VII - RoseRed

stemmed from other factors as well. One concerns a mortal
organization with which the Ordo Dracul is occasionally
(and usually incorrectly) linked — the Freemasons.
The Freemasons are believed by some to have evolved
from a much older organization of monastic soldiers called
the Knights Templar, but their incarnation even in 1717
(when the Mother Grand Lodge of Freemasons opened in
London) bore little resemblance to the Crusader knights
of old. The Masons were not warriors or monks, but men
who came together with only a reverence for truth and
individuality binding them. The Ordo Dracul was less interested
in the Masons’ origins or ideology, however, and
more interested in their information network. Masons from
all over the world could recognize each other with a handshake
or a gesture, and the organization’s membership included
leaders, scientists and artists of the highest caliber.
If the Ordo Dracul ever made a serious attempt to penetrate
or gain influence over the Masonic Order, current
records do not speak of it. Over time, however, the
Ordo Dracul did gain advantage from studying the rites
and practices of the brotherhood, and, by the beginning
of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1837, the Ordo Dracul had
withdrawn from Kindred society almost entirely. For the
next six decades, the covenant remained quiet, its members
never advertising themselves as such. The Ordo
Dracul had become a secret society rather than an open
covenant, and, for a brief time, it was possible for a vampire
to claim membership in the Lancea Sanctum, the
Invictus or even the Circle of the Crone as well as the
Ordo Dracul. Just as their unholy ancestor Vlad Tepes
had supposedly done, Dragons could learn the secrets of
blood magic as well as the Coils of the Dragon.
In short, for much of the Victorian period, the Ordo Dracul
did very well for itself. The leaders of the covenant took the
codes and titles that they had inherited from Dracula and
his brides, and worked this ideology into the extensive practices
that the Ordo still follows tonight. The covenant probably
would have been happy to remain a secret society, a
quaint fable from the “land beyond the forest,” remembered
only in the torpid dreams of elders. But in 1897, Bram Stoker
introduced Vlad Dracula to the world.
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Vampire legendry was and remains a staple of life in
Romania, the birthplace of Dracula and the Ordo Dracul.
All cultures have taken half-remembered encounters
with the Kindred and turned them into tales of horror,
complete with proscriptions and remedies that seldom
have any other effect but to make their undead targets
laugh. The Gothic literature movement that produced
Frankenstein and The Hunchback of Notre Dame also produced
several other works about the undead. John
Polidori’s story “The Vampyre” saw print in 1819, and
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla was published 53
years later. The Kindred of some domains reacted with
a history of the ordo dracul
mild interest, but the Masquerade had seen and survived
the circulation of tales of horror, even of vampires, before.
Such tales seldom reflected enough of reality to be
worrisome outside of a few unfortunate domains.
✺✻✶✲✬✹’✺✂✴★✺✻✬✹✷✰✬✪✬
And then, in 1897, an Irish writer named Abraham
Stoker published a novel about Count Dracula and his travels
from Transylvania to England. The mortal audiences
loved it; a stage version of the novel, four hours in length,
was being performed before the novel actually saw print.
The Kindred, of course, were somewhat less than amused.
As with any reaction to a mortal phenomenon, the
undead were slow to react to Dracula. The novel didn’t
immediately inspire mortals to grab torch, rifle and Bowie
knife and go hunting through the abbeys of England for
wayward vampires, after all, so it didn’t seem to do much
harm. But as news of the novel filtered back to some
older Kindred, alarms sounded. Although the Ordo
Dracul had been out of sight for decades, some Kindred
did remember a blasphemous society of vampires named
for the title character of Stoker’s novel, even if none of
them remembered Dracula himself.
The Ordo Dracul did its best to avoid exposure, but
there was precious little the Dragons could do. Members
of other covenants performed their own “investigations”
in many domains, flushing out the hidden members of
the Order into the common sight of Kindred society. The
Ordo Dracul realized that wasting energy hiding was no
longer useful, so the Dragons simply declared their allegiance
formally. Thus the Ordo Dracul transformed, in
many domains, from a secret society within the hidden
world of the Kindred into a covenant of its own.
In many domains, the emergence of the Order shook
the solidarity of other covenants and broke the bonds of
trust between many Kindred. Loyalties shifted, allegiances
collapsed and suspicion spread like spilled ink in many
cities. Some Kindred kept their status as Dragons secret,
or quietly withdrew from the Order. Those Dragons who
had held joint membership in the Ordo Dracul and other
covenants often became sacrificial lambs during those
nights, though some of them retreated from Kindred society
and became Kogaions. This was the beginning of
the modern incarnation of that position.
✾✯★✻✂✫✰✫✂✺✻✶✲✬✹✂✲✵✶✾✦
Bram Stoker took inspiration from several sources: Romanian
legends, historical accounts of Vlad Tepes, the
works of Le Fanu and Polidori and discussions with Hungarian
professor Arminius Vambery, thought to be the
inspiration for Abraham Van Helsing. Some evidence
exists to suggest that Stoker also studied the history of
Elizabeth Bathory, the “Blood Countess” of Hungary who
murdered hundreds of young women in the 18th century.
It is not at all beyond the realm of possibility that he made
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chapter one
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