Dastur Anosh

Dastur Anosh was vital for the formation of the Black Hand as well as the nascent Sabbat. He is a stern enemy of the influence the so-called "True" Black Hand has over the Black Hand.

Biography
It is told that Anosh was born in ancient Persia and was a follower of Zoroaster. While there, Anosh was one among many of the magi who gathered around the Golden One. Although he was not so learned as some of the astrologers and magicians there, he was born with visions. He befriended a scribe who was very interested in his visions, exspecially one about a a strange stone that wept blood. Eventually, at the scholar’s urging, the two departed the company of Zarathustra’s faithful. At first, Anosh assumed they were simply wandering, but an off-hand remark of the scholar’s brought understanding: They sought the stone. Afraid but excited, he searched with the scribe for more than a year. The closer they came to finding it, the more intense his dreams became. They traveled during the night, sleeping during the day according to the needs of the scholar, which Anosh did  not understand, though he did not comment on them in any way. When they finally found the stone, the scholar licked the blood of it and turned on Anosh, killing him. But afterwards, he granted him the blood and Anosh rose again as one of the Damned.

They fled, then, bound for the secret citadel of Alamut, his sire’s home. In that journey, Anosh found that his dreams had left him, and that he was instead subject to strange visions of grief and pain. At the citadel of the Eagle’s Nest, Anosh found a cold welcome. Sequestered in a black cell deep within the fortress, Anosh lost all track of time. Those who brought him his draughts of blood intimated that his master sinned in Embracing him, and that he must answer for those sins. When they were granted the right to leave, he saw that his sire and master was subject to the same strange visions. As they traveled at night, his master spoke with hatred of the Third Generation and their terrible sins and the betrayal on Enoch, Irad and Zillah. They traveled away from the lands  controlled by Alamut, until the night when the three Kindred appeared at the edge of their encampment as the sun set in the west. These three emissaries of Alamut ordered them to return to the Eagle’s Nest, but Anosh’s master refused. The only reply the emissaries gave were drawn blades, and Anosh hid. The battle was hideous, the kind of carnage that only Kindred of many years can unleash, but in the end only Anosh’s master stood. The two then left for Africa and Anosh witnessed hwo his sire began to lose himself to the visions of grief, often weeping uncontrollable for hours and recklessly Embracing progeny. In one of his rare moments of lucidity, the Weeping Master sorrowfully referred to himself and his childer as the “Lost Tribe of Alamut,” never daring to risk returning to that vaunted citadel. When they returned to the site of the Weeping Stone and Anosh once again had tasted the blood, he began to understand the burden of his sire more and more and began to record his ravings. Over the next few centuries, the Lost Tribe grew and attracted a small handful of others. As time passed, the Tribe assumed a cultic reverence, with the Weeping Master as their prophet and Anosh as his high priest and interpreter. They built a haven near the Weeping Stone, and members of the Lost Tribe guarded the site from others.

The years turned him introspective, and Anosh found himself sympathetic to a body of principles similar to the Path of Blood that his master tried unsuccessfully to teach him. Taking the canon of that Path and combining it with the tenets of the beliefs they were developing, Anosh developed one of the first portions of what would later come to be known in the Sabbat as the Path of Caine. Forced to leave their haven because of assailants from Alamut, the Lost Tribe established a hold in the bustling young metropolis of Alexandria. The resources of the city proved useful in the development of the Tribe’s strange philosophy. They sought evidence of the Third Generation, first as proof of their existence, and then with a fanatic’s zeal and desire to destroy them. It was here that the Lost Tribe found fragments of the Book of Nod and further refined its goal of fighting the dreaded Antediluvians.

When attack teams from Alamut managed to capture the Weeping Master, Dastur Anosh became the leader of the Lost Tribe. In his grief, Anosh scattered his followers to the winds, sending them far away for their own safety. He would call upon them in the future, he assured them. In the meantime, they should keep secret their goals and spend their efforts to gather more information on their great enemies, the Third Generation. Then, in the year 139 BCE, Anosh returned to the site of the Weeping Stone, fortifying himself on a taste of its bloody rivulets, and returned to the bosom of the earth, surrendering to grief and torpor.

When Anosh awakened, he assumed the identity of a recently embraced neonate, entering Alamut and learned what had happened during this time. Afterwards, he called his followers together, and after ten nights of revelry from the blood of the Weeping Stone, he slaughtered all who had told of the Weeping Stone to lesser Cainites in exchange for temporal power. The survivors were re-christenized as the True Lost Tribe, who began to use the black crescent moon as a symbol. The Lost Tribe continued in this way for generations, until the assault upon the Lasombra Antediluvian. Word quickly reached the Lost Tribe from its agents. The Lost Tribe retained its secrecy, but joined with this vestigial Sabbat movement. The vampires of the Blackened Crescent infiltrated these movements, feigning ignorance of one another. They began to use a small sect as cover, called the Black Hand, that acted as a weapon of the Sabbat against the hated Third Generation. By the time the colonization of the New World had begun, Anosh realized that the Lost Tribe was no more. What had been conceived as a disguise for the Tribe had supplanted it. No more were Cainites swearing to uphold the rigors of the Lost Tribe. In fact, those who had even known of its existence made up a smaller and smaller portion of the Black Hand’s population.

With this in mind, Anosh did what was unthinkable to his brethren of the Lost Tribe. He revealed their existence. In a gathering of the leadership of the Black Hand — including those who would one night be called its Seraphs — Anosh revealed the origins of the black crescent, his contributions to the Path of Caine, his personal history and even the location of the Weeping Stone, all in his notably passionate style of address. But even as the Black Hand rejoiced for this connections to their true roots, the elders of the Sabbat began to question his loyalty. Anosh further reckognized new influences within the black hand, and began to suspect that other powers might be at work. He ventured into the America's and became fascinated with the native cultures there. From here, he watched carefully. He took command of the Black Hand in the New World himself, carefully watching its members and drawing more from those Cainites newly Embraced from among the natives and settlers of the young domain over those with ties to Europe.

In order to find the conspirators that had begun to manipulate his sect, he once again assumed the identity of a mere neonate and infiltrated his own organization, until he learned the terrible truth: His Lost Tribe, who had sworn itself on avenging Zillah and her brothers, had become the pawns of a maniac death cult who worshipped the very beings that he had intended to destroy. Short times afterwards, a host of wraiths attacked him and he was forced to flee into the mexican desert.

It ahs been assumed that Anosh met Final Death in 1766, short time before the First Sabbat Civil War, but he once again had disguised himself as a neonate, determined to bring the Tal'Mahe'Ra down. Anosh gave up his original identity and the leadership of the Black Hand — two things that weighed him down with responsibility and limited his ability to search effectively for the answers he demanded from the world. In the time since, he has taken on the mantle of multiple Sabbat neonates, often showing up as recent Embraces from various crusades, or claiming a recently destroyed Sabbat vampire as a sire. About half the time, he arranges to find a place in the Black Hand, going through the induction rites thereof and drinking once more from the Weeping Stone.