Malena grew up in a small town in Aragon heavily influenced by the Cathar Heresy in the nearby Languedoc and held its tenets close to her heart. Over the objections of her family, she chose the life of the perfect, proselytizing to any whom she met in her travels. Her faith was sorely tested, however, when the Albigensian Crusade fell upon the south of France and she was witness, first hand, to the suffering and pain of her fellow Cathars. Something in the death of so many for so petty a reason made her reconsider her beliefs. She was unable to dismiss the loss of material life as her faith said she should.
Fleeing the Crusade and searching for an answer, she came upon a monastery in the mountains near Spain. Seeking shelter and respite, she instead found an offshoot of the Cainite Heresy. Taken before its saint, Josephus, she had an epiphany and threw herself at his bleeding feet. Recognizing true belief, the mad priest embraced her and bid her go forth and spread the faith. Barely versed in the facts of her new existence and preaching highly heretical religious dogma, it is a miracle she survived the nights of her first few years. However, her tenacity and faith carried her until she found similar cults who were receptive to her teachings. One in particular, a Provencal offshoot of the Zantosa revenant family called the Prejean, adopted her as its own patron saint.
Revenants and Lasombra fed off of each others beliefs and corrupted them in turn. Malena fell from the pure form of the religion imparted on her at the monastery and began to believe she and the other kindred were blessed by the Rex Mundi, the evil creator god of Gnostic lore, rather than being closer to pure spirit. Rather than bringing her to despair, the change of view came as something of a dark comfort, a resignation to the absolute power and certainty of the evil which she'd seen her whole life and been unable to dismiss. Rather than support the Crimson Curia, she sought to corrupt its membership to her own new perspective, finding allies among the darker cults of the Heresy. When the Convention of Thorns led to the formation of the Camarilla, she and her fellow Cathari joined with other Anarchs to form the Sabbat.
Retribution followed hard and the Prejean family sought to flee, as so many of the other Sabbat were, to the New World, and Malena fled with them. Upon arrival, they set about the task of reinforcing their claim on the colonies against the inevitable arrival of the Camarilla. They were supported by a group of Tzimisce and another French branch of a revenant family, this time the Bratovich. Spreading out along the northeast from Nova Scotia to New Amsterdam, they quietly gained influence and hid their hunting under the guise of native attacks or skirmished between the French and British. Malena herself kept to remote areas where she would tend to her converts, but kept abreast of developments in the sect through the news they brought her. In this way she learned of her childe Vicario's plans to usurp the Louisiana colony from the Brujah who sought to turn it into a Camarilla stronghold. Coming out of hiding, she contacted him and offered support. The Acadians were in the process of being pushed out of Canada by its new British owners and needed a place to settle. Subtly, she urged them to Louisiana, just in time to bolster her childe's power base with the Acadian revenants and Tzimisce.
This was not an altruistic gesture on Malena's part. She saw in Louisiana the chance to put her beliefs into fuller practice. A den of pirates, prostitutes, and thieves, it provided the perfect concentration of sin and decadence that she needed. She moved southward but stayed aloof of the city itself, instead influencing it through her faithful revenants and former Tzimisce allies. Her efforts did much to mitigate the otherwise devestating effects of the first Sabbat Civil War and were doubled when she was able to secure herself the position of Priscus. Quietly, she began to seek more and more subtle means to influence affairs in the city and surrounding areas. Her revenant allies insinuated themselves into all levels of society, mostly without alerting either Vicario or the Camarilla to their efforts. With the rise of the Setites, she saw even more possibilities. Their use of corruption and vice to control and influence endeared them to the elder and she sought quietly to help them increase their influence.
The Civil War proved to be something of a setback, even to the Albigensian, but it also provided many more chances for her to alter the playing field in subtle ways to help limit her childe's power and create a careful structure by which she might be rid of him so that the Setites might take control. The Second Civil War again shook things up, but the signing of the Code of Milan did much to give the elder more influence in Sabbat affairs by solidifying the hierarchy. With a careful eye out for encroaching competition from Miami and Mexico City, she manipulated the endgame for her childe and saw to his destruction at the hands of the Brujah. What she had not counted on was the absence of Legba on business in Haiti at the time of the event, which allowed her grandchilde, Delacriox, to muster the support to make a serious claim for control of the city. The best she could manage, in the end, was to name both bishops along with the enigmatic Baron Samedi (who forced the issue politely with intimations of his vast, ghost-collected intelligence and the need for a neutral third party).
While the city hasn't become quite the bastion of perverse decadence that Malena foresaw, she takes the long view and the trend is certainly there. The last few decades she has been taking stock of the city, to plan her next move. Among her agendas, however, is the quiet encouraging of materialism and immorality that pervades the city zeitgeist and bringing over as many of the younger kindred to her philosophical views as she can. As a participating member of the original Anarch Wars, she never underestimates the power of the young and disenfranchised to bring about change, and is again putting her lot in with the younger crowd against the less controllable elders.
Malena's fierce dedication to her moral view has less to do with faith than it has to do with a deep and desperate need to believe that the evil she has seen and which she is now an embodiment of is all that really exists in the world and that the promise of spiritual purity and a better existence after death is merely a cynical lie used to manipulate the weak. One of the things which draws her to this city is the necromantic talent which supports her assertions with its descriptions of the facts of the afterlife. Such reinforcement comforts her and drives her even harder to destroy any proof or even hint of any dissent. In particular, she has an irrational fear and hatred of the Salubri and their search for Golconda. Any seeking this state had best give New Orleans a wide berth, lest they draw the elder's wrath.
Other than her psychotic self-delusion, she is a very intelligence and manipulative woman with a Brujah's flair for engaging conversation, particularly on matters of philosophy and ethics. Nearly eight centuries of such pursuits have given her an unparalleled ability to undermine the theoretical basis for any belief system. She is the ultimate nihilist, taking perverse joy in crushing the idealism of any foolish enough to try and argue philosophy with her. This ability is the core of her persuasiveness, as she uses the void her devestating arguments leave behind as the core to support her own view.
Malena's need for support in her beliefs has led her to retain a fierce loyalty towards 'believers', while all other vestiges of trust and loyalty have crumbled under her all-consuming nihilism. She felt no pity for the childe she destroyed, seeing him only as an obstacle to her own plans and a disappointment, due to his pursuit of other philosophical standards than her own. Simiarly, she feels no particular bond with her grandchilde, whom she sees as a less effective version of the former Archbishop. This attitude is probably the only reason she hasn't begun to orchestrate his downfall, too.
Her fondness for the Setites has grown since their acceptance of the Sabbat, though she is wary of Legba and his childe and prefers the younger members of the pack. Their receptiveness to her teachings has pleased her greatly and she has been secretly using her revenant contacts to support Marie's efforts to build her power base. Similarly, she is quite taken with Ange and is highly protective of her pack, even taking rites with it on more than one occasion.
She has a neurotic fear of the Samedi, whose role as guardians of the dead and whose spiritual pursuits are too similar to the philosophy she's left behind for her taste. The matter of spiritual betterment is still a subject which causes deep feelings of guilt in the elder, even after all these years. Because of this, she is somewhat easily intimidated by them, part of the reason she allowed the Baron a position as Bishop (the rest being hints that he knew she's arranged Vicario's death).
Malena isn't particularly interested in temporal power or politics outside of the Sabbat, so her influence in the mortal world is fairly limited and tends to come from the various little cults she has established in the cities of the South. Blood cults in the old tradition, they usually only number two or three members (the largest, in New Orleans, has eight) and serve also as her Herd.