# Last Words First
Last Words First
of Note
My name is Ming, and I am a child of darkness. You don’t need to know the name I bore when I was alive.
That part of my history is over and done with. Now the unliving part of my history comes to an end as well. I will write this account to explain to someone why I seek destruction, and then my faithful human lackies will perform their last service to me. I will see the sun, and perish.
You will not believe this story unless you have had some experience to show you that another society exists behind the one you know. If you have not had such an experience, seek out someone who has. You know someone who’s been touched by darkness, who shows a secret fear or secret pain that they’ve never been willing to discuss. When you read this, you will understand them. Seek them out and let them know that they were right. In a world you do not own and which you will never own, at least you can give that comfort.
The Beginning In the beginning there was Caine, the first murderer.
Yes, it’s true. There was an Adam and an Eve, and a Garden of Eden, and a God who rewarded the sacrifice Chapter One: An Unmirrored Corridor of blood and condemned the sacrifice of grain. You live in someone else’s story. I did not wish to accept this myself — I was a child of my time just as you are, skeptical and sophisticated. Nonetheless, it is true. In the beginning one word made creation, and in the end one word will end it. But the ending is not quite yet.
The curse that God inflicted on Caine was what we now think of as vampirism. Caine created three “childer,” or offspring, and those three sired 13 grandchilder for Caine. The 13 warred with each other and their creators, and it was their wickedness as much as the sins of humanity that provoked the Great Flood.
You may say, as I once did, that the flood is a myth without geological evidence. I say in return, who can trust evidence when God Almighty wills otherwise?
Perhaps he removed the evidence, or just as likely, it’s right there and we simply can’t see it.
If you believe any of this, you should feel fear. Good for you, if you do. My unlife has been a never-ending nightmare of fear, of being so close to such power, without defenses. We are all the pawns of forces beyond our control.
The 13 Antediluvians survived the flood. Did God change his mind, or have some other plan for them?
God doesn’t speak to me any more than he speaks to any other damned soul. Perhaps he might answer your prayer, if you ask with a sufficiently pure heart. Perhaps you would be better off not knowing, though. Whatever his reasons, the 13 survived, and they founded clans of Cainites that remain active to this very night. One of them is my own sire eight generations removed, who is called by his progeny “Lasombra.” All of his childer, including me, suffer from a particular weakness that makes us unable to reflect in mirrors, and we inherit an aptitude for preternatural strength, the ability to command others by force of will and the ability to command a sort of living darkness. Each of the other clans has some other distinctive combination of a comparable sort.