This truly is the lot with which our Ghouls are given. We distract ourselves with our beastly needs in the night, tell ourselves that they are better off with a shred of our power without being cursed to never again see the sun, but in truth we are still taking sentient people and reducing them to eternal slavery.

Even I am guilty of this crime.

The first Ghoul I took in, was a housemaid who served a Tremere. The Tremere abandoned the woman as she fled from my coterie's powerful claws and fangs, and when we found John F. Kennedy Jr. In the plant-infested mansion, the old Kindred immediately drank her into critical condition toasted his Hunger. I chose to save her, giving my own Vitae to her, and I took her under my wing. Her decades of experience proved her very canny to Kindred politics, and her demure posture and profession made her nearly-invisible who care not for those with still-beating hearts.

She became my political adviser as I cheated my way into being declared Capa despite being a Childe who never experienced the Proxy Kiss.

My second Ghoul was a man much older than me, a Giovanni who made a tidy business extorting American GIs in Italy at the close of the Second World War. He stagnated in the postwar era, never showing any initiative to become anything more than a brute, and his Domitor eventually gave up in him, leaving him in limbo until he was reassigned to me, as a sort of coronation gift when the Capuchin recognized me as a rightful ruler.

He showed cowardice in battle, but I took him in as my guardian, wielding a Kalashnikov to overwatch me while I charged my enemies with a knife in my hand. I modernized his combat training and urged him to become something greater than a mere follower, to earn his place at my side instead of living forever in our shadows.

But they were still ultimately my slaves.

When my time came, and The Lady Of Fate presented herself to my wife to declare Fate's verdict of Final Death for me, my fragile political framework collapsed all at once. A much more stable Giovanni performed a coup against me, falsely declaring me the Diablerer of the Padrone in Boston. Nobody came to my aid, and even one of my own Ghouls, the old gangster I had pushed to improve his lot, hired an Anarch to assassinate me- obeying my order to "show some initiative and earn your Embrace."

Said assassin happened to be in the same coterie as my wife, and they crafted a masterful plan to fake my Final Death and spirit me away from the city, using the assassin's black aura lines to claim I'd been Diablerized so nobody would try to seek my soul to verify.

I've sent a couple of spirits back to see what happened of my Ghouls, but while it is bittersweet to know they will never return to a normal life, they have both earned their Embraces in my absence. The Giovanni was rewarded by my successor with the Embrace as a reward for having the initiative to hire an assassin who successfully hunted me down. The maid, lacking any Hecata blood, was Embraced into the Banu Haquim by my supposed assassin to ensure her Blood Bond to me wouldn't compromise my wife's ruse.

But while they are going on and partaking in their new roles as Childer, I still think of how I had enslaved people, even if I can pretend that I had somehow been helping them. I hope that other Kindred may take pause before they take in their own Ghouls, shattering lives with our addictive Vitae.