Lysander's Biography, rewritten

Lysander of clan lasombra

Prologue

During his early childhood, Lysander had always been privileged, high education, rich family, Lysander grew up with all the finer things in life even as the world was still recovering from WWII. This all lasted…until of course his father got screwed over by a corrupt accountant who told him to make “investments” in companies that weren’t exactly existent, after which the accountant in question had an eventful night involving prostitutes and lots of illegal gambling. A while later they found his corpse, the mob didn’t exactly take all that kindly to gambling depts. Lysander’s family was ruined of course, having trusted a small fortune to that man and no longer having the funds to rebuild. They had to sell everything, the house, the car, the family jewellery, they lost everything. His father went to take a job at a local coal processing factory, working hard every day and night just to keep his family fed. His mother couldn’t deal with the shame, the hunger, the cold nights, and one night they found her hanging from a lamppost out on the street. After that his father became a mess, spending the majority of his small income on cheap liquor to drown himself in every night. Lysander all the time, had no idea what had actually happened. All they told him was “this is just how things go sometime” ..heh, little did they know how much difference that would make later on.

Lysander of course, couldn’t stand for it. After his mother’s death he had already started to grow more embittered and resentful to the world around him, and the fact that his father was dead drunk most of the time was the last thing to push him over the edge and drive him from his home and his family. He spend very little time on the streets, before being picked up by a local crime family. After all, somebody had to do the dirty work, even if this person had the qualities of a future crime lord. So Lysander, bitter ambitious Lysander, showed the qualities that they looked for in a leader. Remorselessness and a contempt for others. There were others of his generation that might have attained the position too, but they never really….lived up to their potential, either by dying in brawl contests, in fights with other crime families or by being busted by the police, and more then a few could say (even if they did not know it) that Lysander had a hand in the untimely end of their criminal careers. Lysander became the leader of a small gang after that, gaining a foothold in a suburb of Los Angeles. There Lysander began doing the big boy crimes, extortion, drug dealing, dealing in illegal arms, and so onward.

Around the early 60’s, Lysander had his own little corner of the world tucked in his pocket. His boys were always out picking a share of everyone’s profit and dealing in illegal wares, and kept other gangs, crime families and the police out through bribery and murder. He himself had it pretty well, being the central figure for crime there he had a income that he wouldn’t have ever gotten out of any honest living. He could afford the finest things in live, cars, liquor, women and a house that hard working men could only dream of having. The locals would never dare speak out against their local dark overlord, and so his crimes went unpunished. But such things would never last….

One day, the police raided Lysander’s house. How they knew who he was, where he lived and how he was involved in his gangs activities he didn’t know, neither did he know how they found enough cocaine in his house to turn a small city block into addicts. They threw him behind bars, and told him he would never see daylight again. How right they were….



One night, a week before his trial, Lysander feigning a serious injury lured a guard into his jail cel. When he came in, Lysander was on him before he could figure out what was going on. Lysander took his gun, and shot the man through his head. But of course, that wasn’t an entirely unthinking action. He released the rest of the prisoners, letting them wreak havoc across the jail, while he went off for an entirely different target. The local officers who busted him. He found them in a separate part of the jail, having a cup of coffee, their last cup he thought. He started interrogating them, how did they know where he was and where to look, who the FUCK informed them? They decided to not tell him anything, so he shot one through the hand, and told the other one that he would shoot his friend through his head if they didn’t talk. The man broke down of course, that sort of emotional blackmail wasn’t exactly in their job description. They gave him an address, and he gave both of them a bullet between the eyes anyway. Witnesses weren’t something he could afford.

That night he fled the prison, with the stampede of other prisoners functioning as his cover. There was obviously no way for the police to track him while also hunting for the other escapees, and he knew the local suburbs well enough to make the best advantage of that. When he returned to his gang, they had turned into the disorganized rabble they really were, and had fought a short, but bloody, civil war. Most of them were dead as their chosen group wanted to take control in Lysander’s absence, and from the several groups that fought only one had been left standing. Lysander quickly took the reins back in, and gathered the small force he had remaining and went off to exact bloody revenge. He knew it had to be one of the men that had gone missing in his absence, there just wasn’t any other way. And he had it planned out so nicely…he would take the guy and have his men beat him to death for doing this to him, then he’d take his remaining forces and move to another state.

He arrived at the place the cops told him, a rundown apartment building in the bad part of a town that had to deal with far more sadistic gangs then Lysander’s. After arriving at the indicated room, he to his surprise, didn’t find what he expected to find. He expected to find that had been generously rewarded for his “bravery” in unmasking Lysander, or maybe even the small base of a criminal mastermind who was planning on taking his territory over. He found neither. The place was dirty and seemed deserted at first, mostly lacking in furniture, were it not for the one fold-out bed in the room, with an unshaven man sleeping on the bed. Smelled like he had been on the streets far too long though, so he couldn’t have lived here for long. Lysander gave him a rather rude awakening, involving a baseball bat and lots of angered yelling. The man spilled his guts pretty easily, telling Lysander that a man told him all the information that he told the cops, in exchange for part of the reward for busting Lysander. In addition, the man was given a phone number, and was told to call when Lysander got convicted. Lysander himself, believing to have found his prize, told the man that he was to contact his informant for a meeting, as he had some interesting news to share. Both in mind and body, Lysander was grinning from ear to ear. Little did he know….


An hour later, the man Lysander had found was walking into an alleyway behind a closed fast food restaurant. He was heavily dressed in a scarf and coat, to cover his fresh injuries. And out of the shadows came Lysander’s target. A man dressed in an expensive leather suit, glaring at the heavily cloaked man with a look of great disdain. At that moment, Lysander gave the queue. His men came bursting form behind the restaurant and around the corners, with bats, chains and improvised clubs. But right as they were to maul their target, he made a relatively simple movement of the hand, a strange gesture in such a scenario Lysander thought, but Lysander had little time to ponder it further. Suddenly, swatches of darkness began to move on their own, grabbing his men and dragging them screaming into the shadows, or flicking them into the air like ragdolls. The man Lysander was intending to interrogate, torture and kill was fighting for his live…but he wasn’t a mere man. Lysander watched in awe as his men were butchered, one by one. When he snapped out of it, he grabbed his pistol, but as he lifted it to aim, the darkness about him began to move on his own accord. However it did not in an attempt to grab him, it surrounded him like a wave of icy cold. But Lysander was not about to die without giving up a fight. He aimed and even as the darkness deepened, emptied his clip in the direction he thought would hit someone, anything, before he couldn’t see or breathe anymore. For a moment, he gasped as the darkness seemed to choke his lungs, and stifle every muscle in his body. But then, without warning, it disappeared as suddenly as it came, retreating back into the shadows of the alley without a sound. Only then could Lysander see why. The man was lying on the ground, yelling wordless roars as he squirmed to get back up. Unfortunately for him, it didn’t do him much good. A bullet had pierced his leg and shattered the bone below, several had hit his stomach, with a trail of them leading up to his head. Several had pierced his throat. Lysander was shocked for a moment, he had shot this man, this thing, through the head, the torso several times, and yet still it lived. So he grabbed a nearby club, and smashed the thing’s skull in. That was enough. And as Lysander watched, the man’s physical body decayed in mere minutes.

Lysander quickly rounded up his surviving men, and lead them away. His first stop was his own house, had to get some things before leaving for good. When he was done getting what he needed, he came back outside….only to see his men…gone. There was no blood, no signs of struggle, but the car was empty, the two he left at the door were gone. There was only a certain….feeling in the air. As though something was wrong, very very wrong. He went to the car, intend on getting the hell away from there as quickly as possible, without turning around. But when he heard a clapping noise coming from behind him, he could not help but turn around….and there he saw a man. He was dressed entirely in a black Victorian style, wearing a black Fedora hat of a broader design that could easily hide the man’s face. And he was clapping. Lysander might have shot the man on sight, his intimidating clothing and tall form normally would’ve been enough reason for Lysander. But something in Lysander’s gut told him, run. It was a feeling stronger then he could resist, and he immediately tried to turn tail. But right from under him, he was grabbed by something cold and serpent-like, and it began dragging him to the man. Lysander screamed as the man opened his cloak, and revealed a pit of darkness beneath that defied the laws of physics, and Lysander was drawn straight into it.

The next time Lysander woke up, he found himself sitting in a long, elaborately carved chair, at the right end of a long table. He felt dizzy and disorientated, his eyes needed to adjust to the twilight in the room. But more then that, he felt hungry and thirsty. A cold cackle echoed through the room, and spoke “Oh good, you’re awake. You must be ever so thirsty…go on, drink”. Lysander could finally see the source of the voice. A dark figure sitting at the other end of the table…the man that he had seen at his house…but that didn’t seem important, what was important was where in gods name could he get something to drink! He felt like he was starving, dying of thirst and hunger. And before him on the table stood a single wine bottle, the bottle itself showing that it held an in particularly old vintage. Lysander shakily grabbed the bottle, and could feel the eyes from the other side of the table glaring at him as he ripped off the cork and took a long sip. As he took his second gulp, he realised, this was blood. But nothing in his life had ever tasted sweeter. He drank until the battle was dry, and then smashed it on the table to lick the remains out from the shards. The man on the other side of the table did not move, or speak. He merely watched…

During the next weeks, Lysander was thought what he was, and who he had become. He was a vampire now, but not just any vampire, he was a Cainite of the Sabbat. And his sire was the Bishop of a large swat of land, and an old vampire at that. The Vampire that had attempted to set Lysander up was revealed to be the Bishop’s former childe, who wished to take Lysander as his own. The fact that Lysander defeated him, meant that he was a far more worthy protegé. He remained within his sire’s estate for about three weeks, as he was thought the principles and teachings of the Sabbat, and his sire instructed him in his favoured art, that of Obtenebration, the Lasombra’s unique power of controlling shadows. Lysander, having seen the darkness of the Abyss, was soon to share that love. After his instructions, Lysander was send off by his sire on his first mission. He was a vampire now, and he had to erase his ties to the mortal world. And so he went back to that little town where he grew up, and killed his drunk father. As Lysander would recall the event later, the man was crying to god why he let the devil take his little boy…he chuckled a little each time he remembered it. He then went to the little city block that he once used as his base of operations, and killed anyone who would remember him, former victims, “employees”, cops. In the newspapers it would be the acts of yet another serial killer. In reality, it was Lysander shedding his last vestiges of humanity, and he felt the beast tugging harder on his soul each night. But he began to revel in the feeling. The beast was singing a song, and Lysander was dancing to it’s tune….

All the while, his sire was watching, as Lysander drew ever closer to the Beast. There was but one thing he wanted to teach him before…well, he never really did disclose that bit of information. On the night that Lysander returned from his final killing spree, his sire came to him and said:

“My childe, you have shown so much promise in these lasts nights.
I have thought you what you need to know, what you need to know to survive…but more importantly, I thought you what you needed to know for a purpose. You will soon see. I must take my leave tomorrow, the Sword of Caine has called for my assistance in far away places, and I doubt we shall stand before each other again. I have but one last gift to impart to you…the path to true immortality, not just it’s potential, but to make it a reality. I will not tell you where to find it, but I will give you this hint…Knowledge is power, and power is immortality. Knowledge is there for those who dare to look, but power is only for the strong to take.”

And since then, Lysander never saw his sire again.


Lysander was left with his sire’s estate, him to watch after during his absence and use as he pleased. For nights Lysander pondered this riddle that his sire left him with…he felt he could get close to the answer, but each night just as he was about to reveal it to himself, the Beast would be roaring and it distracted him, frustrated him. He would often take out his frustration on kine that he had hunted for blood, leaving rather messy scenes whenever he went on another rampage. Each night he was not busy venting his frustrations on poor victims, Lysander would be in the large library of the estate of his sire, going through book after book for just a reference of what his sire was talking about. But he found nothing. Frustrated, Lysander sat down again, contemplating the riddle. After going through most of the books that he felt were relevant, Lysander finally gave up on the library, and took to wandering the large estate of his sire in a melancholy. And large it was, there were many small paths in it’s garden (Lysander also noted that he had not realised before that most of the “plants” in the garden were made of marble, granite or stone) that Lysander had not realised were there. However, hidden completely from sight in a small corner of the garden was what seemed to be an entrance to a tomb. In fact, it was so well hidden that Lysander must’ve walked past it several times in the past few weeks. Lysander didn’t know what the tomb was doing there, as his sire would obviously have no use for such a thing. He wondered if perhaps it was a leftover of previous inhabitants, as the stonework looked ancient enough for this to be the case. As he opened the rusty iron bars of the gate, he peered inside to see only darkness. Darkness…he thought. “Knowledge is there for those who dare to look”…

After fetching himself a flashlight from the mansion, Lysander went inside. The light appeared to penetrate the darkness easily, as though it bit through the shade and the shadows recoiled in pain. As Lysander kept moving into the tomb, it was not long before he encountered the first intersection. Lysander realised then, this was not a tomb in the normal sense, this was a labyrinth. And Lysander believed that if his sire wanted him to find something hidden, here it would be.

The intersection led to three pathways further into the Labyrinth. Each one was framed by a sign. In gold above the left most hallway was a metal sign with beautiful print, written: “In this path you will find the light, salvation of the soul, and judgement before His divinity”. Above the rightmost path was a silver sign, on which was written in a powerful, strong print: “In this path you will find the twilight, the power of freedom and the ability to rise above all others”. And on the center path, on an obsidian slab of stone was chiselled in a disturbing wicked print “In this path you will find darkness, the last of all places, in which all will end”. At the very end of the lines on the obsidian slab was an addition to the writing, and it appeared to be been clawed into the stone “And be devoured”. Lysander considered each path. The path to the light promised salvation….but Lysander knew that to vampires the light held only exposure to his enemies, or a painful death beneath the rays of the sun. The path to Twilight offered power, and freedom. This, Lysander decided, was the path he wanted to choose, as power was what he wanted. But as he almost passed beneath the silver sign, he remembered the teachings of his sire….the greatest weapon of a vampire…of a Lasombra, was the darkness. It was their, it was his greatest tool, and his greatest ally. It served him purposefully and loyally. And thus Lysander decided that he would go the path of darkness, the centre path. As he walked the stones underneath his feet began to change. From the even but old and weathered bricks that he had been walking on for some time now, the floor gradually changed into what seemed to be pure obsidian slabs, with no connections between them, entirely smooth and black.

After a few minutes of walking, Lysander suddenly exited the hallway he was walking in and entered a somewhat larger room. He could smell the air inside the room, for some reason it seemed colder and more stale then the air in the hallway. Shining his flashlight ahead of him, he could not see the end of the room, nor either side. Lysander walked to the centre of the room, hoping to catch a glimpse of it’s end or it’s sides. He could see neither. As he shone his flashlight, a very distinct noise, at the very end of his perception could be heard, and it was building. It seemed a language though it sounded like mad gibbering, spoken in a sound that at the very seem time, seemed a low moan, and a shrill shriek. It started slowly at first, but as Lysander listened, it became louder and louder. When a cold draft became to intensify around him, he realised. He was not alone. He reacted, shining his flashlight left and right, hoping to see what was there. At first, the shadows seemed as empty as before. But it was not long before he saw, them. Bodies of inky darkness, with the appearance of emaciated humans devoid of gender. Hair hang in patches off their heads, taking on the appearance of smoky wisps around their heads and faces. Their fingers and toes ended in what seemed to be sharp spikes, and their mouths were lipless, showing arrays of gently smoking fangs, half opened to release that horrible noise. And their eyes…they were utterly dead, showing only the reflection of Lysander’s light. Some staggered towards him on two feet, like zombies. Others crawled on all fours like hungry animals. Lysander staggered back, back into one of the creatures. It grabbed his arms, making Lysander let go of the flashlight. It tumbled to the ground several feet away, and to Lysander’s amazement, the creatures darted out of it’s way, as though the light pained them….it did not seem to reduce their desire to assault him though. Head butting the creature behind him in the face, he ran for the flashlight. Barely tripping on one of the creatures that lunged for his legs, he grabbed the flashlight and ran back to the entrance of the room. When he came there….the hallway was gone. Shining the flashlight back behind him, he could see he was surrounded. They were everywhere, as far as the light could gaze and slightly beyond he could see the reflection of dead eyes in the darkness. Lysander’s first thought was, “Have I picked the wrong path?”, as he grabbed from his pistol and began firing into the creatures. The bullet parted the shadowy flesh where it hit the creatures, but to Lysander’s amazement the darkness itself seemed to rush in to fill the gaps of shadow flesh, replacing it. For some reason, the darkness itself reacted to Lysander’s gunfire, shrouding the view his flashlight even more. Then for some reason, his flashlight flickered, and went out, as though the darkness itself had smothered it. Lysander, for the first time since his embrace, was horrified, horrified at the thought that he would die like this in this tomb, alone, powerless to stop it. But he was not entirely powerless. He would show these creatures how a Lasombra fought in the darkness. It didn’t matter what they were, he would show them, he would show them all! He entered the Black Metamorphosis, shrouding his body in a living cloak of the abyss, leaking the shadow stuff on the ground as it formed on his skin. When he was finished, he could see into the darkness, a side effect of the power. And then he could see that the creatures had stopped, short a meter of his person. They all rose to their two feet….and kneeled.

They began murmuring, though what they said was beyond Lysander. After a minute or so, everything turned quiet, and they rose to their feet. One of them stepped forward and spoke in a low hissing voice, “The master said you come. You free us.” Lysander did not know what the creature was talking about, but before he could respond, the mass of creatures before him parted to form a path and the leading one who spoke to him pointed his jagged finger towards the path. “Go”, it said. And for the first time, Lysander had a chance to see where he truly was. He was in the Abyss…


However, unlike what his sire had told him, the place seemed…strange and distorted. The room seemed to stretch for a long way before ending in walls of blackened glass. He could not see clearly beyond it, but what he could see was....disturbing, and more in tune with his sire’s teachings of what the abyss was to a mortal mind. The insanity of ages of nothingness. Lysander walked between the creatures, not a single one of them moved as he walked past them. He was heading for the very back of the room this time. There he found an obsidian pedestal, upon which lay a large book, strapped in black leather.

The title was, Semita quod penitus vox vocis, the path of power and the inner voice. The book looked hundreds of years old, and it seemed as though none had touched it for an almost equal span of time. And as Lysander ran his hand along the cover, he noticed all of the creatures had moved, they were staring at him. Lysander carefully picked up the book…it was heavy. But at first nothing seemed to happen, the creatures did not react. But then Lysander looked at his back again, towards the back wall of black glass. It was shattering, the stuff from the Abyss outside leaking into the room and forming a rolling cloud that was quickly gaining momentum. Lysander took a few steps back, before turning around and beginning to sprint back through the path between the creatures. At the end he could see that for some reason, the hallway had reappeared. Lysander ran as fast as he could, giving a single glance back. He could see the still motionless creatures being consumed by the darkness. He could’ve sworn they were all smiling as the darkness engulfed them. Lysander made it to the hallway, running a good distance before looking back. Then he could see the hallway was falling into the abyss, the stone itself falling down into nothingness. He kept running, till he passed beyond the intersection again. From the two other passages he could see more abyss stuff pouring out, apparently the abyss was “closer” there. He kept running, even as the bricks he had stepped on not a moment ago fell away beneath his feet, until, using all the might he could muster, launched himself through the entrance. He looked back, and saw it collapsing on itself, until nothing was left but a pile of rubble. Lysander had passed the trial, his prize in his clutch. He walked back to the mansion, eager to glean the secrets of his sire from the tome.

Inside, Lysander found that which he least suspected. He found enlightenment. The tome spoke of how one may conquer the Beast by conquering the world, it’s power, and yourself. It was a truth Lysander never even had considered. But it made sense all along, in his mortal existence he spend his life gathering wealth, women and comfort to himself, but what petty things these are…they are not lasting, they are fleeting, they are useless. The true meaning behind everything, behind every little scheme and lie, behind every great war of kingdoms and nations, behind life itself there had always been a singular truth. Power. It was so simple, yet so elusive. It was power that everyone need, that everyone desired. But of all people on earth, who truly made it to that most desirable of all peaks? None did, only the antediluvians…no, only Caine reached those heights of power that Lysander now knew he craved. To master the world…some would consider the thought horrifying. But truly, who was more worthy to attain such a noble goal? It had become his purpose, and in choosing his path, he had taken the first steps into becoming truly inhuman. It is easy after all, to become a monster. Far harder is it, to shake off the shackles of your humanity, and become something greater.

Looks good Is.