This lasted for about seventy or eighty years. Joshua’s search for his creativity, his fire, never ceased. He returned to his haven one night, after spending his evening in a coffee shop, snapping to the almost-extinct beat poets. Frustration and anger racked him, tortured him, as it always did. He looked up to his writing table to see his oil lamp burning (a danger to his current life, but if he was being punished, he might as well tempt the end of the punishment) and the Queen of the Harpies sitting in his seat. She had taken ten or twenty of the crumpled pages of his work and had spread them out on his table. She seemed to be enraptured, as this Clan so often was when looking at something beautiful. Joshua politely cleared his throat, as this was one of the most catty and easily-insulted Kindred in London. She blinked and looked up. “Ah. Joshua. It’s about time you got back. Your poetry is passable. I will exhibit these at the next Elysium, which will be put on by my Clan. You will be introduced in your new station, as Harpy, then. You have a month to prepare. You will be representing your Clan and your soul at this meeting. I expect a new piece, better than these, and I expect you to read it in front of all those gathered. And I expect it to cause a stir. Do you understand?”

Joshua’s only response was a slight nod of his head. Then the Queen of the Harpies stood up, and floated out of his flat. A work. That would cause a stir. Something creative, entirely blasphemous, and that would upstage every single Toreador present. But his block whatever it was that had frozen his creativity, made it static, that would have to be defeated to complete a work of this type and magnitude. He chewed on the back of a ball point pen, as he had begun to do to emulate the poets of this age. There was only that static hold, that frozen cage wrapped around his soul, his emotions, and his creativity that held him back from accomplishing anything that would get him respect and praise. Slowly, an idea creeped up his spine, and swept across and through his mind. He put the pen to paper, and did not stop until the sun rose and forced him to sleep.

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.