9 - 2 [Fool] A Hunger Fit For Demons Kills the Cat The Exorcist - 4th of Mead’s Tap, Year 1125 A.E.

The Exorcist lay atop his cot, ruminating and awake yet with eyes closed.

The sun was far from coming up, the hour a fitting one o’clock in the night; the thirteenth hour, the time of the Dead-to-be-Forgotten and when vigil over a funeral, be it in pyre or grave, was to end.

When the spirits were left to fend for themselves.

Phineas had never been much of a man of faith. Never had he prayed to the gods for protection when good silver and a few fateful words were enough.

Yet the sight he had seen tonight was close to requiring a damned priest. And though Fin already was ordained by the Lycean Temple, he did not consider himself a true follower of the Parcae; the Three Mistresses that Wove Web from the Lives of Men.

He borrowed Power from the Domain of Fate, yes, but he did not venerate deeply any one of Its godlings; any of the plane’s many incarnations—They were not his sole Patrons.

He carried Their blessings but was not bound by the weight of Their Ethos.

His soul was his own.

Di inferni…

The damned bitch piggybacked off a karmic thread as thin as a fly’s hairs. The encounter with the vampyre provided pathway while the lad’s wrath and sorrow became beacons in the black.

It’s a discrete working of influence so sublime it borders on the Divine.

Which, in a sense, is not wrong.

Devil and god are but two opposite ends on a single hempen rope; extraplanar beings that meddle in the affair of mortals with no care for the woe left behind. Matters not whether it be one of the Seven or Nine, all Sixteen are pricks of the highest order.

At least back in Vitae, we know all of the gods are proper arseholes.

Though Fin knew he conversed with himself to soften the hazy and rumpled fur of his worries, to try and keep ahold of his sanity and scruples along the Path, the Exorcist found himself feckless and lacking.

The lad was his charge, and Fin could do and had done nothing for him while Eiden slept. Soul-dreams were not so easy things to enter, hence why the Exorcist found the karmic working done by the Mother of Vampyres so… exquisite.

The eternal soul wore armor of adamant, a shell impenetrable by Fin’s brutish skills of magicking—no blade of spirit could slice through such material.

Yet, all plate, no matter how impervious to steel, had chinks; places where leather was bound or the joints where metal could not so easily be wrapped and needed flexibility.

Such was where a properly-wielded and envenomed blade could find purchase and draw blood. The administration of toxins need only a single entry-point, and all that.

In Eiden’s case, it was less of a metaphorical dagger and more of an inhalement of miasma. For though the eternal soul wore armor of adamant, its helmet still possessed holes punched-through for breathing where choking gas could enter.

And kill a man from the lungs inside-out, drowning him in his own blood.

Sulfus mostarde.

Chemical warfare had abounded in the last century with the rise of alchemy’s more mundane sibling. The ease of fabrication and the lessened burden of magickal resources necessary made the dastardly branch of war positively thriving.

With a flick of his will, the Exorcist banished any and all wayward thoughts, bringing his mind to heel. Now was not the time for philosophizing on the moral decay of Man.

Eiden had come close to accepting a bond with Lilithu Herself. The Exorcist had woken up from his false sleep to the rotten odor of carrion and the visage of the Diabblein Tree. The eld image spread out in a subtle layer of the Spiritual, in between the Myriad Planes like some parasitic worm.

Cannot hide from these eyes of mine, wretch. I’ve chased you and yours’ scent through half a millenia.

Yer secrets are laid bare to the Sight of Lupus Lykeios.

The Tree’s roots were varicose veins, porphyric and purple, sickly like a bloodborne taint that made the body rot from the inside-out. They suckled upon the soft, fleshly insides of reality-in-between.

A parasite that took upon the teet of the Living Universe Itself. A creature unwhole—unholy—looking for that which would fill the void; the missing piece of the tapestry of Themselves.

Nothing did. Nothing would. For therein lay a hunger fit for demons spawned from the lowest fathoms of the Abyss.

Appétit prophane.

The Liliyyoth’s trunk and branches were arranged in the manner of a willow, yet with blacken feathers instead of leaves and dried, leathery human skin stretched in place of bark—the shed hide of all that had succumbed to Its seirene call.

Upon those unholy boughs hung damnation sown by seed of irony.

The Exorcist dared not look into those fruits directly. For not even he could resist the allure of the Power within, should he be caught in the trapping of sight. Mana—existential essence—of that density and quality possessed enough sway to transform even himself.

All that looked upon the Liliyyoth were destined to eat its infernal boon. Not even the Divine were entirely immune to such, minor godlings all around Terra Mundus having fallen to the temptation of maggot-ridden fruit and turned devil.

If not for the fact that Eiden was a sorcerer, a bearer of an Awoken soul, he would've fully gone through the Transference of Chains that came with accepting the accursed gift given freely.

Or perhaps, it was the other way around with a few added subtleties. The lad’s sorcery was a tempting thing to the Nighten Fowl with Yellow Eyes. Even if She could not fully bind him, leaving the boy with a smidgen of Her influence was enough.

Spirit resonance would do the rest, transforming him into an appropriate vessel. Those hurt by a monster most often took upon the very same fell Power—a phenomen most often called “Seeking Steel in the Dark” in the vernacular of the Northern Realms of Europa. Or “Deal Done with the Devil” in the particular case of King’s Kedwen.

Sorcerer no longer would he be, his elixir drained and him reduced to, in the kedweni-britonnic tongues, a warlock. A conjuror soul-bound to a Patron of the Nine rather than the more accepted Seven.

Not that Fin would let it be so.

When Eiden fully fell to sleep once more in that same night, the Exorcist got up and palmed Bastille in his wrinkled mits. The oathbinder’s presence was a comforting weight in both body and mind.

She promised power; she beckoned vengeance.

She was doom in the guise of shining silver.

The living sword hummed in barely restrained fury, having felt the influence of the Devil Beneath the Crow-Feathered Willow come upon the boy. If not for the fact that the remnant spirit that dwelt within the blade was an existence of sharp discipline, Eiden would have felt its wrath through the fabric of the mental plane.

[Worry not, we shall never let this be.] Fin sent through their soul-bond; the lashings of thread karmic that hewn them twin-twain as one.

With a few flicks of his wrist, inscriptions were cut into the marble of the inn’s floor. The carvings were hollow things waiting to be filled with the substance of spirit. Such was called sigaldry; a magicking art that bound sympathy and spell to the form of physical glyph.

The inscriptions were laid out beautifully, their form more akin to the calligraphy of brushwork rather than the etching of tablet stone. Glyphs spread out in the configuration of a hexagram, following the lines of the invisible six-pointed star. Crook and guide to the sigaldry therein.

Thank me wrinkly rump that I bought some reagents beforehand. Seems the Fates were as kind as They be cruel.

The magicking materials shall still be used with the lad in mind.

The Exorcist filled the carvings with ash and then made a circle of salt around the entirety of the hexagrammic glyphery. Halite dust and greyen alkali both fell through the funnel of pinched fingers, his accuracy and hand-eye coordination masterful if not exceeding mortal limits. Not a single grain out of place.

The ash would bind within and the salt would bind without—a common enough arrangement for sigaldric circuits or magick circles as they were oft called.

Mana, the stuff of the elements distilled, was poured into the glyphery—equal parts each of earth and air, fire and water, infused unto ash and salt both.

Sigaldry was not unlike mundane oven-cookery in this regard; it was an art that required careful and exact measuring lest the end product be half-baked.

From his Center, the Exorcist took the required essences he had long since cultivated and transported them fro. First through the veins of his spirit then subsequently through the invisible veins of the world without, channeling them finally into the carvings.

His skill in spiritual transference elicited no physical phenomena, such as actinic sparks or wisps of errant and erratic light in between him and the destined medium. For no leakage was to be found—Fin was no mere novice, no simple amateur.

Through the subtle threads of sympathetic spirit that bound all, he transported essence. In his mind’s eye, he held an arkane pattern called a spellform; a geometric representation of mana woven to a purpose, not unlike sigaldry. Yet where one was spell bound to physical glyph, the other was wrought from the intangible stuff of minds and fashioned in the likeness of a net or half-finished weave.

The lashings of the mental construct contained echoes borne of nature, shadows of greater things that lay behind the Veil and Beyond the Pale. A design that conjured the basest of physical law and highest of heavenly emanations through underlying mathematical structure.

Like the web of spiders they were; wrought beautifully of the gossamer that was thread karmic—the interstitial tissue of reality, binder of all.

His spellforms were impeccable things, aqueducts made to channel not water but instead mana with utmost efficiency. They were superimposed upon the World of Spirit, bending subtle thread ever just so to form a strong enough sympathetic link with which essence could flow. Not a breach for effluvia to be found.

Like with the alignment of planets in the nighten sky, gravitas—the weight of presence—was paramount. The Exorcist wielded such a force as a royal seamstress sew vestments proper from textiles of Xingese silk.

A Wolf that Weaves, just one of his many epithets earned through the centuries. A Perfectionist-Obsessive and Over-Detail-Oriented Prick being his first.

When the sigaldric circuits were filled with as much elemental essence as their physical mediums would allow, the glyphs thrummed with white-blue incandescence, embers of chalk burning with barely contained energy.

The fourfold essence amalgamation ate away at itself, grinding away at its material-physicality and shedding quanta in the form of light in the process—not unlike the friction of a bow-drill making a spark by rubbing two pieces of wood together with tinder.

From the shed quanta, energy pure and malleable, the Exorcist fashioned a fulcrum in the Realm of Spirit. Such would be the leverage upon which the ritual would flourish.

Cupped in the hands of spirit that was his aura, he shaped the essence to a purpose no different than a potter mold wet clay. From a diffuse lump of no particular specificity, the Exorcist hew a rough lozenge lesser in in size yet denser in substance.

The singularity of mana therein was a weight not to be denied—similar to but much lesser than that of the Diabblein Tree—bending the Myriad Planes around itself as a boulder doth cleave a stream in twain.

Such was a presence, a gravitas, that bent the world to its whims. Yet, all power, no matter how great, needed a point of contact; anchorage that would beget change.

Like a god without an avatar, a fulcrum with no anchor was spineless and without roots with which to grasp the waking world.

Now, for a binding agent.

The Exorcist took from the living sword’s spirit a drop of imbibed blood. Though the physical remnants of the substance were long gone, Bastille remembered the taste of the lad’s copper.

She, just like him, was a wolf with a hellbent sniffer, never to forget the scent of prey. The lad was, afterall, a carrier for vampyrism—though, at a much lesser rate of contagion and not truly a bearer of the Lilithuan curse, for he had not succumbed in soul to the Devillein Fruit.

Funny that, a child no older than seventeen years having a soul with such steel. Stronger even than some manifestations of divinity; than the godlings that had succumbed to the seirene’s call.

He, alone and powerless, had resisted the Transference. He, without any passing skill in magick and bereft of specialized training, had achieved what most grandmasters of the Art could not.

What the Exorcist could not.

Yet, all would be rendered zeroth if left unchecked, for no matter that steel may survive a single strike to stone, consecutive blows would doom it to be rent asunder. And so was why Fin did now what he did: to protect his ward from what was to come.

Influence-left-crippled-yet-still-dangerous lurked in the shadows. A blade coated in honey, coaxing and lilting to the tongue yet no less sharp and cutting beneath the saccharine veneer.

Maggot-ridden fruit.

Phineas Luciean would let beget no such thing.

The Exorcist wove Eiden’s lifeblood onto one end of the ritual’s fulcrum and his own onto the other.

Not that Fin bled actual blood any longer. He had veins and a beating heart, yes, yet they did not pump humor sanguine through his body. The Exorcist was kindred to his prey; a being far diverged from the base or foundation that was humanity. He wore the skin of man but was something decidedly other beneath.

Donning the hide of hare, the wolf therefrom stares.

Only pneuma coursed through him now; the breath of the spirit, equal parts each of the essences of air, wind, life, and water. Were he to be cut, he would bleed a transparent liquid that would quickly evaporate like pure alcohol and burn like strong acid should a mortal touch it with their mitts.

And so, his vital breath was woven into the glyphs.

From without and from salt, wind howling and green as viridis incarnatus—the stuff of dancing auroras in the Far North and Far South—came to.

From within and from ash, vibrant red as scarlata incarnata wound around the confines of the sigaldric working.

Viridian and carnelian—pneuma and ichor—met, not mixing but instead staying opposed. And from their opposition came the binding of conflict, difference making mooring wrought of war waged.

A clinchment of swords forged from the substance of spirit.

Good. All that is left is to seal the sigaldric working and then pressure can safely be exerted through the fulcrum—lest the damn thing just implode upon itself due to instability.

No edifice lasts upon shifting sand.

Thankfully, the Exorcist would not have to convey meaning to the recipient at the other end of the fulcrum by having Eiden swear an Oath.

The First Law of Sympathy—Accord—was not broken but instead superseded by a higher principle.

The Second Law of Sympathy—Synecdoche—stated that: As Within, So Without. A substitution, in the way of material or spirit, could work just as well as conveyed meaning.

Such as the lad’s imbibed blood; his spiritual stench; his auric imprint.

A price was still to be paid, so the universe cared not. Accord would still be achieved through the likeness present in the working’s reagents—Synecdoche or constituent vow; promise sworn by the elements without for they were once within.

A part for the whole. The whole for the part. The general for the specific. The component for the object.

For as within, so without.

The efficiency would be somewhat lackluster without Oath, but Fin would end up speaking with Eiden in due time.

He would not let the lad shoulder such a burden so soon. To know that he was of the same kind of creature that had culled his kith and kin? That would do no small amount damage to a mortal mind so young.

Fin would not let it be so.

The Exorcist spoke, his word natural law and heavenly mandatum. He drew from the authority deep within the very core of his core, gathered through his half-millenia as a binder of Oath.

It had grown no different than plaque upon a farmer’s teeth; no different than condensation upon left leaf; no different than steel shed of scale and slag and now unsheathed.

Each promise made, no matter how minor or great, and done justice; each vow spoken and upheld; each time Truth had been uttered in place of falsehood, a glint of ethos had come into being upon him.

Cultivated virtue borne in the alma kord’atio—the core of the Tripartite Soul.

His voice, cold and sharp as the silver in his hands, cut through destined doom with promise sworn. Weaving of the Parcae rent and then stitched with the cloth of another’s design.

“My word is Fate. And thy Fate is forfend.

“Fate bind thee.”

His will covered the sigaldric circuit, endowing it with a semblance of foundational anchorage. Like a man girding his loins, the sigaldry was gathered into a condensed and sleek form with which pressure could be applied upon, safely.

Were Fin to meddle before stability was reached, disaster would be sure to come. Backlash, most of the magedom called it; to reach beyond what was proper and sensible without heed for common caution.

In a word, it was stupidity. In another, ingenuity. For only in dancing the knife’s edge did magicking flourish with zest and zeal. Only in woe did true weal follow.

High reward beckoned too high risk. A price paid in full for the Wheel leaves no debts.

The glyphs died down in their blazing glory, the ash and salt recombining with the material constituents of the marble itself to reconstruct the floor. A minor pattern called an alchemist’s mark—escalum equilibrium—was left behind, a square branching network of lines like stress fractures.

And with the physical medium of the ritual having been erased, only the spiritual components were left in the wake of the sigaldric working.

In the Realm of Spirit, the Exorcist held aloft his Forfend’s Fulcrum, a sphere with skin like molten glass yet without any of its harsh, bronzen glow. Geometric lines wove and spun and intersected in the inside of the Fulcrum, much akin to the gears and machinery of clockwork artifice.

With Forfend hewn from substance insubstantial, all lashings that bound the Crow-Feathered Willow to his apprentice were gelt and spayed.

The fell image disappeared from the Spiritual much like dust swept by the winds, leaving simply the Exorcist and Eiden in their shared room.

The boy’s peaceful sleep continued as such, him none the wiser. And so it would stay.

For as long as Phineas drew breath.

Lilithu would not find pathway nor even a trace of karma with which to reach his apprentice.

The Exorcist’s weight of presence—gravitas—would press upon any sympathetic bindings that had attached themselves onto Eiden, bending them such so that their wyrden flux was compromised. Much like tying a coil around a limb to stop blood-flow, the karmic connection was neutered.

For now.

The Exorcist, with help of his aura, pushed the Fulcrum into his oathbinder’s spirit. Therein, one Forfend talisman joined another in a long line of many.

Countless as stars in the night, they were bound and strung together with thread karmic like a Sevenfold rosary.

Within Bastille were the fates of a thousand-thousand innocents and black-hearts alike.

Within silver most cold and wrought of the bones of a long-dead god, doom dwelt in the guise of a woman with ashen hair and eyes like the glint of naked steel drawn beneath the light of the Abline Moon.