Mythic Tragedy: The Nabataean

Here we see the Nabataean, one of the Children of the Revolution penned by Mummy developer C.A. Suleiman.

Thematically, I love this guy. He exudes a mythic feel that’s perfect for an elder vampire, and he does it without being an uber-character who can blow something into splinters by looking at it. He’s also tied very well to a modern world event that’s perfectly on target for Children of the Revolution. And he could easily show up in practically any chronicle, to be helped by characters or to be exploited by one of their nemeses. “Who’s this guy? Holy shit, he’s a two-thousand-year old victim of some kind of abusive clan bullshit. Hey, come over here and we’ll help you out. Now, can you do us a favor…?”

Mechanically, I think he’s almost there. I think one improvement would be to eliminate Amnesia in the form of a Flaw and replace it with a more exploratory treatment as a derangement. He’d still perform admirably in his role without that scurrilous Iron Will, too.

What do you think?

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<1>The Nabataean

<n>One by one, we fall from Heaven into the depths of the past. This, our world, is ever upturned, so that yet some time we’ll last. Who are we?

— Riddle of the Sheik

In the 363rd year of the Common Era, the hidden city of Petra (the biblical “Sela,” in what is now the nation of Jordan) was in the midst of its second bloom. The first came centuries before, when it blossomed into the premier stop along the trade routes between the East and Gaza, the most important port in the Levant, and the gateway to the markets of Greece, Egypt, Rome, and Syria. This important trade route was the family business and life’s blood of Petra’s inhabitants and civil overseers: the Nabataeans.

The intervening winter that allowed for this second spring came with the winds of change, blown from the west when Rome, which had been receiving tribute from Petra since the 1st century BC, invaded and claimed much of the  surrounding territory, including several precious trade routes. Petra’s decline was swift and sharp in the wake of Rome’s avarice, and yet drained of vitality though it was, the mountain city remained. When Emperor Trajan annexed and established it as the capitol of what he called the Arabia Petraea, Petra slowly began to see a new revival — one that would, in part, erase its cultural identity, but an architectural and economic revival all the same.

By the year 363, Petra was the center of a diocese under the auspices of Constantine’s dream, the Eastern Roman Empire. It had lost some of its luster from the glory days of the Nabataean kings, but the addition of Byzantine colonnades, finely carved chancels, and arrays of opus sectile mosaics certainly beautified the aging city….

…until the earthquake.

Records of the time indicate that the quake was felt as far away as Aqaba, and the devastation it leveled on Petra certainly reflected such magnitude. Like most earthquakes, it began at a tumultuous locus and concluded with an aftershock some hours later. It toppled temples, sent broken columns into the walls of the Royal Palace, and utterly demolished the city’s only theater. Over half the residents took the quake, which killed hundreds, as a sign from above and chose to abandon Petra, her short-lived Renaissance now at an end, forever.

<3>Shaking Heaven and Earth

The quake that rocked Palestine then remains an oft-discussed event. So great was its power that diviners and oracles, including some from as far back as the reign of Emperor Trajan, claimed to have foreseen the event. None of these prognosticators spoke in specifics, naturally, but the timing is certainly curious.

Just before the earthquake, in late 362, the Emperor Julian, “the Apostate,” had outlawed the teaching of Christianity, which had been the state religion for almost 30 years by then, throughout the breadth of the empire. Then, a month after the earthquake, Julian died at the Battle of Ctesiphon. Shortly after that, Julian’s successor Valentinian made his brother Valens the ruler in the east, and in so doing, created at last a permanent separation of the Roman and Byzantine Empires — an act that would ultimately precipitate the fall of both empires, according to some scholars.

Not every inhabitant of Petra felt so defeated. One man lived through the quake just the same as the others, but where they saw only ill-omen, he saw a need to pick up the pieces and soldier on. Like his father, and his father before him, the man worked the hydraulic engineering innovations that were the wonder of their place and time: conservation systems and dams to control the rush of winter waters that caused dangerous flash floods. He was a Nabataean, and his ties to the land and to Petra ran deeper than any Roman fear or Byzantine superstition. Knowing what a mass exodus would mean for Petra’s fortunes, he spoke out against her abandonment.

By that time, though, the word “Nabataean” had taken on pejorative connotations, such as “peasant,” “boor,” or even “bastard” in the very lands that had once comprised the Nabataean kingdom, a sad degradation of a people who had once been among the most tolerant and gifted of the ancient world. Although the man had done everything he could do to fit in and to be of use, including even converting to Christianity (as some Nabataeans had done, once Roman-occupied), to the ruling elite his word, was that of his people. And his people were “peasants.”

One powerful individual did take note of the man’s ardor and loyalty, however naïve or optimistic it was; he just didn’t do anything about it. This individual, one of the long-dead begotten of Cain, watched as the caravans filed along the city’s Colonnade Street, past her Nymphaeum and her fallen Temple of the Winged Lions, down her famous siq, and out her front gates. The city’s structure never lent itself to prolonged Kindred habitation, but it was as perfect a way station for them as it was for the kine, and it was in this capacity that the vampire was in Petra at the time.

This dead visitor, a scion of the King of Shadows, did not bring the Nabataean into the endless night. He merely took note of the mortal’s name, family line, and behavior before vanishing once more into darkness. In fact, one might say that his presence in Petra had been rooted in the same.

The Nabataean’s plea ignored, his city’s star would fade slowly over the next 300 years, as trade routes shifted away from Petra and support from the eastern empire waned. By the year 747, it was a backwater municipality in the growing Islamic Caliphate, its population dwindled from almost 40,000 during its heyday to fewer than 2,000 residents. But among those who yet remained was the last descendant of the Nabataean, who insured his line would keep faith with their land. This descendant, a humble laborer, eked out a living as best he could in Petra’s decline.

And then it happened again.

If the events of the year 363 were the beginning of the end for Petra, the earthquake of 747 was the final nail in her coffin. The city had been reusing materials for centuries by then, and what little foundation they provided was sorely outmatched by the power of the quake’s fury. It tore through not only what remained of Petra, but all the cities of the once-Nabataean Negev, leveling temples, collapsing homes, and swallowing tomb and soul alike.

And this time, the Nabataean was caught in the middle of it. When the quake started, he was working on the temple of Qasr el-Bint (“the daughter’s castle”), amending some of its masonry. Before he could even take a breath, the world was falling in all around him. In a last-ditch effort to find safety, he ran to the nearest aperture, and in a daze he thought brought on by the stress of the moment, he saw through the opening a beautiful white camel, smiling serenely beyond. Upon hearing a section of sandstone break loose overhead, he closed his eyes in preparation for death… but it took an unexpected aspect.

His eyes fluttered open and beheld a figure of nightmare, surely a djinn or one of the ghûl. Yet it stood with arms outstretched, an inscrutable look upon its weathered face, as if welcoming him back home. Looking up, the Nabataean saw the block of sandstone, suspended in mid-air… by shadows. At this, the mortal’s fragile consciousness gave out and he collapsed in a heap on the temple floor. When he awoke, he was no longer among the living, but the Damned.

Like his ancestors before him, the Nabataean had adopted the religion of his place and time; in this case, Islam. The Nabataean people, like other tribal Arabs, started out as fully polytheistic, offering their prayers to the likes of Al-Uzza and Al-Qaum, Dushares and Manawet. When the Israelites conquered them, Alexander of Judea forced mass conversions to Judaism, and so Nabataeans born in that place and time accepted that faith. Under the Romans, the Nabataeans converted first to the Hellenized incarnation of their former pantheon, with Venus and Mars in place of Al-Uzza and Al-Qaum, and later, under the Eastern Empire, to Christianity — until, of course, the coming of Islam. Indeed, adapting to survive in peace seemed to be the Nabataean way.

When the Nabataean discovered that his undying savior had not adapted as his ancestors did — had adopted neither the faith of his place and time, nor those faiths that had come before it — he was dumbfounded at his sire’s deed. He hadn’t been especially religious in life, but on finding out that beings such as this existed, his mind couldn’t help but frame the discussion in religious terms. After many nights, he mustered the courage to finally ask his sire why he had come to Petra in her decline, why he had saved a humble Muslim Nabataean only to damn him immediately thereafter.

“I have not slain you,” came the response. “I have preserved you.”

“But why? Why me?” said the Nabataean.

“Because one night, you might be the last of your kind.”

* * *

On his subsequent travels around the Levant, the Holy Land, and the Fertile Crescent, the Nabataean learned a great deal about not just one world, but two: the world of the living, and the secret world of the accursed dead who walked in its shadow. As sire and childe, the pair toured the courts of the Ashirra, the Islamic brotherhood of undead, and conversed with caliphs, supped with sultans, and interviewed with imams. The known world took them in, and they in turn took in the world. And through it all, the bond between the two Kindred grew.

As is often the case with the Damned, this very engagement was the very thing that spelled the end of their time together. In the early 11th Century, following the emergence of the so-called Taifa kingdoms in Al-Andalus, the pair ended up the honored guests of a fellow Lasombra named Bakr ibn Safwan al-Qushari, the self-proclaimed Sultan of Málaga. When the sultan asked them to pray with him, the Nabataean’s sire politely refused. The sultan, thinking him a fellow “person of the book” (i.e., a Christian or a Jew), offered him access to a local church or synagogue, instead. When he was again refused, the sultan realized that his guest was neither Muslim nor dhimmi (a non-Muslim freeman), but true infidel, and thus in need of some counsel.

So it was that the Cainite Sultan of Málaga challenged his clanmate and guest to a contest. Should the sultan lose, he would give up half his sultanate to form a new domain for his guest (who had, to that point, established no earthly domain of his own). If he won, his guest would agree to convert, if not to Islam than at least to another religion of the book. Thinking the contest a jest at worst and an evening’s entertainment at best, the sire agreed. The Nabataean no longer recalls the manner of the contest, only that his sire lost and that they both suspected deception. Both Kindred foolishly believed their aged host to be above cheating on such a trivial dalliance.

When called to make good on his loss, the Nabataean’s sire again politely declined, but made no mention of his host’s own bad faith in the process. When a Cainite guest breaks faith with a Cainite host, the results can be explosive, and this instance was no exception. Incensed, and feeling the honor of both clan and tradition slighted, the sultan brought the matter before the Amici Noctis, the quasi-secret internal tribunal of the Lasombra clan. Al-Qushari had been careful to cultivate alliances with both Muslim and Christian clanmates over the years, and his influence was heard and felt among those who sat in judgment of their nomadic clanmate. As such, their verdict was as clear as it was swiftly delivered. If the Nabataean’s sire would not make good and convert, then he would face the Final Death.

Knowing his sire would never convert to a faith he did not love, the Nabataean, who had stayed silent through the matter, made a bold and decisive move. He offered his own unlife in exchange. To his surprise, neither his sire nor the sultan objected, nor even reacted with especial dismay. The sultan accepted at once, and sent word to the tribunal that the sire’s verdict was to be voided, provided his Nabataean childe remained true to his word. After almost three centuries years together, sire and childe parted ways with nothing more than a lone knowing nod and a somber valediction.

Again the Nabataean prepared himself to meet death, as he had the night of his Embrace, and again was Death denied. The sultan, moved by the guileless integrity of his Muslim clanmate, though not moved enough to forgive the sire’s trespass entirely, opted to spare him the Final Death… in exchange for an eternity of nothingness. Al-Qushari drove a wooden stake through the Nabataean’s heart, boxed up his corpse, and kept it as the prize of his collection of treasures.

Before long, the sultan’s penchant for contest again had the better of him, and he was forced to forfeit the Nabataean as the culmination of a very heated exchange with a rival Christian Lasombra. Word of the “Nabataean trophy” spread like wildfire thereafter, and his body found itself passed from one undead curator to another, ever at the whim of vampires more seasoned and cruel than he. For a time, he was bound to the crypt of a qlipphothic sage, who unboxed him every few years to ask the same question: “What is your name?” When the Nabataean could no longer answer with certainty, his host sold him to yet another Kindred eager to possess the undying curio. The only constant in his indentured unlife was the ruling that bound him to coffin and clan, but it was that same ruling that prevented his soul from falling prey to the Amaranth or to the Final Death. After a few centuries, the Nabataean no longer knew whether he felt this to be a blessing or a curse.

When the Reconquista returned much of Al-Andalus to Christian (and more importantly, non-Lasombra) hands, the Nabataean returned once more to the Middle East, where he found himself the idle plaything of one Sheik al-Khali, called the Empty Prince. A man of infinite tales and riddles, the sheik’s favored form of interaction with his prize was to remove the stake and play tribal host, pretending that the Nabataean was an honored guest from afar. At the end of a long evening of heady drink and discussion, the Empty Prince set a riddle before his captive audience. Should the Nabataean guess correctly in time, he would win his freedom. If not, back to the box. Knowing his guest’s worldly experience had stopped abruptly at the turn of the millennium, the sheik’s riddles could be chosen accordingly, and thus, their outcome was never really in doubt.

By the end of World War II, the Nabataean had fallen into the possession of one Mirri al-Lam’a, childe of King Sharif and blood sister to the monarch of the Lasombra in North Africa. The Nabataean still doesn’t know how or why he ended up in her care, for she never unboxed and interacted with him the way the others had, she simply kept him stored in her cool cellar. But none of that mattered, anyway, since she was the last vampire to ever play host to his body.

Mirri al-Lam’a was the sole Lasombra resident (and de facto Prince) of the town of Sirte, Libya. Yet even as Sirte grew under the auspices of its prodigal son, Colonel Mu’ammar al-Qaddafi, the city’s Kindred activity remained constrained, as though its most tenured resident sought actively to avoid others of her kind. When the Arab Spring finally arrived at Qaddafi’s doorstep in October of 2011, the resulting hostilities made a wet, smoking ruin of Sirte, as well as Qaddafi.

What no one knows is that the Arab Spring accomplished an important Cainite event at the same time: the release of the Nabataean, after 1,000 long years of nightmares both real and imagined.

He awoke to find himself submerged. The siege of Sirte was accompanied by not only shelling and gun battles in the streets, but also flooding. And while the sub-basement that was his resting place had been secured against intrusion and sunlight, it hadn’t been entirely waterproof. With his stake dislodged and his host nowhere to be found, the Nabataean was on his own for the first time in a millennium. Were it not for the water everywhere and his ability to take his rest where he may, he almost certainly would have either met the sun or lost himself to frenzy.

Since his rude awakening, the Nabataean finds the world a stark and disorientating place. His unspeakably long torpor didn’t drive him mad, but it did strip him of many of his memories, much compassion, and even his identity, including his own mortal name. His first act of volition was to leave Sirte, which was still a ruin by the time he escaped the tomb that had been his most recent home. As if by instinct, he followed his memory of self east, heading back to the ruins of Petra.

Along the way, he stopped in Egypt and watched the fallout of the Arab Spring take hold there. He’d been to Egypt before, with his sire, but the place was of course unrecognizable to him now. After a run-in with a nomadic Sabbat pack (of whom he made dizzyingly short work), he followed the political ghibli once more, crossing the border first into Sinai and thence into Palestine, where he gazed in grim understanding at the familiar face of oppression and the loss of self-determination. When he arrived in Petra, his fear that it’d be nothing more than historical curio was confirmed.

As of tonight, only one purpose drives the Nabataean. He seeks to reconnect with his lost sire. Centuries of fitful sleep have robbed him of his certitude, but something tells him that his sire is yet undead, and if he can find him, maybe he can assemble the pieces of his past and move forward. With no contacts and nowhere concrete to start, he is reduced to wandering lands he once knew, now unfamiliar to him, alone and bereft of the guidance of even his own god. He wanders now, as in nights of old — wanders and wonders if he is indeed the last of his kind.

Sire: Antipater of the Hoof

Clan: Lasombra

Nature: Idealist

Demeanor: Martyr

Generation: 7^th

Embrace: 747 CE

Apparent Age: late teens/early 20s

Physical: Strength 5, Dexterity 4, Stamina 5

Social: Charisma 2, Manipulation 3, Appearance 3

Mental: Perception 3, Intelligence 3, Wits 5

Talents: Alertness 4, Athletics 3, Awareness 3, Brawl 4, Subterfuge 2

Skills: Etiquette 4, Melee 3, Stealth 2, Survival 5

Knowledges: Academics 1, Craft 4, Investigation 3, Occult 3

Disciplines: Auspex 2, Fortitude 3, Obtenebration 4, Potence 4, Protean 3

Backgrounds: Mentor 4 (though the Nabataean cannot again call upon this mentorship, yet), Status 1 (Lasombra)

Merits/Flaws: Code of Honor, Iron Will, Language (Arabic, Aramaic) / Amnesia

Virtues: Conscience 1, Self-Control 5, Courage 5

Morality: Humanity 7 (treat as Humanity 5 until the Nabataean has an epiphany that returns his forgotten Humanity to him)

Willpower: 8

Blood Pool/Max per Turn: 20/4

Image: The Nabataean is handsome but unremarkable at first glance, an Arab of indeterminable extraction, standing just under 5’10” and possessed of a mason’s hands and upper body build. He does claim one physical curiosity among his kind, however. Like a mortal who went for decades without exposing his body to very much weather, pressure, or sun, the Nabataean’s skin is incredibly life-like for a vampire of his advanced age. This absence of the Cainite’s trademark pallid cast has already proven fatal to younger, cocksure vampires who thought him an easy mark. While he’s acquired enough contemporary clothing to get by without drawing undue attention, it’s clear to any discerning eye that the Nabataean is quite literally a man out of time.

Roleplaying Hints: The Nabataean can’t quite relate to the people around him, yet, and he’s still in the process of rediscovering humanity in toto, so that he can rediscover his own humanity. It’s all coming back — slowly — but until he gets his bearings, the Nabataean will have to walk a fine line between the poles of his own being, between way too little and way too much. And when one is an ancient nocturnal predator, those kinds of growing pains can be quite painful, indeed, especially to those who would think to prey upon him.

Haven: The Nabataean learned from his sire the Gangrel trick of taking one’s rest in the cold ground, and like a feral animal, he retreats into this mindset with the dawn of each new day. While he’s certainly capable of finding and establishing a true haven of his own, the concept simply isn’t on his mind for the time being. All he wants is to move, as he did in the old nights, and until he finds either his sire or a suitable source of answers, that’s unlikely to change.

Influence: If his sire is indeed still undead, he would be quite an influential figure in his own right come the modern nights, but the Nabataean can’t access any such influence, of course. Given his age and physical capabilities, he could easily become an influential member of either the Camarilla or the Sabbat, but thus far his understanding of both sects is greatly limited, and such aspirations aren’t even a concern to him for the time being. Once he acclimates, he’ll be a force to be reckoned with, but until that time his main concern is finding his sire — and his place.