Just over a decade ago, a force of Crusaders from Venice - despite the threats of excommunication - subjected the greatest city in the world to every horror imaginable by man. For three days, men from the length and breadth of western Europe who had dedicated themselves to God and the reclamation of the Holy Land chose instead to perform every sort of sin within the walls of Constantinople, raping, pillaging and looting their way through the city and carrying off untold riches…
Now, eleven years later, Emperor Henry I sits on the throne of the Latin Empire, a pale shadow of the once-great Empire of Rome that it apes, while the true Emperor of Constantinople sits in exile in Nicea, or Trebizond, or Thessalonica, or Eprius, depending on who one asks.
The Tribunal of Thebes, long one of the strongest Tribunals in the Order of Hermes, is likewise reeling in the wake of this massacre. The dominion of House Jerbiton, once a cornerstone of the Tribunal's politics, has been crushed now that the House's great city of Constantinople is fallen and enemies, allies and vassals alike all move to find purchase in the slippery political soil. Meanwhile, the ancient regio of Faerie and Magic that once were home to the gods of ancient Greece have begun once more to stir, and those deities awaken into an age that knows them not, while the streets of the world's greatest and most devout city have become a battlefield, as the Divine and Infernal clash in Constantinople. Gods and monsters, demons and angels, all stalk the lands of the once-great Eastern Empire alongside dangers of a more prosaic sort, and into this hotbed of mortal politics and supernatural conflict is thrust a young Covenant, seeking its fortune in a land in chaos…
