Crommey's Posthumous Warning
On October 18th, an encrypted message surfaced on ShreckNet and continued to be thus circulated on secured networks among the supernatural; the thaumaturgical signature powering its encryption was picked up on the 'Net by a Virtual Adept, who forwarded it to his peers:
I'm dead or worse if you're reading this.
Fear has compelled me to write this message, and loyalty has forced me to revise its as many times as I have implored my superiors to accept that the scandal we face is inevitable. We should at least control when it drops. I would kill to craft the perfect letter explaining how our House is at no fault, but I can't, and we are running out of time. This draft drops if I do not return tonight.
The mortals who killed Ramos, Faith and Hector are not Inquisition. They're the Fellowship of Athanasius, a cult which thinks the Bible's passages of "stewardship of the earth" is God's directive to curate and purify the world, and they have tricked us into wildly underestimating them.
When I first read their correspondence, I laughed. Apparently malevolent aliens have represented themselves to Earthlings as "God" to manipulate humanity into preparing the planet for a takeover, and Daniel's four beasts or kingdoms of the apocalypse are aliens. I ignored them as UFO cultists with the rest.
But then they sent that execution video and chilled me with the Regent's name and fact that they hunt for the Author, in whatever form that goddamn thing has taken since its activation. The fact that they even know that thing exists should be alarming.
Hildebrand believes we can recover the Author faster than the Fellowship and tuck it back away in the archives, leaving the Tower in blissful ignorance to the crisis we narrowly dodged in the shadows. We simply can't pull that off. I won't let him force us to lie about the loss of the Author just so we can leave behind a pretty collective corpse.
If Khadem's studies are correct, finding the Author means these zealots will succeed in exterminating us and whoever else they think compose Daniel's four kingdoms.
Their imagery paints us as one of "four societies who live among men as if they were one of them." Their ramblings against the Occult lead me to suspect their second 'kingdom' to mean the Willworkers. They write of 'false men whose presence claws at the sanity of the innocent, taking on demonic shapes and terrible visages,' which I am suspecting to mean the Lupines.
Khadem has abruptly left New York for San Francisco, and I have followed.
The Author is safest in the hands of the Tremere, and so I will not identify it, but I will force our hand to contract outside help in its recovery: find Ehsan Khadem, and work with him. Further, one of our chantries is in possession of a fragment of one of Viorel's diaries. I will allow that chantry its anonymnity: they are wise enough to produce it swiftly enough to do so on their terms.
- Dr. Aidan Crommey, Apprentice of the Seventh Circle of House and Clan Tremere
