# After the Last Sunset
After the Last Sunset
of Note
Andrew surveys his newly constituted pack. They all bear the scars of last night’s Creation Rite and reek of Sire’s Gamble Deceiving the childe about who ruined his life carries certain risks, though not as many as some sires worry about. The more a childe becomes accustomed to regarding all humanity as prey, the less what happened in life seems to matter. Many sires go ahead and tell their childer the truth, when the childer begin the process of siring themselves.
Sometimes a childe decides that the manipulation and lies do call for punishment. A sire whose newfound childe spontaneously develops a bit of Auspex may unexpectedly face confident accusations of deceit, and sometimes a sire in the flush of the Embrace finds himself diablerized in short order. A more cunning childe may set about ruining the sire’s unlife in revenge, culminating in the sire’s destruction, with or without blessing from the Courts of Blood. tonight’s blood. They stand confident, ready to take over the world. He hopes to ruin their night.
Most new Lasombra don’t survive. By making it this far you’ve already beaten the odds, to some degree, but never for a moment think that your existence is now secure.
More than half of the kine we choose to Embrace fail to survive their testing period. They despair and commit suicide, or break under the strain, or survive but show that they’re crippled by unworthy personality traits. At least one in a hundred, and sometimes more than that, fail to survive the Embrace itself, either simply dying or emerging so totally mindless and compulsive that they must be destroyed immediately.
So of a thousand mortals who seemed worthy after initial investigation, we now have about 450 to 500.
Look around you, and notice that where there were ten of you on that first night, now there are only eight.
We lose ten to twenty percent of new recruits in the training interval before formal acceptance into the Sabbat. In times of crisis, the percentage can double or even triple, and it’s never much less than ten percent. Too many new vampires retain more humanity than is good for them. That gets us down to perhaps 350 to 450 of the original thousand.
In the next five years, experience says, at least half of you will have gone to your respective unmarked graves. You will perish in battle, or offend your superiors and warrant judgment by the Courts of Blood or the bishopric. Some of you will fall in Monomacy. Some of you will destroy yourselves in accidents. One of you may attempt to join the antitribu, and may even survive to do so. If more than seven or less than three of you stand together five years from now, you will be a most unusual pack indeed. Of our initial thousand, as few as 200, or as many as 300, survive.
Those of you who make it to five years will continue to face challenges. Of the five or so of you likely to last that long, at least one and perhaps as many as three will perish in the next five years. The pace of this brutal winnowing slows further and further for those of you who endure. Another halving takes place between 10 and 25 years, another between 25 and 50, another between 50 and 100. Your instructors and I face the same challenges. Perhaps one of you will win the right from a Court of Blood to destroy me and enrich your standing in the ladder of generations. Perhaps then in turn one of your current peers will win the right to destroy you.
Chapter Two: The Keepers’ Unlit Halls In the Camarilla, which keep its pampered childer in gilded cages, more vampires survive past a century than in the Sabbat. You can even seek to join them, if you wish. All you give up is your only real chance at survival when our true enemies appear, your freedom to choose your own destiny and the precious support the Vinculum provides. Yes, you can exist indefinitely as the Antediluvians’ pawn and the prince’s slave. Or you can remain here, burning more brightly and becoming far, far more of what you can be than they allow. Those who persist in our grand conflict reach heights of mastery that no humanity-fearing vampire, let alone any prey, can imagine.
You gamble your existence. Would you have it any other way?
In Endless Dark: