Eamon Pryce

Daeva Regent of the Southwest, Bishop of the Lancaea Sanctum

The Bishop of the Lancaea Sanctum tonight is nearly as much of a legend as his peer, Stagger Lee. This was not always the case, however. Until 1994, Pryce was one of the most (perhaps the most) visible of Chicago’s Kindred. Under his guidance, the Lancaea Sanctum had a commanding role in city politics, especially in their “home ground” of the far southwest side. Continual competition from the Circle of the Crone didn’t weaken the covenant; in fact, it gave the Sanctified focus and drive.

Now, not everyone in Chicago is even sure the Bishop still exists. Those in the political loop know that he maintains contact with the Regents and with his parishioners through written correspondence sent from wherever it is that he calls a haven these nights, but that he is not known to have set foot within Chicago city limits since the mid-1990s. In this period, Bishop Pryce and the Lance as a whole went through some very troubling times. Twice, buildings that secretly housed Sanctified temples suffered devastating fires (during the day, so no Kindred were harmed). A third temple was found to have its fire alarm system continually disabled, even when a new one was installed from scratch; that building was abandoned by the Lance without even waiting for a fire. The neighborhood around yet another temple was targeted for urban renewal, which meant all-night road construction and demolition on all the surrounding blocks. Mortal allies and pawns of the Sanctified were murdered or reduced in influence, and the Circle of the Crone were ever more successful in luring Catholic congregations back to the pagan practices of their ancestors. The Bishop himself was hit by cars three times in 1994.

All of this would point to simple, old-fashioned Kindred influence-mongering under normal conditions, but for some disturbing details. Both of the fires that burned the Lance’s temples were started by lightning, in buildings that were far from the tallest structures in the area (the Sanctified practice of the time was to locate temples near, but not inside, well-known Catholic churches, whose steeples towered above the surrounding construction). The drivers of all the cars that hit Bishop Pryce turned out to be mortals, non-ghouls whose minds (to the extent that the Lance could determine) had not been tampered with. The faulty fire alarm system was installed by a trusted ghoul of a Sanctified parishioner. Add to this the buzz in Chicago’s occult community that hauntings had been on the rise on the south side all this time: again, string-pulling could account for this, save that hauntings actually had become more prevalent; Kindred aren’t the kind to be worried about things that go bump in the night, but the whole area became a short-lived sensation among mortal ghost hunters, and large concentrations of curious, superstitious mortals make it very difficult for Kindred to do business, especially when those Kindred make it their divine mission to glorify their role as monsters to humanity at large.

One night, all this ended. The Sanctified were once more able to attend Saturday night Mass in peace (relative peace, of course). This coincided, unfortunately, with the Bishop’s complete withdrawal from Chicago. Popular rumor has it that the covenant’s troubles began when the Bishop disclosed to the wrong Kindred that he was contemplating a seizure of Praxis in Prince Farragut’s absence. The Bishop’s criticism of the Goose Island Accord was already well-known to many Kindred, and as a traditionalist and a strong leader, it seemed only natural that he would seek the throne over the city. But even assuming this, the question is raised: who stopped him? The obvious culprits were of course the Carthians, at least as politically motivated as the Lance and disposed against a Prince. Possibly the Circle of the Crone, whose occult powers may have been able to cause a few of the more trying disasters to face the Bishop and also well-known for their differences with Sanctified theology. The third possibility is one that lingers on the mind of every Kindred, but on the lips of only a select few: the party who intervened with the Bishop was Prince Farragut himself, or at least his agents remaining in the city. No one was ever sure of how far Farragut’s occult knowledge went, nor even what covenant he swore allegiance to, which makes it that much easier to place lightning strikes and undetectable hypnotic suggestions within his capability. Perhaps the Bishop himself knows who drove him from Chicago; perhaps he met with that unknown assailant the night he decided to leave…but he hasn’t let anyone in on that secret just yet.

Tonight, the only Kindred able to lay eyes upon Pryce are his fellow Sanctified, and only then the ones that he trusts completely. To them, the Bishop appears as a shell of his former self, isolated in his crumbling suburban Victorian home and only rarely showing the fire that once drove his sermons, and rarely able to spare a cautious glance eastward toward the looming lights of Chicago.

Kindred of Chicago