Occasionally. Back in the old days when I was still a Carthian myself, I’d occasionally get asked by well-meaning Invictus and Ordo Dracul, why I would waste my time and talent on the Carthian Movement.
Even now, with this little project going on, I’m getting asked by people in the Ordo, “[title redacted] Eldridge! Why are you taking important time away from the great work to bother with these people?
My answer, is the same now, as it was then. It hasn’t changed, with my change of covenant.
I want freedom.
Of course, those Invictus types, looking to reign me in or recruit me, would say. “Well yes. But I have just as much freedom as you.”
“Sorry skippy. But you don’t.”
*Laughing. perhaps a bit nervously.*
“No really. and I’ll prove it.
Do you belong to family dynasty?
Are you a member of a faction within your covenant?
Do belong to a guild?
Are you presently under an oath, mystical or otherwise?
Is there some elder looking over your shoulder?
Are your failures going to reflect badly on your sire and your sire’s sire?”
“Well...”
“You’re not free. You are, at the price of some power and perhaps a nice lump of cash, hopelessly entangled in a web of laws, rules, expectations, obligations, traditions, and horse-shit. When you are forced by circumstances to stand idly by while some other member of your covenant executes a friend, or worse, are forced to do it yourself...Come talk to me about how free you are.”
And that usually shuts them up.
When you don’t have any power to speak of, you tend to pay attention more. You think through your moves. You work with what little you have and try to figure out ways to maximize and HACK what power you DO have. When you are sitting on a fat pile of power, the tendency is to become a victim of your own success. This is WHY I tell you that mental passivity is death. Some night, sooner or later, you’ll find yourself falling to someone younger and smarter who has figured out how to take you down with nothing more than a butter knife and a jar of mentholated salve. UNLESS you keep struggling to learn.
But as I say, when you don’t have power, your thoughts might turn to what it is, how it works, how to get it. How to KEEP it.
And I tell you, that the nature of power, true power, is choice.
When you have choices. You have power.
When all you have is poor choices or NO choices, you have no power.
When you hesitate to make a choice, because it seems like you have too many choices, the act of hesitation, STEALS your power until you make a choice. It’s better usually to make a choice and be wrong, and have to choose again or change plans, than to dither and die.
The Carthian Movement is a covenant built on the idea that we each have a purpose and that the only thing that is going to keep us going from night to night is the ideal that we struggle to live by. No one can choose that purpose for you. Only you can do it. The Movement can never ever be a sort of situation like hammering a square peg into a round hole. Other covenants do that stuff all the time. They’ll tell you who you are. They’ll tell you who you can be. They’ll ruin you if you don’t play the role they’ve assigned and try to make you feel ashamed for being yourself. When you realize this is happening, check your neck for bite-marks for they are draining you of everything you are. I am beginning to suspect that the reason why Carthians seem to have a much lower incidence of insanity is not down to our dearth of elders. It’s down to the fact that we are more likely to be ourselves and devil take the hindmost.
Frankly, if it weren’t for certain betrayals and the fact that most of my fellow carthians in my hometown were jerks, I’d still be one tonight.
Now, the freedom I fight for is finding my way outside of the curse of vampirism.
I was never all that keen on becoming a vampire in the first place.
My front may have changed, but my fight hasn’t.
I want to be free. and if that means dying as a mortal man does, I’ll take it.
If you want to take my freedom. If you want to take my ability to choose. You’d better be ready for the fight of your unlife.
There is only one more thing you have to know about Power.
And I say this thing to you out of hard experience.
Power is never without cost.
Be sure, that you are ready to pay the price.
