Zoe Komnene was born in the Imperial Palace of Constantinople, the youngest of

eight children born to Emperor Alexios I and his favorite, though her eldest sister
disagrees on that point. From the beginning she was an uncommonly bright child,
excelling in her lessons in literature, Greek language, rhetoric, and the sciences.
When her tutors reported to her father that she had a scholars heart, he brought
forth wise men from the ends of the Earth to broaden her learning. At the feet of the
wisest men, Zoe was trained in astronomy, medicine, history, military affairs,
geography, and mathematics. The breadth of her education, erudition, beauty, and
noble bearing became broadly known in the Byzantine court, the affairs of which
she would later publish as part of a history of the Empire from the time of Justinian
shortly after her twentieth birthday.

It was precisely because of her exquisite mind and late birth that she became a
candidate for the Embrace. The sharp eared young polyglot became aware of
games played on the edges of the Great Jyhad when she became aware of less than
exact translations delivered by courtiers and diplomats, translations that werent
merely inexact or sloppy, but seemed purposefully designed to exacerbate conflict
between feuding houses, or broker deals that seemed to benefit no one contrary to
all logic and expectations.

Following such a courtier one night, Zoe ventured into a strange, disused part of the
palace where she beheld a fearsome sight. A gruesome mockery of Communion, a
man that had fangs for teeth and wielded some terrible sorcery over a nobleman of
high esteem and respect, such that he groveled like a dog when this man so much
as frowned at him. Zoe fled back to her chambers, frightened but also deeply
curious by what she had witnessed.

For the next decade, the study of the ghouls of Constantinople and their Kindred
masters was the subject of fearsome study by the young princess. Even her
marriage to an admiral, management of a country estate near Sophia, and the birth
of her children did not break her concentration for very long. Every chance she
could steal, she was back in the capital, watching from shadows and taking
scrupulous notes. She finished her work and sent it to the printer, knowing even as
she did so that she was dripping blood into shark infested waters.

That night, a man came to her room. Nubian and fearsome, he seemed a relic of
another age, and he was not one of the monsters that Zoe had observed in her
decade of careful watching. Before the princess eyes, he put her manuscript in the

fire, and asked her why, after so much careful observation, she should expose
herself so brashly.

Without a trace of fear in her voice, Zoe said to this man who was not a man,
Because I have studied you for so long that I have only come to realize how much I
do not know. I would spent the rest of my lifetime and not learn one ten thousandth
of what I could. I exposed my work to prove that I was worthy. Take me in. I want to
learn all that there is to know.

The man considered her for a very long time before laughing. It seems to me that I
have only three choices. Kill you now and save everyone a lot of trouble. Make you
as you demand. Or wait and have to deal with you when the damned Nosferatu
bring you over to their side. Lucky for you its bad luck to murder royalty.

Though she had not been initiated into the mysteries of Set, nor sworn allegiance to
the cult operating in Constantinople, the Serpent of Byzantium, Khaytal, brought
Zoe over as he promised. Her death due to illness was masterfully arranged, with
her sire draining her over the course of a month so that her family could see her
waste away despite the efforts of the best physicians in the land. After a slow,
wasting death in public, the princess was Embraced upon an altar of serpent god
and spent six years in the journey to become an initiate-priestess of the faith. And
there she and her sire began their feud.

Zoed had too much education not to recognize the old signs of the mystery cult her
sire and clan were part of. And she had no use for an esoteric religion. Even the
Orthodox Christianity that had been her mortal faith was barely tolerable, but the
secret religion and suppressed gnosis of Setite-lore? She laughed the first time
Khaytal told her of the Aeons that secretly enslaved the world, and in his fury the
elder Setite had beaten his childer nearly into torpor. The very next night, Khaytal
coldly announced that she would study for a time in the Library of the Forgotten,
and since then relations between sire and childer have been strained, at best.