The Spirit of the Clans.
Sometimes, we need to run away from home to find ourselves. Sometimes, a people can only come into their own in isolation.
But after long enough on their own, most come to long for community and brotherhood again.
Clan Blood Spirit found themselves able to take an offered hand-up at just the right time.
The Blood Spirit “Re-Awakening” has been a true cultural revolution spurred on by shifts in the Clan’s geography and position in stellar politics which represents a sea-change when contrasted with their previous behaviours and cultural mores. Where before the Blood Spirit outlook could be summarized as a self-righteous superiority, held in isolation from other geo-political and social forces, what they have now is a renewed perspective with a focus on duty alloyed to a renewed confidence in their way of life. Where before the ‘Spirits looked down on nearly all others and sought to avoid virtually all contact with them, now they seek to share their culture and way of life with those they deem worthy, as a means of uplifting humanity in order to achieve its rightful destiny in the stars.
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While SOG; the proto-SLDFiE, were undertaking their ill-advised and nearly disastrous post-TF: SERPENT reconnaissance mission among the surviving Clans, they came upon the Blood Spirits, backs to the figurative wall and literally fighting for their lives.
The purpose of Operation: MUNIN was to ascertain whether or not the remaining Clans appeared to be preparing to break the terms of the Great Refusal and renew their war of conquest against the Inner Sphere. The point of this exercise was to determine if it would be necessary to repeat the Annihilation of Clan Smoke Jaguar on another target or targets as an object lesson to the Clans as a whole on the subject of Spheroid resolve.
As it transpired, this was unnecessary; but at the time, many in the militaries which had participated in the fighting believed that expanding the war of military and cultural annihilation to the other Clans was not just potentially necessary, but inevitable. It has not been lost on historians that the forces engaged in Operation: MUNIN might have brought about the very circumstances whose likelihood they were investigating. It is further theorized that a certain party or parties within the still-nascent Star League, or it’s iteration of the SLDF might have planned this from the outset It is certainly a fact known to later-day historians that the Word of Blake’s Shadow Divisions were designed and built with a genocidal war against the Clans as their original raiseon d’etre.
At some point in their campaign, SOG forces under McKenna made their presence known to the Blood Spirits on York through that uniquely-Clan cultural ritual; the friendly invitation to a curated battle with live ammunition. Of course, this Batchall was more than just a friendly exchange of munitions, McKenna wished to use it as a barometer for the readiness of the Blood Spirit Touman and the overall disposition of the Clan as a whole.
What he found was a people living on a knife’s edge. Constant raids from the Star Adders and others continually tested the resolve of the Blood Spirit Touman and drained their remaining resources. There were shortages of everything but enemies and the ‘Spirit Warriors, individually were exhausted, and demoralized to the point of a morose fatalism.
The contest itself was bargained down to a handful of individual warriors and fought to a draw. McKenna took part, personally; facing Khan Karianna Schmitt mech to mech, but failing to defeat her before the agreed-upon duration of the battle expired. Several hours after the battle’s conclusion, Clan Star Adder returned to York for yet another raid and SOG stood aside in order to observe both forces in action.
The Star Adders, however were enraged at the presence of spheroid mercenaries and their leader refused to recognize their status as 2nd League troops. With this as pretense, the ‘Adders abandoned traditional Clan ritualized warfare and engaged targets of opportunity. This included ‘Spirit forces, SOG and Clan Blood Spirit civilians and infrastructure, this quite despite being outnumbered by the local forces on the ground; including the ‘Spirit’s elite Command unit.
The Khans of the Blood Spirits were moved by the actions of Star League forces defending their civilians and downed pilots, particularly because the previously-committed and heavily-damaged units committed to the Batchal also took part in the ensuing battle, with several being lost. It seems they placed a great deal of weight in these forces’ ability to abide honourably by the Way of the Clans, to which the ‘Spirits held so dearly, in contrast to the ‘Adder’s seeming eagerness to throw off all allusions to nobility and fight like the very barbarians they cast themselves against.
As the battle played out, SOG fighters closed the local aerospace and forced down the ‘Adder dropships, while Blood Spirit reinforcements cut the Star Adders off from their landing zones. Caught between SOG heavy tanks and furious Blood Spirits, the ‘Adder raiding force was hunted down to the last ‘mech and defeated.
In the aftermath of the battle, SOG remained in the York system for a number of days while they licked their wounds. The Blood Spirit leadership met with McKenna and his staff several times and continued to do so thereafter through encrypted HPG transmissions. Evaluating the gravity of their situation in full and offered the use of numerous SLDF and SOG transportation assets, Clan Blood Spirit opted to evacuate their homeworld holdings for the comparative safety of the Canton Worlds, while SOG forces continued Op: MUNIN, using this as a diversion. In exchange, the ‘Sprits are thought to have provided McKenna with valuable intelligence data and may have taken part in several joint covert operations during and immediately after the evacuation took place.
Escorted by their remaining warships and bolstered with boot-strapped assets from deep-space and asteroid Brian Caches, Clan Blood Spirit thus hurriedly withdrew from their ancestral holdings.
This episode is still painful for the Clansmen today and is a subject rarely discussed with outsiders. Some Blood Spirits long for a return to their lost worlds, while most wish nothing more to do with those who now squat on land still mainly seen as theirs. The evacuation itself was completed in record time, partly due to Khan Schmitt’s general orders for all Clansmen to be prepared for rapid withdrawals under pressure from their collapsing holdings and partly because the ’Spirits had never been a larger Clan and they had declined sharply and continuously from the time of the Golden Century.
When the time finally came to leave, large quantities of otherwise salvageable materiel, particularly in housing and civilian infrastructure had to be abandoned to the ‘Spirit’s fallen cousins simply because they lacked the manpower to recover it. But it is held as a comparatively-factually-represented article of faith that upwards of 98% of the Clan’s personnel, portable supplies and military equipment were accounted for. Interestingly, it is a mark of Blood Spirit culture that even under such duress, they refused to destroy, scuttle or otherwise sabotage any resources they could not take with them. Even among Clansmen, Blood Spirits stand out as thrifty and skinflint, but this utter abhorrence for waste or despoilation was arguably taken to extremes in the face of circumstances.
The Star Adders, in particular made note that they found no evidence of poisoned crops or wells, no sign of attempts to sabotage any form of infrastructure and that all forms of civil habitation had been left intact.
But by the same token, the ‘Spirits had slaughtered, rendered and packed-out all their livestock and picked their warehouses clean. Even the waste from processing their herds appeared to have been converted to rations for the journey or fertilizer for the future.
Evidence of the ‘Spirit evacuation efforts can still be found today in their factories, where heavy machine tools still show crude laser-cuts on their mounts from where they were removed and equally obvious new fittings improvised in-situ. Anecdotal evidence is easier to come by without special permissions; the Blood Spirit Remembrance boasts several passages on their “3rd Exodus” and almost all the “Old Blood” lower caste communities have oral and sometimes written sagas covering this period of Clan history in detail.
These are inevitably flowery, in the typically-Clan fashion; but the Blood Spirits are less-given to embellishment than some others. Blood Spirit culture instead demands that events such as these stand on their own, without the need for exaggeration and vainglory. What we encounter then is an art-history-tradition in the Remembrance, typical of any Clan; a more reliable, but fragmentary written history and an oral history that exists as a performance art all it’s own working from a grounded foundation. This, in-turn lends Blood Spirit history and to an extent; culture, a more approachable uptake and makes other Clans’ seem positively opaque by comparison. This is true not just of their history from the 3rd Exodus, but all of their surviving history as well.
This then naturally correlates strongly with the success the Blood Spirits have enjoyed, out-stripping all others in the attraction, intake and assimilation of worthy petitioner candidates. However, while some scholars attribute this as the sole fountainhead of their renaissance, sober investigation places this as a contributing factor entering into force after several other key events and decision points.
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Shortly following their relocation to several sites in the Canton Worlds, the Blood Spirits experienced what some more pretentious scholars call their “Come to Kerensky” moment.
Following the incitement of a series of raucous debates among the blood-named warriors by the Khans, there came a series of trials of grievance and refusal, in accordance with Clan tradition. What words and ideas could not achieve; violence settled permanently. Not for these matters the proxy-wars of the sports-field, tavern contests or gaming tables, for the very future of the Clan was placed at stake by the Khans’ directions.
Despite the stereotypically-Clan bombasity of these activities, the Blood Spirits emerged with a series of what SaKhan Boques called “points”. These being in the rhetorical sense. While depleted, the Blood Spirit Touman mustered hundred of *points* during this period, constituting several severely-depleted Galaxies augmented by dozens of ersatz civil defence formations, not-yet disbanded.
As orders of battle are not out concern, we shall instead expand on the former;
1. The Blood Spirit Clan represents and epitomizes the truest, best and most practical expression of the ideals of Founder Nicholas Kerensky.
1a. Any supposed “deviations” from The Founder’s original or later directives by the Clan in the years since the Founding were, are and remain natural and logical developments and evolutions of those ideals, in line with *His* own ideals of pragmatism, growth and social Darwinism with the ultimate goal of producing the best and strongest possible human society.
2. Despite the fundamental truths of points 1 and 1a, the campaign of isolation had, through no fault of the Ancestor-Spirits who came before, failed to convince any other Clan to reform or take the correct path in following Clan Blood Spirits as their natural leaders.
2a. So long as Clan Blood Spirit survives and is capable of growth, the Clan has not failed as followers of the Kerenskys. Therefore, and by extension; Clan Blood Spirit has not failed in their mission to lead all the children of Kerensky as the true and rightful IlClan.
3. The Touman is not in a fit state to achieve a conquest of Terra or the Inner Sphere at large.
3a. This is not, then; or in keeping with point 1a, a desirable or practical outcome at this time, or in the foreseeable future.
4. The essential and fundamental purpose of Nicholas Kerensky’s vision of the Clans; their *Spirit*, which this Clan epitomizes above all others, remains valid, but must be interpreted through the light of revelations and with reference to stellar-political realities, with respect to point 3 and other data.
5. With respect then to points 1, 2a, and 4, the Clan should move to seize membership in the reborn Star League, as soon as point 3 is sufficiently addressed to represent the strength, dignity and worth of our people.
6. The current situation demands that Clan Blood Spirit reevaluate our posture and the expression of our ideals.
6a. Reaffirming points 1, 1a, and 2, Clan Blood Spirit must move specifically to rectify the deficiency to-date of point 2a and establish our rightful place as preeminent in leadership, culture and ideology among those among our cousins whose failings have not yet rendered them beyond the point of recovery.
6b. The Watch must assess our extant cousins in order to determine their continuing viability to rejoin or continue in the community of The Children of Kerensky.
6c. It is the considered opinion of the conclave of the Bloodnamed of Clan Blood Spirit that point 6 be addressed with a cultural re-awakening of strength, pride, openness and above-all: *Correct Action and Behaviour* in order to serve as a *visible* example to our lost brethren of our power, success and ultimate destiny.
Schmitt and Boques both made additions to the Spirit Remembrance concerning this series of debates and trials, but neither wrote extensively of it in their memoirs. Blood Spirit history, frustratingly, doesn’t consider it particularly noteworthy, either. But Khan Karianna Schmitt’s autobiography, written by Loremaster Bayle Campbell insists that she basically hand-carried the issue from start to finish, from setting the agenda and topics for the debates, to mediating and overseeing the trials. In a few spots, Campbell even comes close to suggesting that the Khan bent the rules and even used her SaKhan as a stalking horse to essentially manipulate her Warriors into coming to the conclusions she herself had already reached.
Problematically, Campbell’s writing contradicts the official histories in several places, which shouldn’t happen, because Clan Loremasters effectively curate their Clan’s history. But Campbell’s work is uncharacteristically even-handed and forth-right for a Loremaster and he even cites sources, which even if he provides them himself in the appendix is reassuring.
But while Khan Schmitt’s actions wouldn’t be out-of-character for a Clan Khan of any era, the best we can say on the subject as serious scholars is that she probably influenced the course of events. This falls well-short of Campbell’s laudatory rendition of history painting Schmitt as pragmatic and effective, but operating behind a veneer of an apparently perfect example of Clan governance-by-warrior.
It also doesn’t explain why a Loremaster would deliberately allow such a lapse in version-control by literally creating his own version of history, to stand; only somewhat less-accessible behind the more popular public version.
In any event, the result of all this high drama occurring against the backdrop of the Blood Spirit civilian castes doing the hard work of resettlement is that the Warriors had now found a way to reinvent themselves and the ‘Clan as a whole. What they develop as the Jihad unfolds in the Inner Sphere is the cultural bastard-child of the “Confucian Gentleman” and a squad of earnest cheer-leaders. For those of you reading this and absent your credits in Ancient Terran Influences on Capellan Culture (shame. I worked hard on that.); Confucius (latinized from Kǒng Fūzǐ (孔夫子, "Master Kong") was an Ancient (551-479 BC) Chinese philosopher and scholar. He proposed a mode of behaviour for his ideal citizen as a man of upright bearing and virtue who would always seek to act correctly, but not concern himself with how others perceived his actions or even, crucially; whether or not his example was followed. The Confucian Gentleman thus proceeded in his life with a confident and correct expression of behavior, isolated from the judgement of his lessers and peers and thus; untouchable by them, through the absence of his notice of them. The goal being to set a laudable example, which self-evidently succeeds on its own merits, without recourse to lowering one’s self to an unbecoming concern with those who so needed the uplift of the example which was set.
Cheerleaders of course, require no such lengthy explanations.
Over the course of 20-25 years, the Blood Spirits created a culture of Cheerleaders who would tumble, fly and shout the glories of their way of life and do so without ever seeing the crowd, the stands, the scores, or even the opposing teams.
Their culture retains a unique nature that eclipses all other Clans and has truly re-defined the *spirit* in Clan Blood Spirit.
This expression of values and ideals and the uniquely earnest and joyful way in which it is expressed is what has made Clan Blood Spirit the draw they are for tourists, petitioners and their fellow-travellers in the Clans.
Their SLDF colleagues form with them one half of a mutual admiration society which has no imitator in this age. Simply put; Blood Spirit Warriors will go where they are asked to, without question. They will fight the most elusive and clever foes, in the worst environments, without ever counting the cost and in so doing; suffer and die amidst incredible hardship without complaint. It is their esprit de corps which sustains them, the hard, thorough and coldly realistic nature of their training which forges them and their culture which ties them together.
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