Jápicu the Worthy - Iberian Nights - The Refugee - Triumph of Will
1175 AD - 1230 AD
Jápicu di Trápani at the time of his embrace
By sunbreak, the groaning of the slaves below deck had ceased and there were no other crew left alive to operate the ship. A strange pestilance had set upon the corsair's ecletic crew and their human cargo which now appeared to have finished them all off. Except the Sicillian, Jápicu di Trápani who had been the captain's translator and confidant. The kindred who called himself Alfonso had followed the young man on the streets of Sále to learn about his nature and habits. He saw that he was intelligent not just because he could speak multiple tongues but also from the way he handled his affairs with other mortals. He was more than a translator, he was the glue that held the ship's crew together despite the constant idiocy of their captain. By settling disputes and negotiating prices at market all the while evoking the name of his social superiors he garnered a reputation as critically useful but without personal ambition. In truth he was a man of great ambition born into the world without wealth or powerful family connections and so despite his talent he found himself in the service of a reckless moron. Let me put these revelations into context, the vampire Alfonso was Lasombra and the members of this clan define themselves among other things as masters of their own fate through the triumph of their will. They can be utterly cruel for no other reason than to prove a point about reality but they are not psychopathic monsters and are capable of the full spectrum of emotions rather they see their unlives and environment as something to be made to serve their will rather than be things to be controlled by.
Alfonso Vasquez was quite the Lasombra and like any other Lasombra he sought potential candidates for the embrace that displayed ambition, ruthlessness, and disdain for humanity. He rejected public figures and leaders because he thought them too attached to lesser forms of gratification. No, only mortals who were competent but did not require adulation could be worthy of the dark gift. It's true that Lasombra once they decide you meet the base requirements to be embraced, they go about destroying your mortal life by targeting what you value the most and it doesn't matter if that is your wealth, career, or even your family. A Lasombra will ruthlessly take these things away from you so that they can see how you respond. If you persevere and use these losses to grow stronger than the sire will approach the candidate and offer vampirism either as a way to solve the mortal's problems or to escape the problems and become something new. Typically the sire refrains from revealing their part in the candidate's misfortunes until much later. For Jápicu di Trápani, there was little to be taken away, his family had been slaughtered by pirates when he was a boy and he had been taken away from Sicily to live amongst these pirates. It had been the captain, now rotting in his personal quarters, who had taken him in after winning the young Sicilian man in a game of cards in Alexandria. After being approached by Alfonso and offered the dark gift if he was willing to help kill the entire crew he accepted without hesitation.
The details of how the two kindred escaped the drifting slave ship are lost to time but we know that Alfonso and Jápicu found themselves in Iberia where conflict between ambitious Lasombra princes stoked religious antagonism between Christian and Muslim Lasombra. In truth the Iberian Lasombra were different than their counterparts in Italy and the Byzantine Empire who were adherents of the Abyssal. Christianity and Islam heavily influenced the spiritual unlives of vampires living in Iberia and the Sea of Shadows had never been able to convert the natives to the ancient traditional faith of the Lasombra. Alfonso Vasquez was rare that he was one of the converts to the Abyssal and even though he had deep roots in Iberia amongst both Christians and Muslims, he was not wholly trusted by a prince of either faith. Let me also say that when I say Christian and Muslim, I mean the variation of those religions filtered through the prism of kindred civilization. The history of Iberia may be described in more granular detail later but for now you should know that Alfonso and Jápicu were not really surrounded by friends in this time which was partially the reason they were in that shattering country. Alfonso Vasquez, a strong and true Lasombra understood how great a challenge a war-torn Iberia would be for a fledgling Lasombra and so made it his intention to raise his childe in such an environment.
It was Iberia that served as the proving ground for Jápicu di Trápani and he would spend twenty two years fighting and scheming alongside his sire. For what they fought against and schemed for ranged in it's objective importance. Often their objective in a city was frivolous on purpose, something like seeking out a tax collector to rob knowing his family would witness the act forcing Jápicu to kill them all. There were times where Alfonso would have to return a favor to a helpful kindred lord or on occasion betray the helpful lord if the return favor was too high a price for the pair. All of these occurances were exercises in being a vampire and Jápicu grew stronger because of them. Years later he would critisize some of the decisions his former master made but he would always look upon those nights in Iberia as the crucial formative experience of vampiric childehood. Inevitably the tensions between Lasombra princes against their Sicilian masters, against eachother, the religious violence fueled by it exploded in 1197 AD ushering in whole scale warfare between the Shadow Inquisition and Midnight Caliphate. The worst of Alfonso's decisions was having them both remain in Iberia for as long as he did. It was obvious that there would be full scale war throughout the peninsula and by 1195 AD they should have probably made their exit but Alfonso was determined to mold his childe into his best offspring because of some failure in the distant past it was opined. A Lasombra must never allow something as dangerous and stupid as pride make their decisions for them.
They were able to make their way to Cordoba from which they would travel to Barcelona to board a ship for Sicily but Alfonso would not survive the night. A pack of Muslim kindred in the service of the Midnight Caliphate discovered their presence in the city and after some intrigue were able to corner Alfonso Vasquez and tear him to pieces after which were cast into an open pit so that the sun could destroy them. Jápicu disturbed but not paralyzed by his sire's death immediately made arrangements for departure without any sentiment. He would successfully arrive unharmed in Barcelona and as dusk fell into night, boarded the ship embarking for Sicily. In his own words, he eulogized his dark father in that particularly analytical way that Lasombra eulogize the dead of those they cared about, "I am the childe of Alfonso Vasquez who was unyielding in pursuit of that most glorious triumph of will, the musician who could get a tune out of any soul, defeated by his pride in the year of the Shadow Reconquista, 1197 AD."
His arrival in Sicily was not the homecoming he expected when he left that island as boy. Then he had been just another Sicilian peasant enslaved if not by his county's mortal lord than by pirates. He could remember those dreams of return that he had sleeping in his tattered bedding while the pirates drank and sang next to him. There were forty eight years between that naive helpless boy laying below deck of a pirate corsair and the immortal kindred he was at the moment he stepped off the ship in Syracuse. He was strong and ruthless, capable of protecting himself against most any vampire younger or as old as himself and could give even some older vampires a challenge. Those grim and bloody nights in Iberia had shaped him into a formidable vampire but he knew little about Sicily where Montano himself ruled the Sea of Shadows from. Alfonso had told him once that if he ever found himself in Sicily alone that he was to make contact with a friend whom he called Tancredi di Mezzo. If he was worthy, this Lasombra would put him to work on some project or ambition. He warned Jápicu however that Sicily was not a place for beggars and that Montano and the Amici Noctis would kill him without hesitation if he proved a weak link.
Tancredi di Mezzo it turned out, was one of the premier courtiers of Montano's court in Syracuse and member of the Amici Noctis. The Amici Noctis or "Friends of the Night" were the vampiric secret society that ruled the Sea of Shadows directly but also governed the affairs of the Clan Lasombra throughout Europe and Africa to varying degrees. Think of the Papacy and how although they didn't directly govern all of Catholic Europe, it still possessed a large degree of influence on European culture. The Sea of Shadows is the Lasombra Papal States and they decide on matters outside of their territorial holdings because of their prestige and intrigue. By the 13th Century AD the Amici Noctis still held tremendous influence on the Lasombra but their own territory, the aforementioned Sea of Shadows, was slipping away as the Shadow Reconquista had pushed them out of Iberia in 1197 AD and the Lasombra numbered too few to keep hold of Northern Africa. Still the Sea of Shadows controlled Constantinople and swaths of territory in the Byzantine Empire and Southern Italy. Jápicu di Trápani was not the only Lasombra refugee arriving in Sicily from Iberia, there were hundreds of others having lost everything seeking positions in the feudal hierarchy of the Sea of Shadows. This refugee crisis was a direct consequence of the Amici Noctis's inability to keep hold of Iberia and though Jápicu had somebody to turn to in Sicily, he would most certainly have competitors.
Fortune smiled on Jápicu though the Lasombra would say they make their own fortune. Tancredi di Mezzo had considerable respect for Alfonso Vasquez and it helped that he believed the lie he was told about the circumstances of his death. He immediately put Jápicu to work on rooting out rivals to their clergy familiars in the Catholic Church. This kind of job was reserved for those Lasombra either deemed too weak to engage with other kindred, as a common form of punishment, or as an early test for new courtiers and embraced. Jápicu very quickly dispatched the problematic clergy with brisk aggression and calmed the nerves of the familiars. He served as an enforcer against the mortal only briefly and was promoted to the private guard retinue of Tancredi di Mezzo by 1200 AD. It was in this capacity that he gained experience with the court of Montano in Syracuse and like any good kindred began to learn the secrets and angles between it's courtiers and officials. It must be described now the character of Jápicu di Trápani especially after all these years of evolution.
As a mortal he had been hardened by his experiences as a slave but he did not allow his resentment and fear control him. He understood how pride and resentment could destroy not only mortals but kindred as well. Those who praised him would almost certainly become enemies, the sunlight or rather the moonlight of adulation blinded mortal and kindred alike to approaching assassins wielding either the knife or lies. He was unmerciful even when it cost him nothing to be merciful because mercy like the net cast into the sea can bring up a shark just as likely as salmon. The years in Iberia had sharpened him to understand that enemies lurked everywhere but instead of paranoia he gained awareness. These strengths of personality along with his formidable prowess in combat were aimed entirely at one goal during this time, the obtaining of his own titles and the permission to establish a vampiric house. These ambitions burned deeply inside him and nobody, not Tancredi di Mezzo or even Montano himself would stop him. But he was not reckless and knew his place in the hierarchy of the Sea of Shadows, if he was to achieve these goals he would have to use cunning and deceit both at which he was incredibly talented.
The years passed and despite his successes and competence as soldier and then leader of Tancredi di Mezzo's guard retinue he was routinely looked over for greater positions within the court. In 1227 AD he learned that his master had been spreading rumors that he had fallen in love with a mortal woman, the daughter of a priest in a rural village, nonsense! It was clear that he was not to be promoted further and it was because his master feared Jápicu's talent and prowess. So the real intrigue began and the rumors began to spread about di Mezzo's supposed crimes against the Amici Noctis which included acts of forgiveness toward the familiars directly connected to the court of Montano, a bout of melancholy that caused his failure to pay taxes in 1209 AD (in truth it was sheer corruption but that could have been construed as cunning), and finally the egregious of them all, the exposure of secrets to an agent of the Inquisition which Jápicu had forged documents made through a compromised familiar and left on the grounds of the court. Tancredi might have been able to amount a proper defense if he had not alienated other members of the Amici Noctis with his hubris but he could not in a Court of Blood and was diablerized in 1229 AD. To the surprise of Jápicu di Trápani, he was told by Montano's spymaster that it was known that he was behind the rumors but that they were impressed by his ambition and cunning so did not intervene in the execution of his master or bring him to trial. Instead of punishing him, he was inducted into the Amici Noctis and granted the County of Messina as replacement to the traitor Grazzano di Sini who in truth was simply part of a series of proscriptions of Montano's court to reorganize the Sea of Shadows in the wake of losing Iberia, promote younger more ambitious Lasombra who had come from Iberia, and bring them into his orbit, as the old saying goes, "keep your enemies close and your friends closer".
So, in the year 1230 AD, Jápicu di Trápani, had acquired aristocratic titles and permission to establish his household. This may have been satisfactory for most other kindred but for this particular Lasombra it was only the beginning. Among the other traits he possessed was unrelenting ambition and he was eager to start what he called "the real work of my existence."
