Tremere Lich

Embalmed

Mage The Awakening Sourcebook 363
warning.png"Tremere Lich" is not in the list of possible values (Architects of the Future, Ascended Adept, Austere, Awakening Gambit, Bearers of the Eternal Voice, Bene Ashmedai, Blank Badges, Brotherhood of the Demon Wind, Carnival Melancholy, Celestial Masters, Chrysalides, Clavicularius, Cryptologos, Daksha, Daoine, Devourers of the Flesh, Dreamspeakers, Echo Walkers, Eleventh Question, Eyes of Ain Soph, Fallen Pillar, Fangs of Mara, Forge Masters, House of Ariadne, Illumined Path, Imagineers, Keepers of the Covenant, Liberatores, Logophages, Lords of the Inanimate, Masters of Destruction, Mimirs Voice, Neocologists, Orphans of Proteus, Path of the Book, Perfected Adept, Princes of the Many Masks, Pure Sovereigns, Pygmalian Society, Reality Makers, Reality Stalker, Roses of Eden, Scions of God, Secret Order of the Gate, Singers In Silence, Sisterhood of the Blessed, Skald, Sodality of the Tor, Sphinxes, Stewards of the Celestial Orrery, Stone Scribes, Storm Keeper, Subtle Ones, Tamers of Fire, Tamers of Rivers, Tamers of Stone, Tamers of Winds, Tamers of the Cave, Tellurians, Thread Cutters, Threnodist, Thrice-Great, Timori, Transhuman Engineers, True Soul, Uncrowned Kings, Unforgotten Scions, Votaries of the Ordained, Walkers In Mists, Whipping Boys, Wraiths of Epochs) for this property.
Primary	Death
Path	Moros
Past	warning.png"Tremere Lich" is not in the list of possible values (Architects of the Future, Ascended Adept, Austere, Awakening Gambit, Bearers of the Eternal Voice, Bene Ashmedai, Blank Badges, Brotherhood of the Demon Wind, Carnival Melancholy, Celestial Masters, Chrysalides, Clavicularius, Cryptologos, Daksha, Daoine, Devourers of the Flesh, Dreamspeakers, Echo Walkers, Eleventh Question, Eyes of Ain Soph, Fallen Pillar, Fangs of Mara, Forge Masters, House of Ariadne, Illumined Path, Imagineers, Keepers of the Covenant, Liberatores, Logophages, Lords of the Inanimate, Masters of Destruction, Mimirs Voice, Neocologists, Orphans of Proteus, Path of the Book, Perfected Adept, Princes of the Many Masks, Pure Sovereigns, Pygmalian Society, Reality Makers, Reality Stalker, Roses of Eden, Scions of God, Secret Order of the Gate, Singers In Silence, Sisterhood of the Blessed, Skald, Sodality of the Tor, Sphinxes, Stewards of the Celestial Orrery, Stone Scribes, Storm Keeper, Subtle Ones, Tamers of Fire, Tamers of Rivers, Tamers of Stone, Tamers of Winds, Tamers of the Cave, Tellurians, Thread Cutters, Threnodist, Thrice-Great, Timori, Transhuman Engineers, True Soul, Uncrowned Kings, Unforgotten Scions, Votaries of the Ordained, Walkers In Mists, Whipping Boys, Wraiths of Epochs) for this property.
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This is a Left-Handed Legacy.

In the Dark Ages, when mages held more sway in the world and the orders waxed in power, great resources were spent in plumbing the most profound secrets of the earth. Sanctums swelled with students, vast libraries of lore were gathered, and expeditions were mounted to the most remote extremities of the globe. Mages journeyed to mist-shrouded mountaintops in legendary lands, deserted isles in uncharted latitudes, lost cities crumbling beneath waves of water, sand or jungle, and into the moldy vaults of rumor-haunted necropolises of antiquity. Some of those who pursued this last course dug too deep into the past and literally awoke the dead.

Even the most finely honed Awakened would be sorely pressed to resist the chilling intensity of an undying desire that has festered in darkness and hunger for centuries. These mages found that they had, willingly or not, taken on new instructors, keepers of profound knowledge and wielders of terrifying power, teachers who might have been human once, but were no longer. Masters with a particularly insatiable need.

Vampirism is a state of being that comes with fantastic potential, but it is nonetheless a curse. Young vampires do not always grasp the full import of this simple fact, but as the sunless decades of hunger pass, they learn that undying existence is not the same as eternal life. Raging against this fate, an obscure line of vampires called the Tremere encountered an entity from the Abyss and wrested from it certain secrets about the Supernal and Fallen Worlds. Using this forbidden knowledge, they formulated in their blood a way of circumventing their curse by stealing from the living the inner light that they themselves lacked. Through the drinking of blood, a Tremere could tap a victim’s soul, allowing him to live for a short time as if he were nearly human, walking in twilight (but not full daylight) and becoming sated by normal food rather than blood. The process desiccated the stolen soul, however, leaving its owner to wither away into a slow, witless death. The souls of normal humans proved too dim and murky to sustain the Tremere for more than a few days at best. The undead needed something much brighter and clearer.

They found what they needed in the Awakened souls of the mages who intruded into their lair, but the very brilliance they desired also ensured that their intended victims were not mere cattle to be seized and consumed with impunity. The mages had to be lured into the fold with intimations of ancient power and arcane lore. The vampires made good on their temptations, unveiling some of the deepest mysteries of vampiric lore. The mages eagerly took the bait, heedless of the cost that would be exacted from them.

In tapping the mages’ souls while they drank of their blood, the vampires discovered that their Abyssal lore had failed them. The blood burned in their veins with celestial fire and rendered their bodies to ash in mere moments, destroying every single one of them. But their damnation did not end with them. They passed on a part of their curse to their vessels, infecting the mages with the most virulent aspect of their unique Abyssal damnation. The mages, though not undead, had placed one foot firmly on the far side of the grave and found their souls eroding away into the great darkness beyond all light. The spiritual vacuum thus created eventually spread to their outward forms, consuming their bodies until some of them ceased to exist, or else wandered the earth as hungry ghosts. To fill their growing void, the survivors learned to steal the light from those who had it. They had become living vampires, stealers of souls.

At first, these sorcerers took the vampires’ name, Tremere, as a title to describe their condition: “Tremere-inflicted.” Other mages just called them the Tremere, and over time the lichs accepted this shorthand for themselves, although it is still used as an adjective: “Tremere lich.”

A mage must be voluntarily initiated into this Legacy by having his own soul severed by his teacher and replaced with someone else’s. The soul link between instructor and pupil transmits the lich curse once the new soul is attached. Usually, the master then attaches the pupil’s soul to himself, for Awakened souls last much longer than Sleeping souls. It is extremely rare for a young or even middle-aged mage to make this hideous choice. Usually, only those near the end of their natural life spans choose to become lichs in hopes that, by unnaturally extending their lives on a diet of souls, they might unlock the key to ascension and rise to the deathless lands of the Supernal World.

And yet, it is possible for a pupil to reverse course and restore his humanity before he has gone too far. If he can regain his own soul and reattach it (using spells, not Tremere attainments) before he raises his Gnosis above the amount of dots he had when he was first initiated into this Legacy, and then if he sacrifices a dot of Willpower, he loses all Tremere attainments and become fully ensouled again. He cannot, however, learn any other Legacy ever again. He cannot engage in soulcraft with a Tremere-touched soul, even though he has overcome the Legacy’s curse.

Some have wondered if the vampiric bloodline that damned the mages to lichdom still survives. Although the Tremere mages have searched for any signs of it, they have found none.

=Attainments

• Hideous Stipend
• Wicked Claim
• Supernal Theft