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By Brian Campbell, Stephen Michael DiPesa, Conrad Hubbard, Sam Inabinet, Kathleen Ryan, Malcolm Sheppard

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CreditsAuthors: Bill Bridges (Introduction, Epilogue), Brian Camp-bell (Signs of the Times, The Revolution Will Be Televised), Stephen Michael DiPesa (Hell on Earth), Conrad Hubbard (A Whimper, Not a Bang), Sam Inabinet (The Earth Will Shake), Kathleen Ryan (Prologue), Malcolm Sheppard (Judg-ment, Designing Ascension). World of Darkness created by Mark Rein•Hagen.Storyteller game system designed by Mark Rein•Hagen.Development: Bill BridgesEditing: Carl BowenArt Direction: Aileen E. MilesInterior Art: Langdon Foss, Michael Gaydos, Jeff Lauben-stein, Larry MacDougall, Jean-Sebastien Rossbach, Alex Sheikman, Drew TuckerCover Art: Christopher ShyLayout, Typesetting and Cover Design: Aileen E. Miles

© 2004 White Wolf Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction without the written permission of the publisher is expressly forbidden, except for the purposes of reviews, and for blank character sheets, which may be reproduced for per-sonal use only. White Wolf, Vampire, Vampire the Masquerade, Vampire the Dark Ages, Mage the Ascension, Hunter the Reckoning, World of Darkness and Aberrant are registered trademarks of White Wolf Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. Werewolf the Apocalypse, Hunter the Reckoning, Wraith the Oblivion, Changeling the Dreaming, Werewolf the Wild West, Mage the Sorcerers Crusade, Wraith the Great War, Trinity, Mummy the Resurrection, Demon the Fallen, Dark Ages Spoils of War, Dark Ages Storytellers Companion, Demon City of Angels, Doomslayers into the Labyrinth, Hunter First Contact, Nights of Prophecy, Rage Across the Heavens, The Red Sign, The Shadow Players Guide, World of Darkness Sorcerer, The Bitter Road, The Book of Chantries, The Book of Madness, Blood Treachery, Convention Book Iteration X, Dead Magic 2 Secrets and Survivors, Digital Web, Digital Web 2.0, Dragons of the East, Guide to the Technocracy, Guide to the Traditions, The Fallen Tower Las Vegas, Forged by Dragon’s Fire, The Fragile Path Testaments of the First Cabal, Horizon Stronghold of Hope, The Infinite Tapestry, Mage Chronicles Volume 1, Mage Storytellers Companion, Mage Storytellers Handbook, Manifesto Transmissions from the Rogue Council, Masters of the Art, New World Order, Sorcerer Revised, The Technomancer’s Toybox, Tradition Book Akashic Brotherhood, Tradition Book Celestial Chorus, Tradition Book Euthanatos, Tradition Book Hollow Ones, Tradition Book Order of Hermes, Tradition Book Sons of Ether, Ascension, and Time of Judgment are trademarks of White Wolf Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. All characters, names, places and text herein are copyrighted by White Wolf Publishing, Inc.

The mention of or reference to any company or product in these pages is not a challenge to the trademark or copyright concerned.

This book uses the supernatural for settings, characters and themes. All mystical and supernatural elements are fiction and intended for entertainment purposes only. This book contains mature content. Reader discretion is advised.

For a free White Wolf catalog call 1-800-454-WOLF.Check out White Wolf online athttp://www.white-wolf.com; alt.games.whitewolf and rec.games.frp.storyteller

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ContentsPrologue 4Introduction: The Trumpet’s Clarion 14Chapter One: Signs of the Times 20Chapter Two: Judgment 50Chapter Three: The Revolution Will Be Televised 96Chapter Four: The Earth Will Shake 120Chapter Five: A Whimper, Not a Bang 144Chapter Six: Hell on Earth 166Chapter Seven: Designing Ascension 188Epilogue: Glory Days 220Sam

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PrologueAmanda waits without impatience.

She sits on the shoulder of a titanic rock — wheat-colored, fine-grained, perilously smooth. Her right leg is stretched straight out and arched to follow its curve; the boulder is without feature or foothold, and only the friction of denim on stone prevents her sliding to the ground below. Around her left foot is looped a barber’s strop. Her leg bends and twists a little to keep the leather taut as she works. Her knee braces her hands as she guides the

weapons along the grit.Below the massif, David Cho kneels in powder-soft sand

and lays a fire against a smaller slab. He makes a nest of dry grass and sage leaves, sets withered fern stalks and oak twigs beside the tinder, reaches for flint and steel. Before he strikes, he prays; before he prays, he looks around. He and Amanda are the only living things he sees. These rocks, in a misshapen circle of twelve — these are the only landmarks in a desert too bare for dunes and too flat for concealment. Water wore this country to its bones long ago. The sea rebuilt it, aeon by aeon, from grit and gravel. When the ocean left, the dust devils invaded, scouring the sandstone into powder, but tonight there is no wind, no water, no clouds in the stark, cold sky.

David draws sparks, catches them in wool, places them gin-gerly into their cocoon. He watches the first white thread rising, follows it with his gaze, watches it disappear into a blackness full of unwavering, bitter stars. He smells only arid air and acrid smoke. He feels only sand’s heat and night’s chill. He hears only his breath, the tinder whispering on his fire, and the thin, silken scraping of Amanda honing her knives.

Not her knives, he reminds himself. Mercedes’ knives.From the corner of his eyes, so that she might not feel his

glance, he studies his companion.Mercedes’ blades are steel, folded, clay-tempered, curved like

katana, strong and lethal along their entire length. A Portuguese sorcerer stole them from their native Japan and put them to ill purpose in Spain. Mercedes Gonzaga de Ortiz bani Euthanatos, slew him and took his weapons as trophies. Senex of Cerberus set them in the hilts and handles of his apprentice’s own foci — Toledo-made masterpieces whose own blades were broken.

As Amanda works them, starlight flashes black, white and yellow from their edges. Cold iron, pure silver and raw gold have been fused into blade, guard and pommel. The ornamentation weakens the knives, but Mercedes had wanted to kill creatures

that steel could not harm. The Old Man would never have done it, so some other smith added to the master Euthanatos’ craft after Mercedes abandoned him — after she followed her lover Alexander Gericault to the Labyrinths of the Nephandi. After she entered the Caul and sold her soul to darkness for irrevocable eternity.

Senex balanced these tools perfectly for Mercy. They are uncannily suited to the hands of her Avatar’s current incarnation. Amanda flips one in the air and catches it with thoughtless ease. David adds kindling to the fire but feels a chill creep up his arms.

He remembers two photographs of Mercedes as a Nephandus, taken shortly before Senex slew her in 1923.

In the first, she stands on Coney Island by the Ferris wheel, dressed as a flapper. She has a dancer’s centered balance — the swaying hips, artful pose, sensuous stance of a courtesan. Yet, compared to the young girls, the housewives, the grandmothers beside her on the boardwalk, her body seems deadened, slack, propped up by habit only. The barabbus leans against the rail looking down on masses of day-trippers from the metropolis, and there is nothing in her face but sun.

In the second, Mercy has seen the camera and who holds it — a man whose shadow falls clearly across her pale summer dress. It is Gericault, and she has turned toward him. She smiles, her dark eyes lively. The crow’s feet around them make a strange pattern — not the marks of laughter. Smoker’s creases surround her mouth. Her cheeks are pinched and sunken despite her voluptuous figure, belying her youthful hands. Passions etch her deeply; that smile is earnest, painful, demanding.

The two photographs were kept in a traveling frame — a small leather folio, cracking with age and desiccation, on the shelves of Senex’s study on Cerberus, beside Mercedes’ knives.

When David and his cabal, the Second Seven, visited the Euthanatos’ college after many years of traveling with Amanda, the Old Man spoke to each alone. He took David last — brought him to the study, listened to him, heard the history of the Ecstatic’s journey, taught him old magic and new rotes, gave him fragile fire from an ebon box on the shelves.

When David saw the portraits, he knew instantly who they were. Amanda had been there a thousand times. She had handled the frame, peered curiously at the decaying calfskin. Yet she never realized who the woman was.

He glances up at her again. Her pose is utterly unlike her predecessor’s — leaner, taller, without coquetry, intent only on the keenness of the edge. She looks nothing like Mercy. Her hair is blond, her skin light, her eyes blue. But in the lines of her face,

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