You would think being turned into a creature of the night would change his life. It should give him opportunity and possibility that hadn’t existed in the past. The punishment should be at an end. No. Nothing ended up changing. He was still alone. After learning the ropes of the society he’d been brought into, which were incredibly simple and full of loopholes, he found that he was still poor. He was still being punished for something that he had done that he could not fathom. He was still filled with these feelings that refused to be expressed in normal modes of speech, normal modes of writing. That, he discovered later, was why he had been given this curse. His Sire considered his poetry revolutionary. What his sire didn’t know was that the very act of making him what he was, making him eternal, had frozen his gift, his creativity, in the instant that he was Embraced. The revolutionary nature was gone, as beat poetry was beginning to spread worldwide. His Sire had failed in Embracing him. So his new life, his life as a Kindred, was already hollow and empty.

Rose, he would discover, was also his Sire’s Childe. Joshua’s sister, in a way. He never discovered why she had warned him away from Lord Welcomb (as if he’d had a chance), and she never deigned to tell him. She, too, had been given the curse because of “revolutionary art.” From what he’d been told, and had gathered from tomes and from his brothers and sisters in London, was that his Clan, the Brujah, were warrior-poets. The knowledge-seekers, and the deliverers of rage-filled justice. He didn’t feel like a Brujah at all. And as his knowledge of his kind increased, he found the Clan he should have been with. Rose, as well. The Toreador. They were the artists and the social sharks of the Camarilla. They were who Joshua most admired. So he emulated them. He wrote his poetry, failing time and time again to create something new. He saw the beautiful sculpture and paintings of the Toreador, and came home and wrote night after night. Trash. Rubbish. Putrid. Clumsy. Not one word was inspired. Not one word was beautiful. They were as empty and as hollow as his new life.