Ormonde
Count Ormonde is Setite of 9th generation who was Embraced in 1599.
Background
Ormonde and his sire first came upon one another in the muted half-light of the marketplace. It was scant moments before down in Bordeaux. He was unloading a table from which he was about to barter his family’s crops, as she was concluding an ill-timed errand that necessitated her frantic flight to her curtained carriage. No words were exchanged only a momentary exchange of glances.
Jean–Michael went on with his day’s duties and returned that night to his wife and children. His wife was beyond her years already. Her belly swollen with their fourth child. Something, however, had changed in him. He couldn’t verbally say what, but he could not dismiss from his head or heart the apparition he had beheld that early morning. Was it love at first sight? Sorcery all women share? Or simply the persistent regrets one has of a life not lived?
What the peasant did not – could not – have known was that at that very moment, secreted away from the light, Lady Clea Auguste d’Holford was similarly haunted. She knew much about the snares and strategies through which a man’s heart may be won and wasted; what was it about this one? Unbroken spirit? A game she had not yet plated to completion? A Quality she no longer possessed?
As soon as Lady d’Holford decided to make him hers she found him searching the dusk-lit plaza for some sign of her presence and bearing a pathetic bouquet of wildflowers. He had left his family, his fields, his will to search for her and he never once looked back. And thought it took years, far more the Lady d’Holford would have spent on any other mortal, he broke. He entered immortality on his knees after being softened by a life of excess and opulence, laden with baubles, finery and half a dozen venereal diseases. His lifeblood seeped away with any trace of the man Jean–Michel d’Ormonde had been.
In the modern nights, Count Ormonde lives a transient, solitary existence, flitting from city to city in search of diversion and the Next Big Party. Lady d’Holford, full of disgust, discarded him like old trash not long after his Embrace. Count Ormonde is frequently mistaken for a Toreador, Ventrue, or even Lasombra, and thus he passed through Camarilla and Sabbat territory unchallenged. His Charm and good looks, along with a remarkable tendency toward discretion over valor, have seen him through several tight spots over the centuries.
Appearance
Ormonde is a slender man whose slight build sometimes lends the illusion of height to his otherwise unimpressive stature. In life, he was cheerfully handsome, a low-born farm boy who had missed the turn to beauty by inches, but his sire’s cruel kiss has put all that behind him forever. Jean-Michel’s features are delicate, almost feminine, at once studiously reserved and dangerously expressive. The Count sports a neatly trimmed goatee, wears his dark, lustrous hair loose past his shoulders (sometimes gently gathered with ribbon or tied up in elaborate marquis-style plaits, as best befits the occasion) and keeps a stylish pair of tinted glasses close at hand. Even in casual company, his raiment is striking and carefully chosen for effect.
Character Sheet
Gallery
Count Ormonde in Children of the Night
Count Ormonde VTES card