Withered Ones

The Withered Ones is a Nosferatu blood cult to the Nictuku. Every society tells stories about bogeymen and mythological monsters that stalk the dark, preying on those that wander too far from the safety of the light. Kindred societies, despite being made up of those very monsters in the minds of humanity, are no exception.

The myth of the Nictuku has haunted Clan Nosferatu since before recorded history. The thought that the most secretive and hidden of the clans of Caine is hunted by something even more secretive amuses many Sewer Rats within the Clan.

Most who have even heard the stories view the Nictuku as just a myth, nothing more. It’s all too easy — and sometimes fun — to write off stories of sudden disappearances of their kin as the doings of some shadowy monster, but little evidence exists to prove that these creatures exist.

Sensible Kindred, doubters claim, shouldn’t fear such tales. After all, those who believe spend their existences huddled in fear in their warrens... save for those known as the Withered Ones.

Overview

Fear is a curious thing. Those who allow it to control them can act irrationally as the primal terror of death leads them to desperate acts of self-preservation.

If something exists that desires to devour and destroy the Blood of Clan Nosferatu, then perhaps working to further the goals of these creatures might earn some the right to survive, or at least to be killed off last.

It is this line of thinking that birthed the Withered Ones, a disorganized cult of maddened Hidden that has dedicated itself to destroying their clan from the inside. Lacking anything resembling structure, the Withered lurk throughout the world, plucking their own kin from the shadows and consuming them — or worse, staking them out as offerings for the Nictuku.

In either case, those Nosferatu taken by them are never seen again.

The Withered Ones draw their membership from the most fearful and desperate members of Clan Nosferatu. By and large, these wretched creatures emulate the Nictuku of myth by filling their role, culling the weakest of their own clan to aid the creatures they dread and worship.

If the myth is true, they reason, then the Nictuku operate on the will of the very Antediluvian that began their terrible line. They have come to see the Nosferatu as worthy of nothing save destruction, and by furthering the goal of their hidden masters, they might secure their own unlives, at least until the very end.

Whether anyone ever struck such a deal between the cult and the Nictuku, or whether these are merely the assumptions of the fear-maddened masses, is unknown, even within the cult. They simply do not care.

If they are right, then they will stand alone until the rest of their Clan finally crumbles to dust. And if they are wrong, they will simply die with the rest. To not make the attempt to die last or to survive would be akin to giving up now.

Better, in their twisted minds, to walk into the sun and forget the fear than not to take steps to prolong their existences.

To emulate the objects of their veneration, and to distance themselves from their victims, the Withered wear grotesque masks modeled after rare descriptions of the ruined faces of the Nictuku.

Even though their own faces are often more twisted than those of the masks they wear, these ritualistic objects are crafted with a sinister mien and lend their members a measure of anonymity and uniformity.

While it is rare for one of the Withered to remain among polite Kindred society, some few manage to maintain a tenuous balance and become hidden killers, wolves hidden amongst the sheep.

Culture

The Withered Ones are not without ceremony. Their rituals, held in small gatherings of the cell in a hidden chamber of their warren, help them to indoctrinate new adherents and bolster their resolve to act despite their abject fear.

The most sacred rite of all is bestowing a new mask. This is a personal rite of passage for the fresh inductee to the cult. The recruit is often blindfolded, taken deep into the tunnels around the cult’s lair, and seemingly left there lost in the dark with nothing.

Their objective is to find their way back to the cult, while along the way, cultists dog them — or sometimes, depending on the bloodthirstiness of the cell, hunt them — while wearing their horrific masks.

The ceremony is designed to make the inductee fearful near to the point of madness until they stumble back into the relative safety of their brethren and are given a mask of their own, which symbolically transforms them into one of the monsters that had pursued them.

While many inductees to the cult are willing participants in this awful rite, having sought out the Withered Ones based on rumors and driven by their own fear, this is not always the case. Some Withered take special delight in snatching an unsuspecting Nosferatu and twisting them into one of their own through fright and torture.

Withered Convictions

The convictions held by the Withered Ones help keep them from descending into Wassail, though they remain only a temporary measure at best.

• Do not hesitate to slake your hunger on the unwitting. Those Nosferatu who grow too lax in their security or too resistant to the urgings of their paranoia deserve their destruction. The Withered see them as easy targets and devour them to emulate and serve the Nictuku.
• Never leave sign of your passage. A Nosferatu who disappears without evidence as to their fate strikes fear into the hearts of the clan. The Withered use this to their advantage.
• Never strike against another Withered. The Withered Ones are few, and thus, as a measure of practicality, view attacking other members of the cult as anathema. A strike against another Withered who remains true to the cause is wasted, as they all share the same purpose.

Rites and Rituals

The masks worn by the Withered Ones hold no special magic, but they are sacred objects to the cult just the same. Generally crafted of leather — the exact provenance of which is left to grotesque speculation — these malformed, uncanny facades resemble prevalent Nosferatu deformities taken to the extreme. The sinister features are designed in such a way as to allow deep shadows to mask the wearer’s eyes and give the face a more menacing countenance should victims see the mask in any sort of light. Deep wrinkles and folds line the features to accomplish this. Usually, the mask merely frames the mouth instead of covering it, the better to allow the wearer to feed upon their intended victim.

Should one of their number fall during a hunt, the cult will take great pains to recover the fallen one’s mask. Only rarely will the cult craft a new mask. Instead, the Bitter One grants new inductees into the cult the mask of one of the fallen to bring them into the fold and to give them a connection to those who came before them. Nevertheless, one or more members of a cell often learn some measure of leatherworking so that they can provide a new mask in those rare occasions that one is needed, and they take great pains to match the grotesquery of the mask they were unable to recover.

Within their rituals, the mask takes an important place, symbolically binding them together as one within their coven. Those who have utterly forsaken their old lives go so far as to staple or sew their mask to their faces, only leaving their mouths exposed to feed. A Withered One without their mask is one who has lost their place within the coven, and their former cohorts quickly turn on them. Even a Withered with their mask who acts too strangely may be devoured, and their mask ripped from their body, set aside to be given to a new recruit who can honor it.

Organization

The tales that describe the creatures known as the Nictuku vary in detail. Some paint Nictuku as a single beast that stalks the darkness, culling those Nosferatu that become complacent or taking vengeance upon them for some unknown, ancient insult.

Others weave a tale of an entire bloodline of vampires descended from the progenitor of the Nosferatu and bound to his will. Their goal: the outright destruction of his failed clan.

As long as these stories have existed, so have the Withered in one form or another. The cult does not have an unbroken tradition stretching back into antiquity. Rather, the Withered Ones are a modern incarnation of an ancient fear and hatred.

Again and again throughout history, the Withered Ones rise up, the cult’s members grow too brazen with their killings, and other Nosferatu band together to stamp out the branches of the cult.

Still, like cockroaches, they return, perhaps with only a superficial resemblance to their past trappings but sharing the same desperate goal.

The modern cult has existed in small numbers for centuries. Not even their own members really know how long, as the Withered are not ones for record-keeping.

They replenish their numbers as they must and share tales of their unseen masters that have warped and changed through generations of telling.

Each coven is led by a single member known as the Bitter One, who carries the stories and knowledge of the cult passed down from those that came before them.

The masks, they teach, are to make them one, to bind them together as a coven, and are said to represent the monstrous nature of their souls.

References

VTM: Forbidden Religions, p. 17-20