Bizarre Blood Triangle: Dastur Anosh

Commenter Adam suggested that we include the character Dastur Anosh, Black Hand Seraph (referenced in Caine’s Chosen), Assamite antitribu, and Kindred assumed to be extremely dead. Well, that sounds like a fine revolutionary character to me. Joe Carriker worked on him, and Dastur Anosh ends up being, through some clever crafting by Joe, part of a very compelling trio of Kindred whose stories interweave through their entries in the book.

Naturally, Dastur Anosh is exceptionally old, dating back to the original schism with Alamut before such things as a Camarilla or Sabbat stirred Kindred passions. Normally, that puts me off a bit. Vampire has a lot of extremely old and powerful characters running around, acting like selfish assholes and generally fucking things up for all of the Kindred who didn’t have the serendipity to have been Embraced when Caine was still rounding out the contacts in his iPhone. The cool part here, though, is that Dastur Anosh isn’t present to kick ass and take numbers. He’s present to throw a monkeywrench into modern Sabbat politics and to give the Black Hand (Sabbat subsect) an active point of contentious overlap with the Black Hand (secret sect of mankind’s shepherds concentrated in the Underworld). Dastur Anosh sets to boiling a conflict that to date has been merely simmering. With the other two characters that make up the triptych (you’ll see them soon), Sabbat politics ratchet up a notch for those players who have a stake in them, and when the Sabbat suffers internally, the other sects can practically feel the Sword of Caine’s hackles rise.

So here he is, fucking things up in the good, stories-will-come-out-of-this sort of way. Remember when the clever among you put together the pieces of the Karsh and Jalan-Aajav situation? I think you’ll find something similar here, if you put on your thinking cap.

(Also, the Children of the Revolution Kickstarter for the prestige edition is heading into its final week. Be sure to pledge if you want a copy but haven’t backed the project yet!)

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<1>Dastur Anosh, The Seraph Dying and Reborn

<n>The origin of the martyred Dastur Anosh is a thing of interest to the fanatics of the Sabbat’s Black Hand. His contribution was archetypal within the Hand, the Cainite whose role was so important to the assassin cult that when he suffered the Final Death the order felt it necessary to encode his duties into the identity of the Hand: the title of the Seraph. Sabbat historians solemnly note that the Black Hand appoints four Cainites to the Seraph’s title, a recognition not of those Seraphs’ inadequacy, but of Anosh’s importance.

<3>Life and Embrace

The Black Hand’s apocrypha claims Dastur Anosh was born in ancient Persia, his familial origins humble. He only ever spoke to his followers of his time in the company of the Golden, the wise man clad in white that history would later know as Zarathustra. Some modern Sabbat historians cast aspersions on this tale, but most of the Black Hand accept it as practically an article of faith in their cultic history.

While there, Dastur Anosh was one among many of the magi who gathered around the Golden One. Although he was not so learned as some of the astrologers and magicians there, he was born with visions. The noble and learned magi paid little heed to his strange dreams, but a scribe and scholar who frequented their gatherings showed interest, asking the young man about his visions and what he thought they meant.

The two struck up an abiding friendship. Every dream the young man had, the older scribe recorded, and they often passed the hours of the night discussing their meanings. When Anosh spoke of seeing a strange stone that wept blood, and the sounds of a woman sobbing on the desert winds of the night, the scribe grew very interested. He diligently recorded all of the young seer’s recollections of the stone. Again and again the young man dreamt of the weeping stone, each time with greater and greater clarity and recollection.

Eventually, the two departed the company of Zarathustra’s faithful, at the scholar’s urging. At first, Anosh assumed they were simply wandering, but an off-hand remark of the scholar’s brought understanding: They sought the stone. Afraid but excited, he searched with the scribe for more than a year. The closer they came to finding it, the more intense his dreams became. They traveled during the night, sleeping during the day according to the needs of the scholar, which Anosh did not understand, though he did not comment on them in any way.

Finally, the pilgrims found the stone, in a strange, desolate valley with iron-reddened sands that looked like a field of blood under the wan desert moon. The stone itself was tall, lushly curved, and planted deep in the earth. The coppery smell of blood wafted from it on the wind and the scholar trembled as they neared it. A thin trickle of liquid coursed slowly down the stone’s surface, its path over the centuries wearing a rivulet in the basalt.

The scholar licked the stone, tasting of the blood before Anosh knew what he was doing. When the scholar turned to regard him once more, his face was bestial, all fangs and rage and grief. The Cainite scholar fell on him in frenzy, and killed the young seer. As dawn neared, however, he raised the young man in the Embrace and brought him across the threshold into damnation.

<3>Flight from Alamut

They fled, then, bound for the secret citadel of Alamut, his sire’s home. In that journey, Anosh found that his dreams had left him. Instead, the scholar woke from his daily slumber shrieking of his terrifying dreams. The two agreed that somehow he’d drunk the boy’s visions along with his blood; his sire insisted that the “blood of Zillah” had something to do with it. He would answer no further questions, however, until they arrived.

At the citadel of the Eagle’s Nest, Anosh found a cold welcome. Sequestered in a black cell deep within the fortress, Anosh lost all track of time. Those who brought him his draughts of blood intimated that is master sinned in Embracing him, and that he must answer for those sins.

Finally, they called for Dastur Anosh, and he came to them. He answered their questions truthfully, fearful for his existence. In the end, they granted him their leave to exist, but made it very clear that it was by his sire’s virtue, not his own. He and his master left as quickly as they might.

As they traveled, Anosh’s sire wept his own tears of blood, and often woke from his daily slumber with screams. Eventually, Anosh discovered that his master was dreaming, experiencing visions of the destruction of Enoch, Irad, and Zillah. As they traveled at night, his master spoke with hatred of the Third Generation and their terrible sins.

When Dastur asked why they did not travel directly to the Stone, his master smiled and replied that it was because they were being followed. Alamut desired the knowledge of where this Stone might lie, and he refused to tell them. In the hours before they returned to slumber, and in the hours after they woke at night, Anosh’s sire trained him in the arts of battle, the use of his Blood and the legacy not only of the progeny of Haqim, but of Khayyin and the Second Generation.

They traveled away from the lands controlled by Alamut, until the night when the three dark-skinned Kindred appeared at the edge of their encampment as the sun set in the west. These three emissaries of Alamut ordered them to return to the Eagle’s Nest, but Anosh’s master refused. The only reply the emissaries gave were drawn blades, and Anosh hid. The battle was hideous, the kind of carnage that only Kindred of many years can unleash, but in the end only Anosh’s master stood.

Anosh and his sire traveled into Africa where they met many strange Kindred. There Anosh’s master was called the Weeping Master for his oft-bloodied eyes and his terrible power. The African Kindred soon learned to leave the ebon-skinned scholar and his apprentice in peace as they traveled.

As time passed, however, Anosh couldn’t help but notice his master’s degeneration. He often spent entire evenings in thrall to his visions, weeping uncontrollably. The Weeping Master forgot his name entirely, and nearly slew his childe when Anosh called him by it. He was falling into his visions and finding it harder and harder to find a way back out. More than once, he emerged from his trances in a frenzy, and Embraced no few of his victims afterward, forcing Anosh to take his new siblings under his wing.

<3>The Lost Tribe

Although he considered it, Anosh knew better than to risk a trip to Alamut again to introduce them to the rest of the clan. In one of his rare moments of lucidity, the Weeping Master sorrowfully referred to himself and his childer as the “Lost Tribe of Alamut,” never daring to risk returning to that vaunted citadel.

In time, the small company returned to the site of the Weeping Stone. Anosh was the last of the Master’s childer to taste the blood of the Stone. The others tasted the strangeness in the bloody trickle and experienced odd dreams, but Anosh fell into his own blood-dream trance, wracked by visions for the first time since being mortal, dreaming the horror and bitterness and grief of Zillah’s psychodrama.

He emerged from these visions a changed man. Where his Master’s gibbering and glossolalia once only terrified him, he understood more of what he said. He saw his Master’s burden not as madness, but a gift from the First. He took to recording the ravings of the Weeping Master and organizing them into something of a cogent whole.

Over the next few centuries, the Lost Tribe grew and attracted a small handful of others. As time passed, the Tribe assumed a cultic reverence, with the Weeping Master as their prophet and Anosh as his high priest and interpreter. They built a haven near the Weeping Stone, and members of the Lost Tribe guarded the site from others.

The years turned him introspective, and Anosh found himself sympathetic to a body of principles similar to the Path of Blood that his master tried unsuccessfully to teach him. Taking the canon of that Path and combining it with the tenets of the beliefs they were developing, Anosh developed one of the first portions of what would later come to be known in the Sabbat as the Path of Caine. Even tonight, Noddists the world over hold Dastur Anosh to be one of the founders of that Path.

All such things come to an end, however, and in time the Lost Tribe discovered that the agents of Alamut sought them once more. They fled the site of the Weeping Stone, hoping to protect its location through obscurity and diversion.

The Lost Tribe established a hold in the bustling young metropolis of Alexandria. The resources of the city proved useful in the development of the Tribe’s strange philosophy. They sought evidence of the Third Generation, first as proof of their existence, and then with a fanatic’s zeal and desire to destroy them. Anosh counseled slow progress in such things — the sheer power of the Antediluvians was inspiration toward diligent planning and study.

It was here that the Lost Tribe found fragments of the Book of Nod. Its words further galvanized their philosophy and spurred their research. But even before they were able to formulate any plans for discovering and destroying any of the Antediluvians, the hawks of Alamut found them and attacked their hold. Vicious fighting brought about the Final Death of many of the Lost Tribe. Anosh managed to smuggle a number of his brethren to safety, but Alamut’s agents captured the Weeping Master, spiriting him back to Alamut.

Dastur Anosh believed that the Followers of Set in Alexandria sold them out, and maintained a foul regard of Setites from that night on, so much so that his dislike became partially encoded in the Black Hand’s operations, making it very difficult for Serpents of the Light — “still too close to the dead god’s breast” — to become members.

In his grief, Anosh scattered his followers to the winds, sending them far away for their own safety. He would call upon them in the future, he assured them. In the meantime, they should keep secret their goals and spend their efforts to gather more information on their great enemies, the Third Generation.

Then, in the year 139 BCE, Dastur Anosh returned to the site of the Weeping Stone, fortifying himself on a taste of its bloody rivulets, and returned to the bosom of the earth, surrendering to his grief and to torpor.

<3>The Return of Anosh

Several centuries passed before Dastur Anosh made his presence known again, in a spectacular fashion. Footnotes in the annals of Alamut’s history record the troubled times when the clan ground out the assimilation of Islam into its tenets. They note that the renegade Dastur Anosh, childe of the Weeping Heretic, was caught in the citadel’s archives.

Disguised as a recently-embraced neonate, he claimed to be seeking his sire, managing to escape before his captors took him before the masters of Alamut. His powers of deceit and command were impressive; it was later discovered that he’d been in their midst for almost a full year before anyone discovered him, disguised as a new Embrace.

Shortly thereafter, he appeared to all of his old followers, scattered across Europe, Eurasia, the Middle East and North Africa, placing in their minds the desire to journey to undertake a pilgrimage. Following inexpressible subconscious directions, these Cainites made their way slowly to the site of the Weeping Stone.

There, they found a much-changed Dastur Anosh.

Where once he was a quiet, scholarly man, driven by his devotion to his master and teacher, they found a firebrand apocryphist. It was clear had emerged from torpor for many years at that time, and he’d spent his time searching for the Weeping Master and seeking fragments of Cainite history. He roused his followers to a religious frenzy, drinking from the Weeping Stone to Dionysian excess, falling into states of spiritual rapture and drunken trance, relating their visions to one another.

Then, at the end of ten nights of this, when the moon was but a sliver in the sky, he slaughtered a third of them as they lay in near torpid blood-glut. When the others regained their senses sufficiently, he called on them as the faithful, calling them his Lost Tribe.

Those who met the Final Death were traitors, he said, who did not keep his commandments to be silent. They failed to seek the knowledge of the Third Generation in his absence, or had doused their hatred of Zillah’s killers in their blackened hearts. They had given up their knowledge of Dastur Anosh to petty Princes and to the agents of Alamut in exchange for wealth or favor.

To acknowledge themselves as the worthy survivors of Anosh’s killing floor, the survivors took the blood of the Weeping Stone and mixed it with clays, tattooing themselves with the blackened crescent moon of that night sky, the sign that eventually came to denote membership in the Black Hand of the Sword of Caine.

His apostles were no more than a dozen or so Cainites, and they went their separate ways once more, after copying down one another’s gathered lore. For hundreds of years, they met on the anniversary of the Cleansing of the Tribe, as it came to be known. Some years, one of the apostles did not return. In other years, one or two brought childer or acolytes who were true believers, to be inducted into the Tribe.

The Lost Tribe continued in this way for generations, until the assault upon the Lasombra Antediluvian. Word quickly reached the Lost Tribe from its agents in Malta. Some of them counseled caution, suggesting watching these angry childer from the shadows, aiding them where they might. Others suggested that they subvert this movement and use it as their own weapon.

But Dastur Anosh chose the middle path: The Lost Tribe retained its secrecy, but joined with this vestigial Sabbat movement. The vampires of the Blackened Crescent infiltrated these movements, feigning ignorance of one another. Members of the Lost Tribe participated in the attack on Lasombra, and again later aided the Amaranth of the Tzimisce Antediluvian.

<3>The Black Hand

As the Sabbat established its identity through sheerest chaos, overthrow of the vampiric social order and consuming the heart’s blood of members of the Thirteen, the Lost Tribe likewise set its own plans into motion. They christened this shadow faction the Black Hand, claiming to have found kinship with one another in the Sabbat’s holy crusade, and dedicated to acting as the foremost weapon of the Sabbat. Their insular activity and crescent marks gained them quick notoriety within the young sect, and soon brought recruits to their doors.

Although Dastur Anosh maintained a position of leadership in the Black Hand, it soon became clear he was not the only force within its membership. Powerful Sabbat Cainites — many well known for their martial prowess and thirst for violence — were inducted into its membership, and their charisma soon usurped some of the influence and control of the assassins’ cult away from Anosh.

By the time the colonization of the New World had begun, Dastur Anosh realized that the Lost Tribe was no more. What had been conceived as a disguise for the Tribe had supplanted it. No more were Cainites swearing to uphold the rigors of the Lost Tribe. In fact, those who had even known of its existence made up a smaller and smaller portion of the Black Hand’s population.

With this in mind, Dastur Anosh did what was unthinkable to his brethren of the Lost Tribe. He revealed their existence. In a gathering of the leadership of the Black Hand — including those who would one night be called its Seraphs — Dastur Anosh revealed the origins of the black crescent, his contributions to the Path of Caine, his personal history and even the location of the Weeping Stone, all in his notable passionate style of address.

Once again his fiery rhetoric served him and his brood well, and the Black Hand rejoiced at its ancient lineage, older even than the Sabbat. Its gathered elders begged to be taken to the Weeping Stone, to taste the coppery tears of nighted Zillah and to be given the chance to know she whom they would avenge in the coming nights. A pilgrimage to the Weeping Stone became part of the Black Hand’s rites, and the history of the Lost Tribe became a part of the Black Hand’s identity.

The elders of the Sabbat, however, discovered these pieces of information for themselves as it slowly trickled out of the Black Hand’s membership and came to the awareness of the sect as a whole. Appalled to learn of such a full infiltration, they resented being made fools of, though Dastur Anosh made earnest attempts to soothe pride frayed at the discovery.

Nonetheless, he found his loyalty questioned ever more frequently, with Priest after Bishop after Priscus citing his great betrayal when his actions crossed their ambitions. A creature of patience and aplomb, even Dastur Anosh’s tolerance for these importunities had its limits. One particularly onerous Bishop, the Tzimisce called Altzay, cast aspersions on Anosh’s motives and zeal before the leadership of the sect as a whole, and he answered the accusations calmly, the whole night through.

Then, at the end of the night, he challenged Altzay to the Rite of Monomacy and ripped the much-larger Cainite apart in a torrid moment.

Dastur Anosh’s demeanor had always been one of such unwavering composure that it was easy to forget what a devastating purveyor of violence he could be. In fact, few among the Sabbat had ever seen him truly fight. To their horror, as it turned out, few of the assembled Brothers and Sisters were aware of just how old he was.

Anosh, of course, was aware of all of these factors, and chose to use the sudden eruption of ultra-violence to make his point, calmly announcing that anyone else who challenged his loyalty would be met reasonably, and he would submit himself to questioning. But anyone who proved to be incapable of proving his perfidy would find themselves met with a similar challenge. Then he left the gathering, and never returned to another.

<3>Other Hands at Work

From that time forward, Anosh was no less resented. Other Sabbat simply became much more circumspect with their accusations. For their part, individual members of the Black Hand were often fiercely loyal to their high priest, particularly among the younger members who admired to his devotion, iconoclasm, and fiery words, so full of passionate hope and hatred for the Antediluvians.

For many years, he retreated to the site of the Weeping Stone, entering a period of seclusion, seen only by those Black Hand elders with the authority to visit the site. The once-a-year initiation of new Black Hand members continued, in which they received their taste of Zillah’s vitae and their black crescent tattoos.

From his perspective, however, Anosh watched strange traditions take root in the Black Hand. An old hand at infiltration, he was canny enough to recognize the signs, though he’d been far too close to see it. Young members showed up at the Weeping Stone, bragging of the ritae they’d mastered and the patrons they’d won, and Dastur Anosh saw other influences where his own had once held sway.

He turned the pastoral duties of care for the Weeping Stone to one of his childer and disappeared. In time, word trickled back through the Black Hand that Dastur Anosh had revealed himself among the Sabbat who’d traveled to the New World. It was clear that he was not eager to lay claim to the new lands on behalf of the Sword of Caine, as so many of them were, however. He simply showed up in newly claimed Sabbat diocese occasionally, frequently in need of safe harbor from Lupines he’d run afoul of in his wanderings.

No one really is sure what it is he sought during those times, or why his obsession with finding his old master would bring him to the New World. An old journal written by a Lasombra neonate — noteworthy for being one of the first mestizos to be given the blood of the Clan of Shadows — notes a long conversation its author had with the wandering Anosh in which he claimed that he had again experienced visions.

After a decade away, Dastur returned and spoke with admiration of some of the warrior cultures of the native peoples of the Americas, introducing some of their ways into the Black Hand’s ever-evolving culture. While the Hand was distracted with the new customs he’d introduced, he swore in three kamuts led by those who’d once been members of the Lost Tribe themselves, and took them to a new sanctuary in the upper reaches of Mt. Washington, in New England.

From here, he watched carefully. He took command of the Black Hand in the New World himself, carefully watching its members, drawing from those Cainites newly Embraced from among the natives and settlers of the young domain over those with ties to Europe. Years passed in this way, and the Black Hand came to speak of his increasing eccentricity, wondering if madness was far behind for the high priest of the Black Hand.

After making his presence so visible in the New World, Dastur Anosh returned to his old habits. He claimed to be entering torpor in a hidden location in the countryside around Mt. Washington and promptly disappeared. He reappeared in Mexico City, disguised as a neonate among a recent mass Embrace. There, he attracted the attention of the Black Hand, and was inducted into their ranks, which granted him a fascinating perspective.

The rites that he’d established for his followers were being subverted, subtly altered at the lowest level of interaction: pack priests and individual agents. He slowly traced these lines of influence, following them back to a source. Then, one evening while this mid-level agent and instructor within the Hand trained him, Anosh sprung his trap. Despite the power of the Nosferatu antitribu, Dastur Anosh overwhelmed her easily.

For the next week, he kept the staked vampire available to answer questions, compelled by both commands and the occult thought-reading Anosh had mastered centuries before his prisoner had been Embraced. The answers he found in the vampire’s mind and records were unsettling. A death cult of some kind, tied to ancient stories of the city of Enoch, pulled his strings.

Finally, he gained a name: the Tal’Mahe’Ra. The very next night, an unholy host of ghosts and shrouded Cainites attacked the Nosferatu’s haven, destroying her and attempting to lay waste to Dastur Anosh at the same time. They had underestimated his power, however, and he nearly destroyed them.

Anosh disappeared once more, fleeing into the isolation of the deserts of Mexico, a territory now familiar to him. There he wandered and thought. After a many months of this, he reappeared in the Black Hand citadel in the mountains of New Hampshire. Already, the rumblings of conflict between branches of the Sabbat had begun.

In 1766, Dastur Anosh died. His death came as a shock to the sect and his followers in the Black Hand. His rivals in the Sabbat were quick to accuse one another, or to lay the blame at theoretical enemies of the Lost Tribe. Shortly thereafter, the first Sabbat Civil War broke out, pitting the Sword of Caine against itself.

<3>The Seraph Dying and Reborn

Dastur Anosh, of course, did not die. The attack on him was real enough, however, arranged by agents of the so-called “True” Black Hand seeking to terminate his influence. He destroyed their agents and rid the area of all evidence of such, save for one set of ashes, into which he dropped some of his own regalia, first scourging the remains of their true identity so that the able death-sorcerers of the Tal’Mahe’Ra might have no incontrovertible proof one way or the other.

Anosh gave up his original identity and the leadership of the Black Hand — two things that weighed him down with responsibility and limited his ability to search effectively for the answers he demanded from the world. He grew concerned that the would-be leaders of the Black Hand would break out into open warfare with one another, so soon after the end of the Sabbat Civil War. Fortunately, they settled on the idea of four Seraphs, leaders in his image.

In the time since, he has taken on the mantle of multiple Sabbat neonates, often showing up as recent Embraces from various crusades, or claiming a recently destroyed Sabbat vampire as a sire. About half the time, he arranges to find a place in the Black Hand, going through the induction rites thereof and drinking once more from the Weeping Stone. He even occasionally implants in younger Sabbat a memory of having recently Embraced him, giving him an easy introduction into the sect when he wishes it. He does what he is there to do, and then stages his own death once more.

The time in solitude has not been without its effects on him. Sometimes, he forgets what he’s looking for. The Antediluvians. His sire. The Tal’Mahe’Ra. Sometimes, he conflates them, sure that the False Hand is in service to the Antediluvians, or that his sire was consumed by an Antediluvian he seeks vengeance against that progenitor. Perhaps the Weeping Master was taken by the Tal’Mahe’Ra?

Over the years, the Seraphs have collated information about the appearance of strange Cainites in the midst of the Black Hand. Jalan-Aajav acquired sufficient information to deduce that the ancient Anosh — the original Seraph of the Black Hand, the high priest of the Lost Tribe — exists yet.

He and the others have heard of what amounts to a shadow war between this figure and seemingly disparate factions and individuals within the Black Hand, which flares up occasionally, as swift as a sudden desert sand storm, and is gone as quickly.

Sire: The Weeping Master

Clan: Assamite antitribu

Caste: Vizier

Nature: Visionary

Demeanor: Enigma

Generation: 5th

Embrace: Unknown; sect apocrypha claims he was Embraced around the time of Zoroaster

Apparent Age: early 30s

Physical: Strength 4, Dexterity 6, Stamina 5

Social: Charisma 6, Manipulation 5, Appearance 3

Mental: Perception 5, Intelligence 3, Wits 4

Talents: Alertness 6, Athletics 4, Awareness 5, Brawl 3, Empathy 3, Expression 7, Intimidation 3, Leadership 5, Streetwise 2, Subterfuge 5

Skills: Etiquette 3, Larceny 2, Melee 6, Stealth 6, Survival 2

Knowledges: Academics 4, Investigation 5, Law 2, Medicine 2, Occult 6, Politics 3

Disciplines: Auspex 7, Celerity 5, Dominate 6, Fortitude 4, Obfuscate 7, Potence 3, Presence 5, Protean 3, Quietus 6

Backgrounds: Alternate Identity 3, Black Hand Membership 2 (5*), Contacts 8, Resources 4, Rituals 5, Status (Sabbat) 4* (Dastur Anosh has access to the Backgrounds marked with an asterisk if he reveals his true identity.)

Virtues: Conviction 5, Instinct 3, Courage 3

Morality: Path of Caine 9

Willpower: 8

Blood Pool/Max per Turn: 40/8

Image: Dastur Anosh is a small man, standing just over five and one-half feet. He dresses in clothing appropriate to his current façade, or goes unseen most of the time. His eyes are deep-set, and his flesh has become the deep, almost-reflective obsidian of truly ancient Assamites. He usually hides his identity through a combination of cosmetics and potent Obfuscate, avoiding the presence of elder Cainites of the sect unless holding them accountable for some transgression.

Roleplaying Hints: Anosh is quietly intense, with a veneer of unsettling calm. He chooses his words carefully for maximum effect, except when he’s speaking on some subject he is passionate about. Then his words are a torrent of pathos, sweeping up those around him in their spell even without the use of Disciplines. Most troubling of all, and truly part of the horror and danger he represents, is his dwindling ability to recall certain specifics of his solitary crusade. Even when he becomes confused as to the end he desires, his passion for it never ceases. In his most lucid moments, he suspects that he is becoming something other than the consciousness he once held in iron thrall to his cause. Despite the bulwark of the Path of Caine, Dastur Anosh is terrified that the Beast owns him more than the Man, and his long unlife has a fearsome number of lacunae in its history.

Contacts: Dastur Anosh has carefully cultivated a variety of contacts worldwide who aid him in his various searches and travels. Each knows him as someone different.