They’ve always been here.

Ever since humanity learned to be afraid of the dark, it has been plagued by shadow beings jealously hungering for life. The Kindred hear stories of corpses clawing their way out of graves, tearing flesh and thirsting for blood; and the younger and more foolish among them imagine that they’re stories about draugr, or revenants, or debased Kindred. The Kindred are the only true vampires. The fiends, the corpse-stealing smoke-shadows, don’t exist. Those Kindred are wrong. And if the Strix ever hear them voice such opinions, they might just make an example of them.

The Strix are counterparts, shadows, and — according to old legends from the nights of the Camarilla — relatives of the Kindred. Where vampires are people brought back from death by the power of the Embrace, hungering for blood as their connection to Humanity fades, the Strix were never human.

Shades of darkness and omens of doom, they steal life without needing the medium of blood, and force their shadowy forms into the bodies of the dead to experience the feelings of flesh.
They are the monstrous vampires of legend, the ones with no Humanity but not given over to the Beast’s insanity. The Strix are coldly, calculatingly evil. They hunger for the life they’ve never known, and hate the living for having it. They see the Kindred — like them, but masquerading as human — as perversions in need of a harsh lesson in inhumanity.

The Strix embody themselves in corpses.

The Kindred are corpses.

The Strix suffer from additional banes as they age, resembling the banes suffered by calloused Kindred, and it’s the knowledge of these methods that Strix-afflicted domains try to spread.

Many young Kindred have wondered, at one time or another, why mortal legends of vampires contain so many inaccuracies and weaknesses the Kindred don’t suffer — crosses, running water, silver, certain herbs, the thresholds of homes and more. Some of these were spread by Masquerade-minded vampires as misinformation. Others are stories of calloused Kindred. Most,  though, are the results of the Cacophony. These legends don’t describe Kindred — they describe the Strix; they are desperate attempts by besieged domains to warn and arm other vampires against the Nemeses.

Some Princes consult Mekhet sages, hoping to find some easier way of telling the Strix apart by scrutinizing suspected hosts with Auspex, but no such method exists — to the Mekhet Discipline, the aura of a Strix in a vampire host is exactly — disturbingly — like that of a vampire who has committed diablerie. Most Mekhet sages don’t like to think about that one too hard.