By Stacey Lawless for the Dakini bloodline.
When the Dakini can be persuaded to discuss the Ghuls at all, they say that seven hundred years ago, a bandit chieftain made his lair somewhere near Benares. He was a vile, cunning and depraved man, ravishingly handsome and splendidly rich. He was clever, too: though a particular Dakini who called herself Sindha had long been trying to control him and his bandit army, he had been able to resist her wiles and worm out of her traps at every turn. Sindha could not help but admire the cunning and evil of her quarry, and finally she came to him in person and asked what she could offer him to entice him into her service. The Kiss, he named as his price, for he found the power it offered to be too much to pass up. And Sindha, more fool she, agreed to it.
Hardly had the bandit king died and been reborn, when he twisted in his Sire's arms and, grabbing the sabre he had carefully hidden for just such an occasion, struck off her head. He only had drunk a little from her corpse before it withered into dust, so he stormed into the night to rouse his men. The hunger and blood had made him drunk, and he fully intended to drink and slay any and all his army came across that night.
But he had killed his Sire before she could tell him anything of the race he had joined, and no matter how he ripped out the throats of the hapless travellers he found and slurped down their hot, still-living blood, his hunger was not satiated. In fury, he beat his own men 'til scarlet ran from them, but this living blood did not ease his thirst either; it was like water to a dope fiend. He frenzied then, ripping into his men and their horses, til the sun rose. The bandit king fled its burning rays, and still in frenzy ran to shelter. The many of his army who had not been lucky enough to escape lay as mangled wrecks on the earth, interspersed with raw chunks of horseflesh, and became a feast for the flies and kites.
At dark, the bandit king returned, ravenous. Though he was no longer in frenzy, the Beast, always close to his heart, had dug its claws in deep and its feral light glimmered behind his dark eyes. He was unable to find anything alive to rend and kill, and hunger beat at him until, desperately, he fell upon the bodies of his former servants. The little blood left in their veins was thick and clotted, stinking and laden with the eggs of flies, but it was laced with the cool dark wine of death, and he was, at last, able to ease his hunger. But the horror he felt at drinking from the spoiling bodies eroded the last of his sanity, and the Beast claimed him.
Thereafter he scavenged from cold funeral pyres, from slaughterhouses and battlefields and the vulture-towers of the Parsees, and murdered anyone he could for their fresh amrita. He was no more than a brute, but a vile and cunning one, and he eluded the Rakshasas and Sindha's avengers for nearly a century. During that time he now and again grew anxious for company, perhaps from a last glint of cultured sensibility, and would dishonor the Blood in his veins further by feeding it to a beggar or brigand after slaying them. Sometimes he would later devour these companions; more often he drove them away after a few nights. These wretches went on to scavenge and murder as their Sire had taught them, and some of them Sired, and the more clever ones learned how to be cunning and hide, so that when the disgraced Dakini came hunting, they could never be certain they had eradicated the bloodline.
These Ghuls, as the Dakini came to call them, learned to hide among beggars and lepers and feed from the dead wherever they could. Many took to following merchant caravans, killing and robbing any stragglers, and sleeping in the cargo by day whenever they could. Along with these caravans, the Ghuls spread across India, into Persia, and beyond.
Ghuls still exist, and can be found in India, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan; rumors also place them in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Iran, and every now and then, Iraq. They are not many in number, but they are very good at hiding and at not drawing attention to themselves. They are craven and nearly as opportunistic as cockroaches. All of them are lost to the Beast, and most of them would barely qualify as sentient. A handful, however, have managed to hang onto their minds. These are usually the ones who Sire, are almost always the oldest Ghuls around, and can be truly dangerous.
The more intelligent Ghuls hide in slums, where they blend in with the urban poor and diseased. Some of them have organized gangs of human wretches as Retainers. Bestial Ghuls make their dens wherever they can; in New Delhi, one popular place is beneath the stone ghats (huge stone steps) that descend the Ganges' banks and into the water, and the ghat-Ghuls will swim the river at night and climb into boats (though they must be wary of the Caiman Rakshasas, who kill every Ghul they catch).
Rumors persist, however, of large gatherings of Ghuls deep in the jungles or high in the mountains, of the remains of bonfires replete with charred bones (human, animal, and otherwise) near where the Ghuls are supposed to gather, of weird and unpleasant carvings on earth and trees, and sometimes flesh, of chants carried on the wind that sound almost like Latin learned by rote, or like less pleasant things, of a corpse found in a shack in Lahore, killed in a darkly ritualistic fashion, the blood used to paint strange symbols on the walls.
It is unknown if these rumors point to the existence of a Ghul cult, or are falsehoods spread for some mysterious purpose. Little evidence has actually been put forward to prove the rumors. Many of India's Kindred, however, fear that something evil has come to make its home in their country.
In the last hundred years, a few Ghuls have been caught who displayed stranger appearances than their fellows: leathery, withered skin stretched tight over the bones, caved-in noses, and receded gumlines. Their blood was found to contain traces of embalming fluids and spices, leading their Ventrue captors to speculate that the strange appearances resulted from the Ghuls (or perhaps their Sires) feeding on embalmed corpses. With the spread of the Samedi bloodline, some Kindred have noted similarities between these Ghuls and the "mummified" type of Samedi, and wonder if there is a connection.
Every so often a tale drifts around of this Ghul who displayed Potence, or that one who Earth Melded, or the one who vanished in plain sight. These tales are given little credence; after all, where could these degenerate beasts find anyone to teach them Disciplines?