By Robin Pfeifer (robin@one-world.de)
Brothers and sisters in the quest for enlightenment, here I stand before you bearing witness of the invaluable revelations that have been disclosed to me over the period of the last four years by the grace of one Marduk, a forefather of our Cainite race, who I had the privilege to meet and discourse with during my research in the Near East.
As some of you will know it has been my duty to study and evaluate findings of cuneiform tablets and other archaeological sources in the region of Iraq which may lead to the widening of our knowledge of the early days of the Childer of Caine. I have fulfilled this duty for all of the seven and a half centuries of my unlife granted to me by my gracious Sire Khaleb, may his immortal soul rest in peace at the side of the Children of our Father. I have been instrumental in the assembly and reinstitution of what we now call the body of the Book of Nod, and this past century I have devoted all my efforts to guiding the resources of the mortal world to the excavation of the remains of the civilization these mortals consider the source of all their achievements.
In the early days of the year 1991 I was staying with one of my retainers in Baghdad, who in his daily life is a historian and archaeologist of note and a famous scholar of the Fertile Crescent civilizations. In these days, the damnable government of that petty country was enmeshed in some minor dispute about land to the east which had enormous repercussions in the whole mortal world and sadly put a momentary halt to any efforts pertaining to the discovery of further information about our origins.
In these days the mortal world declared war on Iraq and the beautiful city of Baghdad was subjected to frequent air raids. The bombing destroyed many valuable sites and the loss inflicted on our quest has not been fully determined yet. But Lady Chance cast a favourable eye on me when I stumbled one night through the ruins of a minor museum where I had hoped to find the remains of a newly arrived batch of freshly unearthed cuneiform tablets from the south which subsequently proved to be utterly destroyed in the shelling. Nothing had been left of the building; where it had stood, only a deep hole in the ground could be discerned, severed pipes spewing waste water into its depths. I descended nonetheless, hoping to find some salvageable fragment which might have led to further finds. I was disappointed in that regard. But at the moment when I finally accepted the futility of my endeavors, I heard something move under a pile of rubble at the deepest point of the crater.
Putting all my strength into action I heaved aside large slabs of concrete and unearthed what I believe to be the most important find in the history of my research.
Under the debris I found a human body, lying prostrate on his back, not as if fallen and smashed down during the destruction of the building, but lying dormant and resting beneath it. He was alive -- alive, that is, as we all are, my brothers and sisters, for he was of our kind. He was quite dark-skinned, as our brethren in the Assamite Clan are, and of Near Eastern build. He wore a garment of brittle fabric that turned to dust as he moved to free himself from the rubble. Some of the stone fragments around him, I discovered, had not been part of the demolished building, but were in fact the remains of a kind of stone sarcophagus in which the elder had rested for a time the sheer length of which I had no conception of at that moment. The Elder was shrunken and starved and had been awakened from his torpid state by the explosions above. He fell on me, but I evaded him easily. I reached out to minds I felt moving above between the ruins with my preternatural endowments and called them to me. It took three of them to feed the Elder, and their husks were stowed away in secret beneath the debris.
I gave the Elder shelter in my rooms and soon we established some rapport, although his dialect of the Arabic language was antiquated even for me, and the words in other languages he spoke were even more cryptic and unheard-of. Weeks went by while we were establishing some rapport; culture shock was heavy on the Elder, and we stayed indoors in the reinforced basement rooms I used then for nearly all the time. His appetite was voracious, but had to be fed. The price in mortal souls was well paid.
When the shelling commenced the Elder was prone to fall into frenzy, but I managed to soothe him often and confined him to a reinforced room during his more violent bouts. When he was coherent, we talked nights through and he enlightened me to a great extent as to the state our kind was in during the old days when Hammurabi ruled.
Marduk was the name he gave himself, Marduk of the 5th generation. When I asked for his clan, he looked at me questioningly. Then he said that I would recognize him as a Childe of Assam, although the Assamite clan had not been formed yet in the days when he was made.
This is what he told me.
Marduk had been embraced at the beginning of the second millennium before Christ by Marduk of the 4th generation. It had been a custom then to name the Childe after the Sire. I shall expand on this fact in a moment. As Marduk told me, the Second City had fallen thousands of years before. Caine was a legend even among his peers, as were the Second and the Third generations. As the Book tells us, the Prophecy of Uriel made the 3rd generation forbid their progeny to create further progeny of their own under the laws of the Second City. But when after the fall of the Second City the 3rd generation was scattered to the winds, the 4th put themselves in their place and created a 5th generation to serve them. These again were prohibited to procreate.
Over the next millennia the Kindred of the 4th generation guided the mortals like sheep. They made them found new cities, oldest of which was Ur. Within these cities, these Kindred set themselves up as Gods. Every city had its God. Ur itself was the domain of Nanna, God of the Moon. Rumors had that he was not only a Childe of cursed Malkav, but the Antediluvian himself, struck with madness and believing himself his own Childe. So potent was this delusion that his blood was diminished in power and his progeny was no stronger than others of the 5th generation.
Anu of Ventrue ruled over Uruk and later accepted Inanna of Malkav as his consort Goddess. Inanna was also the Goddess of Ninive, and there is a peculiar trait to Inanna and her progeny which may well be one of the oldest recorded bloodlines, now most probably extinct (see the Inanna bloodline).
Eridu belonged to Enki, son of Brujah, not of accursed and banished Troile who even then roamed the wilderness of far Africa.
Nippur was in the hands of Enlil of Lasombra, God of the air. Kish was the domain of Ki, Goddess of the Earth, daughter of Gangrel, who often roamed far from her city. Other cities belonged to other gods, but Anu, Enki, Enlil and Ki were chief among them.
Centuries later gave rise to Akkad, which belonged to then returned Troile's progeny and was their first Carthage. After Akkad's fall did rise legendary Babylon, and this city was the prize of Marduk of the 4th.
It was custom then that each God send his progeny to inhabit the God's temples in other cities in the God's name. So this Marduk that I spoke to was his Sire's proxy at Ninive. In life he had been a priest of Hunter Marduk who was said to have formed the world out of the carcass of Tiamat (who in actuality had been a Childe of Nosferatu and was Goddess of a subterranean kingdom in the grip of the group called Nictuku, that became hell to the mortals of the time and lay removed from the world beyond the shroud of death).
Marduk held his office for nearly a thousand years, but then the humans rose against their gods and threw off their yoke. The Chronicle of Shadows reflects this in the Rules of the Canaille: "Thou shalt not become as a God to the Children of Seth, for the One Above, growing jealous in his sky, will strike down the line of Caine forever. Remember gentle-faced Ashtoreth (Ishtar / Inanna), remember golden-fat Baal (also known as Shaitan, founder of the accursed Baali bloodline), remember strong Tammauz (according to Marduk a Gangrel elder previously known as Enkidu who was cursed to rest in the Earth for half a year and could rise only at the behest of Inanna). Know thou that the Children of Seth will rise up with weapons from the One Above, and conquer us, should we be as Gods to them."
The conflict between the Gods of the Cities and the Baali who dwelt in dread Chorazin and subverted the Minoan culture was hard on the mortals. At the same time another son of Malkav named Jahwe took a tribe of humans called the Abrahamites from Ur to the west to establish a new culture based on tenets that were directly descended from the laws of the First City. This culture rose to power and between the Baali and the Israelites, as the progeny of Abraham later came to be known, the Gods of the Cities lost their thrones.
Most of the Gods now have perished. Marduk knew of no survivors save himself. The clans as we know them were, for the most part, founded long after his time. Marduk could not inform me as to the resting place of any Antediluvian. For a thousand years after his fall did he sleep in Cappadocian caverns. Then, for a span of three hundred years, he rose again and witnessed the death of Christ and the rise of his religion. He slept and awoke for short periods afterwards and finally laid himself to rest at the place where I found him that violent night in the year of our Lord 786. It is not far from that place where he rests again now, for he is weary of life and feels the thirst overpowering him. I am proud to call him a friend, for such has he been these past four years. There is a lot more that he told me about his time as a God, but time does not permit me to divulge all of his secrets here.
I thank you all for your patience. I will gladly stand to answer all of the questions I believe many of you will have after this short survey of my findings. May Caine's favor rest upon you all.
I would glady appreciate any comments and helpful suggestions on this. Mail me at robin@one-world.de.