Born in 1799, David W. Patten was one of the original apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. According to LDS lore, he once encountered a mysterious figure who claimed to be Caine—the biblical son of Adam and Eve, cursed to wander the earth for slaying his brother Abel.
The tale goes that Patten, while riding one night in the early 1830s, met a tall, dark-skinned, disheveled man of immense stature walking along the road. Moved by spiritual prompting, Patten asked the man who he was. The stranger replied that he was Caine, doomed to walk the earth in torment, seeking death but unable to die.
What official accounts omit is the moment of connection between the two. Patten, overwhelmed with compassion, cried out to God: “Won’t the blood of the Redeemer save even the most wretched of us?” Caine held his gaze for a long while, then whispered, “Do we dare to hope, my childe?”
In 1838, during the Battle of Crooked River, Patten was mortally wounded. As he lay dying, a secretive 4th-generation Salubri—the last true childe of Saulot—appeared and Embraced him, whispering as Patten rose, “You have work to do.”
Thus began Patten’s second life. Under the tutelage of his sire, he traveled the world, studying ancient rites and the lost wisdom of Saulot—perhaps even of Caine himself. He took up a mission passed down from his bloodline: to uncover the primordial forces that could undo the curse of Caine and grant salvation not only to Patten and the faithful of Saulot, but to all Kindred who seek it—a path to Golconda that leads beyond death and into the Celestial Kingdom. Years of study followed. Grail traveled to spiritual fault lines across the globe—Lake Baikal, Lake Tanganyika, the Caspian Sea—searching for echoes of ancient power.
Patten eventually returned to the Latter-day Saints, finding in their fervent faith not only spiritual nourishment but a unique, resonant vitae unlike any other. Feeding upon the blood of true believers advanced his journey toward redemption in ways he had never imagined.
Now calling himself Lucien Grail, he revealed himself to Brigham Young and a select few within the Church’s inner circle. By 1841, Young and his closest advisors had become bonded ghouls. While Grail continued to travel the world, seeking deeper understanding, he would always return to the Saints to guide them in the right direction. At Grail’s urging, they expanded and codified the “new and everlasting covenant” of plural marriage—not only as a spiritual ordinance, but as a eugenics project designed to refine and enhance the mystical properties of Mormon blood across generations. Three years of study followed. Grail traveled to spiritual fault lines across the globe—Lake Baikal, Lake Tanganyika, the Caspian Sea—searching for echoes of ancient power.
Brigham Young and his most trusted inner circle had come fully under Grail’s sway—bound not only by blood but by a growing understanding of the deeper covenant Grail envisioned. They no longer saw the Church merely as a vessel for spiritual reform, but as divine infrastructure upon which a redemptive society for both kine and Kindred could be built.
But Joseph Smith remained a problem.
Despite his prophetic gifts, Joseph resisted the redirection Grail subtly introduced. He clung to more traditional Christian cosmologies and began to publicly reject the expanding doctrine of plural marriage—seeing it not as divine revelation but as a dangerous innovation. More troubling still, he began to receive visions that alarmed Grail: apocalyptic dreams warning of "angels in white who drink the prayers of men" and "watchers beneath the earth." Whether true revelation or spiritual paranoia, Smith’s visions threatened to expose something far older than the Church itself.
Hyrum Smith, his brother and moral anchor, was an even greater obstacle. Devout and incorruptible, Hyrum would never tolerate secret oaths more extreme than basic masonic rituals, blood rites, or anything that hinted at pacts with undead powers. The brothers together were a spiritual firewall—an unyielding barrier to the transformation Grail envisioned.
It was then that a visitor came from the south—a Lasombra diplomat named Sebastián de la Cruz, claiming lineage from the old Courts of Veracruz. De la Cruz brought with him secrets older than America itself: charts of ley lines traced by Aztec sorcerers, maps drawn by early Spanish explorers, and half-burned journals recovered from failed missions into the Uinta Basin and the Great Salt Lake Valley.
He spoke of the Timpanogos, a powerful Ute-aligned people who had long venerated a hidden place beneath the earth—"the Whispering Tower"—a natural formation said to speak with the voice of stars and gods. De la Cruz believed the Salt Lake region was one of the last untouched nexuses of pre-Abrahamic power in North America, a rare geomantic wound left by the separation of worlds at the dawn of human memory.
Grail was fascinated. The Lasombra emissary confirmed what he had only begun to suspect: the ground beneath the Great Salt Lake was holy in the oldest and darkest sense. If properly tapped—if aligned with a faith of sufficient purity and structure—it might become a new Zion. Not just a sanctuary, but a fulcrum, capable of lifting even the damned toward redemption.
But for this plan to proceed, the Church could no longer belong to Joseph.
Joseph’s revelations had become too unstable. His influence too great. Worse, he had begun to dream of blood and shadows and unnamed engines buried beneath salt. Grail feared the Prophet would either expose their aims or ruin them. The old leadership had to be removed—not only to clear the path for Brigham’s ascension, but to ensure the Church could merge, unseen, with the deeper covenant Grail and de la Cruz had begun to shape.
And so a conspiracy bloomed.
De la Cruz provided intelligence—names of hostile Gentiles, economic pressure points, ways to ensure plausible deniability. Young spread quiet dissent in Nauvoo, encouraged political infighting, and privately assured trusted lieutenants that the Saints’ survival depended on moving west—without Joseph.
In June of 1844, the final act was set. Joseph and Hyrum were lured to Carthage Jail under a pretense of legal negotiation. What followed has long been attributed to a mob—but the deeper truth is darker. The bullets may have come from without, but the conspiracy came from within.
And when the dust settled, Brigham Young stood ready—not just as successor to the Prophet, but as the mortal mouthpiece of a hidden mission. The Church would cross the plains not merely to escape persecution, but to claim sacred ground. And beneath that ground, the Echo Tower waited.
In the death of Joseph Smith, the Church was reborn—recast as a divine instrument not just for the living, but for the unliving. Kindred and kine, converging on a single, secret Zion.
Behind the scenes, Grail shaped both mortal and Kindred society in the Salt Lake valley. His obsession: to reverse the Embrace, to cleanse the soul, and to redeem the Kindred condition. He views LDS theology as partial revelation—divinely inspired but incomplete. Grail teaches, in whispered, heretical circles, that Caine was not merely cursed but trapped—his immortality a failed prototype of what would become the Embrace. To redeem Kindred, one must complete the path Cain could not.
He believed that the Black Salt Engine and the Salt-Echo Rites—ancient, half-remembered magics that resonate with the very foundations of the world—might purify the undead soul, unlocking true ascension and final death in the Celestial Kingdom.