Zoe Komnene was born in the Imperial Palace of Constantinople, the youngest of eight children born to Emperor Alexios I and his favorite, though her eldest sister disagrees on that point. From the beginning she was an uncommonly bright child, excelling in her lessons in literature, Greek language, rhetoric, and the sciences. When her tutors reported to her father that she had a scholars heart, he brought forth wise men from the ends of the Earth to broaden her learning. At the feet of the wisest men, Zoe was trained in astronomy, medicine, history, military affairs, geography, and mathematics. The breadth of her education, erudition, beauty, and noble bearing became broadly known in the Byzantine court, the affairs of which she would later publish as part of a history of the Empire from the time of Justinian shortly after her twentieth birthday.

It was precisely because of her exquisite mind and late birth that she became a candidate for the Embrace. The sharp eared young polyglot became aware of games played on the edges of the Great Jyhad when she became aware of less than exact translations delivered by courtiers and diplomats, translations that werent merely inexact or sloppy, but seemed purposefully designed to exacerbate conflict between feuding houses, or broker deals that seemed to benefit no one contrary to all logic and expectations.

Following such a courtier one night, Zoe ventured into a strange, disused part of the palace where she beheld a fearsome sight. A gruesome mockery of Communion, a man that had fangs for teeth and wielded some terrible sorcery over a nobleman of high esteem and respect, such that he groveled like a dog when this man so much as frowned at him. Zoe fled back to her chambers, frightened but also deeply curious by what she had witnessed.

For the next decade, the study of the ghouls of Constantinople and their Kindred masters was the subject of fearsome study by the young princess. Even her marriage to an admiral, management of a country estate near Sophia, and the birth of her children did not break her concentration for very long. Every chance she could steal, she was back in the capital, watching from shadows and taking scrupulous notes. She finished her work and sent it to the printer, knowing even as she did so that she was dripping blood into shark infested waters.

That night, a man came to her room. Nubian and fearsome, he seemed a relic of another age, and he was not one of the monsters that Zoe had observed in her decade of careful watching. Before the princess eyes, he put her manuscript in the fire, and asked her why, after so much careful observation, she should expose herself so brashly.

Without a trace of fear in her voice, Zoe said to this man who was not a man, Because I have studied you for so long that I have only come to realize how much I do not know. I would spent the rest of my lifetime and not learn one ten thousandth of what I could. I exposed my work to prove that I was worthy. Take me in. I want to learn all that there is to know.

The man considered her for a very long time before laughing. It seems to me that I have only three choices. Kill you now and save everyone a lot of trouble. Make you as you demand. Or wait and have to deal with you when the damned Nosferatu bring you over to their side. Lucky for you its bad luck to murder royalty.

Though she had not been initiated into the mysteries of Set, nor sworn allegiance to the cult operating in Constantinople, the Serpent of Byzantium, Khaytal, brought Zoe over as he promised. Her death due to illness was masterfully arranged, with her sire draining her over the course of a month so that her family could see her waste away despite the efforts of the best physicians in the land. After a slow, wasting death in public, the princess was Embraced upon an altar of serpent god and spent six years in the journey to become an initiate-priestess of the faith. And there she and her sire began their feud.

Zoed had too much education not to recognize the old signs of the mystery cult her sire and clan were part of. And she had no use for an esoteric religion. Even the Orthodox Christianity that had been her mortal faith was barely tolerable, but the secret religion and suppressed gnosis of Setite-lore? She laughed the first time Khaytal told her of the Aeons that secretly enslaved the world, and in his fury the elder Setite had beaten his childer nearly into torpor. The very next night, Khaytal coldly announced that she would study for a time in the Library of the Forgotten, and since then relations between sire and childer have been strained, at best.