18th Dynasty of the old Egyptian kingdom. The high priest of Amon, Heptat discovers his wife's forbidden love for the humble handworker Onophis. She and Onophis had this thing going now for months, and his fury knows no bounds. Onophis flees this rage, but is eventually captured in Abydos.
He is taken to the temple in Thebes, where he is offered to the god on the lake of Moet. Heptat's wife (it is strange that we don't know her name) asked the gods for their grace. Thereupon the soul, ba, of Onophis would be bound to an insignificant scroll that would serve as ka. As long as this scroll existd, their love would be eternal, even when the whole of the Egyptian faith and culture would be gone.
It is this object that Lucius Carrinthe has to steal from an exposition in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden. It is there since a couple of weeks, and it is making everybody in the building pretty nervous. Whatever happened in the long ages since the 18th dynasty, it transformed the piece of papyrus. Everbody was glad when it was stolen one evening in the year 2000.
Lucius Carrinthe got the order to steal it from Mukhtar Bey, although he only met the prince of Cairo after the deed. Lucius won a great amount of money with it, but he also got stuck with the spirit of Onophis. Right after the theft, this spirit was proving to be a major pain in the ass. Later, Lucius' problem with the spirit lessened, and he almost learned to deal with it.
One who did not forget about it was Kementiri. She is old enough to have known the mortal Onophis and perhaps did. It is not important. What is, is that she learned that this spirit could be instrumental in a ritual called "The Spell of Life". Using this spell, she hoped to regain her own mortal lover from long ago. So Kementiri forced the prince of Cairo to get the object for her.
But when Kementiri tried the ritual, it didn't work. It took some time, but she found out the spirit was gone. Her wrath was directed at the poor prince of Cairo, even while he had only been a middleman. Mukhtar Bey again was forced to do her bidding, and arranged for the Tremere to do his work.
The Coterie of Lucius meanwhile got their own problem, with the back cathedral in the midst of their city. It was radiating something that could harm vampires, and perhaps created a terrible blood disease. So they asked their old Tremere companion Franceska for help.
For Helena van Zolden, chantry Regent of Utrecht, everything fell into place. She could bind an unruly Tremere Ancilla to her by giving him creation rights, she would then offer this newly embraced Tremere to the ritual she got from Peter Dorfman, thereby securing a position in a much wanted mystical area in Eastern Europe, and she would help Peter Dorfman in getting rid of an influence that was probably bad for all. The downside was that the ritual itself looked thoroughly infernal. Probably best to let Franceska deal with those matters.
The spirit of Onophis proved stronger however. Stronger than the combined mystic forces available to the ritual, spirits who had been at that place for centuries. Onophis prevailed and attached himself even stronger to Lucius. Unfortunately, this also meant something else had to go. Why, or how it happened, no one knows, but the end result is that reality itself was changed. The members of the Coterie, together with the sacrificed Tremere Mathilda, were sent back in time. They awakened in the same cathedral, only almost 600 years earlier.
