#33, It's Complicated: Cappadocius
Originally posted here on January 21, 2022.
Do you/your fictomere have a complicated opinion of, relationship with, or history with someone or something? Does it often get reduced to something simplistic, or is it portrayed accurately, according to you?
> Note from Goratrix: Japheth did not provide a prelude to his answer to this prompt, and a few terms and concepts are not explained in any way. (The main term to know is "diablerie," which is when a vampire drains another vampire of blood and kills them, consuming their soul and taking their power.) I will interject when I feel necessary (he has agreed to allow me to provide annotations) but parts of this may be somewhat incomprehensible to people unfamiliar with our source material, Vampire: the Masquerade. Japheth is a sourcemate of mine, although we come from different non-canon timelines... not that it matters, much, given that we have never met in any of them. <
> I will warn that this is fairly heavy content: it discusses religion (specifically Christianity, frequently in a negative light) and fanaticism, insanity, something akin to dementia, murder, the destruction of the soul, mass murder, fratricide, and touches on a kind of genocide. <
> Now, onto Japheth's own words. <
But they were family, and they were as the clan was. We were one of the most numerous clans once we gained momentum--as it turns out, scholars, particularly of death and undeath, are in high demand in vampiric circles. By the seventh century, we were the largest clan of them all, as far as we could tell. And yet, and yet, and yet.
Let me go back.
My father, Cappadocius, did not immediately take to the Embrace well. When he became a vampire, some part of his mind... broke, or shattered, or left, I don't know. I wouldn't be born for a few thousand years. He lost his memory, forgetting everything that he had known about being a... mage, presumably, but we don't really know. His sire never really shared, and they're dead now, anyway. His skin took on a deathly pallor, he withered and wilted somewhat, and over the years, he took on a gray hue. This became the curse of the Cappadocians; we all looked this way, marked by death more than the other vampires were. This was fine. It made us identifiable (which would lead to our eventual demise), but that was useful--you could always find the scholar in the crowd.
But his mind... whatever damage was done wasn't all clear at first. His deterioration was slow, almost methodical. He wanted to help people, to make a better world. He sought truth in reality and existence, to find out why we existed, why vampirism existed. Where did vampirism come from, why did it work? What is a soul, and how is it tied to the body? What is undeath, really? This and other questions consumed him, as they completely consumed the clan. We became known for our investigations into such questions, and as a result, many of us became religious scholars. Which religion? Well, at first, any religion you could think of. All of them, any of them, that we could find, and Embrace people from. As it turns out, when asked to face their own undeath, people tend to turn to their own gods and beliefs first. It made sense.
But, over time, Cappadocius slowly began to realize that the world itself was flawed. Something about it wasn't right, inherently, and he wanted to fix it. He just didn't know how. He sought an answer until Christianity, of all things, rolled around, and he latched onto it with complete fanaticism. He was certain that it was the answer--it held the keys to all of our salvation, it could explain life beyond death, and it could be his ticket to making a better world.
It destroyed him. It destroyed us all. He let it consume him completely, and his building madness rapidly increased its pace, destroying his mind and reason and throwing him into a religious fervor that none could hope to match. He threw himself into his studies, desperate to find the answers to his questions and to find ways to help people. He dragged many of us into it, too--and I found truth in it, yes. It was meaningful, to me and to many of the others. How could it not be? My father's enthusiasm was infectious. When he felt like he was on the right track, his grins and laughs and cheerful explanations and early-morning rambles could give you the energy to work, untiring, for weeks or months. He devoured knowledge like no one else--even I couldn't match him.
Unfortunately, though, he eventually turned to the clan at large to help him on his quest. Upon doing so, he realized that the Cappadocians were the largest clan, largest by far, and not all of them shared his dream. The clan had become fractured, losing focus, and very few actually followed his teachings as closely as he would like. This wouldn't do, of course, he told me--as the leader of the clan, they had to listen to him, help him, for what was the purpose of the clan if they did not follow the best path, the one he had laid out for them?
I promise you, dear reader, that he only meant the best. By God, he went into this with the best of intentions, but his insanity had long since taken hold. I had watched him deteriorate over the centuries, unable to do anything but stand by and watch as pieces of my father sloughed off into the abyss, leaving me with a shell of a man powered by his own wild thoughts and desperate feelings.
He called the clan back to Kaymakli in 697, in what would eventually be called the Feast of Folly. He supernaturally sent a call through the blood, and every Cappadocian heard his summons. Most came; some did not. My "brother," Lazarus, was one who did not, and Cappadocius was furious with him, but we'll get there. We'll get there. To the Cappadocians who arrived, we (Cappadocius, Caius, and myself) asked them three questions:1. Can you read and write?
2. Have you ever helped to build or maintain a church?
3. Do you follow the Via Caeli? (I am lucky he never asked me this question and simply assumed. I did not.)
> The "Via Caeli," or the "Road of Heaven," is an alternative system of morals. Vampires can leave behind human morals and their concepts to follow another--and the Road of Heaven is one not dissimilar from Humanity, but with a more fanatical Christian flair to it. <
An answer of "no" to any of these questions led to the vampire in question being sent deep into the mountain, into the deepest depths of the city long since forgotten and unfound by modern kine. Thousands of vampires went into the mountain, and once we were done sorting through them, Cappadocius drew himself up.
And cursed the place.
He made it impossible for mortals to enter. He made it impossible for vampires to leave. He... he really thought he was doing good. I could try to explain it, explain his reasoning, but I think it best to just provide a... more-or-less accurate restatement of something he wrote to one of the other Antediluvians, as well as my own annotations that I left on it before it was sent.
> This "more or less accurate restatement" is something that our system's host, Tanix, wrote for the campaign that I am from, that is parallel to the version of our reality that Japheth is from. He doesn't remember it verbatim, of course, so he is using what Tanix wrote as an approximation. <
Cappadocius' words:
"You should have seen it, Arikel! Thousands of my childer, grandchilder, all the way down, gathered at my call. Eager faces, students and teachers, those excited to hear what I had to say. It was glorious. Others--students, less excited, having refused to learn even one lesson from their time in the clan thus far--would need help, time away, special instruction. Given time, they would be all the better for it, and happy to have experienced it. In the bettering of others, we better the world, and the way I see it, the world badly needs it. See the state it's in! You, me, and Saulot seem to be the only ones still working towards our dream that we all promised to make together, our Heaven on Earth..."
And my own annotations:
"These "special students" that he refers to are the ones locked in Kaymakli. We asked three questions: can you read, have you built a church, and do you follow the Road of Heaven? An answer of no to any indicated a need to go deeper into the mountain. Many scholars of death, in addition to "drifters" or other "undesirables," in the words of many clans, were sent in. He took not having a positive response to all three questions to be a refusal to learn the core tenets of the clan. Sending them in was meant as an enlightening, a seclusion, a way to get away from the distractions of the world and focus on what was really important.
"No kine or animals were included in this group."
He gave them no blood, no sustenance but each other.
How am I supposed to feel about that? What was I supposed to do? God, he did it all with the best of intentions. He was wrong, he was completely wrong. He had no concept of reality at that point, and nothing I said or did, not even collapsing, weeping and screaming, at his feet could get through to him. He would just lose his pleasant smile and kneel down, rest a hand on my head, and reassure me that the answer was at hand, we would find it, not to worry, dear Hope for Morning. I couldn't forcibly stop him--he was too powerful. He condemned thousands of our clan to starvation, cannibalism, diablerie, torpor--and for what? To thin out the numbers? To re-focus the clan? He succeeded, at least. The clan shaped up, except for Lazarus and the others who didn't show, who became the Infitiores and broke away from the main clan to live their own lives.
I resented Lazarus for having the foresight to stay away. The ability to stay away. I couldn't stop my father, not without killing him, and I couldn't bring myself to do that, even if I could overpower him. But, just as equally, I could not leave him--I couldn't just abandon him, especially not after Caius, in anger, went to bring Lazarus home, and was never heard from again, outside of rumors that he was killed trying to haul Lazarus home. Mahatma was busy in Constantinople, Caius was dead, Lazarus had fled, the others... the others were busy, too, doing Cappadocius' bidding elsewhere. I, Japheth, Last Hope for Morning, was left alone with him, like the only child left to love an aging dementia patient. The others wanted little to do with him, and in the end, now, I can hardly blame them, nor can I blame them if they wanted little to do with me.
I let him call the Feast of Folly. The blood of thousands is on my hands, just as much as it is on his. I could have, should have, done something, and I didn't, and I regret it every single night. But, in reality... what could I have done? What could anyone have done?
I stayed by my father's side after that, of course. His deterioration progressed; he began to seek a kind of power. Eventually, days before his death, he revealed the entirety of his plan to me: he was to die, be a sacrifice, as Jesus Christ had, and thereby ascend high enough to reach God, and diablerize him, consume his power, become God, for God was near-perfect but not quite, for He had allowed death to exist, and Cappadocius intended to stop all death, leaving every possibility of demise in his wise hands, his supposedly perfect judgment.
I was the captain of a sinking ship, and I refused to abandon him, even then. I would go down with the ship. I stuck with him, until the end, until Augustus Giovanni betrayed and killed him, destroyed and consumed pieces of his soul, until Augustus's son, Claudius, tried to do the same to me, and only failed due to the intervention of a few brave fledglings.
I watched my father die, and even though it had to be done, he had to be put down, it hurt, it hurt more than anything, and it led to the eventual destruction of nearly the entire clan at the hands of the Giovanni, who usurped us, destroyed our knowledge, and took the name of the Clan of Death for themselves.
He had to be stopped, but God, why like that? Was it because I failed, over and over, to stop him? Because I refused to step in and do it myself, to destroy what little stability the clan had left in the name of possibly saving us all from his next bout of murderous madness? How could I have ever killed him? I loved him. He was more my father than my biological, mortal parents ever were--spending thousands of years with a brilliant, loving, caring man like that will do that to you.
I could not kill my own father, because of love, even though I had to, also because of love. No matter what I did, I was wrong, and in the end, even now, I just wish that it had never come to this, that I never had to be faced with that fucking choice, because he was my father, and all I ever wanted was to have my father back, sane, happy, safe and sound, and I didn't get that, and I will never have that again.
The world isn't fair, but for Cappadocius, why couldn't it be?