Vampires in other covenants hide their monstrous natures behind veneers of self-control, or hellfire religion, or politesse, or ideological fire. But the vampires of the Circle of the Crone are the howling beasts who roam in bloodstained packs. In other covenants, the dead try to hold fast to religions and ideologies, maintaining hierarchies and rigid systems of control. The Acolytes believe that you must change. Other covenants believe that to be a monster, you must do the will of God, or have a will to power, or study dark secrets. But the Mother’s Army is made of monsters just because it’s the way they are. They are the attendants at every witches’ coven you’ve imagined, the crazed, naked bacchanals who tear apart the bodies of those who get in their way, who sit like spiders at the centers of orgiastic witch-cults populated by the unwitting and the lonely. Their thinkers and mouthpieces might affect etiquette in some quarters, but have somehow more energy than the theologians of the Sanctified or the boardroom manipulators of the Invictus. They are the ebullient academic occultists and the old-fashioned coven leaders who give the covenant an eloquent, seductive voice. The members of the Circle of the Crone might call themselves pagan. These are the vampires who see the Curse as anything but — as a blessing bestowed upon the strong, the survivor. They are a part of nature. They are monsters because it is the way of things. The Circle’s component movements range from old to new, from ancient blood-cults to post-modern feminist magick societies. Within the covenant, secrets and magics are shared freely, but outsiders are kept forever in the dark. None of them are human religions, or owes much to human mysticisms; every one is a dark mirror of living superstition. In the few, brief centuries since the Circle’s founding, the Crone’s Acolytes, the self-styled Army of the Bitch-Mother, have created a chaotic, freely contradictory synthesis of belief, and with it, a roughly defined system of blood-magic that has spread like a virus across the Western world. ---- Nidial leads the Circle as its Hierophant and the eldest of them. His knowledge of Cruac is immense and he knows many lost rituals, making his list of prospective apprentices a long one. In a city the size of Paradi, it's impossible for him to be everywhere at once... isn't it?... and he has several Vala, called //Sacerdos'// ("offerers of sacrifice"), who serve as spiritual heads to local Circle sects. The Circle was relatively unchanged in the years before and after Van Dorn's coupe. Nidial was too powerful to be removed and so remains a High Primogen. The covenant's goals are less political and more mystical. There are underpinnings to the city which they seek to unravel. Certain places in Paradi respond better to Cruac than others, spots where magic flows more freely. Let the others play at power; the Circle is on the verge of a greatness. For now, the Circle has an interest in maintaining the status quo, which makes them nominal allies to the current regime. Nidial and Van Dorn hold no love for one another but the elder Acolyte is too personally powerful and too connected to ignore. At present, the Circle works to understand the meaning behind the re-emergence of the uratha, as several of the sites where Cruac works more freely have become contested by shapeshifters.