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The Crusades, the Hunts
Our Clan died on 6 May, 1291, 158 years after Saulot did.
The Third Eye
My sire remembered little of those nights after Saulot’s
death, only visions of a great and grand wyrm wrestling with
itself. When the bloodlust died seven nights later, he tasted
the blood of his Clan on his lips, and all three eyes wept
with the horror of what he’d done. The Clan was never
great in number, but when Tremere drank Saulot, we tore
ourselves apart in grief and rage. The Usurpers who ripped
the mantle of Clan from our ash-strewn shoulders went to
work, thinning our shattered ranks with frightening aplomb.
I should note that I heard a different tale from
Nikolai Steen. Yes, that Nikolai, “the Danish
Malkavian”. By our friend the Dane’s reckoning,
Saulot salved Malkav’s madness more out of filial
piety than love for all Caine’s grandchilder. Set
and Malkav were brothers to our progenitor, which
explains our fraternal loyalty to the latter clan and
familial enmity for the former. In Nikolai’s tale,
Saulot gained his eye before venturing to the East,
a gift from his brother and a way to see a bit of
the world from a different angle — beyond reason,
beyond sight, as a mystic like Malkav would. It was
this eye that allowed our founder to survive the
Suspire, the vision quest locked within our blood
that leads to Golconda, provided one survives a
final test. Within the Suspire, one faces both Man
and Blood, with only one triumphant at the cusp
of Golconda — those who succeed find salvation,
those who fail find only red madness. My own sire
believed that Saulot backed away from Golconda
to lead us there, like a bodhisattva; Nikolai says
instead that Saulot failed in his Suspire, yet the
sight of his eye led his soul back from Wassail.
Certainly, it sounds like something Malkav would
do, and statues of three-eyed demigods and
bodhisattvas are prizes for archaeologists all along
the lands our founder walked.
Ironically, this was a time of great potential for us. The
Clan had long grown in tandem with Christianity, Healers
working within the Knights Hospitaller, Warriors bearing
the red cross of the Templar. The enmity between the two
belied the unity of our Clan, which grew stronger with
shared shame. As the Crusaders swarmed the Levant and
formed their kingdoms, we found ourselves in positions of
praxis for the first and only time. The Holy Land became
our last bastion, a bulwark against the Usupers.
Without Saulot to guide us, we turned to the other Clans
for protection but found uncaring hearts, turned stony from
years of checking Cainite interests to keep humanity strong.
Acre was our last city of strength, and when the Crusader
kingdoms fell, so did our hopes. The crumbling towers of
the city were as the peals of a bell, tolling our doom.
Friend Steen says that all Malkavians know this
tale and swear it to be true, but then, he also
told me a story about an elephant.
for he was the only Warrior among them. As we spread our
might through the Levant, the Healers assumed control of
the Clan. They cleaved fiercely to the ethos of Constantine’s
Christianity, for ministering to the poor and salvation in God’s
name resonated strongly with Salubri identity, but this also
marginalized our temporal power in an increasingly Muslim
territory. Others of our number spread throughout the world,
finding the dispossessed or the heretical and tending to them.
Thus we remained, guarding the liminality between Kindred
and kine during the Long Night.
Until the Crusades.
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We would lose Acre, and we would soon lose Cyprus;
already, Philip the Fair seethed at how much of his debt our
mortal compatriots owned, and within a decade the Knights
Templars would be accused of harboring the damned and
burned at the stake (and rightfully so, since they harbored a
full half of our Clan). We told the Warriors that night that
Saulot could not condone vengeance against the Usurpers;
Rayzeel herself told Samiel’s brood to cease their attempts to
sway the Tzimisce and the Ventrue to war. Even with every
other childe of Saulot agreeing, the Warriors sailed to Cyprus,
wasting their decades fighting the Northern Crusades or
conducting private wars anyways. They all perished (except
one; we shall speak of him later). We refused to help them. The
few European Watchers (if they even existed) did nothing to
aid us, walking along the Silk Road to the East.
The Long Day
The Tremere continued to hunt us, striking everywhere
from the eldest of our Clan on down. Were we descended
from anyone other than Saulot, we might have tried to
replenish our numbers. Instead, we split apart, and we
died. The other Clans tacitly endorsed the Tremere, as the
SALUBRI