"Who wants to live forever when love must die?"

~ Freddie Mercury ~

Few people look forward to the infirmities of old age and fewer still to death. For ordinary humans, life has an inevitable end. Today, a few lucky individuals live to be 90 or even potentially a decade longer than that. However, even the healthiest and the luckiest realize they have little chance of seeing their hundredth birthday. No amount of effort, money, prayer or dedication can alter the inevitability of death. Worse yet, the dubious reward for reaching an advanced age is age itself, which strips even the keenest minds and the finest bodies of their prowess well before death finishes the job.

Dreading this inevitable decline and end, people have for many thousands of years dreamed of extending their lives and eliminating the inevitability of aging and death. Throughout history we have many examples of people who attempted to obtain some form of physical immortality, from kings and sages in ancient China who drank exotic potions containing mercury, to wealthy residents of the modern first world who freeze themselves in the hope of future resurrection. The quest for immortality is ultimately the quest for life itself.

Some dream of being able to evade death's cold grip forever. The most obvious way to obtain more life is to take it from others. All of us kill to live; our survival depends upon the deaths of countless plants and animals. However, in legends and stories, gaining a longer lifespan often requires the death of other humans. There are many ways to achieve this, but the end result is the same: bodies in shallow graves or souls consigned to whatever afterlife might exist, their lives taken and used by another.

Others sought to transcend mortality by transcending their humanity or by making deals with inhuman powers. There are many tales of immortality and most are cautionary. Of course, it's also easy to argue that these stories are only cautionary tales because most people would like to be immortal. In stories we envy those who have a chance at attaining this goal, and thus must demand from them some terrible price. When considering immortality, it's worth considering both how one might attain this state and also what a person might do if they became immortal. Immortality is not merely an end in and of itself; it's a new way of life — one potentially without end. What might that new way of life mean?

What could someone do with eternity? For those who must work to maintain their immortality, their long life might well be little more than a series of desperate attempts to remain immortal. Others could easily lose themselves in the daily distractions that life presents to us all. However, for some dedicated or obsessed individuals, immortality might allow them to focus their efforts and their being to a truly inhuman degree. What might pursuing a career or a consuming passion for a century or even a millennia do to someone? Would no longer facing the inevitable threat of mortality make someone pursue their goals with more or less drive and passion?

Now consider the life of immortals in a world of mortals. All around them, most people age and die while the immortals continue on living, potentially forever. After a few centuries of watching those around you age and die, would you value the precious few years of mortal life more or less? Consider how valuable and how potentially troubling the company of other immortals might be. An immortal could share the truths of her existence with other immortals, but she would also know that these same people would know and gossip about her secrets for centuries to come. For someone who has lived centuries and could reasonably expect many more, mortal friends and lovers could provide either a few decades of treasured closeness or unending sadness at the knowledge of their inevitable decline. Of course, immortals who must kill mortals to remain immortal might soon regard mortals as nothing more than prey.

World of Darkness: Immortals examines various paths to immortality, or at least longer lives, as well as the costs of attempting to become immortal. The unfortunate truth is that in the World of Darkness, achieving immortality or at least extended life and youth is possible, but it is never easy and there is always a significant price attached. The easiest methods turn the individual using them into a murderous monster. Other, stranger methods exist, but all of them either involve stealing the lives of others or becoming something other than human.

One example, a tale of caution, can be found in the stories of The Avalon HouseWardrobe: Somewhere in a flat in Milan overlooking the Duomo di Milano is the center of a minor but influential fashion house sometimes called the Avalon House. There, one of fashion's best-kept secrets lives, surrounded by a personal stable of muses.

To step through the door into the flat one might think they've wandered into Olympus, the place decorated in post-modern Greco Roman perfection, complete with a dozen beautiful women in luxurious dresses, lounging listless and lovely everywhere. These beautiful women are every bit the model stereotype, vapid and distant. They also seem so high on drugs that they appear utterly incapable of even feeding themselves. That is, of course, because they are incapable of feeding themselves; the models of the Avalon House are simply pretty shells, a wardrobe of skins the magicians behind the fashion house use to maintain their network of information, wealth and debauchery.

The masters of Avalon, as they colloquially refer to themselves, are a varied bunch loosely tied to one mentor who perfected the rituals required to keep a human wardrobe, but that was centuries ago and the old bastard is likely dead. Largely these days, the masters of the house are members of a small self-congratulating coven that gather to out do one another and engage in the occasional orgy. They'd be laughable if they weren't so well connected, and of course, happy to kill.

No one knows what possessed Franco Italioni to start studying a way to magically take over the body of another, but what those who knew Franco are sure of is it had to do with a woman.

In a kinder version of the story, Franco had married an older woman out of love instead of lust and as the years began to ravage her body and her mind but not her spirit, he started his research to find a means to achieve not immortality, but simply a few more good years with his beloved. He found no good way to repair the damage to her body, however, and realized the only way was to get her a new one. His spells were only effective for a short period, and then the body's original inhabitant would get it back and force his poor wife back into her decaying prison of flesh.

That's where the story takes a darker turn. Apparently he knew the easiest way to complete the swap was to hollow out a body of its soul completely. However, magic is a fickle thing and the proposition was a more difficult one than he had first imagined, all the while his beloved grew older and older and closer to death.

Finally, he had an epiphany, a way to weaken the soul of a person through sympathetic magic so that in effect, the soul died leaving nothing left of the person. He devised a method using his knowledge of amulet crafting to make a token that would grant its wearer some small gift, good luck or beauty, but all the while slowly stripped away her very soul. The story goes that on the eve of his greatest accomplishment, when he had finally found a beautiful young woman and used his black arts to turn her into nothing but a lightly breathing doll, his beloved wife dropped dead making all Franco's efforts tragically for naught. Some say the Devil came for Franco himself and dragged him off to Hell where he would suffer the greatest punishment possible, an eternity in Hell knowing he'd be without his wife who waited for him in a Heaven he would never reach.

In his laborious studies, he'd taken on three or four apprentices who carried on his perfected arts, using his amulet-making and body-swapping methods for their own ends, ends that had not even a glimmer of foundation in good as Franco's once had.

These black magicians used their ability to escape death in the bodies of the young. Then they made their way into the upper echelons of Italian and indeed European society. They kept their numbers small and, of course, their secrets are carefully guarded, with all eyes on them forever.

Like Franco, the modern House of Avalon primarily deals in amulet making. While most are simply meaningless trinkets only thought to bring good luck, they circulate among some of the richest and most successful people of the world as a private and little recognized status symbol with all the power and legitimacy of a rabbit's foot.

Then again, some rabbits actually are lucky little bastards, and some small numbers of the amulets, reserved for very special clients, have tiny magical gifts worked into their odd Etruscan designs. On occasion, a rare new face in the world of fashion, not connected yet nor well received, will find themselves granted one of these baubles with no explanation. Indeed, occasionally an agent of the House of Avalon will give the amulets to nobodies based entirely on odd combinations of requirements with no other provocation at all.

It is this third type of amulet that is the guts of Avalon's wardrobe. Cursed far more deeply than they are blessed, like Franco, the masters of Avalon use these sympathetic ties to bait and ultimately destroy the souls of the recipient.

The next logical question then, is what is it the House of Avalon does with these living zombies? They can be moved about and will breathe and respond to simple stimuli, but are so listless that they cannot follow simple commands and must be force fed most of the time unless they are actively starving, and even then, they will barely maintain themselves.

The purpose of these shells varies depending on the magician who made them. On many occasions, a wealthy and despicable patron creates them on request. A certain Madam Colette Tremain has created her own select wardrobe of empty women so that she can change bodies the way the rest of us might change clothing.

Some say that Hugo Marchiani, another master of the House, is a pimp who keeps a few of these shells around for special clients with discerning tastes. Whether this is to give the client the opportunity to push the bounds of sexuality on these shells or in them is unclear.

A master who goes only by Umbra works as the House's chief information broker and uses a series of shells he or she has created to infiltrate the parties, homes, and businesses of the well to do either for blackmail later or to perform any manner of espionage.

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