Updated: 13 December 1998

Chapter 1: History & Mythos

U.S.A., 1994 AD.

                    ''Impossible!''
The man exited from his black limo, looking to be on the edge of frenzy as he saw all his life burning in ashes: his drug labs, hidden in an old abandoned factory was burning in flames too high to have been unintentional.
                    "I'll kill the bastard who destroyed my investments!" Shouted the young Italian shark, smoothing back his oiled black hair. He tried to hide by his rage his fear of the unknown: He was backed by a leech, one of the more powerful vampires in the city, and no sane man or Kindred would have crossed him.
                    ''Emilio! Get out and give me the phone!''
Vencenzo turn to the black glass limousine: He should have gone in a party given by the governor, and he was now looking for the ruins of his power. How could he explain it to the Don?
                    ''Emilio!''
A young woman get out from the car, a cellular phone in her delicate hand.
                    ''Kathy! I've told you to keep quiet in the car!'' The baby was gorgeous, but now, he only wanted to strike someone. She dialed a number in the phone, and then gave it to him.
                    ''What? How do you kno--!'' She smiled, and went with sensual steps to the driver's door. She opened it.
                    ''Yes?'' Said someone in the phone. Vincenzo would have answered but he choked himself when he saw Emilio, his driver and bodyguard, fall, face in the dirt. Dead.
                    ''Vincenzo? It's you?'' Asked the male voice in the phone. ''Vincenzo? Answer me!'' The Don remained emotionless as he heard the shouts, cries and shocks.
Silence.
                    ''Hello?'' A feminine malicious voice.
                    ''Who are you!?''
                    ''Don Marcello Giovanni? I've killed your fourth and last Capo, and destroyed your clandestine laboratory in the old factory...''
                    ''You bitch! Who are you!?''
                    ''Do you remember the McLean Family?''
Silence.
The Don made a head gesture to his lieutenant, who went prepare the car.
                    ''Do you remember when you practiced your little tortures on his wife in front of him? When you ordered your lieutenant to rape her?''
                    ''"What do you want!? And who are you!?''
                    ''I'm the Black Widow...''
Tuuut... Tuuut...
The Don shouted, and then ran from his office.







                    Several minutes after, near the factory.
The limo was there, all the doors open. The bodyguard of Vincenzo was there, in the dirt, without a drop of blood in his body. Vincenzo was nowhere, but looking for the bloodstains and the impacts on the car, he couldn't be far.
                    ''Don Marcello!'' The Don went to his lieutenant. Vincenzo was here, ten feet above, in some strange web, like a grotesque insect. Dead and white as chalk, arms and legs in strange angles, like a broken puppet. His face still screamed silently, full of fear and horror.
                    ''Don Marcello, there is a message for you...'' The Don used Auspex to read the tiny letters of blood above the head of Vincenzo. Horrified, he ran for his limo.
The driver tried to read the message.


''A Family for a Family...''





                    The house was the scene of a brutal slaugther. All the servants, All the Childer, all pure and good Giovanni, were dead, in variable states of decay. Only one ghoul, imprisoned in a web to the great classical chandelier, was left barely alive.
Don Marcello Giovanni was horrified: ''She was,'' said the ghoul, ''alone -- Don't know how she entered ... Spiders!...''
Don Marcello considered Embracing the ghoul before his death. At least, he would have a complete description of the bitch. To his surprise, the ghoul appeared horrified by prospect of surviving beyond this night, and refused the Giovanni vitae... The lasts words of the ghoul were for the Don: ''She will come back,'' the ghoul whispered as blood was running from his mouth. ''The Black Widow will come back to finish her work.''
The Don whispered orders to improve the security around him, and, after finishing, he felt himself once more. Whatever her Clan, this Cainite will die from his hands. Satisfied with himself, he lighted a great Cuban cigar.
In a dark corner of the office, a black widow, suspended from her silk thread, waited patiently for the others to come back to join her in the Haven of Don Marcello Giovanni...

Origin of the Bloodline

                    Few know about the existence of the new Bloodline, and fewer even guess its true way of creation, or its true origin. The first Black Widow was, surprisingly, a Vampire who was commonly known as Hathor, the Egyptian Godess of fertility and love. Last of the six founders of the Childer of Set Clan, she was embraced by the Antediluvian because of her beauty: Indeed, her mortal name was ''Nefer'', which means ''perfection'', or ''beauty''.

Each Founder has its own flaw, similar to the Antediluvian Clan Weakness. Hathor had a very powerful, and very cunning Beast. Despite the fact the Egyptian Vampire called their own Beast Sekhmet, Hathor was well remembered for her deadly anger. Like every Childer of Set, Hathor keeped for her Bloodline the Presence and Obfuscate Disciplines. She created a new one, perfecting to supernatural heights her beauty. She called it Neferys.

To the contrary of the other Childer of Set, she didn't learn Maat, but turned to another form of control of her Beast. This research resulted in the discovery of the Furie Discipline. She kept her knowledge to herself, knowing others would not understand her to quit the path of Maat.

But her lack of wisdom would make her an ideal enemy of Maat, as the Children of Apophis allied with her Dark Side, while she was under the influence of her ''Discipline''. While her Dark Side, cared nothing about the Wyrm, its power and its gift, she feared her own destruction by the Mummies, or even the other Childer of Set. Thus, Hathor actively, if sporadicaly, participed in the Setite Purge that destroyed the other Childer of Set to the very last one.

When the armies of Horus came to invade an Egypt now controlled by a slowly corrupted Set, the Antediluvian, overwhelmed and without enough Progeny to fight the Mummies and their Mage allies, fled with the surviving Childer. While Hathor was among them, the Dark Side realized she would lose every bit of her torn soul to the foul corruption of the Wyrm. She turned her back to the Black Pyramid, the Caern of the Wyrm. Set and his surviving Progeny would get out changed, and fully corrupted. The Followers of Set were born.

But Hathor paid dearly her treason: She was cursed to see everyone who shared her love die in a horrible and painful way. Hurt, fleeing both the Setites and the Mummies, she joined the Ananasi Werespiders. Every Childer of Set had felt, at least once, a kinship for an animal, thus making it her symbol. Hathor then discovered her own kinship for spiders.

Thus, she created a new Discipline, Arachnea to emulate the powers of her new lover. But she never succeeded in Embracing Progeny: She had become infertile. Her Vitae was still strong, but it somehow had something to do with the curse. Torn because of her Ananasi lover's death, she entered Torpor. But her Dark Side whispered vengeance, and through her new Discipline, after centuries of research, she found a way to create a Bloodline...

Lillith

                    Greetings, Athanasios, my beloved Childe.

I hope everything goes well. We have yet to see the results of your works in Paris, but I trust you will give us total satisfaction.

You would be surprised to see how much I learnt about the Dark Mother. You must consider this as a personnal request from your Sire. Even our Allies in the Tal'mahe'Ra doesn't know about it.

I found traces of the influence of our Dark Mother in egyptian ruins I was investigating in southern america. While it cost our sect dearly to hide this pyramid from mortal archeologists, it gave us some strange secrets about Set and his dark brood. The writtings, in hieroglyphs carved in a secret chamber where lies an empty sarcophageus in the middle of gigantic webs, would want us believe a very strange tale indeed.

Well before the creation of our sect, Egypt was, we believed, a battleground between Set's forces and the Mummy Horus' own. Or it is what our mummy ally told us. The truth, if the claims of the Hieroglyphs are to be considered truth, is less simple: What we called the original Childer of Set were in truth bastard childer created with both the Vitae of the Antediluvian, and the Vitae of the Wraith we know as Osiris, supposed to be a Vampire before his death.

The number of those Childer, who inherited the power to create their own Bloodlines, and so, called the Founders, was 6. I have yet to understand the link between those Bloodline and the Followers of Set, but I believe some kind of war occured, destroying all Bloodlines, and their Founders. But one: The Vampire claims to be Hathor herself. Childe of Set and Osiris, and Founder of the Loved-by-the-Gods Bloodline (what a name for a Bloodline!).

She claims Set was seduced by a Greater Elemental Evil known as Apep (Perhaps a Souleater?), and that in the last moment, called by a feminine voice, she fled the ''Dark Pyramid'' to the south.

There, she writes about her history with the werespiders, and to strange rites held in honor to their Spider Godess whose name could be well a bastardized Lillith!

Anyway, by the last writtings, Hathor seems to have converted herself to the Faith of the Spider Queen, and seem to bear now a strange birthmark in the form of a black widow spider. While I doubt it has anything to do with the Noddist Creshent-Shaped woman, I found this story, combined with the presence of werespiders hiding nearby, and the presence of apparently Torporous but Vitae-blotted spiders in ther middle of millenary webs confusing at best.

I have yet to find an exact symbol of Lillin's presence, even if the symbol of what she calls her ''Sekhmet'' Discipline is similar enough to one of our secret symbol to make me doubt.

I believe there is another secret chamber nearby.

Marikasha,
Childe of Iontius,
Grandchilde of Arikel,
Great-Grandchilde of Enosh,
Great-Great-Grandchilde of Caine,
Great-Great-Great-Grandchilde of Lillih,

Selkis & Hathor

                    As you requested, my mission continues in secret. I have yet to understand this need for stealth, even among the Shemsu-Heru: After all, Hathor was beloved of Set, and was one of the most corrupted vampires of that time. Who would object to my hunt?

Anyway, I discovered troubling informations while exploring the southern Africa continent, and after a trip in the southern America: Our first information led us to think Hathor had fled among the corrupted spider-shapechangers, where she had created this awful vampiric power.

Still, after interrogation of one of those monsters born in south America, I deciffered inscription in an old mayan temple mentionning Hathor in a rather obscur way: Only the pronunciation by the prisonner, correcting our own verbal version, enabled me to recongnize it. But if Hathor was seen as some kind of dark mother (could she be the so-fabled Lillith?), the name of the local Godess could only be assimilated ot Selkis!

Why this possibility never crossed our minds? Selkis was Godess of scorpions, arachnids and poisons, as well as medicine. If our informations are right, she would be of the 5th Generation since Caine, and thus, less powerful than her blood mother.

I still search for more information that could lead me to her haven. Of course, I recommand outright destruction: Fully awakened, Selkis would be too much powerful to easily be put to rest, and the risk to have such a monster walk freely under the moon would be too much.

Love,

Neith

Chapter 2: Character Creation
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