Cybele refers to two powerful methuselahs, one Malkavian and one Baali – who might have been the same person. While the Malkavian Cybele was the sire of the infamous Red List anathema known as Petaniqua, the Baali Cybele was the Cainite who devised the ritual that bound Troile and Moloch beneath the salted earth of Carthage.
Cybele's past is surrounded by mystery. There is a distinct possibility that both Cybeles refer to the same person – a dark creature whose fury and corruption have shaped both clans and Cainites in general. Each account his its own lore about the methuselah.
Malkavian Lore
Cybele was Malkavian methuselah who claimed to be a goddess of fertility to the people of ancient Greece. Furious and frenzied, the mystery Cult of Cybele brought power to women that was stolen from men – sacrifices of both beasts and men were often by castration. At the time, Malkavian elders fought bitterly over the lands of Greece, and the Cult of Cybele was forced into the hinterlands.
When Philip II of Macedon began his conquest of Greece he made a political marriage to Polyxena, the princess of Epirus. To the Cult of Cybele, however, she was known by her cult name Myrtale, and her elevation to Philip's queen gave Cybele enormous influence. She would become the mother of Alexander the Great and one of the most powerful woman of the ancient world. Cybele Embraced her, and in time she would be known as Petaniqua.
Cybele refused to let her childe Embrace her son, and when Alexander the Great died Petaniqua went to a conclave of thirteen True Brujah in Delphi. After swearing her allegiance they bid her to deliver a talisman to Asia Minor. When she returned she found her sire's body burnt to a husk by the sun and the True Brujah gone.
Baali Lore
The creature known as Cybele was Embraced in the darkest corridors of the Knossos' Labyrinth, the greatest Baali fortress of its time. She was a childe of Nergal, who had proclaimed himself "Shaitan". When the Second Baali War ended with the eruption of Mount Thera, Cybele was one of the few Baali to escape. Her fellow Baali, Moloch, had betrayed them, and her well of hatred for him and his progeny was bottomless.
1,400 years later Cybele reappeared and disguised her bloodline so she could support the Roman Ventrue's war of annihilation against Carthage. In that Phoenician city, Troile and Moloch had attempted to create a Cainite paradise to rival the Second City. It was Cybele's ritual that forever bound the two beneath the ashes and salted earth of Carthage. Afterward she disappeared again, supposedly heading back to Crete and the ruins of Knossos.
Rumors say that Cybele appeared one last time a thousand years later, at the Iblii-al-Akbar organ pit in Chorazin, to help Annazir and other Baali curse the Assamites with a terrible blood thirst. Cybele claimed to be a servant of Namtaru, like her sire. If she spoke truth, she may have found the demon in the broken Labyrinth of Knossos and taken one of its names, becoming Decani.
Speculation
Though drastically different, some of the two histories can be reconciled. An Apostate is a Cainite whose vitae has been changed from that of her original clan to that of the Baali. Cybele may have been Embraced as a Malkavian, but she willingly became part of the Baali bloodline. In such a situation, Nergal would be her sire in the sense that he led her to become an Apostate.
Furthermore, Cybele's childe, Petaniqua, has also been portrayed as both Malkavian and Baali. The destruction of Knossos happened 1,200 years before the birth of Alexander the Great, so both histories could be true, at least until the Embrace of Olympias, later known as Petaniqua. Cybele's childe found her sire betrayed by the "True Brujah" and burnt to ash. Cybele may have faked her death, but if so she remained strangely prominent, as 200 years later she helped the Roman Ventrue destroy Carthage in order to gain vengeance over Moloch.
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