The Story Of Jacob. Act Two.

Jacob was born 2016 years ago. He was a good man. He was a farmer. He lived in an arid but fertile river valley in what we would now call Northern Africa. He farmed and his children farmed and he owned vast tracts of land. In times of prosperity he provided many jobs and in times of famine he provided food inexpensively or for free to those in need.

In the year that we would now call 29 AD Jacob was 45, which was considered a long and healthy lifespan in those days, and he was going to die. Jacob's family and friends and loved ones heard of a traveling mystic of a sort, a so-called prophet who, it was said, had made a blind man see and a deaf man hear; who had healed the lame and cured lepers. And they sought the Man out and offered him his greatest challenge. For Jacob was not sick, he was old, he was dying of age, dying of having lived. He was dying of dying.

The Man came but arrived too late - when He arrived at the home of Jacob, Jacob was dead. But the Man placed His hands on Jacobs brow and, though He was alone, asked His Father to help. And Jacob opened his eyes and was alive.

And Jacob lived for many years. And his children grew old and died. And his grandchildren - and their children, and their grandchildren, grew old and died while Jacob lived. For Jacob had been cured of Death.

Then the time of a great plague came and Jacob's family and his friends and his village died. Jacob did not die and he traveled from village to village, not knowing that he was carrying and spreading the plague wherever he went, and he killed many people.

Jacob went out into the hot desert and lay down in the sun to die and day followed day after day and he grew dry and the bacteria that carried the plague died upon and within him, but he did not die. Eventually he rose up and, dry and shriveled and brittle as parchment, he staggered out of the desert, alive.

Years and decades and scores of years and centuries passed. Jacob made friends and they grew old and died the way the crops he had planted as seeds had grown unto the harvest. He met women and grew to love them and they bore him children who grew old and died as unto the seeds that grew orchards of trees and bore fruit. As Jacob had grown so old that he saw trees he had planted grow old and topple dead, so he saw his families spring up and fall by the wayside.

In despair Jacob became a reculsive hermit and lived in a cave and grew mad. And then grew serene and centered and went back down the mountain to re-enter society. He had realized that if he traveled and never formed liasons he would not have to watch anyone he cared for grow old before his eyes.

In the 16th century he was traveling with a gypsy troupe in a part of Northern Europe that would become Slovakia. One night he was attacked by a beast. Loup Garou - a creature with the feral cunning eyes and sharp ears and course fur and fangs and claws of a wolf but the form of a man. Jacob was torn about the neck and shoulders and lay dead with a gallon of his blood on the ground. but his eyes opened and he lived. And after that every month at the time of the full moon he hungered and prowled and hunted... and ate.

And in the 17th century Jacob was hunting one moonlit night in a place near Romania and a shadow swooped down and overtook him and, though his strength was great when he was taken with the hunger of the beast, he was wrestled to the group by the creature - a wampyr - which tore open his throat and drank deeply of his blood and left him for dead.

And over the next century that fiend, a wampyr who had drunk of the blood of a loup garou with the curse of Divine Immortality, became the prince of the Wampyr, the greatest threat mankind had faced. But Jacob, the Immortal, a Loup Garou whose blood coursed with the thirst of the Wampyr, was the Prince's greatest foe and his eventual downfall.