Detritus, Daedalea and Other Dead Things [Closed]

[Myca Vykos]

((Dubious-consent sexual content, fades to black before heavier detail.))

Eyes closed and kneeling in gravedirt, Vykos focused on the network of blood vessels pulsing behind his closed lids. Buried deep in the earth, his fingers searched for a responding pulse - his elongated digits and claws tore through dead roots, bracken and husks of dead insects in search for something living. Finally, his fingertips touched something that answered to his power, lighting up a network of mycotic roots in his mind's eye. A satisfied purr from deep in his throat.

“Daedalea abortiva,” Vykos murmured in his strangely accented Latin.

Slowly, tentatively, he pushed through the network with his own Koldunic energy, an indulgent smile curling his lips as his power progressed inch by painstaking inch. Then suddenly, a reverberating growl broke that smile into a frustrated snarl as the network fizzled out like a used candle wick. Vykos ripped his hand from the earth and sat back on his haunches, muttering to himself in clipped, irritated Romanian as he wiped his hands on the hem on his simple robe.

[Asterius]

((WARNINGS throughout. For references to sex. Graphic references. Probably. Don't worry, Asterius is just as worried about his thoughts.))

For once, Asterius was just watching his lover, from across the graves. Plato's windmill proof eddied across his meandering thoughts; he was debating whether it could be applied to a Dominate anchor. The breeze gathered his robe's hem and swirled nearby in a riot of leaves; on this and other cerebral topics he may have been, but, Asterius was no longer a stranger to the second rebellious act of his mind: Vykos' fingers were buried into the earth, the Tzimisce's aura contorted in focus, hunkered like an animal, and all Asterius could think of was those same fingers in a different, cleverer context.

This is how it goes. Give in once and you're doomed. Once your own fundamentals start to morph and dissolve all the others matter less and less.

One thing Asterius did discover, during all this thinking time, was that it's actually quite difficult to think lately. In the past when he lay with Mithras, he had ample time to consider his thoughts, his words, his dinner, his work left out on a table two metres from the bed. Not so, all of a sudden.

Asterius explores research in the same way he casts magic, his entire body and mind given over to it; his soul thirsted for it. But by comparison to that, sex was a rather perfunctory thing, of little interest to someone like him - in any of its iterations. It was a bore. Or worse: it was humiliating. In Mithras he'd landed a very dominant, uncreative lover who liked things just so, and Asterius spent most of their life learning how best to avoid Mithras putting his cock in him, rutting up against him like some Persian alley dog in heat. All this avoidance business eventually put a damper on their sex life.

Lucita also sprung to mind, increasingly this week - and with her the ugly emotion, itself black, that he Asterius himself languish in a while and grow cold with. But as Vykos spoke he shrugged it off, as if from a shoulder, irritably.

Asterius made his way through the headstones, his robe whispering across the dry leaves.

He stopped a little behind Vykos, watching the back of his student's head.

"No fortune?"

[Myca Vykos]

Vykos had been so absorbed in his irritation that he hadn't noticed Asterius approaching. His mentor's aura was so vast and so tenacious that Vykos often did not notice his movement over small area unless he reached out with Auspex. As it was, he was taken a little by surprise. Just as Vykos over his shoulder, the topsoil underneath them shifted ever so slightly - it was as though a single vibration had run under it or an invisible cloth pulled a fraction underneath the earth.

"A little, but the earth will not work with me for longer than a few moments."

Vykos sniffed and stood up, turning to face Asterius in one fluid motion. His stern expression softened with a hint of amusement as he took in the sight of the Cappadoccian standing among the headstones before a backdrop of the old church. Fitting.

"That stirring just now, when you surprised me - that was more than my conscious efforts have yielded all evening."

Another soft sound of frustration. Vykos flicked his wrists at his sides and all the earth covering his fingers fell immediately from his skin - the motion of cleaning his hands manually was clearly just a habit.

"Perhaps I am trying too hard. I am not certain if it is that mad king's recent actions or my own powers that are interfering. No matter. What brings you from your crypt, dragul meu?"

[Asterius]

Asterius didn't like to admit that it placates his own ego that there remain moments he can sneak up on Vykos. He'd gone undetectable as a wraith - and even before death, had moved soundlessly - for so many centuries that it was a royal irk to be noticed, with so little difficulty on the Tzimisce's part. Cappadocians were not made to be loud. It made him feel cumbersome and clumsy, like a Ventrue.

"Hn," Asterius said, deciding not to apologise for something he wasn't even, this time, intending. If he'd known he could surprise the Tzimisce at all, he'd have put more effort into doing so every time. "Then my presence comes at a welcome point."

Newly crafted as his eyes were, the green-hazel starbursts follow the dirt as it hurries from Vykos' fingers; pleasure and a little admiration lights up the necromancer's aura. He would not tire of seeing another work their craft so masterfully, that even the little things as this, which came so naturally to Vykos, were currently impossible to Asterius.

"I can offer only opinions," he said quietly. "Regretfully, it could easily be either. I do expect for our disciplines to continue to oppose one another before they relax in their resistance again. Every new level looks to cause it."

"And - mm - speaking of."

Lifting the dark bell sleeves, Asterius reached into the outer layer of his more elegant black robe that he'd chosen that night, and drew from it, apropos nothing, an emaciated cat. The lining of his robe did not change as it fell closed.

"This is yours."

[Myca Vykos]

Vykos’ dark brows raised a fraction higher than his controlled expressions would usually permit and this time he couldn’t prevent the amused smile from curling his lips. The image of Asterius retrieving the thin, silver tabby from his robes like some deathly magician would stay with him for some time. Vykos gathered himself and looked more closely at the animal, his brow settling into a quizzical frown when he noted the appearance of the creature.

He reached out for the animal, his fingers and claws melding back into a more acceptable length before taking the cat from Asterius. Out of habit, Vykos uttered a few strange chirps and a purr in his throat as he took hold of it. He was never a master of Animalism but he would avoid being clawed where he could. To his surprise, the cat merely looked up into his face with baleful, yellow eyes and required no such calming measure. He tried a hiss - nothing. Frowning again, he took the cat to his chest and looked back as Asterius expectantly.

“Mine, is it? And what exactly is it, magistru?”

[Asterius]

"It is a cat," Asterius blinked, as if that was obvious.

He took his own gaze to the animal, then to Vykos with his hands around it. A beat: Asterius' eyes soften and he appears for one moment deeply nostalgic.

"Your necromantic reserves have grown enough that this is viable. An innate powerwell of your own is required to work when manipulating your own soul. So far you have only been instructed how best to manipulate externals to you: how to connect to death, how to draw upon its energy, and how to lower or raise the Shroud slightly. But all of this uses forces external to your own matter."

"While this is all good and develops the innate muscles, it is only the first step. Over time, frequent channelling of death does build a source of it internally, upon which you might draw later like a battery. So do continue with your current practices."

"But this internal well depletes fast; the soul is not ready to accommodate so much death and not die - a rather messy melting process that destroys the soul when its overcharged. You will become a natural sponge for it, eventually. It just takes time to build sufficient reserves for proper work like Ash travelling or offensive casts - this is why you so rarely saw non-Elder Cappadocians outside of Kaymakli, once upon a time; our early education was long - but you have enough of your own well now. It might be a push but really, this needs to be begun early, because it is difficult."

"I am going to teach you how to shape shift."

Asterius stumbles on his words, apparently more animated for this topic. "Not as you know - ah - this is not Protean. It is not a shifting of your physical shape, so there will be no change in that. Your corporeal shape will stay here, or wherever it is meditating."

"Shapeshifting to a necromancer is a form of soul acclimatisation, or soul translocation. You will in the early stages be cosying up to this cat's soul. Possession is a sub-elective you would ordinarily study under this school of thought, but possession enforces your soul onto an unwilling target, whereas Shapeshifting is mutual. The cat allows you to piggy-back it. It is easier than possession because the target host is permissive of your entry."

"This here is - truly - a cat. They are the best creatures to start with for apprentices because they have one paw in death, and one paw here, as it were. Their souls are already attuned to death."

"Shapeshifting begins with becoming familiar with your target host. You tend to practice 'trying on' its shape. Think of it as... moving through a semi-pliable wall of plasm. You try on its ethereal body. We had chambers dedicated to simulating this with different mammals, faux animals, because actually trying it on with a real soul when the apprentice was unprepared - even if just an animal - could cause unwanted side effects. At worst, attack parts of the souls in truth, a bit like dogs trapped on a knot. It could be a very painful process trying to cut the apprentice free, undamaged, if they spent too long attached."

Asterius pauses. "I lie, the worst cases was just immediate death, as the true soul cannot exist outside of a physical form without the natural laws assuming it has separated in truth, and died. So a badly done hop meant there was no good body landing place, and the apprentice landed poorly between the two, could not reattach to their now-ash body and death's gravity dragged them away."

"That won't happen!"

"There are a lot of things you can do with shapeshifting, not limited to unwilling possession. But the most important, in my humble opinion, is that shapeshifting - or soulshifting - remains the first step to learning how to travel through the Shroud with no body, with no physical form at all. Currently if you were to do that, you would simply die; the umbilical cord attaching your soul to your body would cut and you would be in death in truth, with no way of re-anchoring yourself, your body would just turn to ash. When Lazarus took a third of ours into death, it was an exodus with their bodies. Shapeshifting meanwhile trains the soul to warp and change and become flexible to new shapes and ideas. It in turn trains the body to adapt too, and permit the impossible. A way of breaking reality's laws without invoking paradox and backlash, if you will."

"A truly flexible soul can be anything it wishes - it could cease to be a vampire, if it so chose. No Cappadocian reached that level of mastery, as far as I am aware, but what many of us did was adjust ourselves so as not to require blood to sustain our bodies. We instead obliged our bodies to believe it needed death energy."

"Constancia trained hers to believe it could split its focus across many animated bodies or bone zombies, and so she could command entire armies of the simple dead. I do not understand this, because it is not something I made my soul work on, and so the idea seems illogical or impossible to me, to be in so many places at once. But it is innate to her, as the Lady of Bones. She can also inhabit the impossible: a collection of bones, or quite literally, dead simple matter. She hid from the Giovanni this way."

"For my own, I trained my soul to rebuke the idea that I was limited by the existing laws concerning Ash travel. The details are irrelevant here, but it is why I am a specialist in moving easily in and across the Shadowlands, as opposed to the pains most have to take. I can take an entire group, because my soul has ignored the law that one cannot forcibly anchor other souls to one's own."

Asterius waves, "For now: this is your cat. I have primed it. But it is for you to meditate on over the next three nights. Perhaps you can use your own fleshcaft to your advantage here, and focus first on its anatomy and internal structure, feel what it means to be a cat, for a cat to function."

[Myca Vykos]

Apart from slowly and absently running his fingers over the cat’s small skull, Vykos stood utterly still as he listened intently to Asterius’ description of shifting the shape of one’s soul. His gaze was fixed on his teacher’s face, only occasionally drifting to follow the rare but painfully graceful gestures of Asterius’ hands. Occasionally, Vykos’ head would nod in the tiniest inclination of understanding but otherwise he was as a statue - the breeze that disturbed his hair and robes only emphasising his halcyon fascination.

Nothing changed until Asterius spoke on his own form of soul-shifting and how it aided him on the Ash Path - Vykos’ pupils dilated visibly against their hazel backdrop, his lips parting slightly as he made a soft, involuntary inhalation. His tongue pressed restlessly against the backs of his visibly incisors and he glanced down at the animal in his arms, his hand passing more mindfully over the cat’s thin body as his fingers began to account for every little notch and bump of the creature’s bones.

“So I am ready for another step,” Vykos murmured slowly, a shocked acceptance rather than a question, “I wonder if Auspex is of most use in this, alongside meditation… or perhaps just Animalism.”

Before losing himself in a train of thinking aloud, he looked up and met Asterius’ gaze with the warmest, most genuinely happy smile that had crossed his features in recent memory.

“Thank you, Regele meu.”

There was a hint of joyful laughter in Vykos’ voice. He made another chirruping sound before letting the cat leap from his arms, leaving them open to take Asterius’ empty hands in both of his. He bent his head to press a chaste kiss to his teacher’s brow just below his dark widow’s peak, breathing deep of his anointed hair as he did so.

[Asterius]

"I know nothing of Animalism," Asterius admits, his expression pensive. "But I imagine it will be exceptionally beneficial, auspex only loosely so. To converse directly with the animal would have shaved weeks off my early attempts to make myself understood."

"You are welcome, golden one." Asterius' gaze followed the silver tabby as it leapt to the ground. "I wish you the best of merit with that one. And - do be careful in Reading? I cannot think why Mithras is unearthing that cup now. Nor, in fact, how he got it out of my wards. I'm concerned Constancia opened it up for him, but she's been absent lately and I haven't chased her yet to ask."

Centuries had come and gone in the time Asterius had lived; he found himself unfamiliar with this level of concern for another. A small frown drew together the Semetic boy's brows. "I will meet you three nights after its close by London. Find my old haunt, the one outside Maidenhead."

Asterius closed his eyes and tilted his head fractionally, into Vykos' lips, remaining quite still while the Tzimisce inhaled. The rich scent of temple incense filled Asterius, below and above Vykos' amber musk. It calmed Asterius immensely, he found it eased the domino stack of plans that were falling in his mind, caveat after caveat, condition after condition, for how best to layer any protections on his lover.

"And don't forget to find that - friend - of yours. You have my word, it is not a crude means of assassinating her. The Barghest are a problem for us all."

[Myca Vykos]

Vykos purred contentedly at the pet name golden one, nuzzling his face even deeper into Asterius' hair.

"Of course - I will be careful. Genuinely. Not only my concept of careful."

Vykos chuckled, remembering all the occasions that Asterius had chastised him for his recklessness. He frowned at the mention of Constancia bypassing Asterius' wards but pushed the feeling of suspicion down - he had come to realise that the emotions he associated with Sires did not apply to the complex dynamics of Cappadocian lines.

"Maidenhead? That is a very crude name for a place."

There was delight in Vykos' voice at the concept of naming a town after a hymen and his good mood only mounted when Asterius reassured him again that no - he really wasn't going to kill Lucita on a first meeting. Vykos supposed that would be a good enough start and he would have to trust her to make a good first impression - something she had always been much better at than he.

"I will meet you there, and I will bring her. But come, let us not talk of Barghests before then mm?"

Vykos released Asterius' hands and slipped his fingers into his lover's hair, working his claws along the base of his head where his scalp often felt tight from his long, heavy braid. Vykos too the liberty of loosening the root of the braid a little, pulling Asterius' head back as he did so.

"Shall we go inside? I am finished with my work here - if you can call it that."

A small snort of irritation at his own failure before he pressed another kiss to Asterius' skin, this time at the bridge of his nose.

"I would have your company for the remainder of the evening, if you can be coaxed away from your scrolls."

His talons massaged Asterius' scalp as he spoke, looking down into his lover's eyes with a smile. He noticed there were some bloodshot vessels forming in his sclera. I wonder how well he can see me now - I should rework them for him.

[Asterius]

"It is not a crude name you lusty beast, have your mind out of there - do you ever break the surface of such thoughts?"

"It is Maiden Hythe in truth - after the new wharf that was built. It is a riverside area. The English give ugly short-hands for their own bastardisations. It has nothing to do with virginity."

Asterius' dissaproval was short-lived; for no sooner had Vykos slipped his claws into his hair and raked them gently along his scalp, the Cappadocian froze. The tiny hairs on the back of his neck - and along his arms, beneath the robes - lifted erect. His eyes fell half closed, and peered up at Vykos with a judgemental acceptance.

"Call you what? Oh... yes. We may return inside."

Asterius shifted stiffly. He could feel his nipples impressing painfully upon the silk and he cleared his throat roughly, shooting an accusatory look at the Tzimisce's mouth.

"My company can be granted - I have concluded my work for the eve."