Nabatean

The Lasombra today only known as the Nabatean, is one of the last of the Nabateans and has spendt thousand years staked in a coffin as a Kindred attraction until he reemerged during the Arab Spring in 2011.

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Originally of Nabatean stock, the man who would become the Nabatean was the descendant of a line of people who lived near Petra and worked on hydraulic engineering innovations, like dams and conservation systems. In a time where the word "Nabatean" denoted a man as "poor" or even "bastard", they worked as faithful and hard as they could, bowing before the Roman authorities, but also keeping true to the ways of his people. This was noted by a traveling Lasombra named Antipater, who began to take an interest in the people. When Petra was finally destroyed during an earthquake in 737, this Lasombra saved one of the temple workers of Nabatean origin and took him under his wing, to preserve the line of the Nabateans. As Antipater had converted neither to christianity nor to islam, his standing in his very clerical Clan was quite low. This brought them serious problems, when they were guests by a fellow lasombra sultan of the Ashirra in Malaga. Antipater was challenged to a contest by the sultan in order to force his conversion and lost. When the Nabatean's sire still declined any attempt to convert him, the matter was brought before the Amici Noctis, who put him between the choice of honoring his word and converting or facing Final Death. Knowing his sire would never convert to a faith he did not love, the Nabataean, who had stayed silent through the matter, made a bold and decisive move. He offered his own unlife in exchange. To his surprise, neither his sire nor the sultan objected, nor even reacted with especial dismay. The sultan accepted at once, and sent word to the tribunal that the sire’s verdict was to be voided, provided his Nabataean childe remained true to his word. After almost three centuries years together, sire and childe parted ways with nothing more than a lone knowing nod and a  somber valediction.

The Nabatean, however, was sentenced not to death, but to an eternal slumber. Staked within a coffin, he went through many hands over the years, first the sultan, who lost him in gambling to a christian Lasombra, who sold him out to a variations of older Kindred, who sometimes loosened the stake in order to ask him questions or challenging him to contests to win his freedom, which he all lost. It was only during the Libyan upheveals in 2011 that the Nabatean managed to free himself during the siege of Sierte. With his stake dislodged and his host nowhere to be found, the Nabataean was on his wwn for the first time in a millennium. Since his rude awakening, the Nabataean finds the world a stark and disorientating place. His unspeakably long torpor didn’t drive him mad, but it did strip him of many of his memories, much compassion, and even his identity, including his own mortal name. His first impulse was going to Petra, but he found the city in ruins and a historical curiosity. With no contacts and nowhere voncrete to start, he is reduced to wandering lands he once knew, now unfamiliar to him, alone and bereft of the guidance of even his own god. He wanders now, as in nights of old — wanders and wonders if he is indeed the last of his kind.