NationStates Name: Finsternia
Character Name: Silvanus
True Name:
Alexios Demetrios
Physical Appearance and Description:
Pre-Embrace:
Demeanor: Actor/Puppet Master
Sire: Babylonia
Generation: 6th Gen (failed Diablerie)
Blood Potency: 4
Clan: Malkavian
Bloodline: N/A
Age: 841
Birthdate: 1182
Physical
Strength: 6
Dexterity: 7
Stamina: 7
Social
Charisma: 7
Manipulation: 7
Knowledge
Perception: 7
Intelligence: 7
Wit: 6
Abilities
Melee: 7
Ranged/Firearms: 4
Disciplines:
Dementation: 9
Auspex: 7
Obfuscate: 6
Vicissitude: 7
Dur-An-Ki (Thaumaturgy): 6
Dominate: 4
Potence: 3
Celerity: 3
Fortitude: 3
Mortis: 2
Additional Skills: Silvanus is an expert over the fields of psychiatry, psychology, and medicine, as well as the art form of body crafting. Silvanus can speak fluent Latin, Greek (both modern and antiquated forms), most forms of Russian, both forms of Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, German, and Italian. Silvanus is also the foremost authority in Malkavian Time, the secrets of Clan Malkavian, and the ways of divination.
Biographical Information
There weren't many records on the early life of the vampire named Silvanus and even if there were, they were just snippets of his history and some were perhaps whispers and rumors only. Most of his well known works only surfaced during his ancilla and elder years since during that time he has received some autonomy from his sire. However, the Elder's life started back in the year 1182 where he was born and raised by a peasant family in the outskirts of the ancient city of Nicaea. He was the eldest among the five children of his parents and thus the one which the family often relies to. His father tended fields, his mother went around the neighbourhood for homely services and Silvanus hunted game and done manual labor for a living. This monotonous life continued for a little more than twenty years that by around the year 1206, Silvanus' family fled the city with only a wagon pulled by oxes due to the local political strifes of the time. In search for greener pastures, the family left the city's protection and ventured elsewhere despite the danger presented by brigands and, worse, the threat of the looming Mongol Horde. It didn't take much time for the family to have disaster befall upon their heads as months later on their journey, their cart has been ambushed by a Mongolian scouting party. They could have stayed alive if not for Silvanus' father fighting back. It costed them all their lives, except for Silvanus and two of his sisters who surrendered and were then taken to be slaves by the Horde. It was the last time Silvanus ever saw his sisters, when they were parted as they were assigned their owners.
His new master was clearly someone of noble standing and with a high degree of power over the Khanate yet they are rather... curious to say the least. His master introduced themselves as Inanna and she always has this aura of enchantment around her and Silvanus would swear that she would be the most beautiful woman he would lay his eyes over. The men of the Khanate sure were fans of her as many flung themselves before her feet but a numbered few succeeded in even getting her attention. He would only see her at dusk and during the night and even then Inanna would vanish into the Khanate and into war tents. Silvanus could only serve as her new slave and servant and he cannot question her businesses, even if unsavory news of nightly pleasures leak out of the mouths of many.
Silvanus spent a couple months under her service until one night when Inanna returned with a griveous wound almost splitting her abdomen into two. Silvanus went to help her but the hungry Kindred returned it with a deathly Kiss and drank too deep until Silvanus breathed his last mortal breath. The ancient vampire was clearly not done with him and thus she embraced him, in virtue of being a favorite among her servants. Hours later, Silvanus woke up from his first death but now with the accursed blood of Caine and the mad blood of Malkav in his veins, singing him a sweet melody. His sire was waiting for his eventual awakening and offered him a bowl of blood in which he drank deep. And at that night started Silvanus' integration into vampire society. Inanna explained the world in which he found himself in, what he is, what to do, what he should do, what he can do and what he cannot do. Inanna introduced herself in truth, that she is the age old Malkavian Methuselah Babylonia, childe of Nissiku, dating back from Ancient Babylon and most notably known in the Bible as the Biblical Whore of Babylon. Babylonia herself had many childer yet most of them died or are somewhere in the Middle East, continuing their sire's legacy and thus, Silvanus has a lot to do to win Babylonia's favor.
Silvanus served as Babylonia's personal errand boy, tasked to do the dirty work for her and as her messenger. At the end of the night, he was also her sex slave and has suffered for a long time until her Final Death by diablerie at the very hands of Silvanus in 1835. The thing is, Babylonia became known as the Biblical Mother of Prostitutes due to almost all of her psychoses revolving around sexual deviances and severe perversions. Because of this, her prophecies spring from carnal activities and rituals which she has taught her childer to know. Cults that surrounded these sex oracles were once famous and was comparable to the Bacchanalia and the cult of Liber, the sacred rites of the fellow Malkavian Methuselah the Dionysian. Babylonia taught these secrets to Silvanus, the Path of Carnal Visions, and some other ancient blood craft in which the Methuselah felt generous to teach. Her childe seem to show promise, as his command over Auspex and Dementation are remarkable, which made Babylonia favor Silvanus more and more in grotesque ways even possible. For a long time Silvanus stayed close with the Methuselah until he was dispatched into Nicaea in 1261 for an inside job.
For the span of four to five years, from 1261 to 1265, Silvanus' task was easy. It was to provoke civil unrest and to topple the political heads of the city. It was successful as in 1262 a raving mad mob swept away the city's Toreador and Brujah Primogen and along the years have put the populace at the edge of their seats. By the end of his mission, Silvanus was sent to roam Europe in order to train himself as Babylonia learned that letting neonates go around the continent is a sure fire way of testing whether the newly sired whelps can get themselves some recognition a bit more. Still, Babylonia do have some intentions with this temporary freedom since she can still contact Silvanus even across the continent. In the next decades, Europe would find themselves confronting a weird disease or phenomena: the peasantry are, for some reason, dancing for days and weeks on end until they collapse from exhaustion or outright die from it. Many are baffled, many saw it as demonic possessions, many Kindred feared it was Baali shenanigans or some disease that would infect them if they fed on the ecstatic dancers. Many culled the populations that danced to the moonlight and the unheard music until the ruckus died off. Perhaps if one would look at such and discover that it was a work of a Malkavian neonate, many would think that it was a prank of sorts to baffle the rest of society. It was nonsensical; what can you gain from making people dance?
The answer was that it was a Malkavian ritual, devised by Silvanus' sire. It's a ritual where the the caster shall drive the populace into a ritualistic dance of ecstacy, into the music unheard by many, into the music only they can hear in a state of trance. Basically, the populace infected by the memetic ritual were conduits for the prophetic magic in which their efforts strengthened the Malkavian practitioner and made it easier for them to see through the dark veil. The bafflement and unwitting slaying of their cattle was just an added bonus.
Centuries later, Silvanus would be then called and summoned by Babylonia from his travels to serve her council in Moscow, which she has turned into her new powerbase. This was the start of Babylonia's utter control over Moscow and its resulting state of Russia until her death. The first victim was, of course, the First Tzar of all Russia Ivan IV Vasilyevich who is now most commonly known as Ivan the Terrible. Ivan was actually a rather decent ruler until his slow and agonizing descent into madness and rage. Silvanus whispered horrible things in his ears, twisting the once good boy into a cruel old ruler until his last game of chess. His rule was effectively Babylonia's and Silvanus' weapon to conquer the Russian territories and expand their influence, even into other Russian cities.
In Ivan's court did Silvanus gain the power which made him feared and prized, a Tzimisce named Elpidius who Silvanus has roped in and extracted the secrets of Clan Tzimisce's highly guarded discipline of Vicissitude. The Tzimisce was one of the first projects of Silvanus and he wasn't the last. After Ivan's death, Silvanus once again resumed his travels, formulating his craft. He has naturally earned the ire of some members of Clan Tzimisce, one notably the loathing of Sascha Vykos as both of them crossed paths during their respective adventures. Later on, Silvanus would help in the orchestration of the Great London Fire in behest of Babylonia, almost dying in the process due to him succumbing to the Red Fear. Silvanus would then settle down decades later in Lisbon, serving as an Elder for Clan Malkavian and finally a take over as its Prince. His rule was a quiet one, even if it was controversial. He was perfecting his art and Vicissitude has proven to be a great help to the Camarilla cause as he created soldiers and soldiers of grotesque and scary proportions. Due to his notoriety with Clan Tzimisce, he has been a close friend to Clan Tremere and also a patron of nourishing their thaumaturgical art. Years later, he would receive a guest in 1736 in the form of a Cappadocian Elder named Agnes Eusenatos. Silvanus has always been into the occult, Babylonia has stamped than into his mind, and he granted Agnes protection in his city. He granted her hospitality, accepted her as a Giovanni Primogen, in exchange for some Cappadocian lore on Mortis. Of course, he offered Malkavian secrets to her too (and even an audience to his experiements on Vicissitude for her to study the living and dead flesh) and even if he learned not much to be an expert on the matter, it did help with his experiments and only served to augment his mastery of Vicissitude over time. Perhaps she was one of the few people that the Malkavian treasured and befriended and he even offered her an escape to Macau in 1766.
Meanwhile, Babylonia continued her game of chess back in Russia and has been planning of embracing the new Empress, her new student Catherine the Great. Silvanus hid himself in his own playground, busying himself with the Portuguese royal family and the poor Maria the First of Portugal. He let his sire do as she pleases, he knows that she will run back to him. Indeed, Babylonia became stricken with grief when Catherine died in 1796 and a decade later, on 1808, Silvanus left Lisbon with the Portuguese royal family and into Rio de Janeiro, leaving his Primogen Council to take over the matters of Lisbon for him. It didn't take awhile for Maria to pass away and a Toreador, who goes by the name of Eugenio Vicente de Olispio, took over Lisbon and renounced Silvanus for his horrible experiments. The Malkavian only replied with a letter enchanted with Dementation and he, in turn, took over Rio de Janeiro as his new base of operations. Sadly this, too, was short lived as revolutions were the hottest thing over the corner. Brazil declared independence, many more political messes washed over Rio both the mortal and Kindred kind.
The Farroupilha Revolution of 1835 (backed by his Toreador rivals back in Portugal) became the last straw of his paranoia and he resorted to his greatest trump card: Babylonia. He offered the Methuselah control over Brazil and the territories that would be under them. It was, of course, a big lie. Both Silvanus and Babylonia are blood bounded to each other, such was the result of the vulgarities the Methuselah have tormented him. Perhaps the Methuselah long known of Silvanus' desire to destroy her and perhaps the grief of Catherine's death has placed such heaviness in her heart and wanted to experience the forbidden ecstasy of Final Death. The sire and childe performed one last depraved act, one last carnal performance. It reached its peak when Silvanus felt the great urge of diablerizing Babylonia. He drank deep as their convulsing bloodied bodies intertwined. When Babylonia was near death, Silvanus forced her mouth open and regurgitated her blood back to revive her and resumed feeding. This lasted for seven days and seven nights, an entire week of torture until Silvanus finally finished his feast, devoured the Methuselah whole, and has fallen into torpor within the depths of the São Cristóvão Palace (never knowing his Diablerie fell short and the Methuselah escape by a thread of her life). He would prematurely rise from his sleep 55 years later when revolutionaries aiming for a republic stormed the palace and trashed it up. His resting place was discovered and the Elder didn't take it very well. The little party of revolutionaries never made it out.
Of course, his enemies have already taken the city's rulership from him but Silvanus stayed, spending fifty more years in Rio de Janeiro in an attempt to take control once more. He rallied whatever loyal people he can get and started more fights over the right for Rio's title of Prince. Proxy wars were fought in the shadows, revolutions burned through like wildfire until he signed a treaty with the current Toreador Prince, detailing that both sides would end the conflict and Silvanus will renounce his claims for undisclosed benefits for both parties. It was 1943 and Silvanus gave Rio his last goodbye, bringing his Malkavians with him to Los Angeles and was welcomed by Prince D'Guiscard. By the start of the year 2000, he rose to the ranks of Primogen and proved himself a worthwhile ally to the Prince and the Council but never setting his sights onto the title of Prince, it has tired himself out. He survived the Bloody New Years while he was disguised as a homeless man in the streets of Santa Monica which prompted him to drive back the conspirators and proceed to clean up some messes. He now serves Prince Anna as one of her Primogen and is set on proving himself worthy of the job.
The Primogen has not personally taken field during the battle with the great Demon Archduke Belial, but has supported from the shadows with his mastery over flesh craft. With the Prince spent and in hiding, Silvanus has offered his honest aid and work to the Tremere Anna, and used his own contingency of Dolls and Malkavians to aid the battle both at the front as well as in the shadows. For the past five years the Elder has been in Torpor, but not entirely unconscious. The dreaming artist continues to peer through the eyes of the people he touched and through anybody he fancied to hitch a ride with, his servants continuing their works as artisans for Silvanus and the Prince, and now he has awoken; the Elder now stands in a city barely aging yet still withering through time, standing atop the hive mind of Malkav's brood.
His new master was clearly someone of noble standing and with a high degree of power over the Khanate yet they are rather... curious to say the least. His master introduced themselves as Inanna and she always has this aura of enchantment around her and Silvanus would swear that she would be the most beautiful woman he would lay his eyes over. The men of the Khanate sure were fans of her as many flung themselves before her feet but a numbered few succeeded in even getting her attention. He would only see her at dusk and during the night and even then Inanna would vanish into the Khanate and into war tents. Silvanus could only serve as her new slave and servant and he cannot question her businesses, even if unsavory news of nightly pleasures leak out of the mouths of many.
Silvanus spent a couple months under her service until one night when Inanna returned with a griveous wound almost splitting her abdomen into two. Silvanus went to help her but the hungry Kindred returned it with a deathly Kiss and drank too deep until Silvanus breathed his last mortal breath. The ancient vampire was clearly not done with him and thus she embraced him, in virtue of being a favorite among her servants. Hours later, Silvanus woke up from his first death but now with the accursed blood of Caine and the mad blood of Malkav in his veins, singing him a sweet melody. His sire was waiting for his eventual awakening and offered him a bowl of blood in which he drank deep. And at that night started Silvanus' integration into vampire society. Inanna explained the world in which he found himself in, what he is, what to do, what he should do, what he can do and what he cannot do. Inanna introduced herself in truth, that she is the age old Malkavian Methuselah Babylonia, childe of Nissiku, dating back from Ancient Babylon and most notably known in the Bible as the Biblical Whore of Babylon. Babylonia herself had many childer yet most of them died or are somewhere in the Middle East, continuing their sire's legacy and thus, Silvanus has a lot to do to win Babylonia's favor.
Silvanus served as Babylonia's personal errand boy, tasked to do the dirty work for her and as her messenger. At the end of the night, he was also her sex slave and has suffered for a long time until her Final Death by diablerie at the very hands of Silvanus in 1835. The thing is, Babylonia became known as the Biblical Mother of Prostitutes due to almost all of her psychoses revolving around sexual deviances and severe perversions. Because of this, her prophecies spring from carnal activities and rituals which she has taught her childer to know. Cults that surrounded these sex oracles were once famous and was comparable to the Bacchanalia and the cult of Liber, the sacred rites of the fellow Malkavian Methuselah the Dionysian. Babylonia taught these secrets to Silvanus, the Path of Carnal Visions, and some other ancient blood craft in which the Methuselah felt generous to teach. Her childe seem to show promise, as his command over Auspex and Dementation are remarkable, which made Babylonia favor Silvanus more and more in grotesque ways even possible. For a long time Silvanus stayed close with the Methuselah until he was dispatched into Nicaea in 1261 for an inside job.
For the span of four to five years, from 1261 to 1265, Silvanus' task was easy. It was to provoke civil unrest and to topple the political heads of the city. It was successful as in 1262 a raving mad mob swept away the city's Toreador and Brujah Primogen and along the years have put the populace at the edge of their seats. By the end of his mission, Silvanus was sent to roam Europe in order to train himself as Babylonia learned that letting neonates go around the continent is a sure fire way of testing whether the newly sired whelps can get themselves some recognition a bit more. Still, Babylonia do have some intentions with this temporary freedom since she can still contact Silvanus even across the continent. In the next decades, Europe would find themselves confronting a weird disease or phenomena: the peasantry are, for some reason, dancing for days and weeks on end until they collapse from exhaustion or outright die from it. Many are baffled, many saw it as demonic possessions, many Kindred feared it was Baali shenanigans or some disease that would infect them if they fed on the ecstatic dancers. Many culled the populations that danced to the moonlight and the unheard music until the ruckus died off. Perhaps if one would look at such and discover that it was a work of a Malkavian neonate, many would think that it was a prank of sorts to baffle the rest of society. It was nonsensical; what can you gain from making people dance?
The answer was that it was a Malkavian ritual, devised by Silvanus' sire. It's a ritual where the the caster shall drive the populace into a ritualistic dance of ecstacy, into the music unheard by many, into the music only they can hear in a state of trance. Basically, the populace infected by the memetic ritual were conduits for the prophetic magic in which their efforts strengthened the Malkavian practitioner and made it easier for them to see through the dark veil. The bafflement and unwitting slaying of their cattle was just an added bonus.
Centuries later, Silvanus would be then called and summoned by Babylonia from his travels to serve her council in Moscow, which she has turned into her new powerbase. This was the start of Babylonia's utter control over Moscow and its resulting state of Russia until her death. The first victim was, of course, the First Tzar of all Russia Ivan IV Vasilyevich who is now most commonly known as Ivan the Terrible. Ivan was actually a rather decent ruler until his slow and agonizing descent into madness and rage. Silvanus whispered horrible things in his ears, twisting the once good boy into a cruel old ruler until his last game of chess. His rule was effectively Babylonia's and Silvanus' weapon to conquer the Russian territories and expand their influence, even into other Russian cities.
In Ivan's court did Silvanus gain the power which made him feared and prized, a Tzimisce named Elpidius who Silvanus has roped in and extracted the secrets of Clan Tzimisce's highly guarded discipline of Vicissitude. The Tzimisce was one of the first projects of Silvanus and he wasn't the last. After Ivan's death, Silvanus once again resumed his travels, formulating his craft. He has naturally earned the ire of some members of Clan Tzimisce, one notably the loathing of Sascha Vykos as both of them crossed paths during their respective adventures. Later on, Silvanus would help in the orchestration of the Great London Fire in behest of Babylonia, almost dying in the process due to him succumbing to the Red Fear. Silvanus would then settle down decades later in Lisbon, serving as an Elder for Clan Malkavian and finally a take over as its Prince. His rule was a quiet one, even if it was controversial. He was perfecting his art and Vicissitude has proven to be a great help to the Camarilla cause as he created soldiers and soldiers of grotesque and scary proportions. Due to his notoriety with Clan Tzimisce, he has been a close friend to Clan Tremere and also a patron of nourishing their thaumaturgical art. Years later, he would receive a guest in 1736 in the form of a Cappadocian Elder named Agnes Eusenatos. Silvanus has always been into the occult, Babylonia has stamped than into his mind, and he granted Agnes protection in his city. He granted her hospitality, accepted her as a Giovanni Primogen, in exchange for some Cappadocian lore on Mortis. Of course, he offered Malkavian secrets to her too (and even an audience to his experiements on Vicissitude for her to study the living and dead flesh) and even if he learned not much to be an expert on the matter, it did help with his experiments and only served to augment his mastery of Vicissitude over time. Perhaps she was one of the few people that the Malkavian treasured and befriended and he even offered her an escape to Macau in 1766.
Meanwhile, Babylonia continued her game of chess back in Russia and has been planning of embracing the new Empress, her new student Catherine the Great. Silvanus hid himself in his own playground, busying himself with the Portuguese royal family and the poor Maria the First of Portugal. He let his sire do as she pleases, he knows that she will run back to him. Indeed, Babylonia became stricken with grief when Catherine died in 1796 and a decade later, on 1808, Silvanus left Lisbon with the Portuguese royal family and into Rio de Janeiro, leaving his Primogen Council to take over the matters of Lisbon for him. It didn't take awhile for Maria to pass away and a Toreador, who goes by the name of Eugenio Vicente de Olispio, took over Lisbon and renounced Silvanus for his horrible experiments. The Malkavian only replied with a letter enchanted with Dementation and he, in turn, took over Rio de Janeiro as his new base of operations. Sadly this, too, was short lived as revolutions were the hottest thing over the corner. Brazil declared independence, many more political messes washed over Rio both the mortal and Kindred kind.
The Farroupilha Revolution of 1835 (backed by his Toreador rivals back in Portugal) became the last straw of his paranoia and he resorted to his greatest trump card: Babylonia. He offered the Methuselah control over Brazil and the territories that would be under them. It was, of course, a big lie. Both Silvanus and Babylonia are blood bounded to each other, such was the result of the vulgarities the Methuselah have tormented him. Perhaps the Methuselah long known of Silvanus' desire to destroy her and perhaps the grief of Catherine's death has placed such heaviness in her heart and wanted to experience the forbidden ecstasy of Final Death. The sire and childe performed one last depraved act, one last carnal performance. It reached its peak when Silvanus felt the great urge of diablerizing Babylonia. He drank deep as their convulsing bloodied bodies intertwined. When Babylonia was near death, Silvanus forced her mouth open and regurgitated her blood back to revive her and resumed feeding. This lasted for seven days and seven nights, an entire week of torture until Silvanus finally finished his feast, devoured the Methuselah whole, and has fallen into torpor within the depths of the São Cristóvão Palace (never knowing his Diablerie fell short and the Methuselah escape by a thread of her life). He would prematurely rise from his sleep 55 years later when revolutionaries aiming for a republic stormed the palace and trashed it up. His resting place was discovered and the Elder didn't take it very well. The little party of revolutionaries never made it out.
Of course, his enemies have already taken the city's rulership from him but Silvanus stayed, spending fifty more years in Rio de Janeiro in an attempt to take control once more. He rallied whatever loyal people he can get and started more fights over the right for Rio's title of Prince. Proxy wars were fought in the shadows, revolutions burned through like wildfire until he signed a treaty with the current Toreador Prince, detailing that both sides would end the conflict and Silvanus will renounce his claims for undisclosed benefits for both parties. It was 1943 and Silvanus gave Rio his last goodbye, bringing his Malkavians with him to Los Angeles and was welcomed by Prince D'Guiscard. By the start of the year 2000, he rose to the ranks of Primogen and proved himself a worthwhile ally to the Prince and the Council but never setting his sights onto the title of Prince, it has tired himself out. He survived the Bloody New Years while he was disguised as a homeless man in the streets of Santa Monica which prompted him to drive back the conspirators and proceed to clean up some messes. He now serves Prince Anna as one of her Primogen and is set on proving himself worthy of the job.
The Primogen has not personally taken field during the battle with the great Demon Archduke Belial, but has supported from the shadows with his mastery over flesh craft. With the Prince spent and in hiding, Silvanus has offered his honest aid and work to the Tremere Anna, and used his own contingency of Dolls and Malkavians to aid the battle both at the front as well as in the shadows. For the past five years the Elder has been in Torpor, but not entirely unconscious. The dreaming artist continues to peer through the eyes of the people he touched and through anybody he fancied to hitch a ride with, his servants continuing their works as artisans for Silvanus and the Prince, and now he has awoken; the Elder now stands in a city barely aging yet still withering through time, standing atop the hive mind of Malkav's brood.
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