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Since the night of your Embrace, dreams have largely eluded you as you slumber during the day in your bed. Rare exceptions to this rule occur on days of particular import, as well as when you are recovering from physical trauma. It's simple to recognize the dream for what it is, and as always the confused dreamscape narrative is an unsolvable riddle, offering incoherent glimpses at your past life and the formative years of your un-death.

Fragments of memory coalesce into a scene from the first year after your Embrace, as your sire inducted you into the high society of the local Camarilla. It is far from a pleasant memory—Corliss had been a taskmaster, driving your learning with ruthless efficiency. She made it clear to you from your very first night that the result of failure would be termination. As with any sire, Corliss favored particular lessons, pressing you to excel at very specific skills.

"You will learn not only how to blend in with the shadows," Corliss said, "but to blend in with a crowd. Focus and social engineering are as integral to a spy's toolkit as the ability to move about unseen."

Even though they were said decades ago, in the dream, your sire's words ring as clearly as they had the first day you'd heard them. Say what you will about Eden Corliss—and there are a great many things to say, both good and bad—but she hadn't kicked you out of the nest without preparing you for an undead life among the deadliest, most manipulative creatures in existence. No, it was more than that. She hadn't simply prepared you to survive their constant tests and political attacks, she made you one of them.

Did she see you going soft as you languished alongside the Ivory Tower elites? Is that why she sent you out to fight against Robert Ward and his band of Anarchs after years spent in the safety of her care and your extravagant haven? You twist uncomfortably in your bed as you remember the early days when you were required to procure your own meals: stalk mortals, drown out their fear and screams as blood surged through your body in a heady euphoria of revitalization. You've grown complacent. Docile. The predator had been stripped from you, but now you're awake again.

And you're hungry.

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