They’ve always been here.

Ever since humanity learned to be afraid of the dark, it has been plagued by shadow beings jealously hungering for life. The Kindred hear stories of corpses clawing their way out of graves, tearing flesh and thirsting for blood; and the younger and more foolish among them imagine that they’re stories about draugr, or revenants, or debased Kindred. The Kindred are the only true vampires. The fiends, the corpse-stealing smoke-shadows, don’t exist.

Those Kindred are wrong. And if the Strix ever hear them voice such opinions, they might just make an example of them.

The Strix are counterparts, shadows, and — according to old legends from the nights of the Camarilla — relatives of the Kindred. Where vampires are people brought back from death by the power of the Embrace, hungering for blood as their connection to Humanity fades, the Strix were never human. Shades of darkness and omens of doom, they steal life without needing the medium of blood, and force their shadowy forms into the bodies of the dead to experience the feelings of flesh. They are the monstrous vampires of legend, the ones with no Humanity but not given over to the Beast’s insanity. The Strix are coldly, calculatingly evil. They hunger for the life they’ve never known, and hate the living for having it. They see the Kindred — like them, but masquerading as human — as perversions in need of a harsh lesson in inhumanity.

The Strix embody themselves in corpses.

The Kindred are corpses.

In some cities, the Strix are nothing but legend and myth. Tales told by nomads and Gangrel with as much veracity as any other tale of a boogeyman out there in the dark. The Kindred in Paradi City have no such luxury. Rumors and whispers abound of eyes shining in the dark and shadowed wings flying overhead. From High to Lower, no level of the city is safe from the Birds of Dis.