Glistening white pieces formed the very walls of the Temple of Lanka, so tightly packed that a visitor might mistake them for stone, but the raksha general Thratri knew them for what they were, thousands of teeth. No longer did their gruesome presence give her even the slightest of chills and indeed she took especial thrill to see that today the sacrifices had begun again. Once again, she descended into the depths of the temple to carry out her continuing masquerade. Sometimes she found confused sacrifices there, awaiting the tender mercies of her voracious appetite. Other times strange visions cried out to her for her interpretation. Today, however, if day could be said to happen in the 1000 Hells of the Yomi Kings, things seemed different. A reverence akin to holy worship and bowel-slackening fear all at once came upon her. "Greetings, Lord, I see you have returned"
"Ah, general, but of course no one else knows I ever left, I trust?" Ravana, Yomi King of the Rakshas had returned and Thratri grew fearful. Would he see past the palace rumors of her rulership in his supposed indisposure? And the intensity of the waves of hunger and smoking flesh that seemed to emanate from the demon king awakened deathly desires and terrors she had not felt since the first descent into the Yomi realms. She stood aside in earnest as the first of the sacrifices for the first time in a thousand years actually reached her lord instead of the wanton beasts of nightmare she fed in his absence. Even the most dreadful of the shimmering visions seemed reluctant to even beg for the slightest morsel given the obvious desparate, fiery hunger of their master. Ravana had come home, and he could not possibly accept his failure for his own. Even in the tropical blood-scented heat, Thratri shivered. . .
This year Justin Achilli, who is actually an indredible developer, for whom I bear a lot of respect, struck Vampire with a fury of change unmatched since Andrew Greenberg. Luckily, unlike Greenberg, Justin has been making changes that fit the orginal theme of Vampire and doing wonders for the rebuilding of the sects and so forth into reflections of the monstrous nature of the Kindred.
In this case, however, we do not know where he is going with the final results, but as of DragonCon, prior to my own employment with White Wolf, it became clear that the reference to "typhoon Justin", a tropical storm that strikes Calcutta, found in a throwaway joke in Clan Novel Setite was actually pretty serious. With the release of the Time of Thin Blood, the Ravnos were very nearly wiped from the face of the planet. My longterm thought had always been that the Ravnos were ruled by a creature perhaps very similar to the Daione Sidhe of legend, but I realized that I had always ignored their eastern origins. The Vampire Revised description of this drives this point home, and suddenly I noticed a reference in Kindred of the East. A sinister idea formed in my head.
What if the Ravnos "antediluvian' is the demon king Ravana come to the Sixth World? This would sort of satisfy the Ravnos belief that their founder created himself, as the demon king would have essentially come to the sixth world and stolen chi from one of the 2nd generation vampires to create himself a powerful body from which to try to conquer the west..... now, slain, he is forced to return to the 1000 Hells, specifically to his own, and the rakshasa once again find their leader returned from the 6th world.... the few surviving Ravnos either join with the newly reorganized rakshasa (akuma eastern vampires) or flee bearing tales of terrible things. Some might even escape to other fragmented mythical factions of the clan, whose ancients might even provide some protection, assuming they even survived the Yomi king's deadly curse and destruction. (This is probably not making sense to you if you have not read The Time of Thin Blood; suffice it to say that product details the very destruction of one of the Antediluvians. The first official death that has been made crystal clear to date.)
For those of you familiar with the Path of Paradox, suddenly you may make sense of it. The Yomi demon king, Ravana, sought a way to recover the power he had lost in the Hells, and sought to become King of the Middle Kingdom, to ascend as the prophesied demon king of the 6th age. He, therefore, slipped into the material world, and through some trickery, stole the blood of one of the 2nd generation of Kindred, allegedly children of Caine. With this mighty Chi, he forged a clan of western vampires to supplement the service of his rakshas and akuma servitors. Some travelled so far that the Yomi king's influence fell astray, and they forged beliefs of his karmic nature that almost could have been positive. The power of Ravana grew, fed with the machinations of beings as diverse and misled as the child Nefertiti of Set (see Berlin by Night) and the resurgence of the Daoine Sidhe who also found themselves strangely attracted to the wild children of the Ravnos clan. Ravana even encouraged the nuclear proliferation of India and Pakistan. Ironically this was to prove his undoing, and yet his possible future.
In 1999, various factions met to try to put down the recently awakened Yomi king in his earthly incarnation as one of the Antediluvian vampire-gods. In the end, the final solution of atomic obliteration rained down upon the demonic god's head. The body of Ravana perished in the mighty explosion. However, in the ways of the Yomi kings, the misery and devastation wrought by the release of the poisonous radiations may only serve to further empower his quests for power in the Yomi Hells. And though his western vampiric children have been reduced to a mere 100, even to this night they most assuredly seek to rebuild their clan, and meanwhile his akuma and raksha servants have found newly spawned fervor. For though Ravnos may appear dead, the Yomi demon king Ravana has come home, the souls of hundreds of newly dead kindred feed his kingdom and Hell is about to break loose.