15 - 1

[Fool]

Five Ways To Skin A Dog

Man dies three times. First, when the breath of the gods leaves the vessel of his lungs. Second, when the grave has him claimed and the Mortine Knells, be it Black Crow or White Gull, call no more his name. Third, when there is no one to remember him.

The last and final death is the bane of kings.

-Mandatos Mortes, Holy Scripture of the Cult of the Dust-Reaper.

The Exorcist - 4th of Mead’s Tap, Year 1125 A.E.

A man that was not a man plied his craft under the watch of the Lunarium Geminai, the Twins. His guildam seal that of the Order within the Order, the branch exorcistic of the Vitaen magicking society.

The night shone with lamplight beyond the threshold of the window, the Luna Vorae and Luna Albae in their throe and thrall high above. Blackmoon and whitemoon, respectively, in vulgar and pagan haggle Vitaen, did their dance upon the eventide.

Unto the forever present vigil of the Night-Eye, a sliver of a crescent of color seifar waxed from the nothingness. Different from the day before this one, now the moon of white made itself known with its better-half, the moon of never-waning black.

The natal dark would, afterall, never wane. It never had. A faithful portent in the empty heavens of the night and Watcher over the Veil between the Living and the Dead.

If Mortus was the Keddish god of death and dying, Erebus was the god of staying dead. If only His vigil stopped the spawning of vampyres and other revenant monstrosities entirely, then perhaps Fin would have some long-due rest.

Then again, he would have no longer a trade with which to feed him and his own. The Fates were cruel mistresses, afterall. Nothing ever came for free and without consequence to oneself or another.

The Kedweni aphorism of ‘price paid in full’ never felt so right before this lamplit night.

The Exorcist took off his gloves, the yellow-grey calluses on his wrinkled mitts bulwark islands against the ocean of folds that were the man’s palms.

Though no actual physical reprieve came from the act, Fin still let out a sigh of content. The persona, the leftover and superfluous mask, of a human was one not so easily let go; it gave comfort to the self. Though no longer human was he, humanity he still possessed.

Old habits die hard and all that.

He sat upon the floor, tools of all kinds spread before him, taken from the unfathomable pockets of his coat. Things of metal and wood and even more exotic material such as magickal substances were arrayed in the manner of methodical madness; an arrangement chaotic to the beholder yet organic to the arranger.

Fin, of course, started with the most important part of his arsenal, that which all exorcists errant took great care with:

The exorkizein; the swearing-blade of adamance.

His oathbinder was the foci for his Path’s magicking—the nexus—the common thread that bound all of his discordant technicae and spellcraft. Through the confluence that was the thanatium-silver blade, the Exorcist exerted his trade’s expertise.

Yet, such was no mere tool but instead an extension, anchored to his very soul by adamant Oath never to be broken. Anchored, too, from his soul to another possessing of volition.

Within the guise of silver dwelt a remnant spirit, the Exorcist’s partner through the countless ages. A khaeros; bound-one in the speech of his fatherland. Not so much by force or coercion but rather by choice, similar to a marriage o’ sorts.

Should the spirit decide so, she could leave his side for theirs was a fair and just contract with many stone-etched precepts, free-will the strongest among them. Hence why the Exorcist rather liked describing the bond as an anchorage, for an anchor may lift whenever the vessel decides to take leave of a given port.

The First Law of Accord was the basis for the khaeros within an exorcist-errant’s oathbinder. The Second Law held no sway where the First had touched, synecdoche a paltry substitute for true understanding, but bubbling muck and foundation of shifting sand in comparison to adamance sworn.

And besides the magicking lore of his craft, Fin was not a prick; he would not hold another to his side against their will.

Words, said oh so very long ago, came unbidden to his mind.

‘The people that truly care, stay by your side, son,’ his exorcist-master and adopted father had told him a handful centuries ago, the man’s barrow now but dust.

‘If you must hold another with fetters for fear that they may leave, then neither your love nor theirs is true.

‘Do not keep falsehoods in your heart nor think yourself deserving a specific person’s affection. Their soul is theirs to give to any who they wish to give to, and not your own.

‘Jealousy turns sour very easily, being the mockery of love that it is.’

Phineas Luciean’s master, a High Magister of the Order, had not raised a green-eyed monster covetous and over-possessive. And Fin would not become one now that all that was left of that man was but the shadow of a memory and the name Luciean.

Neuna fata, Neuna dono, Parca Maurtia dono, Fin swore in mind as in body he made the sign of the Fates, fingers held in tithe-bearing gesture going across from temple to navel and then breast to breast over the heart.

Three made into one: distaff and spindle of Nonata She Who Spins The Thread of Life, measuring rod of Decimata She Who Makes Mensurate the Lives of Men, and shears of Morata She Who Cuts The Rope of Breath and Ties The Knot of Death. A versatile sign if there ever was one, not dissimilar to the sign of Oriath’s cross so oft used in King’s Kedwen.

Though, in Fin’s case, this tiny little bit of gesture was all but stripped of superstition, held only in cult to Man. The Exorcist, contrary to his title, was no priest. Just a pragmatist that did not want to create a new tradition from the old; easier to just change the context and meaning than make something fresh, apart from what came before.

It was a deepset thing, this gesture. Every Vitaen, from common pauper to patrician noble, did the sign of the Fates when remembering someone great lost to the Underworld. Be it a loved one they cared for dearly or a person of renown and import, all got a cross of the Sisters of Weaving Three.

The Aged Man had no tripod with which to pour wine in his father’s honor, but this little bit of remembrance before he returned to his craft would do to ward-off the Mortem Memoriae; the last and third and true death, that of memory and name.

From a bunch of similarly cord-bound fabricks, the Exorcist took a single bundled magicking rag therein. He unwound the leather binding, putting the strip off to the side as he inspected the tool properly: done with stitching of silver like the filigree of his oathbinder’s scabbard, the cloth shone back the amber light of the hearth.

No runes were apparent atop the magicking rag, no silgadry nor glyphery of any kind besides the floral design of the filigree without. Instead, the sigaldric circuits and sympathetic matrix were woven into the fabric and with its constituent threads.

A nice and streamlined and sleek invention of the magicking Paths. Silver alchemically treated to be as soft and pliable and thin as silk yet durable as steel was no easy feat, far beyond the possibilities of mundane chemistry.

This was magicking proper. This was supernatural; the bending of base, universal law to the will of the caster.

And it, simply and crasly, was but a fucking rag.

Just a single tool of many, mundane in comparison to the more visually-impactful reagents of Fin’s kit.

From one of the many finger-sized ampullae holstered to a leather carrier, the Exorcist took a single one. The vials all shared commonalities such as sealing parchment glued to their surfaces, the glyphery adorning the smooth-to-the-touch paper so as to hermetically ward the insides. Fin himself could barely feel where glass began and parchment ended, their delineation obvious only to the sight.

To the eyes of man, a greyen oil shimmered and bubbled within. To his mortal touch, it felt lukewarm, the tepidness of teh left to cool for a notch too long.

To the senses of aura superficia, the ampulla’s essence moved as did moonlight upon cold brook-water. To the eyes of Lykeios, the Three-Eyed Wolf, the ampulla burned with the fire of a thousand-thousand suns.

Held in Fin’s right hand was a tonic mercurial taken from an eons-old Place of Power, thrice-distilled in a still made of pig-iron over a flame fed the blood of a cockatrice.

A sublime-quality reagent, of fifth-order removed from the mundane. Rare to find these days in King’s Kedwen.

The Exorcist unstoppered the scroll-covered bottle, breaking the parchment seal that wrapped around the lip of the miniature flask and sides of the cork. The greasy liquid within drenched the rag in his hands. With exposure to the air, atop the viscous and iridescent substance formed greyen layers like shed skin, cracked and full of scalum and scum.

Ethero-oxidization, a magickal reaction analogous to mundane rust.

A little bit of causticity added into his aura undid the effects of the magickal rusting, the act like filing smooth a bumpy surface but with one’s spirit as the file abrasive. Fin reckoned that If Eiden paid a certain amount of attention to the process, the lad would recognize the flavor of the mana used to break down the scalum.

It belonged to the Aspect of Famine; acidic like bile and vacuous as an empty pit. Taken from his Center, from his subtle stomach, the mana of Hunger was a useful essence type.

Especially so for containment: not a drop of the pseudo-mercury fell from the rag, the very base of its essence confined by the Exorcist’s hankerous aura.

The magicker did not even need to wear gloves for the process; the skin of his spirit was callous enough to resist exposure to the acutely-toxic tonic mercurial. Were Eiden in his place, Fin would require him to use heavily padded and well-insulated gloves and equipment in place of naked aura.

By a flick of his will and an imbuement of mana into the matrix imbedded into magicking rag, Fin activated its absorption function; a whirlpool formed, the liquid sucked into the swirling center of the filigreed fabric before it spread out uniformly.

Cloth once white and moon-white silver was now darker, now steel and slag grey.

The greasy rag was then passed atop Bastille, massaging the tonic-oil into her spirit and infusing it with the essence that dwelt within, that of stasis; of permanence among the shifting and scouring storms wrought by the sands of time, the abrasive corpse of the dead-god Father Satronos.

Killed ever so long ago by His own kin, His blood congealed from between the folds of physicks in loci of dense magickal energy called Places of Power.

Wound upon His deceased body that this world was, Places of Power attributed to He Who Split Earth and Sky bled a particular seifar. Yet this was no amber mapolder sap but instead the mana of Steles; of things written in stone and left as edifice to stand against the ravages of the Wheel.

The oathbinder’s spirit-body absorbed the mana of Steles greedily, soaking it up with abandon. After five passes of the oil, Fin took a magicking whetstone from within the many pockets of his coat.

He had not left such outside for the heat it emanated was enough to turn the shared room hot and balmy. Enough to ignite the very air if left unchecked, ripping apart the bonds that bound the components of water and combusting them in the corruscating wave of explosion.

Funny thing, that. Within the poison to flame was the potential for the greatest of fires; source found in the end.

The whetting stone was black as riverjet and smooth as obsidian with nary a pitting upon its surface. A middling transparency let mundane sight pierce through the magick tool’s innards; lines of ember spread vein-like from a heart that glowed as did the coal in a smithy’s forge.

Fiery power beat throughout the Ignial Dia’adamantos, done in rhythmic sympathy to the ebb and flow of the plates so far below that held up the earth that Man trod upon. A tattoo wrought deep beneath, in the black bosom of Gaeya Herself; a middling, pale imitation of Her own divine pulse, though the Ignial did possess.

As with all things magicking, apparent physical qualities fell before the spirit beneath. Mages cared little, in comparison, about the superficial, instead valuing the essence they could distill and take from any given object or entity.

Magickers were much less sculptors, theirs not a rigid medium, and more akin to potters, plastique mana a mage’s clay of choice.

Fin’s, in particular, was that which dwelt within the Ignial: the dual essences of gem and flame; of hardened rock as impervious as godly damascene and of that which brought about change and ash, respectively.

Unlike the usage of stellethic mana afore, the Exorcist used not the existential juice before him. Instead, he used the components, the thread and string that made up the yarn that was mana: arkana.

It was subtle, this branch of magicking. It was to take the essence of existence and unwound it into an even baser substance, transplanting it upon another body of matter immaterial to achieve a sophisticated sort of work. Strings of invisible influence, like the draw of lodestone to iron or the pull of water to steel left in the night, were woven in the intricate pattern of a spellform.

Magick knitting, the Exorcist thought with a small tug of humor on his whiskers.

Though a bit underwrought and reductionist, arkana could be seen as simply another permutation of existential essence, of mana—it just wasn’t commonly found by itself in nature as the base elements of spirit reacted and combined to form stabler versions of matter immaterial, no different than chemicals in the Physical.

Equilibrium was a natural law found even where the writs of reality broke down. The Wheel of Creation Neverending, its arbiter.

The Exorcist passed the oathbinder’s blade atop the smooth, obsidian stone, using not its physical surface but instead its spirit to sharpen and keep Bastille in tip-top shape. The physical proximity translated to spiritual proximity, wasting less mana as the energy did not have free surface area in which it may dissipate into the Ether. Though there was no definite delineation to the dimensionality of the World of Spirit, geography and object-relation were still somewhat present.

The iridescent oil laid atop the oathbinder caught aflame, tongues bright as a magnesium fire suppressed by the Exorcist’s spirit lest Eiden be blinded, permanently. The light and heat smothered by aura and then harvested into Fin’s Center, scythe through wheat, made it so that the flames looked like the vapor of a man’s breath in cold winter.

A quick smattering of glyphs laid atop the marmon floor done with flicks of his sharp spirit helped further focus the energy of the whetting stone, lest it burn through the marble like it were simple butter—to Eiden, who sat ten span opposite Fin, the glyphery simply appeared instantaneously.

The empty carvings were filled with Ignis Fatus, or fate-flame in Kedweni, spreading in a circle with the Exorcist at the center. From the infused, deep-azure sigils, white-hot fulgur ebbed and danced as did embers from a freshly-smothered spit, smoldering with captured quanta.

The Fatal Flame was a powerful ethero-thermic insulator, the mana’s purpose one of sealing through and through. Mattered not that it may be a hungry wraith or some wayward magick stone, the Flame brought it under heel all the same.

Each passing of Bastille atop the Ignial Dia’adamantos whetting-stone was accompanied by a mental working of the arkane. With a spellform in his mind’s eye, the Exorcist crossed through the dual essences of the forge-heart stone.

Like a panning prospector, Fin let the waters of mana flow through the sieve of his spellform, filtering out unneeded aspects and debris, leaving only the gold; the arkana of Catalysis. The dross of spirit, leftover attunements to one element or concept or another, were repudiated into the Spiritual; they dissipated quickly as their quantities were nothing compared to the Sea of Ether, but invisible solute to a greater solvent. Were it in greater etheric mass, the Exorcist would have had to use an artificery-smithy for the exhalation of the useless mana.

The unwound essence-catalytic, more subtle force than true substance, was then taken from the Third Basin of the Mind’s Eye, circulated by the Second, and shunted to the Exorcist’s aura to be used in his magicking.

Catalytic arkana was a sub-aspect of the temporal clade of essence, not unlike stasis or stelethic mana. Yet instead of slowing down and preserving a given body of mana, this arkana sped up the rate of magickal reactions significantly: not simply useful but necessary to make thanatium-silver alloys malleable enough to work with.

Yet a problem lay in that thanatium did not accept antithetical arkana such as the catalytic variety. The remnant will slumbering within its spirit resisted that which was unlike itself and so there needed be an intermediary; the tonic mercurial was used in this regard. Stelethic mana served as the binding agent, that which made bridge conceptually and physically, between the arkana of Catalysis and Bastille proper.

Thanatium, even diluted with other lesser metals, neither blunted easily nor otherwise lost material, but was difficult to sharpen when the need eventually arose—impossible to hone with mundane tools of steel and stone.

The metal was a stubborn thing given its divine antecedence; all ore-veins of thanatium were once the bones of a long-forgotten death-god’s physical embodiment. None held cult to this deity, Theirs a name no longer spoken much less worshipped. Yet still, the ethos of a god smoldered within, endowing thanatium with certain magickal properties.

Quite useful for Fin’s line of work, this death attribution was.

It made of immortals, mortals once again and monsters into but prey.

Gods made for the best of materials, truly. Be it the tonic mercurial or the thanatium-silver, there was always a use for the corpse of a divinity.

Bastille groaned a harumph of delight through their shared soul-bond, letting the Exorcist know that the knots and uneven musculature of her subtle form and aura were eased. The last few weeks of hunting the half-millenia-old leech had done her in bad, in both body and spirit.

[Thank the gods the lad can’t hear ye. Sounding likae pauper courtisan during the Bacchanal.] Sent the Exorcist through his soul-bond.

His cheek was cut, transparent liquid misting up into nothingness before his false skin reknit in less than a blink; faster even than Eiden could perceive.

For now.

[Sorry, love. It was low-hanging fruit. Couldn’t help meself.]

And that was how Fin found himself sleeping in the metaphorical dog-house. His mistress ignored further attempts at reconciliation, his false sleep and, consequently, the dreams within to be left bereft of Bastille’s presence.

Worth it, he thought with a smug yet disappointed smirk as he did five more passes of oil and then sharpening both to his now-apathetic oathbinder.

The etheric channels that bound together the basins of her spiritual self had been frayed like old lashings gone rotten without oil; the Fatal Flame burned spirit just as readily as physical matter, Bastille’s meridians having been used for the propagation of such a caustic essence.

With the introduction of the tonic mercurial and by the influence of the Ignial stone, those spirit-veins turned good as hemp rope newly wrought.

The Exorcist continued his general maintenance after sheathing Bastille back into her scabbard; a housing of rich, black leather and silver filigree together with fittings of platinum. Sigaldry wound its way around the metal bits, suppressing arrangements of glyphery that would hide Bastille’s spiritual presence and conserve her strength.

He would let her stew off her anger a bit lest he just cut his tongue on a blade of his, quite literal, making.