Let Blood Rain from the Sky

-Narrated by Katrina Kirova, member of Clan Brujah and survivor of the Nights of White Ash, late 1998.

Over the last three decades, Prague's atmosphere had begun to worsen at an alarming pace. Some blamed the tense, threatening climate forged by events surrounding former Prince Vassily and Dmitra, sire of the now vanished Prince Carlak.

In 1946, Carlak ceased to be Archon under the command and tutelage of his sire Dmitra, former Brujah Justicar, now replaced by the great Jaroslav Pascek, and attached himself to Nosferatu Justicar Petrodon (recently destroyed). The relationship between Dmitra and Carlak changed radically in 1972, when Petrodon recommended to the Inner Circle that Carlak be accepted as the next Brujah Justicar; Dmitra's fall opened a wound she surely has not forgotten.
Then in 1997, the Nosferatu was destroyed. When the Inner Circle met the following year to decide what came next, Carlak resigned himself. He returned to his city, Prague, to establish his haven among us, permanently.

But former Prince Vassily had long nursed deep reservations toward Carlak and all Brujah dwelling in his city, whom he liked to call "Agitators." Whatever the cause of his resentment toward Carlak and toward us, Prince Vassily made the mistake of demanding Carlak leave the city at once and never return, accusing him of coveting his position and likely his destruction.
Carlak, already frustrated by the loss of his old mentor Petrodon and by the Inner Circle's decision, finally exploded: he flew into a rage and with bare hands sent that fool Vassily to the jaws of torpor.
What followed was a whirlwind of strategy and deals with Prague's Primogen Council, with promises of support for Carlak. But from then on, the city remained tense under Carlak's sudden seizure of power.

Whatever the case, during the days of chaos and confusion after the usurpation of Prague's princedom, nobody paid attention to the strange, rushed movements of the Independent Clans. They stopped staying confined in the Jewish Quarter and in the following nights occupied adjacent domains, spreading across the city.
Chaos was so complete that we were all busy trying to guess what the Camarilla would do about Carlak. The Primogen were so occupied securing agreements with the new Brujah Prince that they did not see the storm above their heads until it was too late for all of us.

The situation exploded outright when word of the Sabbat spread among certain Camarilla members in Prague.
The most traditional Camarilla could not believe it. Sabbat? In Prague? This deep in Europe? Impossible.
One winter night in late 1998, taking advantage of the chaos caused by the abrupt succession to the city's princedom, with all eyes fixed elsewhere, I woke to find Prague swallowed by true hell.

News came fast, uncontrolled and inconsistent, but something was happening, and believe me, it was very bad.
The first clear piece came from television reports, speaking of an avalanche of accidents a couple of hours before nightfall, during what became known as the first day of the Nights of White Ash.
Fires had broken out in early afternoon, spreading from district to district in the New City like a drop of blood in a glass of water. Firefighters could not reach the neighborhoods because car crashes had completely blocked the two parallel bridges linking Old and New City. Charles Bridge was packed with onlookers staring in disbelief at the flames, while an apparent anti-globalization group had turned the bridge into a protest hub, blocking it entirely and nullifying the sparse police effort to disperse them. The remaining law forces were tied up helping firefighters and rerouting city traffic to secondary roads. The other bridge was too far away, and crews had to take massive detours through streets inaccessible to their vehicles, making rapid response impossible.

What I can tell you is that many of the neighborhoods that burned to the foundations housed Camarilla Kindred. Imagine waking to the heat of flames, seeing your haven turned into a bonfire, trying to escape, and finding yourself trapped between fire and sunlight.
I can testify to the marks that leaves on a Kindred. The burns I still have not healed from that afternoon, when I had to cross an entire street in full sun, running and smoking like a human torch, are witness enough.

Fire and sunlight. Those were the weapons Sabbat chose to strike us with, in all their brutality. The two most feared weapons of any Kindred.

Breaking Pinatas...

-Narrated by Kurk Tromesko, Malkavian antitribu and member of the Cold Blood pack, early 1999.

Let's be frank, tovarich... you can crush Camarilla, flatten it, shred it, dismember it, and make yourself a winter fashion line out of those ink-sucking bastards, shoes included. But understand this: after all that, they come back. You can bet on it. And the only thing they mourn is some petty old bastard whose lineage filled volumes and volumes of toilet paper. Mind your language, please...

Why are we both so sure they always come back? Easy, little fool... because what they never lack is money, and money in clever hands works miracles. Of course. And do behave.

The bishops and the prisci knew this for certain and told us how to squeeze it for all it was worth. This is Europe, man, the mecca of human history. And if this land has anything in excess, it is insurance companies, because everything here is old, very old, even the stones, and there are very strange people willing to pay absurd sums for a half-collapsed chunk of building because it is called... what the hell is it called?... Cultural Heritage. Yeah, that. Thanks, man.

Imagine the lawsuits from families left homeless after the fateful fires on the first night of the party, overwhelming insurers that could not absorb the flood of financial and material losses, not to mention the socio-economic fallout. Add the Prague City Council's claims for losses of its own resources, firefighters and police, plus damage caused by emergency access through old stone streets from the year Saint Peter lost his cap... an unprecedented economic and financial disaster that not even Prague's Ventrue and Brujah could have covered, assuming they survived.
Exactly, man: the unlives of those paper-sucking pigs would not be worth a mule's piss once the devil's lawyers sank claws into their empty hearts with not a single euro left. Best part: to finish the job, the European Commission for Culture sued the city council for failing to protect what, after the disaster, is now World Heritage due to age and humanistic value. That's how I like it. I'm good. We're... good.

The bad part is, if Camarilla has one thing in surplus, it's ghouls. Yeah, those sheep who think one sip of Vitae makes them Kindred. They disgust me. But they are useful...
Problem was, if we did nothing, they could tip off their masters about what was happening, and worse, by day they could repair what we broke at night. So we had to stoop a little and fight fire with fire.
We used Prague street gangs and far-right groups to kick up absolute chaos: one dead cop here, another there in a street brawl; a fire chief dead in service while trying to evict a squat, dying along with the disposable squatters, of course; a prison riot and breakout with more dead police; bank robberies with casualties; raids on financial firms; extremist terror attacks against global corporations; and so on and so on... a fucking circus, man, hah!

Then at night we barely had to worry about Camarilla vampires, because they are so stupidly individualistic. That is our edge: Sabbat move in packs, while Camarilla eats its disasters alone for fear of backstabs. So when night came, it was ours... or so you thought at first, mon ami.