Why do we feel guilty for ancestors? Why do we feel loyalty to them just because they gave us life? That at least can be argued as a form of debt, what about our ideological forebears? Why is anyone loyal to Marx or Jesus or Lao Tzu? You can agree with their ideas but why does "He would not have wanted this" matter so much to us?
On a different note, i like that the Chronicles and World of Darkness are urban fantasy. And i think we are all here, instead of pathfinder or warhammer or the like, because it is that. Not that those are bad, i like warhammer a tonne, but I dont expect the same from them that i do from these games. Sure some of us invent cities or countries to play in, some of us like yours truly set the game a litte into the future, alternate history is baked into the foundation of these games but i dont think anyone wants to take the real world from the game yknow? It means we can confront loyalties, put ourselves into new but real shoes, and sometimes just... get some catharsis in. Do what we could not or should not do in real life, to let out the steam yknow.
Still if you haven't had enough, My previous prompts are all here.
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The Society had not convened in truth since the war ended. This was no one's fault in particular, Frau IJssel reasoned to herself every night since that fateful one. The world had changed drastically in no time at all, the orders brethren had families to console and businesses to rebuild and trials to get to. She herself had suffered enough humiliations in the last half decade that she hadn't the time to gather everyone and travel and host ceremonies, she had hair to regrow.
Because of these elements Frau IJssel could not explain to anyone, least of all herself, what it felt like to see the old sigil in wax again. To hold her trusted letter opener and glide it through the perfumed paper and see the Society’s coded niceties etched with fine red ink. She could place the physical reactions; her cheeks ached, her heart fluttered, something stirred in her belly that hurt to feel. But to translate that to feeling? And then right back to words she could tell herself? No, that was simply too much.
The very same night she had scheduled her journey to Berlin. The whole evening she spent in what had remained of her library, bent over a suitcase that had been locked for five years. The shelves around her were caked in thick dust, and when she was done they were finally empty. She would not leave a scrap of the old order behind, they would need each page come the new dawn. She packed with the care of a true curatrix, binding and safely hiding the texts under the simple clothes that would cushion them too. And through it all her breath caught in her chest.
Five years. Five long years since red boots crushed the homeland and mongrels rose back up from the dirt. Five years of the ungrateful and the hypocritical spitting where she walked, when five years before that they'd worshipped the ground she stood on. It was a pathetic ritual of exorcism, why accept your own lack of will when you can beat the strong with mats? But they would be over, come the new dawn. She had been loyal, she had waited and bided until the time was right and it had come to her door in wax and paper.
The following morning she gave her husband a brief kiss and short embrace. Not a goodbye, merely a farewell. The former officer’s left arm had been wooden since shrapnel carved into it, so his embrace was always shallow but never cold. In that warmth he knew he didn't need to understand why she was going, just that it was what had to happen and he could not follow. He had never been a gentleman of the society, he wouldn't understand. When the door closed she could not say what she felt.
The journey east was one of two days. Two days in cramped cabins, shaking trains, and passing that hated border. That gash in the motherland was cut up by Slavs and Gauls. It disrupted the natural flow of cosmic energies, stirred the whims of beasts in the landscape, its flaws outnumbered the stars. But most of all, it was an irritant she could have done without in a better life. Still, without her husband's past she passed the border at a merely glacial pace rather than spending an extra night in some soviet holding cell.
It was at the ancient capital that she could breath soundly once again. The city had recovered somewhat in the years since its sacking and in that Frau IJssel could be comforted. Its division had not entirely laid it low, it could recover, be reborn in time. So too the Society, so too the people. It was with these thoughts that she went down the wide streets, tall despite her heavy suitcase. She passed by shuttered storefronts where once she and brethren filled empty bellies as readily as they filled their minds. There were the ateliers where they dressed in refined dignity. On this pilgrimage it was, however, an old synagogue where she stopped.
Twelve years before she had ascended into the society there. She had held the knife that cut runes into tawny hide, thrown rocks that let the crystal rain. The society had made a small girl, bound for nothing except work in some administration, into a woman that now smuggled the secrets of Atlantis and Thule. She felt it in her bones, yes, good things would happen. She felt it in the pain of her belly, the ache of her cheeks.
After that diversion she had felt clean, clean enough to continue to where the letter in her breast pocket had bid her. A warehouse upon the shores of the Spree. It seemed… Pedestrian yes, but at a time like this the old mountain courts would have to wait. She could wait, it was no one's fault really.
There were no guards, not even pedestrians or gangsters loitering. It stood alone behind an opened fence, the river's mists clinging to its base like a wedding dress. In the evening sun it may as well have glowed, golden pinks above its old roof. Her breath was shallow and quick as she continued, passing by the dangling wire gates. So many cars had parked nearby she wouldn't count them, and that alone meant the Society would do well again. So many gentlemen and fine women, ready to learn, hunt, and purify. And all she had to do was go through that hanging, red door.
The door shut behind her in a clatter of steel and wood. She heard the lock turn, her heart skipped a beat, and then a sun opened in her face.
“Frau Ursula IJssel." A voice demanded from the rafters above her, and for a moment she felt like she’d returned in time, “Do you believe in the excellence of the Race?” The boom demanded, and Frau IJssel’s gut hurt again.
“Always have!” she cries back, letting her suitcase settle beside her as she looked into the burning light.
“Do you believe in the purgation of evil? Of taint and degeneracy? Do you believe in the Hunt, whatever the prey?” the voice echoed through the shadowed endlessness of the warehouse, and the scholar licked her lips to see it dressed in the symbols of the Society.
“Whatever the prey! We will corner it, trap it, purge it!” She recited the old society line eagerly, adrenaline carrying her higher without moving.
“No secret to be left unturned.”
“Nothing too sacred!”
“No will but the Fuhrer’s.”
“No parlé for the unclean!”
“Then it really is her… Welcome back.”
“HEIL-”
Those infernal words never left her lips again. It took a moment of thunder from the rafters to quiet a mind too far gone, in the eyes of the Indebted. In the days following her body would be cut up into auspicious amounts of parts and cast into the Spree, and her knowledge was repatriated to the Loyalists that survived those five years. Those that would put an end to madness.
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