefs or interests, and certainly do not wish the Inquisition to rear its ugly head ever again, they cannot argue its effectiveness. If not for Torquemada and the Crusade against heresy that he marshaled, The Lancea Sanctum might have been unable to preserve the doctrinal unity and political power that it can still largely claim to possess.
The New World
Initially, The Lancea Sanctum had no particular interest in the Americas. From the perspective of most of the Sanctified, there was little purpose in risking a swift end to their Requiems by abandoning the security of their Old World domains and voyaging into the unknown wilds. Unlike their mortal counterparts, they had no compelling need to convert the native peoples, and the promise of gold or other financial gains did not outweigh the very real dangers. Furthermore, to those who imagined creating vast broods of their own supported by the blood of Americans, the Testament expressly forbade them from procreation, despite frequent abuses by certain Kindred. In sum, there was simply nothing driving The Lancea Sanctum any more than any other covenant to stake a claim in the New World.Individual Damned, including some notable Sanctified, did choose to explore the barbaric landscape, however. To these adventurous few, it was the promise of herds of kine ignorant of the existence of vampires that motivated them as well as an insatiable urge to simply discover new things, perhaps as a way to combat ennui and world-weariness. In the New World they could establish their own domains and feed from an unspoiled population with little fear of organized retribution. Word from Columbus and his peers about the primitive beliefs of the so-called Indians they encountered only reinforced the dogma among these Damned that the risk was indeed worth the reward. By the late 1600s the first Kindred had crossed the Atlantic and walked among the exotic people of these strange new lands, availing themselves of all they could.
Arguably the first Sanctified to make a name for herself in the New World was Sister Almudena Marina Garcia, the childe of an Old World Inquisitor. Only a neonate when she arrived in Mexico in 1712, she had an immediate impact. Soon after her arrival, Garcia wrote to her sire in Iberia that she had heard tales among the locals of a figure that she came to believe was Longinus. According to her telling, this person was clearly one of the Damned, and had already been on the continent for more than five hundred years, if the folktales were to be believed. The stories she recounted told how Longinus had passed through the region, working dark miracles before continuing his journey northward. She even claimed to have in her possession proof of Longinus’ presence: a Roman coin dating to the time of Tiberius and struck in Judea, supposedly left behind by the Dark Prophet. The news passed from Sanctified to Sanctified and ignited for the first time in The Lancea Sanctum a significant religious interest in the New World.
Within a century the Sanctified were at least as well represented in the New World — in particular in its northernmost settled regions due to the belief that this is where Longinus had been going — as any other covenant. As the Spanish pushed into what is now the southern United States, The Lancea Sanctum was there, albeit in small numbers. Some of the most renowned missions served as havens for those Sanctified willing to expose themselves to the myriad terrors of the wilderness that seemed to have no end. Still, it was not until the mid-1800s that the Sanctified would make their real impact on the New World.
Throughout North America, by the early nineteenth century the Damned had already established themselves in the multitude of towns and cities that continued to spread across the land. In most of these places, The Lancea Sanctum was of little real consequence, its Old World attitudes meeting apathy from Kindred uninterested what they felt were ideas unfit for Requiems shaped by the new ideas prevalent in the vibrant American domains. Its members served their fellow Damned primarily as spiritual advisers, taking what influence they could in this fashion, careful not to alienate the other covenants that held greater political power. These Sanctified were not necessarily disrespected, but their covenant’s sway in the Old World was an obstacle to their advancement here. Some of the Damned, the Carthians in particular, were overtly fearful of seeing the Americas become the spitting image of Western Europe, where The Invictus and Lancea Sanctum historically held the lion’s share of authority. The Carthians and others wished to build new Kindred societies modeled more on the philosophies that had led to the revolutions of the previous two centuries, and The Lancea Sanctum was an obvious hindrance to such plans.
Strangely, what saved The Lancea Sanctum from playing no more than a peripheral role in North America was the action of a simple neonate. Inspired by the ideas of the Great Awakening and the revivals of New York’s Charles Finney, a pragmatic Mekhet named Adolphus Pym organized what amounted to the first vampire religious revival on an abandoned farm in the American Midwest in 1836. Taking his cue from the kine preachers he had heard and adopting the mien of the consummate showman, he delivered his sermon with all the fire and brimstone he could. Given his substantial supernatural gifts, as well as his own innate talent and unshakeable faith in the righteousness of his beliefs, Pym’s revival proved far more successful than he had hoped. The few who were lucky enough to attend the first revival were so moved by the evangelist’s passion and fury that word of the reverend and his mission spread.
By 1839 one of his revivals near Philadelphia is supposed to have drawn more than two hundred Damned, eager to witness the spectacle and experience the kind of spiritual rejuvenation and enlightenment that Pym was offering. His achievement encouraged other Sanctified to emulate him and by the end of the American Civil War, smaller-scale Lancea Sanctum revivals were not an uncommon occurrence. At first, neonates were most susceptible to the charismatic message of the evangelists and the soulful appeal of their message, but ancillae also soon found themselves drawn to these unorthodox events and listened in increasing numbers to the dramatic preachers, finding in The Testament of Longinus the truth they had been hoping to find. Only the eldest remained unfazed by the Evangelical Movement, to whom the revival’s flagrant reliance upon stage tricks seemed crass and artificial. The few true elders who existed in North America had spent most of their Requiems in the Old World.
To those not Sanctified, these Sermons were nothing new. At least in the Old World they could respect the solemn piety and tradition of the Sanctified, however misplaced or overdone in their opinions. In their minds the evangelists deserved no such respect. They were merely entertainers and rabble-rousers, little better than the unbound wearing a façade of religiosity.
No matter the private views of certain influential Damned, the Evangelical Movement was a watershed for The Lancea Sanctum. Converts to the covenant were numerous and by the turn of the century the Sanctified could boast nearly as many members as any other covenant. The Lancea Sanctum did not wear the same face that it did in the Old World, however. Certainly some domains of the Sanctified clung to the orthodox traditions and creeds established on the other side of the Atlantic, but these places were in the minority. Instead, all manner of deviations took root as Sanctified adopted practices and beliefs popular with the locals. Rather than seeking to eradicate unusual rituals or divergent interpretations of canon, the American Lancea Sanctum incorporated them. What they sacrificed in purity of faith they gained twofold in converts, giving them the strength necessary to assert their authority throughout the continent. No longer could The Lancea Sanctum be sidelined or relegated to effectively ceremonial power. The revivals had brought real gains to the covenant where traditional approaches had failed.
The widespread unorthodoxy of the covenant in North America did not go unchecked forever. In the 1940s a wave of localized conservatisms occurred, with the intent to save The Lancea Sanctum from what individual dioceses saw as a very real threat. They believed that the majority of American Kindred who called themselves Sanctified were in fact nothing more than up-jumped “protestants” whose false claim to know the Testament was an insult to Longinus and God. Two members of Clan Nosferatu struck their first blow by convening a Synod in the Northeast and proclaiming themselves ecclesiastical judges invested with the authority of the Black Abbey to eliminate heresy and bring the faith back to its Monachal roots. Of course, how they could make such claims greatly troubled the Sanctified they summoned to their court, but against such obvious age, theological wisdom, and certain martial prowess, few dared to interrogate them on these questions.
Terrifying in aspect, the Syndics made quite an impression on the Sanctified. Although their inquisitions did result in the destruction of some Damned, for the most part it served their purposes by simply putting the fear of divine retribution into those they judged. They forced those who came before them to learn and recite The Monachal Creed and be reborn, as it were, into The Lancea Sanctum. When the Synod was ended, the pair moved elsewhere and setup a second Synod, and then a third and a fourth. For two decades they held court, bringing The Lancea Sanctum back to its orthodox origins.
As suddenly as they came, they were gone, their work apparently complete. After 1966 they were not heard from again, at least not in North America. Some are unable to accept so neat a conclusion and more than a few rumors have suggested that the Syndics were destroyed while traveling between domains, taken down by diabolical vampires, or instead slipped into Torpor and continue to sleep beneath the American soil.
The Lancea Sanctum Tonight
The American Inquisition was successful in stemming the most egregious heresies from spreading too widely among the faithful, but it was by no means entirely victorious in stamping out unorthodoxy. In fact, in the aftermath of the Synods, many Sanctified disavowed whatever oaths they felt obliged to swear to the Syndics. The Pentecostal “White Sunday Movement” — a sect eschewing ritualism that arose around the time of the Great Depression and has since became prominent in the American South and Midwest — was only limited in its reach, but certainly survived the Nosferatu elders. Other less popular deviations also remained, even if many of their followers chose to cleave more closely to orthodox doctrine.Such deviations grew not only in America, but in Europe and elsewhere also. The Exotheist Manifesto — a document elevating each Sanctified as his or her own Bishop, in essence — gained numerous adherents and there was no guarantee in a given domain that the faith would be preached or practiced in the same manner as in a neighboring city. The Icarians secured at least one city in the Americas they could call their own, while phenomena like the eschatological Crimson Cavalry and other small, radical groups rose up, testament to the variety of creeds and causes the Sanctified cannot agree upon.
Some argue that this diversification was precisely what the Monachus had hoped for when he laid the foundations for the covenant, a religion that he intended to be independent of an overarching hierarchy and that required no authority under God and Longinus but the word of the local Bishop. For better or for worse, this is largely how The Lancea Sanctum has survived into the modern nights.