Lilia Musielek

 Russia. 1925. The leadership struggle in Moscow had just about ended. The Brujah council had been in power since the revolution, but in the outer parts of the USSR, the Ukraine and Georgia and those few countries that hadn't been lost to Germany in World War One, certain other groups ruled. Tzimisce still ruled their ancestral homelands, and for the most part, those regions were Sabbat Land.

Of course, the girl known as Lilia Musielek, just born, did not know of the darkness of the world. Born in Soviet Belarus, near the polish-border, she knew nothing of the monsters that lurked in the dark beyond stories her mother told to frighten her. She grew up middle-class, her father managing to maintain a hold on his factory despite the communist government, and as their only daughter, she grew up somewhat pampered. Luxury was tight, with the state of the country, but she managed.

War broke out in 1939, as everyone knows, and her brothers joined the Red Army to invade Poland. She stayed behind. Then of course, Operation Barbarossa came with it the invasion of the Soviet States. Her father, a known sympathiser, was glad that the communists were going to be removed, and happily supported their efforts in exchange for money. Lilia despised that. Growing up pampered, she may have done well, but instead she was perhaps a little too nationalistic to accept the german war machine.

It was that spark of defiance and nationalism, the love of the land, that drew someone to her. When she'd been found in the woods, trying to aide rebel fighters, he came to her. Viscilly Kamienski was some Sabbat Tzimisce of a nomadic pack, took the girl and embraced her. He saw in her a fire that mimicked his own. He saw a potential student, someone to learn the Way of Fire, the Koldunic path that had made him known throughout the Sabbat of Eastern Europe. How tragic it was then, that despite her embrace, for whatever reason, she was unable to learn. Mysticism rejected her.

He kept her around for long enough for her to learn the ways of the Kindred, but then sent her to Spain, the long-time Sabbat held territory. The war had ended by the time he let her go, and so getting to Spain was a simple boat journey. They travelled to Madrid, at which point she was introduced properly to the Sabbat, and he left her. She did not hate the abandonment - The blood bond had long since vanished from the Vinculum, and beyond that it was understandable. She found her own people in Madrid, studying the ways of the Sabbat, where they remained, occasionally moving cities. She learned the rites of the Sabbat, and became a Pack Priest, and briefly held a title of Bishop within Barcelona.

But her own curiosity got the better of her. Studies into the history of the Sabbat in 2012 unveiled darker secrets than she perhaps intended. She discovered what she saw to be the truth, and what her pack, her sect, and everyone in her life would consider heresy. The Revelations of the Dark Mother, or at the very least fragments of it, came to light from her studies, and the missing piece of it all clicked for her. The last parts of the puzzle became clear, as she realised the truth of the Sabbat - that they revered a traitor and false-god, and that to reject that knowledge would be the worst thing possible.

Escape, however, was not easy. It was careful planning, behind the backs of a pack she trusted so greatly, of maintaining an illusion while also pursuing the newfound teachings of the Dark Mother, and it culminated in her Escape, twelve years after her discovery, in which she ghouled a man, and escaped to the New World, her pack none the wiser till she was already halfway across the world. She arrived in Baltimore, and after getting out of the box, and gathering the dirt, she was ready to make a start.