#2, Canon: Not the betrayer, but the betrayed.
Originally posted here on October 30, 2021.
I am Goratrix, a fictive, from Vampire: the Masquerade. Some relevant background information for those unfamiliar: I was born in 840 AD. I was a Mage, at first, and part of a group of Mages known as the Order of Hermes. A subset of the Order was House Tremere, led by Tremere himself. Eventually, we became vampires, known as Clan Tremere, and were cast out of the Order of Hermes. Due to a series of events, I was cast out of the clan and branded as a traitor. I am extremely magically inclined and was surrounded by others equally magical to me.
With that out of the way, let us begin.
I warn for the following: self-mutilation, discussion of genitals, potentially graphic description of deaths including murder, betrayal, genocide, manipulative thoughts, desires, and actions, and light mentions of sexual content.
My tale is not for the faint of heart, and canon makes some parts much worse than anything that I ever lived through. I
must mention the worst parts to give an accurate comparison between how I am written and how I lived. If you would like for me to edit any of those warnings onto this post as an actual tag, I will do so, just tell me how best to word the tag, as these systems confound me.
This comparison has become an overview of my life story. My apologies.
As I said before, I was born in 840 AD, in what is now France. Canon dictates that I was to die for my "witchcraft," which is true in my life. I alone recall that my older brother spread rumors of my Awakening, of my magic, and I was to be killed for it. Canon agrees that Tremere showed up just in time and rescued me, offering to take me away from this place and teach me how to use my new powers.
Details after that from canon are sparse to nonexistent, so I will fill in the gaps for you based on my own memory. Tremere encouraged me to reinvent myself, my very identity if I wished, and I shed both my name and the gender I was assigned when I was born to arise as Goratrix. (Magic allows one to transition as much as one would like. I went all the way.) He taught me to master my powers as his apprentice, and during this time, he picked up another apprentice known as Etrius. The wiki describes my "canonical" reason for disliking him as being his over-caution and self-righteousness. This is completely true. I also disliked him because he took up too much of Tremere's attention and emotional bandwidth.
Yes. I hated him partly because I was jealous and wanted Tremere all to myself. I have been informed, now, that I display a vast number of symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder (although canon does not reflect this), but I do not feel comfortable going into the full details of this publicly. Rest assured that it caused as much trouble for me as it did for those around me.
How to describe my relationship with Tremere... canon describes us simply as "lovers." A throwaway line in one canonical source implies that we had a sympathetic link of some kind and became lovers exclusively to hide this. That is, for me, not true. Not at all. We were lovers, yes, but we were
everything to one another. Certainly, we slept around--but neither minded. I jealously guarded his love for me, and gave him mine freely. Tremere was my entire world, my love, my life, the light that drove me to awaken each day and help those around me. I am naturally inward-focused, intent upon mysteries that I wish to solve. He made me want to care for other people. I find our connection to be beyond labeling, especially once a magical mishap gave us a permanent mental link to one another. At times, we were almost the same person. There is no word to describe that, not in any language.
Over time, Etrius and I both grew in power and joined House Tremere proper, eventually making it onto the Council of Seven, the ruling council of House Tremere under Tremere himself. This aligns with canon. Details continue to be sparse up until 980 AD (I am being informed that the correct notation nowadays is "CE," which I may or may not remember), up until the consecration of Ceoris. Eight of us climbed up to the mountaintop that would be the home of our new base, stripped naked (such is the way of magic sometimes), and prepared the ritual.
Here is where my content warnings come in.
I have warned you. Do not pretend that I haven't.
In canon, here is the series of events as far as I can glean from the wiki (I refuse to do any further delving): I led the ritual, which required a flesh sacrifice. In a fit of stupidity (which was, unfortunately, true for me as well,) I decided that the best sacrifice would be my own genitals, with the understanding that my magical expertise would allow me to regrow them quite simply and easily. (I had healed worse wounds before.) I took a sickle and removed them, which disturbed one of the participating mages, Ponticulus, so much that he began to retch. This would disrupt the ritual. Canon writes me as looking to Tremere, who nodded, then I stepped forward and slit his throat with the very same sickle. I beheaded him, and added him to the sacrifice. The ritual went somewhat wrong, still, however, and while the consecration was successful, it was not as successful as we would have liked and left me permanently weakened and mutilated: the magic would not work to regrow what was lost.
I have done many horrible things in my lifetime, but reading that? I felt
nauseous. How
dare they tell me that I had
killed Ponticulus! He was my
friend, God damn it, I would
never kill him. The spell went wrong on its own--I blamed Etrius at the time--and killed him in the backlash.
I never killed him. The rest is accurate enough, but I never laid a hand on him. I
mourned him! My heart
broke when they did not invite me to the funeral, because, both in canon and in my own life,
they blamed me for the ritual going wrong.Etrius accused me of botching the ritual intentionally. Can you imagine? Botching the ritual, killing Ponticulus, weakening myself permanently, and losing my genitals, all on purpose? What a fucking idiot. Unfortunately, Tremere, torn by anger at the ritual going wrong and by grief (although, in canon, it seems he just wanted to listen to Etrius, I suppose), took Etrius' side and lashed out at me. We argued, things were said that could never be taken back, and he broke it off.
The night before Ceoris was the last time that he touched me with anything but strict professionalism or outright disgust. Never again did he look upon me with love.
It broke me.
In canon, details from here until 1002 are sparse. We settled into Ceoris. Tremere and I were never as close, but business went on as usual. Canon overlooks my devastation at what happened, my inability to understand what I had done wrong. I had been willing to give of myself to help Tremere, to help my friends. I had done everything I could to do a good thing, and was vilified for it. I cannot tell you how many hours I stood alone in my room, staring into the mirror, trying to figure out what parts of me I could replace with pieces from the people around me that Tremere seemed to like better. What about myself could I change to make him like me again? What parts of my identity could I shed? Who could I become to be loved again?
(I am told these are also symptoms of my personality disorder.)
(A sidenote for the following section: I will be discussing my betrayal of Myca Vykos. I am aware that Vykos now goes by the name Sascha and uses they/them pronouns--however, they explicitly have differentiated Sascha Vykos (they/them) from Myca Vykos (he/him) and actively refer to him as another person. This is a discussion that we have had, and they do not mind me referring to them by their old name and pronouns in their capacity as the mage I betrayed. I may be a cruel, horrible man, a monster in my own right, but I do
not misgender people.)
In 1002, I betrayed Myca Vykos to the Tzimisce vampires that lived in the mountains around us. They hated us, wanted us dead. It was easy enough to send him to his death amongst them. This occurred both in canon and in my life, although canon does not specify why, other than jealousy. That is close enough, I suppose--he garnered too much attention from Tremere, who I was still desperately trying to win back. He was too good at the things I was good at. He was a stunning apprentice, and I saw my old self in him. Both out of jealousy and out of hatred for who I used to be, I sent him on a "special mission," directly into the arms of the waiting Tzimisce. Had I known that they would Embrace him, turn him into one of their own, I may have just pitched him off the tower myself. I never intended for him to go through the torture and cruelty he was subjected to over the following centuries. Had I known, killing him would have been a mercy I would have given.
They never found out what I did. I "led the search" for him myself, and wrote the letter proclaiming him missing, presumed dead, to his family. I wish I had never done any of these things: it was inefficient, wasteful. It caused more suffering than I had intended. It accomplished nothing. But I will not lie to you: I do not feel bad. I have no apologies in me for the monster that Myca became, for furious Sascha who tormented me nightly with spam emails until I ended up here, in the system. They would be insincere. Perhaps I "should" feel bad, and I acknowledge that, but I simply don't. I will not argue with anyone over this. If you don't like me for that, very well. I don't particularly like myself for it, either. I don't know if it bothers me that I don't feel bad, but it disquiets me to some extent.
Moving on.
After that, canon and I agree that something in magic started to fail. The Consensus lashed out against Mages using magic to remain immortal: we began to age again. Out of the fear of death, Tremere set all of the Council of Seven to a singular task: find a new method of immortality. We nodded our stupid, empty heads and moved out, pursuing terrible idea after terrible idea. Etrius even tried demon summoning, the fool, which nearly got him kicked off the Council.
I, an alchemist by trade, pursued alchemy, and the most potent and promising ingredient that I could find was vampire blood.
Canon leaves details of how I developed the potion sparse, and I will not go into the details here. Rest assured it took many Tzimisce vampire lives to perfect the potion that would transform the drinker into a vampire if accompanied with the appropriate ritual. The idea was to partly make the imbiber into a vampire, not convert them completely: grant them immortality and the strength of the blood, without any of the downsides, such as a weakness to sunlight or the shattering of the Avatar. (For a Mage, in short, the Avatar is what gives us our perspective, our love for life, and our magic. To be Embraced by a vampire is to shatter and lose that Avatar. I was not willing to transform myself without the assurance that my Avatar would remain.)
Yes, I tested it on someone before giving it to the Council of Seven. Canon paints me to be an idiot; there was no test run according to those foolish writers. No, of course there was. What kind of idiot do you take me for? My test subject was willing, but did not quite realize just how experimental this drought was. Thankfully for Inlustris, it worked: she became a vampire with a functional Avatar. The weakness to the sun remained, but we were desperate, and with enough magic, surely we could find a way around it. I created eight more doses of the potion and raced to tell Tremere.
The
Ritual of Usurpation, it was called in later years. It went wrong, of course: everything always did. We became vampires, but properly; our Avatars shattered, leaving us broken, near-listless, and without magic, our strongest asset. I was immediately blamed; some thought me inept, others, led by hated Etrius, thought the action intentional. Canon and I agree on this: despite my best attempts to help, I was blamed for the ritual going wrong.
As if I would harm myself that way. Again, logic was put aside in favor of hatred.
Frantically, we began to develop Thaumaturgy: a method to use the new vampiric blood in our veins for a new kind of magic. Our hurry was not coincidental: my strikes against the Tzimisce to obtain test subjects had them baying for our blood, opening the Omen War as they sought to wipe us out. We hid our condition from the rest of the Order of Hermes, as well as the rest of House Tremere except for a select few that we slowly brought into the fold; we could not fight a war on two fronts.
More and more of the vampire world learned of what we had done, and the odds mounted against us. In canon, Virstania and myself created the gargoyles independently (I believe) to attempt to protect the clan. To me, however, this was an order from Tremere: I was always the one to find unusual solutions to problems, and he told me to do
anything necessary to protect our people. I developed the gargoyles with Virstania's aid, yes: and to create a gargoyle, one must kill two or three existing vampires and combine them into a servant, a guardian, a slave.
Canon glosses over reactions to the gargoyles. I remember it well: some resented me for my success. Others, the lives that had to go into each. A few hated that I had created slaves, or worse, imperfect slaves that did not always obey. Once again, I sought to help, I was
asked for help, and I was scorned and hated for it.
The Order of Hermes discovered us, and the war intensified. We had to come up with another solution; the gargoyles were not enough. Tremere sought legitimacy amongst the vampires to make them stop attacking us, and in our research, we came across the concept of an Antediluvian: a clan founder. If he could find one and absorb its power, perhaps he could claim us to be a true clan, and the war may end, or at least calm.
In canon, Tremere and Etrius journeyed the world in search of information and a victim. They selected Set, then changed their minds to Saulot, seemingly on a whim.
But it wasn't them. It was
me.I did the research. I considered targets. I hunted down Saulot's location.
I doomed Clan Salubri. Tremere devoured Saulot and ordered the complete destruction of Clan Salubri, which we carried out. Only in 2008 did I realize my folly: by destroying the healers of the vampires, we cut off any chance they had of recovering from the wounds that they had dealt to their own society. I may have doomed us all. Canon never imagined this. It lays dozens of my cruelties, left out of my tale for the sake of brevity, at Tremere's feet, and
it was never him.Canon paints Tremere as manipulative, cold, and cruel, but he was nothing like that. Tremere was bright, shining, beautiful, wonderful. Energetic and loving, could never stand to see someone suffering. Vampirism changed him; it took most of that light out of him, made him colder and more willing to kill to protect his people. It made him willing to order the destruction of Clan Salubri... after Etrius and I, in a rare moment of agreement, suggested it. It wasn't on a whim, as canon suggests: it was our doing.
My God, we did wrong.
Canon and I agree that Saulot did not go down without a fight. His spirit battled Tremere, sending them both into a torpor state, awakening only occasionally, and leaving us without a leader. We struggled for dominance, especially Etrius and I, and during one of his awakenings, Tremere-Saulot grew angry with me and stripped me of my position as Regent of Ceoris, sending me to France and giving
Etrius my title. In France, I angrily schemed against Etrius, and when word of that got back to Tremere, he ordered me back for punishment.
I had heard those words before. That was code in the Order of Hermes for many brutal punishments, and with Saulot driving him insane, I thought he would kill me.
I ran. God help me, I ran. I fled the clan in 1307, perhaps in an uncalled-for panic. One of the other members of the Council of Seven, Calderon, hunted me down on Tremere's instruction to haul me back for worse punishment. I refused; we fought. In canon, I slew him without a thought and disappeared until I joined the Sabbat in the 18th century.
To me, I was forced to kill a man that I had considered my own brother. He betrayed me by demanding my death, and I had no choice but to defend myself. I had no choice but to kill him.
That, I regret. That, I feel guilt for. It weighs on me, useless--there is no point to guilt. It accomplishes nothing. But it hounds me, haunts me. Betrayed by two brothers, and I killed one of them.
Of course I ran.
Canon paints me as the betrayer--a man who schemed, over and over, against his clan, and fled when the consequences mounted. Canon depicts me as fleeing to the Sabbat (....400 years after I fled the clan. That's a plot hole if I've ever seen one), the enemies of Clan Tremere by that point. It acts as if my own ambition drove me to crime after crime after crime.
I just wanted to help them, God damn it. I only ever wanted to do right by my people. I wanted to help them, save them, protect them, stop Etrius from running them into the ground in Tremere's absence. And all they ever did was paint me as the betrayer, not the betrayed.
Would a betrayer, after being forced to turn to the Sabbat for protection in 1712, lash out against his allies in the 1800s for killing Amzira, one of the members of the Council of Seven, a woman that canon does not even acknowledge? Would a betrayer scream and cry when he heard of her death? Would a betrayer mourn the man he murdered? Would a betrayer love one the people who hurt him the most, Tremere, still?
Canon lists my nature as "monster." It says that I am remorseless, self-centered, ambitious, driven to succeed and destroy those around me at all costs. I would list my own nature as "survivor"--someone that, no matter what, will keep fighting, no matter how much it fucking hurts and how many people turn against me.
I won't bother to discuss the minutiae of what canon believes that I got up to beyond this. There is detail after detail, atrocity after atrocity, done by myself, canon me, or both of us, but this has gotten hideously long as-is. You understand. You already know the kinds of things it says about me. I have not even mentioned Therimna, Malgorzata, any of my time amongst the Sabbat, my thoughts and interactions with the gargoyles, or anything else that comes to mind. Perhaps I will write a followup where I detail the "others"--but for now, this will suffice.
I did not go into this writing intending to outline the basics of my life story in a comparative fashion, but here we are. It feels... good to get it off my chest, at least. Canon acts as if it has heard the beats of my life and nothing else, reshaping them and re-imagining my motivations, my morality, my very personality, and it hurts to think about on occasion.
I would never accept the man that canon makes me out to be. Sometimes, however, I wonder how to accept the man that I made myself.
Thank you for reading.