The mortal who would eventually become Sascha Vykos was born in 976 AD in what eventually would be known as Transylvania in Romania, the oldest child of a minor noble/petty royal family. Myca (as they were known back then) was a clever, gifted child, who excelled at everything they were taught, easily living up to the high expectations that their father had of his heir.  Until, that is, they took ill in early adolescence, and on top of their strange illness started having visions and hearing angels talk to them.  No physician or wise woman could cure them - in fact, they were only getting more sick as time went by - until, believing that Myca’s illness was due to sorcery and desperate for a cure, their family consulted a wizard of the Order of Hermes for help.

As it turned out, Myca’s illness was caused by magic: namely, their own uncontrolled powers, as they had unknowingly Awakened as a mage.  Relieved to have an answer, though saddened to lose his heir, their father sent them with the Hermetic wizard for training. Myca was not consulted in this decision, merely instructed to pack their things, and was resentful and reluctant at first until they actually arrived at Ceoris, the chantry of House Tremere. Once they began learning magic, however, and realized that the potential power they could wield as a mage far outstripped what they would have had as simply ruler of their family’s petty princedom, Myca’s resentment and resistance mostly faded.  Mostly.

Myca took to learning magic as easily and well as they had learned their childhood lessons, and advanced to journeyman magus fairly rapidly, leaving apprenticeship by their early twenties. Promotions in House Tremere tended to be slow, even for the gifted, with apprentices remaining under their mentor’s care for years.  The combination of Myca’s gifts, what looked to be a continued rapid rise, + their political importance to House Tremere due to their family connections utterly incensed Goratrix, a senior magus, who was really jealous.  Really, really, really jealous, and who decided to get rid of his young rival permanently...by betraying them, while Myca was away from Ceoris, to the Tzimisce vampires whose domains they would have to travel through in order to come back to the chantry.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) for Myca, Goratrix’s efforts backfired. While they were captured by an angry Tzimisce intending on torturing an upstart mage to death for trespassing,  the vampire’s plans changed once they found out Myca was nobility from Transylvania...and worth Embracing, rather than just murdering.  However, Myca was instead Embraced by Symeon of Constantinople, descendant of the ancient Dracon, who had come north to Transylvania to carry on his grandsire’s blood feud: either way, Myca lost their powers as a mage with the death of their mortal body.

(Needless to say, once House Tremere also all ended up vampires in the not-too-distant future, Myca was not exactly happy. And resolved to claim in their own right the power of the blood magic that their former House had developed upon becoming vampires).
Afterward, Symeon took Myca back with him to Constantinople, whose vampiric society had been founded on the “Dream”, a high-minded utopic ideal created by three ancient vampires (and lovers). The Obertus Tzimisce, who lived in Constantinople and were a branch of the clan descended from the Dracon, were strange even by Tzimisce standards: their practices could best be described as Greek Orthodoxy mixed with Tzimisce Metamorphosist philosophy by way of an esoteric, ascetic, blood cult.

While Myca was used to to playing by the rules of others, the numerous restrictions that Gesu, head of the Obertus Order, placed on his descendants grated on their nerves. It didn’t help that while they adapted well to Byzantine customs and culture and had been Embraced into the Obertus, they were still considered somehow morally inferior due to their Transylvanian origins, suspiciously in common with the Carpathian branches of the clan.  Myca kept silent about their discontent and lack of belief, especially their lack of belief in their grandsire’s delusions of divinity, and to all appearances bowed gracefully to what their elders asked of them.

Behind their backs, however, it was a different story: while Myca had always been manipulative, self-serving, and somewhat amoral during their life, those tendencies only got worse during their unlife.  In addition to spending a great deal of time in the Library of the Forgotten, reading as much as they could get their hands on, and in the vampiric courts of Constantinople which only further honed their manipulative tendencies while also fulfilling whatever tasks Symeon set them with, they had a number of personal projects on the side. These personal projects included conducting forbidden studies of Vicissitude outside the very limited uses permitted by Gesu’s rules, joining the semi-secret “Dream Circle” solely out of desire to increase their thaumaturgical knowledge rather than any actual interest in enlightenment through dreams,  writing to fellow Tzimisce from back “home” who they were firmly instructed not to contact, collecting a group of fellow intellectuals within the city who shared their interests, and cleverly, systematically wringing every bit of information they could out of basically everyone they met, building a very wide network of contacts as they did so.

Unfortunately, the halcyon nights in Constantinople were not to last.  The Dream of Constantinople had always been unstable at its core, undercut by the collective personality disorders of its three ancient founders: Michael the Patriarch, Antonius, and the Dracon. After the final death of Antonius in 759, the Dream had begun to unravel along with what remained of Michael’s sanity, a process only accelerated by the self-imposed exile of the Dracon. Symeon and his brother-sire Gesu took shared leadership of the Obertus order, but strife between the brothers eroded their relationship - a division encouraged by Myca, who while loyal to their sire, really hated their grandsire.

By 1202, it became very clear that the situation could not stand for long as it was, between the disintegrating Dream and the disaster of mortal Byzantine politics culminating in the Latin crusaders laying siege to Constantinople, backed by the Inconnu, a sect of ancient vampires who held a grudge against the Dream for supplanting the power of Rome.. Myca secretly made preparations to leave the city and continued trying to break their sire’s relationship with his brother, knowing that Symeon would never leave as long as Gesu remained in the city - and Gesu himself had already made it clear that he would never leave.

Unknown to Myca, however, Symeon had his own plans to try to stave off the impending disaster for even a short time: as the departure of the Dracon had been what had precipitated Michael’s last decline, it was likely that only the Dracon could help slow down the inevitable- and finding the mysterious, mercurial ancient when he didn’t want to be found would have been impossible, necessitating a different solution on that problem. Symeon plotted together with Gregorius Dimities, another vampire who had been in the service of Michael the Patriarch, to reshape Myca both physically and mentally (albeit temporarily) into a false duplicate of the Dracon and sent them to Michael under the false pretense that they were his lover, returned at last, in the final nights of Constantinople.

Myca themself was not consulted in this decision, much less given a choice. Michael himself recognized that he had been sent a fake copy and that Myca Vykos was who what was beneath - but didn’t care. The ancient vampire had already had an eye on Myca for some time, encouraging their curiosity and hunger for knowledge: he recognized their similarities to their ancestor and wanted to make them into a (un)living record of Constantinople.  As a “reward” for spending these last nights at his side, Michael “gave” Myca his Dream, made them into its inheritor without their consent or knowledge by laying a compulsion on them that would last for hundreds of years.  On top of that, Symeon hid all those memories from his childe when Myca was returned to his custody, magically erasing and repressing them for the next several decades along with reversing the physical changes.

Within a relatively short time after Myca returned to themself, things went right to hell. In April of 1204, the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople: Myca, along with their sire, (barely) managed to flee the city by ship on the first night of the sack (perhaps predictably, Myca didn’t mourn their grandsire, who refused to leave and died when the crusaders set the monastery where the Obertus had made their haven on fire). For a time, the two of them traveled through the Balkans, staying with various Tzimisce lords who Myca had earlier bargained for sanctuary, including their longtime friend and correspondent, Velya the Flayer, until an opportunity presented itself.

An ambitious Ventrue lord, Jurgen of Magdeburg, pushed east in a bid to expand his territory: unfortunately, the Tzimisce voivode of voivodes, Vladimir Rustovitch, did not take kindly (as no Tzimisce did) to an upstart Ventrue pushing into his territory. Myca - knowing both that the war between the two sides would be costly and that Rustovitch, like many other Tzimisce lords, was already long-committed to war with the Tremere - stepped in, offering both sides a diplomatic solution (that, of course, benefitted the Obertus). Their solution? Create a buffer state between the two warlords that would be administered by a neutral party in the form of the Obertus order, with Symeon of Constantinople guaranteeing the treaty as head of the order. Neither Jurgen nor Rustovitch were blind to what actually Myca was proposing, but reluctantly conceded, agreeing to the tenuous peace and granting the Obertus order the landholdings in question, where a series of monasteries were established.

For the next two decades, Myca lived apart from their sire, in what amounted to nominal independence: while they continued to serve Symeon as his primary diplomat, were expected to travel to his court in Oradea if he had need of them as well as travel between different lords of their clan in order to strengthen diplomatic ties, and were (secretly) being spied on by their sire’s agents, it was still more physical independence than they’d had before, with the space and freedom to pursue some of their own interests as long as said interests did not conflict with the duty expected of them.

Among those interests was an exploration of the Road of Sin, a path of morality that emphasized self-knowledge, self-will, and sensual pleasure, and by nature a thorough rejection of the religious precepts that they were expected to follow as a member of the Obertus lineage.  Myca had already begun to reject those teachings while still living in Constantinople, and a chance discovery of a lost text in the Library of the Forgotten had led them to the teachings of the Road of Sin.  After they had fled to Transylvania, their old friend Velya had introduced them to Ilias cel Frumos, a fellow young Tzimisce and koldun Sinner-priest, to be tutored further in those teachings.
The two became lovers and companions, and Ilias began guiding Myca along the path to confront their self-doubts and the lingering questions and problems of identity that had always simply hung beneath the surface. Questions that Myca had never had the time or space to do more than simply accept, much less think about or try to put a name to, a slow process over the time that they lived together.  It was a fairly happy period in their unlife - but unfortunately, it didn’t last.

In 1232, Myca received a very puzzling “gift” from Jurgen of Magdeburg: a box containing the torpid body of Nikita of Sredetz, one of their clanmates and the Archbishop of Nod, high-ranking member of the (failing) Cainite Heresy.  Nikita, according to Jurgen’s letter, had been discovered in an Obertus monastery that the Ventrue had attacked in violation of the treaty for unclear reasons (that were, ultimately, not Myca’s problem to deal with).  Though highly irritated at being sent this problem by a man that they hated, Myca soon grew obsessed with solving the various mysteries associated with Nikita. There was something familiar and powerful about him and while deeply unsettled, they were not going to simply let those questions go.

After completing (yet another) diplomatic assignment from their sire, Symeon granted Myca the freedom to investigate Nikita of Sredetz to their heart’s content.  For the next two years, they investigated, while keeping Nikita locked up in torpor behind layers of wards in their basement. Their investigations took increasingly strange turns, and simultaneously Myca was haunted by terrifying dreams that they could only remember in pieces at best when they woke up, their long-repressed memories slowly reasserting themselves.
Both these apparently-unrelated things came to a head on what was likely to be the worst night of their entire unlife: Myca returned home on their sire’s orders intending to move Nikita’s body to Oradea, only to find the monastery deserted mysteriously, because everyone inside was dead, and Ilias’s wards on Nikita shattered. Unable to leave before the sunrise, Myca and their traveling companions were forced to remain in the monastery during the day.

Myca woke up remembering everything, every detail of the myriad violations of their bodily and mental integrity that had been committed against them by their sire, Gregorius Dimities, and Michael the Patriarch all those years before in Constantinople: that, alone, was terrible. And then everything got worse, when they woke up in their living room...with one additional vampire, who matched every description of their great-grandsire, and a stranger wearing their boyfriend’s clothes.

During the course of their investigations, Myca had learned that “Nikita of Sredetz” was not, in fact, Nikita of Sredetz: the real Nikita had been murdered by someone very powerful, his death too brutal for his ghost’s memory to hold onto.  While they (reluctantly) suspected that “Nikita” was a childe or grandchilde of the Dracon, their ancestor, the truth was far more convoluted. The Dracon himself had murdered Nikita and taken his shape and identity solely to destroy the Cainite Heresy as revenge against its (now-dead) patron, Narses, who had helped to bring down Constantinople. Afterward, his revenge complete, the Dracon had nothing left to live for: he had outlived everyone he had ever loved, everything he had tried to build, and he was tired of living.  And, unfortunately, Jurgen had not killed him as he had hoped, but instead sent him to Myca, staked in a box.

All of this would have been difficult revelations for Myca to have processed if they had read them in a letter: having their ancestor himself tell them all this while in their living room was beyond difficult. To make matters even worse, and impossibly terrifying, Ilias had been possessed - by the Eldest himself, the Tzimisce Antediluvian, the godlike progenitor of the Tzimisce clan, reuniting at last with his favorite childe.   The Eldest didn’t care what the Dracon wanted: he would not allow his favorite childe to die.  Not when there was a suitable vessel at hand.

[Tzimisce], acting through Ilias’s body, forced Myca to be the host for the Dracon’s essence in order to save his existence, the two of them essentially sharing one body.  The moment the process (which...involved vivisection...) was done, Ilias (apparently) died, crumbling to ash, as his body couldn’t bear the strain of being an avatar for the Eldest.

Grieving and broken,  Myca took their books and fled back to Constantinople. Fortunately for them - and unfortunately for everyone else - this did not impede them from plotting. Though they continued to play the dutiful childe, they knew just what their sire had done to them, and quietly nursed a slow, lingering hatred for the man who they had loved and once trusted almost as much as they trusted themselves, and the knowledge that someday, they would bring a reckoning against him.

At the same time, the order of the world that had held sway for so long was changing, as the Middle Ages drew towards a close. The Black Death was disastrous for maintaining Kindred society and population due to the population pressure caused by the deaths of so many mortals in such a short time. To make matters worse, the mortal Inquisition gained even more power, trying to ferret out evil in the world - especially supernatural evil, and with a particular focus on vampires. Elders threw their young childer as sacrifices to keep their unlives safe, on top of the myriad of abuses that elder vampires often inflicted on the young. And, finally, the young vampires had had enough.

The Anarch Revolt (or so this conflict was eventually called, which eventually became a Europe-wide war) began in the 15th century: Myca, who had kept in touch with their longtime contacts, conspirators,and friends back home, was a leader in the Tzimisce branch of the Anarch Revolt, which began with young Tzimisce rising up against their elders and attacking those who did not side with them.
Together with Velya the Flayer and Lugoj Blood-Breaker, Myca devised a ritual that would break the blood bonds that young Tzimisce had with their elders, which had compelled their obedience. In addition, Myca used their books and accumulated occult knowledge to pinpoint where the Eldest’s actual body was, allowing Lugoj to lead an attack on the Eldest (which Myca was not present for), culminating in him apparently diablerizing and killing [Tzimisce].

The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 forced Myca to flee back to Romania, at which point they took a more direct, active hand in the Anarch Revolt. Their means of assistance took the form of traveling with several wandering packs of anarchs, providing tactical and strategic support and, scholar to the bone, risking their unlife to save books from the libraries of elders who their comrades attacked.  However, while the rebellion had done quite a lot of damage, they were outnumbered and outmatched, and the anarchs were ultimately forced to the bargaining table in 1493 by the new sect known as the Camarilla, formally formed in 1486 as a response to both the Inquisition and the Anarch Revolt and which sought to uphold the status quo of Kindred society (at least, as much as they could).

Myca was in attendance at the Convention of Thorns near Silchester, England, as one of the anarch delegates, in their capacity as diplomat, and they were not pleased, to say the least, with the terms given to the anarchs. While amnesty was offered to the anarchs for their crimes, with the exception of the most awful, absolutely none of the grievances that the anarchs had were addressed and they were not allowed to negotiate. Instead, the anarchs would have to return to their clans and sires, return to the status quo that they had fought to avoid.

Instead, Myca stood up, quietly and viciously insulted Hardestadt, the founder of the Camarilla, and walked out, followed by the other Tzimisce and Lasombra delegates, as well as the few anarchs from other clans that did not take the amnesty. As a further gesture to only further underscore the contempt that they felt for the surrender offered to them, as well as in defiance of the Camarilla’s “Masquerade” that demanded vampires hide among mortals and erase all evidence of their existence, they orchestrated the massacre of the mortal population of Thorns, a small village near Silchester, in as flagrant a display of supernatural power as possible, joined by several of the anarchs who had followed them (and who were all forced to flee the Camarilla’s retribution).

The Convention of Thorns represented a personal crossroads for them, in more ways than simply the political: first, they changed their name to Sascha Vykos, in honor of a fallen comrade. Second, while they had, over the years, finally realized and come to terms with their gender identity, aided by their time spent absorbing Tzimisce Metamorphist philosophy while completely out of the orbit of Obertus religion, it was not until after the Convention of Thorns that they slowly began to reshape their body truly to their liking.
That same year, Sascha was among the delegates present at a meeting in Mallorca, in which, after a series of negotiations, the nascent Sabbat was formed, consisting mainly of members of the Lasombra and Tzimisce clans as well as the anarchs from other clans who refused to surrender to the Camarilla. This sect’s primarily (ostensible) goal was warfare against the Antediluvians - and the Camarilla, who in their denial were seen as catspaws and pawns of those ancients.

After the Sabbat was formed, Vykos’s role as tactical support was formalized when they took on the office of priscus, one of the council of independent advisors to the various senior and regional leaders of the Sabbat, who also were responsible for coordinating strategic efforts whenever the sect went to war and dealing with whatever trouble that they were needed to deal with as they saw fit. The next several centuries were a busy time for Sascha, between their duties “advising” the various Sabbat leaders, using and manipulating mortal pirates as proxies to fight the interests of the Camarilla (who, typically, were much better at using mortals as proxies and far more interested in doing so than the Sabbat, granting them far more influence in the mundane world), and their own interests in furthering their occult and historical studies.

As busy as they were, Vykos still managed to take time out to finally bring down the reckoning on their sire that they had been quietly planning for three hundred years.  In 1550, while Symeon was involved with peace negotiations to try to unify the non-Sabbat Tzimisce, Sascha showed up in their sire’s court, playing the penitent childe just long enough for Symeon to let his guard down. And then they struck, killing their sire through diablerie - and tortured him in the process, dragging it out.

Eventually, however, Sascha grew bored with involvement with Sabbat politics and went into seclusion, much more interested in their studies than interacting with the outside world. They spent over a hundred years with their books before reemerging in the late 1700s, during the infighting of the First Sabbat Civil War, leaving Europe for the New World (at least temporarily).   Once they returned from sabbatical, Vykos began traveling the world, simultaneously to do their duty as wandering priscus and chase all the knowledge that they could.
While Sascha was brutally effective in their service to the Sabbat as both scholar and warrior and infamous for their skill as a torturer (which is saying a lot, given that they were a member of a clan long infamous for brutality and for skill in torture) and for their treachery, they were also more than a little erratic in behavior.   The larger picture of their schemes made very little sense to their enemies - and not much more to their own sect, at times.  Their ultimate goal was to recreate the Dream of Constantinople, acting on the compulsion that had bound them for centuries as one of the inheritors of Michael’s Dream, though - Tzimisce to the core - they intend to build this incarnation of the Dream on a foundation of blood and bone, while diablerizing the few survivors from Constantinople in order to complete their knowledge of that vision.

In 2003, their duty as priscus brought them to the side of Polonia, the Lasombra Archbishop of New York City, in order to advise him during the Sabbat’s ambitious crusade to conquer the Camarilla-held cities of the East Coast as well as lead their own brutal raid against Washington, DC, and taking it for the Sabbat.  Despite their critical role in the success of the offensive, Polonia was given most of the credit and promoted to Cardinal, while Sascha was made Archbishop of DC: though their own ambitions lay elsewhere, Vykos, who had a long-standing rivalry with Polonia, seethed.

Though they set up shop for a time in DC, Sascha did not stay long: they skipped town (without permission), leaving a power void in their wake. While their superiors were presumably not happy, there was little that they could do to them, both because of their own personal power and because they were an effective priscus, just more than a little of a loose cannon.

Vykos resurfaced, some time later, in the aftermath of an averted cycle of Gehenna: while the apocalypse had been threatening for quite some time, with fulfilled signs and portents popping up all over the place, Gehenna was, ultimately, averted.  They had heard rumors - as did their longtime rival and fellow Noddist scholar, Beckett - about the formation of a third Trinity in Istanbul, and had gone to investigate those rumors, the two rivals ending up independently in the same place, at the remains of Michael the Patriarch’s haven under the Hagia Sophia.

Matters nearly ended extremely badly for the two of them: even Vykos, powerful as they were, were in well over their head. At the fall of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, Michael the Patriarch was diablerized and murdered by his ex-lover, Mary the Black, Baali and demon-priestess, but his spirit still existed inside her. By the time Sascha and Beckett came to Constantinople, the two had come to an accord and sought a third member for their new Trinity: Michael (acting through Mary) forced Vykos to mentally submit while he burned  the Dracon free from their body, a compulsion impossible for the Tzimisce to resist. Beckett managed to rescue Sascha, saving their unlife (much to their mutual chagrin) and escape, though severely injured, with their torpored body in a body bag.

Sascha woke up several nights later: Beckett, in the meantime, had sought sanctuary with a powerful vampire known as Prospero, a friend of his (and acquaintance of Vykos) who was essentially Prince of the Cayman Islands and offered sanctuary on neutral ground.  While not especially happy about being rescued - and even less happy that their rescuer had been Beckett of all people, their longtime rival- Vykos was furious that “Prospero”, who they had occasionally been sharing notes with (and vice-versa), was actually Amerin, a member of the Inconnu.  And to make matters worse, with Mary pursuing the two of them, Vykos and Beckett were essentially stuck in the same place, in the Caymans, until they could come up with some kind of plan to deal with the situation and with a high possibility of having to at least temporarily work together.

On top of that, Vykos had to deal with several unpleasant facts: the first being that, with the Dracon now removed from their body, that they were free from their ancestor’s bitter, self-destructive consciousness seeping into them and tainting their thoughts for the first time in centuries. Second, they realized fully (again, for the first time in centuries) that the Dream they had fought to build, to complete, for so long, had been forced on them, instead of being a legacy that they had freely chosen to recreate. Now what?
At least things can’t possibly get much worse. Right?