XVI
Appétence
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> And she, being put forward by her mother, said:
>
> “Give me here, in a platter of silver, the head of Jean the Baptist!”
—The Saint-Skin Scrolls, Evangelion d’Saint-Matieu 6:67 (the Verse of the Silver Platter) translated into Vulgar by Bishop Gascoine D’Tristime; New Standard Version printed by Argo & Sons.
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Until you hold a severed head in your very own hands, you never really appreciate how strong the muscles of the neck are to be able to hold up all that weight.
Dufonte opened the door to stare at the scalp in my possession—the hair had served well as a hand-hold after it was haphazardly bound and tied. I had removed it from the bloodsoaked linen sack after knocking and its aspect was the pallor of Zorephet Herself.
“You get her, I reckon?” The proctor asked without actually asking as he took a good look at the severed head I held up. When he moved to take it, I stopped him by moving it away from his hands..
“Wax-pox—omen-touched curse rebounded and struck the witch six-fold. I do not recommend touching it without gloves; say, like mine.”
The proctor let out a sigh, locked the door to his office and went out into the night with a standard-issue ambarique lamp.
“Follow me.”
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I was damned to Hel and back; no two-ways about it.
You see, I had to present the bounty’s head to the parish priest myself; I would find out tonight—right now, in specific—if I could cross the threshold of a Church or if I would burst into flames.
Fingers crossed, Lamare said as he took possession of said fingers and crossed them.
I laughed the gallow’s laugh just before the guillotine’s sack was put upon he who would lose his head. Dufonte looked at me as if mad but I just shook my head, beset by the irony that I was bringing myself as if on a silver platter.
Should I attempt to wriggle myself out of this, the Proctor would put a bounty upon me as no God-fearing individual would avoid consecrated ground lest he be of Narancan’s accursed bloodline—damned if you; damned if you don’t.
The parish was a nice little chapel built in the Teutonic tradition; hewn of stone-brick and mortar, decorated with vigilant gargoils and crowned with spires sharp as broken mosaic glass stained purple and red and blue in the mesmerising wine-dark of an early morning when dawn had just begun to break—all-in-all, rather nice time to shuffle off this mortal coil.
My heart’s drum increased in tempo from Andante to Presto and then Allegro Agitato; three steps, two steps, one step, four. Those open doors might as well have been the yawning gates to Hel, the gaping mouth beyond which only d’yabels dance.
I entered, crossing over a membranous veil which brushed against me, body and soul; the vampyre parasite came awake at this, thrashing in between my shoulder-blades, crawling up my spine as it spontaneously combusted in the presence of consecrated ground. Though I was not considered a child of Narancan, the vile beast within me, most assuredly, was.
It was all I could do not to writhe in sympathie to the cochlear-shaped helminth as it attempted to burrow into my skull and away from this place. Though there was no hitch in my step and no hesitation in my stride, I was caught in a battle of wills the likes of which dwarfed even the first vampyric baptism—agony was too weak a descriptor for the visceral disgust I felt for the leech that rooted around my spine.
But I was not a single will but instead two; Lamaré rose up from the depths of me to fortify the line against the spawnling, to keep it at bay as its tendrils and roots searched for entry into my cerebellum.
I nodded when spoken to and accepted the silver handed to me and exited so excruciatingly-slowly; the feelers found the great hole at the base of my skull and began to drag the creature inside. Even after I crossed the threshold, the parasite had not caught on yet that it was not in danger any longer. It was a cornered animal that knew only of desperation, fear and hunger.
One turn and then another led me to the byways of an alley where I fell to my knees, gripping my pounding, throbbing skull in my hands. Blood dripped from my nostrils and my ears and my eyes and my lips, no longer held in place by the curse—the beast had entered into my brains then, rummaging around tender nervous tissue and eating its way through grey matter and white matter both.
There were no words to describe the pain beyond the following, precise arrangement of two: ‘tue-moi’
I fell into convulsions, seizures breaking my bones and snapping my muscles as I died and was reborn, again and again and again. The larvæ matured within me, becoming vestigial as it finished cannibalising my lower brains—the stem, the medulla, the midbrain, the amygdala, the thalamus and all other parts of the diencephalon were consumed and transformed.
What was left in their place was decidedly no longer human but instead spongiform and coral-like tissue pitted with cavities whose innards pulsated as if gestating maggots within. I felt them in their entirety, these strange things gibbering an ineffable speech that was just out of my reach—there was more to the vampyre curse, an ancient, terrible secret that hurt to comprehend for the human mind was not meant to grasp the workings of Gods, even dead ones.
An eye nested deep within my basal ganglia awoke—it was the vestige of the cochlear-shaped parasite, the spiral-form surface fleshy and striated with depressions not unlike those left in the wake of a plough. Pulleys of sinew oriented the alien organ as if the gimbals of a gyroscope; utterly revolting, the sensation of something moving within your skull. Saccades orbited around a fixed point in search for the cotermination where all rivers met, became one, ended, and began again.
I returned to a world I could no longer comprehend.
A force came over me, blanketing my very soul in a viscous liquid sea that ebbed and flowed upon my inner eye and yet I could not touch with my fingers. I was a sympathie compass’ needle, a living lodestone bearing witness to something so very far beyond mortal ken: the World Thereunder; the underlying ambarique realm that powered the steam-forged sorcerie of the Sixth Century—God’s Grave, the ether, limbo, the Sea of Souls, the World-There-Under; so many names but one single substance permeated this place: the etherial fluid of phlogiston.
I was seized once again by lockjaw convulsions as ambarique signals overlapped and interacted, amplifying one another like screams of tortured souls within a claustrophobic cavern of some layer of Hel—there were sixty-seven of them; and had I the choice, I would have chosen all sixty-seven rather than this.
All at once, my disfigured mind closed itself to the deluge of stimulus and left only a mess of confusion and fever and delirium and malaise. There was no longer ‘I’ at all but instead only an it.
It was a cornered animal that knew only of desperation, fear and hunger.
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Bleary eyes opened to light that was near blinding.
Last I remembered, I had come up to surface and beat back the parasite but then nothing. I reached for Raphaël’s presence and felt him within our ambarique heart of stone; he was convalescing, the wounds on his psyche reeking of scarred-over insanity—he was a murmuring, muttering, gibbering, inchoate inkblot in my mind’s eye.
Which had just become rather literal as I could feel the thing moving against my brains, ripping apart its moorings as the organ’s saccades overwhelmed the scar-tissue. I held my head in my hands and closed my eyes so tight that I thought they might burst.
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The vestigial cochlear-parasite was a faminous tumour, roots tapping into surrounding cerebral veins to draw in aquavita from the aquifer’s of my lifeblood. It was all I could do to withstand the excruciation, the torment, the numb and dumb agony of the mutation that had come upon the substrate that housed my very soul.
Slowly, it resolved into a dull throbbing that would’ve rendered me suicidal had I not another life in my hands. My bearings returned to me and so too did my surroundings. It was day and I was cowled in my alp-leather cloak, the hot darkness of it brought on by exposure to sunlight.
I was in a byway of some sort—a large, stone basin where water from the sewers and the aqueducts was pumped into for alquemique treatment. The liquid I found myself in was shallow and dark, a brackish maroon of filth.
The smell was the unmistakable bitterness of iron and the sickly-sweet rancidity of a slaughterhouse; my leathers and wool and linens were soaked and caked with dried and coagulated blood and viscera. There were globules of offal and patches of skin and shards of bone and greasy-white brain matter.
My gorge rose and I retched into the shallow quagmire I found myself in; only phlegm and the ghûl’s black bile were purged from my guts but I knew better. There had once been people in there—Dead God only knew how many—rendered into pure ichor via the caustic, distilling properties of vampyric stomach acid.
I looked down at my shaking hands and saw spidery fingers whose tips sharpened into bestial talons more wicked than that of a harpie. The change was not just skin deep but also extended into bone for the only difference between claw and nail beyond the greater concentration of keratin was phalangeal shape. My knuckles were knots in the wiry armature of my fists, dexterity sacrificed for the sake of being able to lock the metacarpals in place with sinewy tendons that were thicker than a normal man’s digits.
The mutations did not stop there; I’d been courting inhumanity for some time now but had otherwise kept up with the charade, the façade of humanity. So long as I did not look too deeply into my internal workings, my strange heartbeat and the like, I could ignore that I’d become a monster, a man-eater, a cannibal imposter that wore another’s skin like a suit.
Now, my nature was laid bare before me.
My forelimbs had elongated, devolving my posture into that of a hunch-backed thing that walks on four legs. Calves and feet were no more the plantigrade stride of a man but rather the digitigrade morphology of a mantigore or some other type of stalking beast.
Bone spurs erupted from my ashen skin and I knew then what form I had assumed; I did not cry for only the fact that I didn’t have tear ducts any more.
I cleared away the detritus and thick, coagulated mess of human mud to gaze at my reflection, to see what had been done to me and my body. What stared back was the uncanny and disfigured flat muzzle of a gravier—the common ghûl, Necrophaga Cryptessaim.
Sounds of heartbeats reached me, conveyed not through ears because I did not have those, but instead through two holes behind my jaw which doubled as olfactory organs—a hybrid between a tympanic membrane and aromatic epithelia, conjoining taste, smell, and sound into a singular, all-consuming sense.
I could not help but salivate at their oily and sweaty skin, their quivering flesh, their vibrant, intoxicating blood.
I had to plead with myself not to eat them alive; had to barrel through the muck and filth and then crawl into the sewers. Time lost all meaning for time has no place in the mind of a base beast that I had become; I was lost, so very lost, and alone. Predatory instincts came alive in the dark as I devoured rats whole whenever I came upon them, the small mammals thrashing in my stomach as they melted into black sludge.
Not even the ghûls were safe from me as I reaped throngs of their number like a scythe does midsummer wheat—tearing, ripping, rending, breaking, slicing, clawing, cleaving. My insides were shrivelled with the hunger, the unceasing famine that urged me to prey upon anything with blood. I hadn’t appreciated that my condition was well and truly a curse until now, what with the horror of waking up inside the skin of a monster.
What even was I?
My body was beset by teratomas—tumours with teeth, vestigial fingers and malformed, unseeing eyes—some parts unmistakably ghûlish while others took to the anatomy of a strigòi instead; a devolved, lesser strain of vampyrism associated with owls rather than to bats. Deformed feather vanes grew from my ashen gooseflesh like the quills of a mantigore, jagged and ingrown.
The desperation that rose up from the depths of my ego was unlike anything I had ever experienced before—I did not want to stay a freak. Anguish gave way to hardened, callous determination. It was the shadow of the man I had once been, a boy beaten into a living weapon.
Steel does not weep.
Mutations such as this were commonplace manifestations of curses of lycanthropy and omen-touch and the like; they could be inhibited and suppressed with spell and silver and sigil and salve and sanctified water and syrup of holywort and cypress branch taken from a graveyard during midday. I had but one of those seven, my coin-purse held onto my hip even after the heinous, unforgivable sins I had committed.
Was it my fault if I could not remember? It was the parasite, wasn’t it? Was I to blame for their deaths and if I was, where was the closest sturdy bough and rope and stool? Dead God on a cross, I was a wretch; a pathetic, guilt-wracked thing that begged for answers for questions that had none.
I would never know and would never make peace with what had happened. This would haunt me, a shadow in my wake, a stain of black regret in my soul. I deserved to look like this then. To stay cursed in the form of a death-eater, a carrion-feeder, a vulture.
But Raphaël did not—he had this thrust upon him.
My claws were unwieldy and so cut the purse-strings, sending silver to the sewer’s filthy ground. I reached down to grasp them and felt the coin burn my skin black as if acid; but by now I was an old-hand to pain and pain to a vampyre is a draught.
I drank of it and swallowed the silver, feeling the coalesced tears of God’s weeping moon incandesce within the seat of my stomach. Resplendent, transcendent agony like cold claws raking through my insides; the vampyre curse had progressed and so had saddled this body with a Narancan-sign, a bane of which to curb the bloodline of the man that had thought himself God.
But sympathie was a double-edged blade—through symbols one might flip a curse back upon itself and that was what I did, baptising myself in Her Majesty’s silver, pressing the coins into the deformations and burning them away.
The tumours receded somewhat and the skin that grew back from the char and soot was human rather than ghûl but my posture was still that of an ape, of a common beast. And so I made my way through Saint-Getaine’s Underbowels like a tapeworm until I reached my lair and crawled up and out of the well, into the moonlight.
It rained, gentle and sparse and cold and living.
Scarlet bathed me but it was not the blood of Man but instead that of God.
Born anew, baptised in the moon as the silver impressed into my flesh drank of the purity of the Left Eye. Tumours burned black, turning to ash as subliminal flame ate away at the monster in me, leaving only the man.
I looked down at my shaky hands, laughing in jubilation. These hands weren’t those of Raphaël’s but mine; and Gods, how I missed them! How long had it been since I’ve felt comfortable in the flesh? That I’ve felt myself?
But, you see, like all deals with the D’yabel, there is a catch; an insidious clause hidden within the contract, a fly in the honey, a price that is not worth the reward.
My shadow was that of a monster, my inner nature revealed through light—the ghûl’s proportions and hunch and ambulatory gait rendered in darkness cast from human form; all of it was laid bare under the moon’s tearful gaze. Silver did not burn me as I had burnt the monster away from my flesh; but my soul? I looked into a puddle and what looked back was nothing at all.
And though I could not see my reflection, I knew what stared back.
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I sat atop a copper-shingled tenement long since turned green, staring out into the waning night just before God closed one eye and opened the other.
When Raphaël finished his reconvalescence from insensate, inchoate insanity, the first thing he did was wrap me in his arms. It was like a phantom’s touch as he was currently within the heart while I dwelt within the body.
Gods Lamaré.
Sobs—not mine because I had no tears left to cry. There was only numb, disbelieving weariness in me, the calloused scar-flesh left behind in the wake of something that irrevocably changes a person.
He held me tighter.
You’re… Gods, Ré. None of this is your fault. Don’t… don’t blame yourself—the fault lies with me if anyone. I should’ve simply skimped town. I should’ve known better; I thought that, at most, I might be outed as a vampyre not that… all this would happen.
I should have known better.
We were fools cut from the same stupid cloth, weren’t we? I blamed myself and Raphaël did as well, each attempting to outdo the other with their hero complex and inability to let sleeping dogs lie. We had to shoulder the burden else that might mean that we had no control, no sway, no manner with which to steer ourselves in the dark and stormwrought sea of life.
“I know, El.”
He became quiet at that.