Editing Lineage:The Rebellion (section)

=History in Brief According to the Rebellion=

For as long as humanity has existed, humanity has been preyed on by Heaven and Hell.  The great mage Houses have never cared.  They are concerned only with wealth and power and not with the fate of the human race.  They have been nothing but impediments in the great war, too obsessed with their purses to open their eyes to what is going on around them.  Only the Rebellion has stood to defend humanity against its endless persecution.

Everyone has their own theory about when and where the Rebellion began, whether it was born from the hunters of Neolithic Africa, or from the slaves of Jericho, or sprang from Eve’s first taste of forbidden fruit.  Its is known at least that its Orders had already spread far and wide by the time the first system of writing evolved to record the human story.  Everywhere, The Houses strove to put The Rebellion down, so obsessed with protecting their own power that they could tolerate no other force in the world.  Yet The Rebellion endured, for humanity could never be forsaken.

Then, in the 16th century, history was changed forever by a rogue mage of House Medici, known as Niklaus Copernicus.  Copernicus proved once and for all that the Earth orbits the Sun and that Heaven has no physical place without our universe.  The revelation sent shockwaves through The Houses as long-standing orthodoxies were shattered and mages everywhere began to question the world around them.  Blooded mages flocked to the Rebellion and movement could no longer be contained.  Slowly, the Houses of the western world called off their war, one after another.  They still fought all comers for territory and glory, of course, but they no longer dared to set themselves against the Rebellion itself.  This was the greatest victory for humanity in history.  It is because of Copernicus and his triumph that mages of The Rebellion in the modern United States need not hide themselves from the great and powerful.