The Defiant
You want to cheat death — properly. You think you can be better. When you were alive, you yearned to be a vampire. You believe that being a vampire could be wonderful, and you want to find a way. You want to become alive again, but so much better than human. You find the occult world terrifying. You are afraid of what you might become.
What They Do
The dead scientist who experiments on humans, vampires, and fairies in a sterile white laboratory. The occult archaeologist who rifles through the tombs of the terrifying beasts of old. The chillingly plausible preacher who leads his disciples into self-mutilation and surgical alteration. The robed cultists whose rituals depend on the sacrifice of angels. These are the Ordo Dracul. They are the Order of the Dragon, the children of Dracula himself.
They adopt mystical names, play at arcane ceremonies, forge underground fighting rings, start cults, explore places they should not go. The Ordo Dracul knows more about the hidden world than perhaps any other group of vampires. If they do not always share the things they’ve learned with each other, they still have a source of knowledge and experience that ensures the other covenants keep them around.
Like the Lancea et Sanctum, the self-styled Dragons seek knowledge through seeking out artifacts and text. But while the Sanctified seem to collect it to keep it or destroy it, the Dragons, instructed by their cold leaders, whom they call the Kogaions, collect it to learn about it and make use of it, no matter how dangerous it might be. It has to have a purpose. Nothing the Ordo Dracul learns is without a use. Everything works towards tightly defined goals: the betterment of the vampire condition, the amassing of an individual’s supernatural power, and the defeat of God.
Like the Sanctified, the vampires of the Ordo Dracul teach their neonates that God ordained that they be vampires; but in their eyes, this makes God an enemy. They spit in the face of God’s injustice. God is senile, they say. God is mad. God must be torn down from his throne. They would fight angels themselves to weaken God’s hold on the Damned. The goal is life, but not simple human life: the life of an immortal, unleashed by the curse of mortality and the curse of undeath alike. The spiritual disciplines taught by the Order, the Coils, don’t quite get a vampire there, but it’s a start. And a start on the road to transcendence is enough.
But what then? What happens when the vampires shed their curse and have only power? Will the hunger also be gone? The Order of the Dragon doesn’t have the answer to that, yet. But they yearn to find out, and when they do they will learn what they can, and they will look up to Heaven and they will spit in the face of God.
How They Do It
The vampires of the Ordo Dracul seek to improve themselves, and the Coils of the Dragons are just one way we do so. Some say they unearth things that perhaps should not have been discovered. They say that the only discoveries they should not pursue are those that, when unleashed, turn and destroy the creator — but there’s really no way to know what will happen until they get started, hmm?
A Kogaion of the Dragons is oddly secure in her place. While all the other covenants are wracked with infighting, the Dragons seem almost to avoid the role of Kogaion, pushing their most senior members into the role almost as some sort of punishment, Vampires of other covenants find this hugely confusing. But even the most enthusiastic Kogaion finds that the secrets she must learn to hold the position are burdensome, and eventually, maddening.
The existence of a neonate in the Dragons is a constant test. Elders send them to find artifacts and texts before the Sanctified squirrel them away. Sometimes they are sent into dangerous situations just to see how they handle pressure. It’s often the neonates who are the first to enter what the Ordo call “Dragon’s Nests,” the places of power that exist in dizzying variety. Magicians, fairies, ghosts, spirits, angels, and other creatures all create spaces, deliberately or accidentally, where the supernatural powers of the world concentrate themselves. The Dragons can’t always get anything out of these places, but when they find one, they nearly always try. Sometimes, if a neonate has been disappointing, a trip to a nest can be the final data point in an analysis as to whether he is even worth keeping.
All this means that while we Dragons don’t know a vast amount about other supernatural forces, they know more than most of the other covenants. More than knowing, though, the Order acts on its knowledge. They continually put themselves in dangerous situations, because if our existence is worth bettering, it is worth risking.