CHAPTER 36     Gunshots. Liliane shivered, then turned slowly. Ariadne’s pierced body hung on her hand like a bangle. Roarke, torn and bloody, caked in dust and the corpses of a million dead ants, staggered into the room, rifle loaded for...

CHAPTER 35     They were an unlikely army: Ariadne had shed her blood- and gore-soaked bodysuit for an ill-fitting duty jumper from Saul’s stores, her sword hanging incongruously at her side. Roarke, the tattered Southern gentleman. Bourne i...

CHAPTER 33     The husk atop Eagle Hill mocked the very idea of a house. Charred, splintered, still reeking of burnt insulation and paint, its walls and doorways bent into wicked smile-curves that seemed to be laughing at the notions of home...

CHAPTER 31     Ariadne drew near the covered bridge on the campus of her daylight days, stepping silently across the well-tended green that had turned brown for the season. The chemically treated lawns still shone unnaturally bright and verd...

CHAPTER 29     Ariadne was dimly aware of footsteps, could recognize Po-Mo and his soldiers as figures from a dream. At Liliane’s command, they lifted Ariadne up, hauled her body like an unresisting sack of meat back up the corridor, through...

CHAPTER 27     The storeroom was as disheveled as Ariadne had left it. Stray styrofoam packing bubbles now littered the floor like freshly fallen snowflakes, but otherwise the room showed few signs of Ariadne’s rummaging. “See...

CHAPTER 25     Bourne barely had enough strength to drag himself away from the car chassis. Crawling across the pavement on his belly, his head pounding and his vision blurred by blood, his mind lost track of the year and the pla...

CHAPTER 22     Ariadne felt as if she had jumped off a skyscraper. These were the moments of freefall, wherein she had time to contemplate the inevitable finish with grim detachment. Roarke was alone. He had no posse, no visible ...

The world is a dark and dangerous place. It is filled with enigmas that do not fit neatly into boxes built by scientists or occultists. That doesn’t stop us from trying to find an explanation for everything. It is human nature to compartmentalize, to label and identify the things that frighte...

CHAPTER 20     Ariadne leapt at Bourne, fangs bared, claws extended. He was ready. With speed belying his bulk, he seized her arms in mid-charge and redirected her momentum, slamming her into the wall with such force that the plaster dent...

CHAPTER 18     Unthinkable! Ariadne thoughts raged. She had walked in on Po-Mo and his boys gathered in the younger vampire’s quarters, arms linked, performing Liliane’s unity ritual. Without Liliane. Or anyone else, for that mat...

CHAPTER 16     Andrei followed tentatively, but without protest, as Ariadne led him through the dimly lit hallways of the First National Bank of Boston, where even the soft press of their footsteps on the carpet sounded incriminating. He had patiently waited ou...

CHAPTER 15   Ariadne was no stranger to disturbing sights—to blood and gore, to dismembered limbs and disemboweled torsos. But she turned away from the vision of Bourne’s rolling waves of flesh spilling out from the small towel he wore as he sat a...

There are times when the rational world seems, if only for a second, to fall away. The leaves rustling in the trees on a still day. The movement just past the corner of your eye. We are taught to ignore the foolish impulse to react. But for those who look too long, too closely, there is anothe...

CHAPTER 14   Liliane, her back to Rose, sighed a small sigh of disappointment. She did not turn around, speaking instead to the air in front of her. “Is the Council so eager to pluck the fruit of our long years of labor?” “Once we clear the mag...

PART TWO Love never dies a natural death. —Anaïs Nin         CHAPTER 12     Ariadne writes a letter under a covered bridge at the edge of campus a...

CHAPTER 10   “It doesn’t matter that Roarke knows Liliane is on to him,” Ariadne told her squad before their departure for the assault. “The Prince has negotiated with the wizards and with the Princes of the surrounding demesnes. Roarke and his re...

Everybody talks about getting rid of the Prince. Few actually make it happen. At the top of it all, sitting comfortably at the zenith of the city’s nocturnal hierarchy, is the Prince. The Prince is a bastard and monster, yes, but he is also the cork in a bottle. The Prince has...

SILENT KNIFE A Vampire: The Requiem Novel by David Nurenberg       CHAPTER 8     First, panic. Ariadne felt her throat fill with water, felt its weight enter every cavity and tug at her. Her limbs felt leaden, slow to r...

Flamesrising.com has a design essay from David Hill Jr, the developer of the Forsaken Chronicler's Guide. Go check it out at their site: Read more >>

CHAPTER 6     Ariadne knelt at Liliane’s feet in the Prince’s study. The door was closed, and of course, there were no windows. The Prince sat in a great leather chair, crossing her legs as she reached for a crystalline goblet topped high with blood. “Our Si...

CHAPTER 5 “‘O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, so haggard and so woe-begone? The squirrel’s granary is full, and the harvest’s done.’” Ariadne closes her eyes, bites her lip, hugs Telemachus the Platypus close, trying to force Keats’s ...

A Chronicle Companion for Werewolf the ForsakenTM in Four Parts The full book includes: • Thirteen chronicle kits, which modify, emphasize and defy your expectations of what Werewolf the Forsaken can be. • Ideas for chronicles set in ancient Sumer, in the t...

CHAPTER 3 The morning wind bites Ariadne all over, but she endures the shivers, nestles closer to Andrei to feed off his warmth. He moves his hands across her small shoulders. “See?” She twists in his arms to face him. “Wasn’t this w...

CHAPTER 2     Ariadne is wearing a tank top and a long floral skirt, sitting all splayed out along the shaggy rainbow bed-throw that her roommate gave her last Christmas, tossing a stuffed platypus named Telemachus up and down in the air. Sunlight, warm and...

SILENT KNIFE A Vampire: The Requiem Novel by David Nurenberg     PROLOGUE     Blood ran in rivulets down the walls. Crimson tendrils spread like spider-plant shoots, indifferent to the paintings suspended in their path. The ...

A Chronicle Companion for Werewolf the ForsakenTM in Four Parts The full book includes: • Thirteen chronicle kits, which modify, emphasize and defy your expectations of what Werewolf the Forsaken can be. • Ideas for chronicles set in ancient Sumer, in the t...

The Atomic Array podcast recently featured Vampire: the Requiem line developer Russell Bailey to talk about The Danse Macabre. From their website: No matter one’s station in life, the Dance of Death unites all. Russell Bailey joins us this week to talk abo...

CHAPTER 28     They took Simon in the day. My shadow sleeps during the day, Jane. No shadows at noon. They took him to the West Loop, the old meatpacking district, where slaughterhouses metamorphose into art houses. They take him to that nineteenth-century...

CHAPTER 26   He assumes that vital organs are not vital in the dead-but-walking, that bleeding to death is not an option. So it all comes down to structural damage. Simon leads Loki into his basement, and then he punches two scalpels, held between the fingers and knuckles of one han...

A Chronicle Companion for Werewolf the Forsaken in Four Parts The full book includes: • Thirteen chronicle kits, which modify, emphasize and defy your expectations of what Werewolf the Forsaken can be. • Ideas for chronicles set in ancient Sumer, in the tre...

CHAPTER 24     The wheel turns. Simon stares up into the night sky, takes in the stars and cosmos and the giant glowing wheel that spins at the center of it all. It spins like a memory, like passing years, like summer to bittersweet fall. It spins. The armed men ...

ACT III     “All you need is love.” —John Lennon “Some assembly required.” —any instruction manual CHAPTER 22<...

The 1940s began and ended with war. The war that opened the decade was fought with bombs and guns, and ended with a weapon more powerful and horrific than anything the world has seen. In the meantime, the citizens of the United States rebuild their society. The war didn't touch the country direct...

CHAPTER 21   Simon lets the wormwood twist his brain. The roots dig and stab and feed off the nostalgia that’s collected over time—dead love residue. He lets it grow and grow, all root-bound in his head. The Corbies cry. Sufficiently twisted, he’s an underworld unto himself. ...

CHAPTER 19   The rain came in the evening, cold and violent and staccato. Officer Polhaus’s call came soon thereafter, curt and quick and staccato—ending in a “Get over here, now.” Then Simon was walking in the rain. And then the faces appeared, eyeless from shadows and...

Update: There's a YouTube video of Russell unboxing Danse Macabre with a few other White Wolf employees. Sun's rising. So what? This party's still going. I still have blood to drink. I still have one more song in me. Across th...

CHAPTER 18 “Nobody touch nothing!” “I think he’s missing some toes.” “I can’t believe I let you talk me into this.” “Just wait till he gets here.” “What the hell is he going to find?” “He’s gifted.” “You really believe that? You really making this de...

CHAPTER 17 “Hello, my name is Clara.” “Hello, Clara,” answers the Obsidian Sanctuary. Clara shivers at the response, nervous at the prospect of speaking in front of the strangers. They said this wasn’t even a full meeting, but the prospect is still daunting. They seem nice, though—encour...

CHAPTER 16 The cracks, the wormwood, and the green . . . Two absinthe bottles lay shattered, green droplets seeping through the jagged cracks. Simon’s malachite eyes stare, shattered, tears seeping out of the green and the jagged cracks of red. There had been romantic music...

FlamesRising.com is bringing us a special inside look at the design process for Scenes of the Embrace, a brand new toolkit for Vampire: the Requiem. ...

CHAPTER 14 “The first thing you need to know, Simon,” says Ichabod, “is that stories are dangerous. Information is alive.” Ichabod Knock talks with his mouth full. Ichabod Knock talks with his mouth full, sitting stark naked, body covered in the weeping wounds of symbols and glyphs carve...

CHAPTER 13 Dream logic. They are all children—but they are all adults, too. It is his grade-school Halloween dance. It is also the Obsidian Sanctuary at the same time. And it is also Carfax Abbey. Everyone is there. Everyone is costumed. Simon is sa...

CHAPTER 12 You are a ghostly saint, Jane. The queen of hearts. The saint of shades. The golden-eyed cadaver. Strange cards in my fifty-two pickup and they all seem to have elaborate meanings, their very own mythologies. . . . As it turned out, the members of the Obsidian San...

CHAPTER 10 SCREEEEEEEEAMfeeeeedbackSSSSSSSTATIChissssssssss. WITNESS—Initiate signal—initiate REM syntax—WITNESS—through blood canals and eardrum pulp—WITNESS—weep—initiate signal birth—dilate black hole, the dead-star womb, event-horizon quim, ravenous, light-sucking vaginal maw—Ini...

ACT II “At last the new moon had come. The night was pitch dark, and promises to the dead are sacred and must be kept.” —Count Carl von Cosel (1877–1952) radiologist, romantic, and necrophile CHAP...

CHAPTER 7 Once upon a time, a little boy named Simon had a compulsion. Simon entered the bathroom. Whensoever little Simon entered any bathroom, familiar or strange, he had to comply with this compulsion before any urine could occur. Simon stood in front of the shower, the plas...

CHAPTER 5 Simon watches the silver wraiths. The sepia wraiths. The monochromatic wraiths. “They are all dead, you know,” he tells the sleepy crows in his cranium. He drinks green. He watches the screen. They are all dead. Purgat...

CHAPTER 3 “Simon, what the hell are you doing?” Dr. Fulani says, her honeyed accent turned sour. Simon freezes with wide, Charlie Chaplin eyes, in a Buster Keaton pose, clutching the blood-encrusted teddy bear in a rubber-gloved grip. Explanations seem elusive. His mind stutters and ...

ACT I From childhood's hour I have not been As others were—I have not seen As others saw—I could not bring My passions from a common spring— ...

STRANGENESS IN THE PROPORTION by Joshua Alan Doetsch PROLOGUE There is no exquisite beauty . . . without some strangeness in the proportion. —Edgar Allan Poe, “Ligeia” Pumpkins left out to rot turn into vampires. Did you kno...