Blood is more than the life. Blood is heredity; blood is memory; blood is instinct. The Mnemosyne don’t just know this for a fact: they are the fact. Everything they do is tied to the concept of memory. The Kindred are terrified of losing their past. They sleep and fall prey to terrible dreams; they wake and begin to wonder which was the dream and which was reality. History plays tricks on the Kindred. You sleep for a century, and when you wake up, you barely know who you are. Dreams of making love and dreams of drinking the blood of kings; dreams of flying, dreams of devils with the faces of owls, dreams of people who you never met and people who have yet to be born. You wake up; the world has changed. You doubt everything you were before. Each slumber makes you a little less human, a little more dead.
And yet, the Mnemosyne don’t seem to have that problem. There aren’t so many of them. Their power is simple, potent: they feed on memories.
A Mnemosyne uncovers the truth, shares it, buries it and keeps it secret. The dead value the Mnemosyne for that reason; there are none more efficient at manipulating history. In the hands of a Mnemosyne, history doesn’t stand a chance.
History and Culture: Ironically, no one remembers where the Mnemosyne came from. They were there in Rome – a second-century CE testament belonging to the Cult of Augurs, a branch of the Roman Camarilla who dealt with prophecy and magic, grants privileges to the childer of a vampire belonging to the “Mnemosynidae” along one stretch of the Tiber. So, clearly, they must have existed long enough to have become a family before that. Documents since that time are rare. Old Kindred say they were always there, or always talked about if they weren’t present. But they weren’t ever the movers and shakers. They
just existed in the dark, hiding, emerging sometimes to save an elder’s sanity, or drive another elder insane.
That’s the most anyone can work out. The Mnemosyne don’t keep their own histories; they’re too busy playing with the pasts of others. Broods of them exist, small families who settle in areas and absorb the local culture. Some vampires, who make studies of such things, identify them with the long-dead Moirai. But the Moirai are gone now (aren’t they?), while the Mnemosyne are clearly here.
The memories they absorb, exchange and alter do strange things to a vampire’s mind. The older Mnemosyne don’t have names anymore. They’re detached, prone to amnesia and madness. Here’s a Keeper who is nearly blank, a cipher without a true identity of his own, having washed away the memories of so many others that his own have become lost. Here’s another who is so full of other people’s memories that she has become taken within the whirl of experiences and personalities. Ireneo Funes, Prince of Buenos Aires, is rumored to be such a Mnemosyne, a creature who long ago lost his individuality, who eats the mind and memory of every victim he feeds upon, gaining a new splinter of personality each day.
A pair of Mnemosyne who were twins in life swap memories (and hence personalities) so often that they become interchangeable. They talk sometimes in unison. They finish one another’s sentences. They answer to either name. They can’t even tell themselves apart anymore.
While more Mnemosyne are unaligned than belong to Covenants, virtually all of them have duties within the hierarchies of their home towns, and those who don’t have some sort of fixed post sell their services to the highest bidder.
Niall works as a Hound for his Prince. Unlike more direct Hounds, he’s something of a detective, a methodical worker. He sifts evidence, reads minds. He finds truths. An older Mnemosyne works as more of a psychic surgeon, a detective who heals the memory of his aged prince each time he falls into torpor. A Mnemosyne in one of the larger cities serves as a cleaner of sorts, one who wipes breaches of the Masquerade from the minds of mortals and incriminating information from the memories of ghouls and Kindred.
Reputation: The Mnemosyne are, perhaps inevitably, better known by reputation than by acquaintance. The stories are many and fearsome, and Mnemosyne often find that other vampires have made up their minds before ever meeting them.
Covenants and Clans are ambivalent about the Mnemosyne. They fear them. If they can really steal memories, they say, they can take their own. But at the same time, they find lost memories. They share them. Each of the five great Covenants respects that. The Invictus and Sanctified alike value those who can verify chronicles and genealogies. The Acolytes and Ordo Dracul may take very different approaches to the question, but both Covenants react with curiosity to a vampire who can drink memories through blood. And while the Carthians may care less for history, the conspirators who maneuver their Covenant towards what they see as inevitable control can find uses for a drinker of memories and a thief of minds.
A Mnemosyne who appears in a city, then, may well be showered with offers of patronage and employment from every quarter; but he should beware, for taking sides makes enemies, and refusing to take sides makes more. Often, the choice is between which enemies to make.