XVIII
Recuire
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> Alquemie, as an art, has no true, standardized body of knowledge. It varies from state to state, school to school and alquemist to alquemist. What one occult scientist calls iron sulfide, a metallurgist proper says is pyrite whereas the hermit at the edge of the woods will tell you it’s fool’s gold. The charlatan will attempt to sell it to you as aurum blessed by the Madrigal Herself that will heal any who touches it of venereal warts.
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> But the d’yabel’s in the details; though there is no common source, there are commonly trod paths by which all practitioners must pass through. We might call a thing a different name but its soul remains the same. The words we drape over truth are comparatively moot before truth itself.
—Enantiodromia by Getârian Grandmaster-Alquemist Karlon Göstaf Jaunas, pg.34 excerpt of folio translated into Vulgar Lucielãçais by Tenured Professor of the Université of the Libertine Arts of Saint-Getaine Franceis Allemon Encre d’Sang in the Year of Our Lord Lucifer 657; Fools Argue Over Gold.
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Fighting off a d’yabel, a spawn of Azazel Herself, is much like attempting to wrangle a hagfish; slippery bastards, they secrete a foul-smelling slime so as to escape the clutches of predators.
Not that I had first-hand experience in the latter but tomes and treatises were well and good enough for a reprobate such as myself that detests any sort of physical exertion beyond sex. The former I had plenty of practice in as the damned parasite had attempted not once, not twice, not thrice but quadrice in taking over possession of my body and soul.
Yes, ‘quadrice’ is, in fact, a word—added to the formal lexicon of the Dictionnaire Lucielãçais in accordance with the grammatical reform of 674 After God’s Death.
But I digress; the vampyric foetus had been the death of me and the life of me both, the impetus for my suicide and the reason for my resurrection.
And so I raged against that good night; the beast within did the same against its coming chains. We both knew what would happen should the other win; and it was not death but instead a fate far worse than death—imprisonment.
I doubted that Calcifer would be fast enough with the rowan stake; we’d kill him within the blink that the beast took over. Though, perhaps that was my catastrophism-pessimism-cynicism taking over. I held out no more hope and would not explain it this time around in poetics as you’ve probably tired of it just as I.
Suffice it to say that no man is hurt but by himself in expectation of a better tomorrow.
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Sleeping and waking and dreaming and delirium—the four states bled into one another like dyes in a vat, mixing and bubbling. At one point or another, the chanter had turned on the machine, pumping amalgam of mercury and tombac into my spinal column.
Alquemique reactions sizzled my insides, occult processes transmuting fool’s gold into aurum and then into platinum. My heart-amber remained unaffected, its ability to withstand alquemique change unparalleled though the cracks had yet to fully mend from my fight with the Sparrow-hawk. Only rowan wood could disrupt the crystallised formation of ichor, alquemiquement-speaking, that is.
Pyrite broke down as unblemished gold annealed my skeleton, sublimating the iron sulphide into vapour under the caustic properties of vampyre’s blood. The room was awash in the stench of sulphur such that the chanter had to use a crow-beaked plague-mask lest he succumb to the miasma.
The nightmares would haunt me until the Advent: carrion crows whose faces were wrought of human leather devouring me alive, plucking at my eyes and flesh until I was naught but a Midas-plagued skeleton lost in the midnight sands of the Black Desert.
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When first I fought-off a d’yabel, now I struggled against a godling.
I stood before a great big shapeless, nameless nothingness, drowning under the shadow of Death. There was no sound but instead a loud silence that echoes within the confines of the soul, begging for release. From the darkness beyond that final threshold which is beyond mortal ken, came a beast, long and sinuous and würm-like with a phallic beak of a head; wailing faces were moulded from its scarlet clay-flesh, its corpulence crawling and convulsing and cavorting and copulating.
Azazel and Lucifer had splintered Themselves many times, creating the Apostles or godlings. Each one was an aspect of existence riven from the macrocosmic mosaic as a living shard; personified, made flesh, consummate and manifest. I learned then that the vampyre curse was born under the influence of the Apostle Methusael—Lust Herself.
This was the true form of the parasite, as seen in the ether. The vampyre’s proboscis was naught but an imitation of the imp of serpents that sought purchase in my soul. In the parasite’s mass of faces, I saw that of my sire, wrought of red rather than white; oh, her countenance was just as deathly beautiful as before and it did not fail in sending cold fingers trailing the spine of my psyche. Not of desire, no, but of abject terror.
Opposite her was a gaping maw where my face was to be placed, to be devoured by the lévayathan and made one through the crucible of the stomach. I was to be skinned from my vessel and the vulnerable insides of my Self subsumed into the mass of damnation, of the Host of Hel.
There are no words to describe a spiritual battle for your eternal soul, of the intangible and ineffable for human speech is made to understand a world that can be touched, seen, tasted and heard. But, if you’ve the patience, my shadow, let me attempt to name the unnameable through the ancient art of kenning.
It was like fighting within a dream, your limbs inchoate of your wits and the strength taken from you. To win against a nightmare, you do not fight as if in the flesh. To win against fear itself, you must marshal your will and this is what I did. Words I uttered not long ago surfaced and I spoke them into the ether, reflected: ‘as below, so above.’
Reverberating and resounding, the all-encompassing coronach of the blacksmith’s hammer against the anvil emanated from the depths of my Self and took hold over this demesne that sought to extinguish me like fire before the wind.
You see, I was not fire but rather the ember that fed upon the wind.
Golden chains, gilded in tombac and wrought of platinum, crystallised from the formless mercury of the eigengrau, shackling the beast in a seven-fold seal. It laboured and struggled against the extensions of my will but it was for naught for the spirit mirrored the flesh. My bones were inviolate and so was the marrow within them.
As the parasite had once woven a cocoon of ruby amber around my heart, I now froze it forevermore within the sulphur unconsumed of pyrite. It was a pillar of yellow salt to my ephemeral senses, preserved and pacified, a hound with a leash that I now held within the palm of my hand.
You see, I was not fire but rather the ember that fed upon the wind.
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Still under fever and malaise, Calcifer carved sigils and seals and scrollwork into my bones while they were still malleable. He used jeweller’s tools, engraving sorcerie upon me as if engraving a wedding band with ornamentation and tracerie. I had not even registered the pain, only knowing this bit of fact second-hand.
When at last I regained full-blooded consciousness, it was to a world blessedly silent. I had not realised then just how much the third eye within my brains had affected my perception and inundated me with stimuli. Under the ministrations of occult metalwork, the beast within was well and truly brought to heel in a cage of platinum, slumbering away in the depths.
I looked around, seeing that I was atop Calcifer’s inking table, my skin covered in a thin layer of nigredo; a waste by-product of the innumerable alquemique reactions that had taken place within me. It was this dark gritty paste that had rubbed roughly against me and fomented my fever dreams with Nazirét, a land in which I had never set foot in and was on the other side of the Aller to boot.
My vampyric strength had yet to fully return to me—if ever it would—as I made a fist, opening and closing my fingers whose nails did not end in wicked talons but were instead coated in a patina of purest gold. No mutations threatened to turn me into a man-eating monster again, the body in which I now found myself in having reached a homeostasis, an equilibrium.
Alighting upon the marble tile of the glyphing room, a dull thud echoed outwards, my skeleton vibrating in sympathie. Well and truly out of it I must’ve been as, for a second, I almost thought that I’d broken the stones beneath my feet.
I called out to Calcifer and he brought me a wash-basin and soap of eucalyptus so that I might clean myself anew. The ablutions were sorely needed as I vigorously scrubbed the alquemique gunk from my skin. By the end of my bath, the water had gone from clear to black and stunk of ammonia, grease, and formaldehyde.
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Having been naked for the better part of a week, I relished the feeling of light and breezy cloth covering me rather than putrefied organic matter. One might’ve thought that Calcifer would simply throw away the sullied contents of the wash-basin but he did not, instead condensing the water into repurposed nigrédo that he might use in other alquemique endeavours such as in creating golemns and other homunculæ and in fabricating artificial ruby-amber.
“Nothing is destroyed, only transformed.” Calcifer told me. “Matter can neither be created from whole cloth as it can be truly annihilated. Only changed; only rearranged—the postulate of equivalent exchange that all alquemists must abide by to achieve transmutation of any sort, derived as an emergent phenomenon from the Three Prime Hermetic Laws.”
The chanter went on to explain the fine intricacies of alquemique theory to an uneducated hick—Lamaré would have corrected me were he awake and euphemized ‘hick’ into ‘layperson’ but you’ll keep our little secret, won’t you, my conscience?
Seeing that my attention waned like the low tide, Calcifer condensed a sphere of phlogiston from the ether and released it at me; a great big roiling mass that flash vaporised the moisture in the membranes of my eyes.
I covered my face with my arms, cringing away from the phantom heat. The gaseous orb of flame spilled harmlessly over my skin, repelled by an invisible aura around my body. Thankfully, Calcifer had only conjured a weakling of a fireball else I might’ve—
The choking stench of something set alight reached my nostrils and I looked back, seeing that Calcifer had set a sheaf of papers alight. With a snap of his fingers, he dispelled the bromine flames before they could spread and anteceding any of my speech, he said: “I did nothing to the sphere for it to bounce off you as if a ball made of cow’s bladder.”
I put two and two together.
“So you’ve truly made me into a living Voltaire display; I’ll repel sorcerous attacks and hexes then.”
Calcifer smiled wickedly and his words came out as a serpent’s susurrus, promising to become like God if only I ate of the forbidden fruit. Once an addict, always an addict—the only way in which I knew to remove temptation was to give in.
I bit into Adam’s apple: “Out with it—what else can I do then? What more?”
In response, the chanter simply gestured come hither and made his way to the storefront where swords floated within vitrines, held alight on the ebb and flow of the ether, bobbing like ships in the sea.
“Tell me, what do you see?”
I humoured the man as he had humoured me: I saw steel grasped by phantom hands that sparked with ambaricité. I saw black-locust skulls suspended within hermetic flasks, schools of ferric dust swimming around them. The monsters were a mix between raven and insect, warped beyond recognition through ichor during the time of the Plagues—the sixth and penultimate time that God had shed blood.
Waxing and waning, tithing and taking; an ocean near invisible yet permeating all things. The interstitial fluid of the cosmos, the parasite gibbered to me, murmuring asleep in the cradle of my brains, a susurrus escaping its black dream. I did not like that I understood the thing’s meaning so viscerally, as if it were my own.
“I’ll be able to affix metals to thin air through ambarique current and pressure.” I asked though it wasn’t a question. This conviction was borne in the marrow of my bones like a lunatic’s delusion; unalterable before clear evidence to the contrary.
“Yes. I’ve yet to inlay your engravings with any additional occult substance so those abilities will be dulled for the most part until you’ve accustomed to the changes. Perhaps you did not notice it yet but you’ve gained weight.”
A little bit of Lamaré bled into my tongue then.
“Rude.”
Confusion and then a mirthless chuckle as he caught on.
“The amalgam is denser than your original calcium matrix—six times as dense and so six times as heavy. You probably think that your strength has yet to return to you but that’s simply an illusion brought on by your anchor-heavy skeleton. Instead of osteoblasts, your bones are maintained through a process of assimilation and transmutation; simply eat the needed metals and the modified Midas-pox will sort out the rest.”
“I don’t have to worry about infecting anyone, will I?”
Calcifer shook his head.
“The rúna seals the curse to your marrow which is from here on where half of your ichor is contained. Your stamina is halved, in essence. Whether to call upon vampyric strength or heart-sight or polymorphie or ambarique pressure.”
The trade-off was worth it—even if I had not gotten an extraneous occult ability—for its peace of mind alone. I rather preferred not devolving into a monster prowling the midnight streets of Saint-Getaine.
Now, when looking into the mirror, I saw myself staring back, red eyes ringed with gold yet forlorn. I could barely imagine Ré’s devastation; he’d killed himself so as to not succumb to the beast and yet he’d been the one to awake under its shadow. It was the cruellest sort of irony that I’d rather only know about through færie tales.
Easier said than done, I knew there was no changing the past. There was only attempting to move on and move past, though not without paying the wages of my sin.
“Calcifer… tell me: was there talk or news of…”
It was as if my Adam’s apple were truly an apple stuck in my throat as I lost my ability to speak then, choking on the guilt wracked upon my conscience. I imagined that this was how weirwolves awoke in the morns after a full moon; bloodied hands and bloodless minds.
The chanter’s excitement died then, his black eyes dull and avoiding my own as he spoke: “No.”
Such a finality—contained in that single monosyllable.
“Unfortunately for them and fortunately for you, they were scum.”
He shook his head at what his tongue had said before his scrupules caught up.
“Not in the moral sense but in the social one; this was society’s dregs, the unwanted scum at the top of the broth that is cast out. The pox-ridden, the lepers whose marks are murder and rape, the addicts, the Sodomites, and the insane. By your accounts, I have all the reason to believe that you stumbled upon a vagrant encampment and savaged all those there, deserving and undeserving both.”
‘The only justice they’ll have is by your hand,’ was left unsaid.
How terrible it was to want penance but not the punishment that comes with.
If I gave myself in, it was the hangman’s noose and the gallows. If I did not, I was spitting upon the deaths of five dozen people. Perhaps I did deserve it—sixty people dead by a single hand is a hand far too dangerous to be left with fingers.
But my body was host to not only mine own soul. I would not let Lamaré die after what he had done for me and I could not waste my life either. Third and lastly, I would do all in my power and beyond so that such a thing never again happens.
“Tell me Calcifer, will the beast slip out of its chains? Are there dangers that I must know or signs as to its awakening?”
Somehow, the man’s sigh was heavier than the last. He lifted a hand and gestured for me to wait as he rummaged around in the back of the shop.
The chanter brought me a gilded stake and handed it to me; I looked it over, feeling as though it were part of me. There was a long chain attached to it that was wrought of a dark, umber steel. Sigils were carved all over the artefact, doused with ichor and salt and spell.
“I made it of the same alloy as your skeleton and infused it with the Midas-pox as well. It is a sort amulet that can be used to further seal the d’yabel or…”
“Or to end my life before it takes me.” I finished, grimly.
I lifted an open palm to forestall the coming assurances and platitudes.
“It’s… well, it’s not fine but you get the gist of it. I need no euphemism or encouragement. I’ll survive, not unscathed, but I’ll survive all the same.”
I came out of Calcifer’s enchantrie without paying a single Talent and yet I felt as if Judas selling out Nameless Christ to Narancan for thirty silvers, a piece of my soul left behind.
There were only ten in my coin purse so I had been scammed.
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By the time that I reached home again, Lamaré had yet to awake.
In the silence of that lonely place, I slowly put things back where they should be as, in his desperation, Ré had wrecked furniture and strewn about the rugs and savaged the wood panels that covered the mouth of the well.
Rain-water had gotten into the lair as a result—the byway being filled meant that it had rained more than once in the intervening week.
Clothes that were water-clogged and soggy with mould I had to throw away into the sewers proper. We’d erected bricks and mortared them so as to impede the breach between the well and the adjoining channel and it had been broken down seven nights ago by the beast; so I took up brick by brick, or at least the ones that were still serviceable and went on to fix the ruins.
The quiet toil helped set my spirits straight; we were halfway there to leaving this wretched Cairn so I put my head down and did the work, the marrow-deep weariness ignored. My wits were ragged and I was at the end of my rope, attempting to keep myself together under sheer force of will.
Slow work pieced back together my home as it did myself. With the timing of the D’yabel Herself, when I put the last brick back in place, my resident spectre returned.
Lucifer wept, have I the tale to tell you.
Each subsequent word that I heard was more fantastical than the last. As it was with attempting to describe mundane dreams, there was great difficulty in translating the intrinsic understanding of the mind’s eye into the vernacular.
The Narancan-signs made more sense now, looking at them through the Éderi lens of soul-binding; curses exchanged for blessings. The rúnari array was staked upon the fundament of the divine, this we already knew and yet it being confirmed as an omen of the Apostle Methusael put the pieces together.
The vis-à-vis with Lust’s herald explained so much about this strain of vampyrism’s idiosyncrasies, be it the method of transference which was, essentially, venereal disease, to the aspects that erred towards seduction and coercion and subjugation; id est the vampyre’s dread song and heart-sight and the assimilation of foreign blood.
After all was said and done, I was nearly disbelieving that we survived. Not unscathed, mind, as we were well and truly battered in heart and soul; but better alive than dead.
If only I could make myself and Lamaré truly believe the same.