By Myranda Kalis (nagaina@yahoo.com)
Refer to the Old Clan Tzimisce: The Oradea League.
Born of humble origins in the mountainous heartland of what would one day be Romania, the members of House Ruthven transcended their beginnings to become one of the most powerful and feared of all the Houses of Clan Tzimisce.
The founder of House Ruthven, a Kine warlord of the same name, was embraced for one purpose -- to provide for the safety and security of of his Antediluvian sire. Weary after ages of unlife and struggle, the Antediluvian felt the years weighing on him as they never had before and he longed to rest in the arms of his homeland. Knowing that his exhaustion of spirit and body would not stay the hands of his enemies, he embraced Ruthven for the qualities that he knew would aid in keeping his foes fangs' from his throat: intelligence, enlightened brutality, and an absolute ruthlessness that boded well for the task before him. A bond of eternal devotion beyond Final Death ensured the rest, and the Antediluvian left his youngest childe to seek his renewal in the healing embrace of the earth. Ruthven himself, on fire with the power of his sire's blood, went about his duty with the dilligence and focus of the warrior he was, building his House based on the one, overriding truth of his existence: without his sire's trust, he was nothing; his sole purpose was to defend the enormously powerful, and yet terribly vulnerable, creature that had given him a second, dark birth. To ensure this, he walked among the Kine of his domain as a god, that they might fear him as much as they loved him, and offer him tribute as was his due; from those, he graced those most worthy with the passion of his embrace, and, to others, made them a gift of his potent vitae in exchange for their loyalty and service. Thus, it is said, were the first seeds planted that, one night, would grow into the revenant families of the Tzimisce. Among his own clansmen he made alliances, forging bonds with those who shared the region with him: the strange and enigmatic House of Tzildaris Peacemaker, gifted with a subtle and potent understanding of vampiric nature; mystick and scholarly House Valorian, devoted to the study of the arts of magick and the nature of the world; brawling House Djilas, who enjoyed the fight for its own sake and needed little excuse to come when Ruthven beckoned to them. For long and long, peace reigned in the mountain fastness, Ruthven raising a vast fortress atop the mountains that housed the slumbering Antediluvian and filling it with childer as fully devoted as he.
Then word came from the House Valorian in the west and House Brankovan-Waivadi in the north -- the legions of the mighty Roman Empire were on the march, as they had marched so many times before, but this time they went not to the sun-blasted lands of the south but against the storm-cradled peaks of the East. A hasty council was called, the elders of the Houses meeting upon the banks of the Danube for what was likely to become a council of war. None looked forward to meeting the legions of imperial Rome in open battle; their own people were fierce warriors, but, even should they prove successful, the cost would be enormous, the butcher's bill high. Complicating matters still further came the unwelcome news that the Kine came not alone -- riding with them were Kindred lords of the west, of the Clans who were and always had been enemies of the Tzimisce, with their childer, and their ghouls, and their knowledge of how to counter the abilities of other vampires. Attempts to contact a Tzimisce lord and his brood who dwelt in the west met with resounding failure; the Tzildaris emissary sent to locate him never returned from her mission. Fear and defiance mingled in equal measure as the elders declared what each could give of their Houses to aid in the defense of their homeland; Ruthven was the last to speak and it was he who offered all the resources of his House, Kindred and Kine alike, leadership, and his own lifeblood in the defense of their homeland, their people, and their Antediluvian sire. His fire galvanized the rest of the Clan and, for possibly the first time in their existence, Clan Tzimisce was wholly united in the face of a common foe.
The war that followed was long and terrible, the Tzimisce and their Kine fighting side-by-side with a ferocious courage, and equally ferocious cruelty, in the defense of their homeland. Eventually, after many long and bitter years, they finally succeeded in their efforts and drove the invaders from their lands, though one of their nations would forever bear the hated name that marked the Roman occupation. House Ruthven emerged from the conflict strengthened and enervated, the war having shaped and honed them rather than weakened them, as it had with many of the other Houses. Their vengeance eventually brought low the proud Roman Empire and the Clans who had stolen their own vitality from it, and in the aftermath of the Empire's collapse, House Ruthven waxed enormously powerful. To see to the security of their slumbering Antediluvian sire, they expanded their dominions, absorbing lesser lineages into their own, sweeping power away from those who could not wield it efficiently, placing a buffer between the torporous progenitor and those who in their fear and ignorance would do him harm. To maintain that security, they sank taloned hands into the tribes of the Kine, breeding revenant families born to the baptismal font of Kindred blood and drinking up devotion to Clan Tzimisce and its founder with their mothers' milk. Certain of their own invincibility, they spread out from their mountainous heartland, allowing the Kine to take control of the storm-battered ruin of what had been their fortress, raising in its place a cathedral to their own Crucified God, called the Church of the Transfiguration, a name that suited the Shapers well.
The centuries had begun to wear on Ruthven as they had worn on his sire before him, the desire to seek the sleep of ages stealing over him as the Tzimisce entered a golden age, the pinnacle of their power, which seemed set to last for centuries uncounted. Granting the rule to his oldest and most trusted childe, Ruthven went to his rest in the same cathedral where rested the Antediluvian. As the years progressed, the Ruthven maintained their power and devotion -- but both began to exact an increasingly heavy price from them. Entropy began its inevitable work: inbreeding weakened the Kine families from whom they selected their childer; the arrogance of accomplishment was replaced by the arrogance of position; degeneracy and decadence began gnawing at the strong roots of their power and pride. By the time the Tremere rose from the ranks of the Order of Hermes to steal immortality from a careless Ruthven Methuselah, the House was horrendously weakened from within, incapable of meeting the challenge posed by the upstart wizardlings but too filled with their own self-importance to admit it. They rode forth with the forces of House Valorian and House Djilas, and all paid a horrible price for their leaders' weakness in the form of the Anarch Revolt, fomented by outraged and dispossessed youngsters embraced solely to die at the whims of their decadent sires. The irony in this -- the Ruthven Anarchs were truer to their House's warrior tradition and the fire of Ruthven's spirit than the elders who presumed to command them -- was almost wholly lost on the ingrained Ruthven leadership, who responded to this internal challenge in a manner that would have horrified them mere centuries before. They fled before the merciless onslaught of the childer they had so ill-used, barring themselves within their heavily fortified havens and praying to the darkest of gods that their House's youngsters would ravage another's dominions. House Ruthven's darkest hour came the night the anarchs, under the guidence of the Ruthven traitor Lambach stormed the Tzimisce Antediluvian's resting place and there met ferocious resistance in the form of their own House's founder, awoken from torpor by the Tzildaris warrior-mage who carried the news of his House's betrayal to the Antediluvian's defenders. The outcome, however, was never in much doubt -- the defenders were overmatched and new it, but fought with a savagery and desperation that seemed all the more tragic in the light of its ultimate futility. Ruthven died beneath the fangs of his vengeful descendants -- as did, apparently, the Antediluvian to whom he had devoted the bulk of his entire existence. The Ruthven elders would not learn for centuries how their Antediluvian sire had eluded his own destruction. At the time, the Ruthven anarchs, heady with the audacity of what they had accomplished, chose as their follow-up a full-scale invasion of the lands of House Tzildaris, intent on bringing the whole of Romania and the southern Russias under their banner. This proved to be a spectacular tactical blunder on their part as they discovered that the famously peaceful and scholarly House Tzildaris had a new Voivode whose idea of peace was giving his enemies their eternal peace and whose scholarly brilliance had been early turned to the arts of war and death. Not only did the numerically inferior and entirely unassuming House Tzildaris drive the invasion to a grinding halt, they counterattacked with such speed and tactical precision that, by the time the Ruthven elders crawled back out of their hiding places, virtually all of Romania was in their hands and the Ruthven anarchs had been driven north. It was then, in the ruins of the Church of the Configuration, that Lukash Ruthven, reigning Voivode of House Ruthven met with Morgan Demetrius i'Tzimisce, reigning Voivode of House Tzildaris -- and House Tzildaris, for the first, last, and only time in their history, turned their backs in disgust on one of their own and returned to their homeland, leaving the Ruthven to save themselves or rot as they chose.
Thus far, the Ruthven have chosen to rot. Shattered by the Anarch Revolt, brought low by their own arrogance, guilty of abandoning the trust that they had been created to uphold, they are, even tonight, the most broken House of the Old Clan. Cursed with the knowledge that the Tzimisce Antediluvian still exists despite them, aware that he no doubt plans a rather suitable punishment for their enormous transgressions, they vacillate between fear of the inevitable, rage that they should be so used, and guilt, for they have every reason to feel guilty. The heart has simply been ripped from the House, leaving them to spend their unlives going through the hollow forms of their previous existence as the virtual rulers of the East -- an increasingly neofeudalistic existence that was aided and abetted by their manipulation of the Romanian Iron Guard during the fascistic phase of the last forty years. Most of the elders spend their nights teaching their childer of their utter worthlessness as the most accursed of the Tzimisce for their betrayal and failure, indulging in horrendous debauches to fill the aching void in their own souls, lashing out with severely reactionary politics designed to punish those who would strive for something more, and brooding over past glories and insults like a clutch of battered dragons over a golden hoard.
Brujah: Just like their elders -- they merely whine while they are attempting to bludgeon you senseless rather than after. . . which is, to be perfectly frank, not much of an improvement.
Giovanni: Father Caine! It is the Clan with two first names!!
Followers Of Set: Precisely what happens when you spend too much time communing with sand dunes and camels.
Lasombra: The primal force of Darwinism. (Yawn)
Malkavians: Unliving proof that politics really will drive us all mad one day. Nosferatu: Vozhd fodder.
Ravnos: More Vozhd fodder.
Toreador: My -- we will have extremely well-fed Vozhd this season.
Tremere: (dead silence)
Tzimisce: Now, really -- is there an actual difference here that I am failing to see?
Ventrue: Vampires in business suits. One of the lesser-known signs of impending Gehenna.
House Vardalek: Every court needs its jesters...
House Von Klatka: Let them and the Tremere die with their fangs locked in each other's throats -- it is inevitable that we shall all die together in any case.
House Elenades: Let me understand this -- they took an art designed to make us an instrument of destruction...and they want to use it to heal. Someone is missing the point...
House Smatzkhe: I hope they give the Hag indigestion.
House Bathory-Nadasdy: Oh, yes, they are real Tzimisces. And that is the worst thing that I can say about them.
House Djilas: So long as they keep to their own borders, they can slaughter each other until our sire returns for a liesurely evening of...reconciliation.
House Frasheri: ...and every court needs its ladies-in-waiting.
House Venizelos: I am sure they will be able to pay off our sire with a suitably elaborate bribe.
House Tzildaris: Blessed be the peacemakers for they shall be cut down in the crossfire. Now, if only we could arrange for them to actually walk into one....