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  OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2004
  
  3
  Features
  5 
  The Empty Hand Martial Arts in the new World of Darkness
   
  By Eloy Lasanta Art by Christopher Lee Simmons
  15 Spotlight On: The NecroCyberz A new online Guild for Wraith: The Oblivion
   
  By J. Edward Tremlett 
  Art by Joshua Gabriel Timbrook
  17 
  Of Floating Spirits Tips for playing Yulan-Jin in Kindred of the East
   
  By Eloy Lasanta  Art by Melissa Uran
  20 Justiﬁcation Vampire: The Requiem ﬁction
   
  By Tony Murlin
  22 The Broken Mirror A secret sect and a broken mirror. Fiction for Kindred of the East
   
  By Daniel Acaba
  Columns & Departments
  4 
  Letter from the Editor 
   
  By Christopher Lee Simmons
  Table of
  Contents
  On The
  CoVeR
  A charcoal study of a 
  vampireʼs victim, by 
  Kat Burress.
  
  20
   
  “Most people who worry about morality ought to.” 
   
   
   
  – Richard Hugo
  Justification
  By Tony Murlin
  On the day of my rebirth, for one perfect moment, there was 
  no line between the Beast inside me and myself.  Through dulled 
  senses and deadened skin I felt the rain drop in torrents over my 
  body.  There was once a time when the cold meant something, 
  when I grasped for warmth as a matter of instinct.  But now there 
  exists only the purely physical knowledge that what I once was is 
  no more, and what I am now is something more and something 
  less, then what I used to be.
  Feeling slowly cascaded over my prone form, my weight slowly 
  dragging me into the mud.  A silent scream passed from my lips 
  and attempted freedom, but my jaw, clenched in a swirling discord 
  of new emotions that were muted, yet at the same time exited to 
  an insane degree, refused to grant it leave.  As the world came 
  steadily into focus, I knew more and more about hatred… and 
  hunger… than I have ever felt before in my life.  What was once 
  a dull, low ache rapidly became a ﬁre that burned at the very core 
  of my being.  Anger and hunger mixed and became one blinding, 
  indescribable emotion.  As I began to rise I felt that the tremors 
  wracking my body were no longer from the icy coldness of the 
  unforgiving rain, but from the hell that erupted behind my eyes.
  A seething red haze came over my eyes, enveloping the entire 
  world.  Distinguishable patterns became blurring movement in an 
  indecipherable environment.  The sounds of rain gave way to a 
  deafening silence as I lost control of my very being.   There was a 
  thing inside me that required satiation, and it would not rest un-
  til it received its due.  My last vestiges of human thought lost its 
  lingering hold on the precipice of my existence once I perceived 
  more movement.  After that, all became nothing.
  •••••
  There is very little in life to assure one who walks its myriad 
  of paths.  The only assurances are those that the collective “you” 
  know for absolute certain.  You will, at some point in your life, get 
  sick.  You will, barring misadventure, eventually wither and die. 
  At least most of you will.  Of course, this does, for the most part, 
  leave exception for us.
  Who is “us”, you ask?  I don’t think you’re ready to know yet. 
  Give you and I some time to become acquainted, and then I might 
  ﬁll you in on my little secret.  But you must indulge me, lest I feel 
  the urge to discontinue the conversation.
  Ah… blessed silence.  You learn quickly, a trait that I like 
  very much… keep it up.  In the days ahead it will almost cer-
  tainly ensure the continuation of your existence.  In the spirit of 
  friendly conversation, let me ask you a question.  Is it a sin for a 
  being greater than a man to kill him?  Be careful how you answer 
  this question, because the answer you give will be loaded with as-
  sumptions you never meant to make.  How do I know?  Well, take 
  the answer “yes”, for example.  If it is, indeed, a sin for a greater 
  being to kill a man, then what does that say of God?  He is a great-
  er being, is he not?  But, how can he, who is the ﬁnal arbiter of 
  that which is “sin”, be sinful?  Doesn’t his existence as a murderer 
  make him bias, seeing as how his will has brought thousands, if 
  not millions, to their deaths since the birth of the religions of the 
  book?  Even if you rule that only one death was God’s will, does 
  that not make him a murderer?  If not, maybe he is guilty of the 
  sin of suicide.  If we are taught our entire lives that “two wrongs 
  do not make a right”, then how does a murder/sacriﬁce truly undo 
  the sin of the world.  We could always say, “because God is perfect 
  and can do anything”, but that would be too easy. 
  If God were perfect in every way, shape, and form, then the 
  blight that is this existence would not be as such.  The idea that 
  God created evil in order to test man shows that man is a ﬂawed 
  creation.  If God is perfect, then how could he create a ﬂawed cre-
  ation?  Either he is ﬂawed (and thus not perfect), or mankind was 
  ﬂawed from the very beginning.  Taking the latter into account, 
  would it then serve that there are ways for mankind to transcend 
  his ﬂawed state and become something more… something great-
  er?  And if, on the path of this continued transcendence to a less 
  ﬂawed state, the greater being had to kill a more ﬂawed lesser be-
  ing, one could come to the conclusion that it is not a sin, due to 
  the fact that the death of the lesser being was part of God’s will.  
  Hmmm… you’re either rapt in fascination or attempting to 
  cower in fear.  Either way, I like that I have your attention.
  •••••
  The sensation was akin to the combination of good sex, a good 
  cigarette, a world shattering epiphany, and the excitement of a 
  near life experience.  It’s as if every life afﬁrming experience I’ve 
  
  21
  ever known before this night were added together and multiplied 
  by some ludicrous number that exists only in space and national 
  economies.  
  My violent euphoria was taken from me by a sorrowful whim-
  per, the kind that engenders people to buy those unwanted pup-
  pies inside cardboard boxes on wayward street corners.  My vision 
  reawakened into a world of brown.  At ﬁrst I thought I still had 
  mud in my eyes, but I quickly realized that it was a cascade of 
  long, wavy locks blocking my vision.  My mortiﬁcation came and 
  went like a New York taxi cab, until my senses returned enough 
  for me to realize that I not only had someone in my arms, but that 
  I was sucking on them.  I forced myself to ignore the connotations 
  behind the copper taste in my mouth, and at ﬁrst became resolute 
  to allow my reverie to continue.  I felt truly at peace, clasped 
  onto this person like a lamprey.  It was like a womb for my mind, 
  the monster coiled throughout, placating my every desire in one 
  perfect moment.  This was love.  This was Heaven.  This is what 
  I was meant to do with my life.
  A sharp burst of lightning cracked hard behind me.  Something 
  deep inside spoke to me, warning me that someone, or something, 
  was going to take my Heaven away from me.  I was resolute in my 
  need for this feeling, so what I did was squeeze a little harder.  At 
  the time I was too enveloped in what I was doing to realize that 
  I was constricting harder and harder every time my Heaven pul-
  sated, or I heard the strange whimper, or the lightning exploded. 
  Eventually, after a twig snapped, the whimpering stopped.
  •••••
  Have you ever contemplated Hell, my friend?  What is Hell, if 
  but the absence of God’s sight?  Would God need to watch over a 
  perfect creation?  No, I doubt that.  What would a perfect being 
  need with voyeuristic tendencies?  That’s right, my gagged friend, 
  he wouldn’t need to watch at all.  A perfect being does everything 
  perfectly… and thus does not require God’s constant vigil.  
  But if being consigned to Hell is being taken from God’s sight, 
  doesn’t that make one perfect in God’s eyes?  Being Damned is 
  transcendence, my friend, or, at the very least, transcendent.  If 
  a being becomes Damned, that being is forever taken from the 
  eyes of God, which, in turn, one may surmise that it also frees 
  one from God’s plan.  Therefore, Damnation is the ultimate free-
  dom… freedom from mortality, freedom from limitation, freedom 
  from the world of man and God.  
  There is a price for this freedom, as hypocritical as it may seem; 
  the thought that one would be a slave to debt in payment for 
  ultimate freedom is a paradoxical juxtaposition at best.  Once 
  set free, you are alone… forever.  Your freedom is such an affront 
  to God that his presence tears at your very being.  As a being set 
  aside from the God-Created world, the ﬁres of Creation and the 
  light of his loving oppression seek to bring you back into the fold 
  via the Mortal Coil.  Fortunately, we have our own Coils.  And 
  with each further Coil we transcend, we come closer to our im-
  minent goal…
  •••••
  Upon regaining consciousness, I discovered that there was 
  blood on my hands now, a viscous glove of spilt life that, like Mi-
  das, brings ruination to everything it touches.  The rain danced 
  around my statuesque form as I watched water attempt to clean 
  the sin from my hands.
  The form at my feet was now nothing more than a thing, an 
  object once imbued with life that now surged like frozen liquid 
  ﬁre through my veins.  Once there was bliss, now there is only the 
  mocking laughter of the Serpent, who brought ruination to my 
  own personal innocence.  The red fruit of Eden was taken from 
  the Eve at my feet, her body ravished, crushed, and laid disdain-
  fully at my feet.  I now knew evil; I now knew that I had become 
  like the Eve sinking into the mud at my feet.  I remember the pre-
  cious feeling of her heartbeat as I held her body close to mine, the 
  warmth of her skin as my cold mouth rested open and hollow on 
  her supple ﬂesh, and the feeling of her life, as the years left in hers 
  came to rest in me to fuel one more day of my blasphemy.
  The percussion of thunder rang loudly in my ears as the wind 
  caused the trees to play a subtle melody.  Nature itself roared in 
  applause of this silent song, a requiem for Eve, and her new Adam. 
  There was no doubt within my mind after this point that I was in-
  deed damned.  Through vicious wrath I had sated my gluttonous 
  thirst.  I had become sin incarnate, a monster so abhorrent that 
  life itself had left me, and now I stand, cold, dead, and hollow.  
  In my rush to learn what it was to live, to stare intently into 
  the abyss, but I had completely ignored the eyes staring at me 
  back.  Now I know exactly what must be done to live… others 
  must die.  The men and women in the world must now become 
  my Eucharist, for their blood shall give me life.  The prospect 
  was too much to bear, the idea that a higher power would allow 
  these things to happen.  I made one last promise before I initiated 
  myself into a race of liars: I promised that I would become like 
  unto God himself, if only to prove that transcendence lies in the 
  realms beyond his sight… 
  •••••
  I bet you’re asking what it’s like to be Damned.  What it’s like 
  to know, for a fact, that God does not like you, and, if anything, 
  would like to see you obliterated.  It’s quite liberating, I assure 
  you.  As a man, before my Embrace some seventy-ﬁve years ago, 
  I was quite concerned about my place in God’s plan and what he 
  thought of me.  Every day I took it on faith that he truly loved me 
  like the good book said he did, and I followed all the little rules 
  and regulations required of me… like all good Christians.  Oh, 
  sure, I slipped every now and then.  I enjoyed the drink a little too 
  much one night (despite its illegality), and on the next I would 
  enjoy a… bad woman.  Heh.  But a quick trip to the confessional 
  and the requisite renunciation of my acts was enough to get me 
  in, right?
  Deep inside I felt that the answer was not one I’d like to hear, 
  but I held hope that, despite my faults, I was the type of man that 
  would get to sit next to the throne of the Lord when my day ﬁ-
  nally came. That I would be forgiven.  But then the nagging ques-
  tions began: “What if my religion isn’t the correct one” or “What 
  if my religion is correct, but I am ultimately a failure in the eyes 
  of God?”  For a man as concerned over religious matters as I was, 
  these were questions to which I lost sleep.  Then, one day I met 
  my un-Maker, and became… free.
  Hmmm…. You aren’t going anywhere… let me tell you a 
  story…
  
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