The Chief of Shadows

A bit of suggested listening as you read through it


2/23/378

Who am I? No… The better question is what am I? I truthfully stopped thinking of myself as an Individual several months into my service. What was the trigger? When did I stop being me, and when did I become TheĀ Tenebrae? When did I embrace the title so wholly, taking every strand of history the title held and weaving it into my very being, while twisting those strands to separate myself from my prior incarnates.

How will history reflect my temporary possession of the title? We’ve seen the same old tale told again and again, every successor embracing or undoing the work of their predecessor… yet why despite knowing this universal truth do I feel the absolute desire to be one with the collective of the Tenebri? Is it the sway that simple title holds? No, that fear and power was destroyed many moons ago. The title a shell of what it was in the past. So what was it? Perhaps I must look at who I was before I took possession?

I was nothing of particular note. An individual with a scorned past whom thought they were bigger than they actually were. I was so gungho to take on the city, so confident in the skills that had allowed me to survive all these years, unaware of just how utterly useless those survival mechanics were in such a large city. I tried to rise higher than I was in the city, and was pushed back down without hesitation. Reminded of the failure I was. What did I do in the year that followed? I think I drank myself into oblivion, all the while sporting that damned pin, like some bit of driftwood. I clung to it in the farthest corner of my mind, hoping I might draw on the strength of others to become something more.

To think that member, whose name I don’t even remember, would take a risk on the buzzed sack of flesh sitting at the bar, drinking in celebration of yet another year wasted. Yet they did, and on that day, the anniversary of my birth, I signed my life over to the Family. Ha… Such poetics, yet none of which were planned.

Even having joined something greater than myself, I sat there in confusion. Never amounting to anything in the years that followed… Until that day when the Lithmorran Family was reduced to two, and on the brink of destruction. Why? Why did I clutch at the void of power, taking it with such ferocity? A nobody in the family, the lowest of the low, taking claim to that… That Title. That Legacy. I could have left that day, could have continued to live with no sin nor crime attached to my name. Yet I chose to throw away any chance for normalcy to gain what? What was worth sacrificing my life further?

I. I don’t know. I cannot fathom what drove me to throw everything away. The Title held no power, it carried only problems and shame. Yet for some unfathomable reason I desired that? Perhaps what I sought was destruction… That if I were to meet my end it would be as something more than what I was, even if I was undeserving? That. That seems like something the person I was prior would hold of value, their ego even in death.

But I am not that person anymore. I am not that broken shell of an individual. I have taken what remained of the Tenebrae and reconstructed some semblance of power the title once held, without the needless bloodshed of Tenebri past.

However, a Tenebrae is nothing without those they lead. Without the Family of which they are the Patriarch. I embraced a value the family had forsaken long ago, the very thing that made them. That they were a family. I embraced that which I had lost, taking so many under my wings in such short time. I have lost many children, but those losses have taught me what I must do to ensure the survival of the rest of the children I have gathered. And now we stand stronger than the Family has stood in many cycles.

I am a Tenebri, and this is my cycle.

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