13th of Cylus 720, dawn is breaking.
Rakvald met the dawn chained several ways by his hands, feet, neck, and waist. He couldn't move from the center of a ceremonial sigil circle, blood grooves carved into its lengths, and feeding into the hairy roots of blood lights that grew at the far extremities of the circle. The glow of her blood was still on his lips, though it'd long dried and coagulated there. Leaving a caked layer of glowing red filth on his mouth and face where she'd nursed him. Try as he might, he could not dispel the memory of the taste of the blood. The tantalizing sensation of flaying a flesh and blood being's lifeforce, however darkened by the shadow that lay in her marrow. Between the shadow-woman's glowing blood, and inner abyss, Rakvald felt he was in the middle of a terrible nightmare, and tried several times to call upon sanctuary with no luck. He was not dreaming or nightmaring. The chapel, the ivory-skinned naer, and blood sacrament were all too real.
She came to him without any further ceremony, as he was already baptized. She took her nails to his wrists, and began cutting deep into the ancillary blood vessels, outlying the main arteries. The blood trickled into the grooves surrounding him, though he fell to all fours, and smeared that blood on the stones surrounding. Still the blood found a way to the hairy roots of those blood lights, feeding into them.
"Now, Penitent, you will feed these vessels of our Wounded God." The ivory lady, Laora turned her back on him, and reached her arms out to the acolytes surrounding. They began worshipping the Lotharro mage that was slowly bleeding out onto the floor.
Yet, something spoke into his mind at that moment. He felt her strumming at the edges of his consciousness, perhaps another kind of magic she possessed, for it was obvious now that she was a mage. The mutations were considerable, and thus she must have had at least one discipline of magic, if not two. It sufficed to reason that she was using some form of magic to encourage certain feelings emotions and possibly even thoughts to the Lotharro's mind.
He didn't fight it though. WIth every drop of blood fleeing his veins, he lost his will to fight, only the drive to survive was left. Once that drive was isolated, he felt it bolster, as if on its own. Survival, hunger, despair. All of these amalgamated in the moment and drove him to thoughts and innovations that were hitherto unheard of in his discipline. His blood was yet another extension of his being, was it not? Then could he not use it's contact with those bloodlights in order to leech what vitality they drained from him in turn?
The small rivers of blood that ran through the grooves became as conductors for his ether, as he took the next few bits slowing the bleeding, yet not entirely. Leaving his wounds open just as thorugh a pin, Rakvald concentrated on those blood lights. What was their nature?
His goat-like eyes narrowed as he took in the knowledge of their being, through his blood. As his lifeforce fed the plants, the mage grew as familiar with their flesh, their roots, their dermis as if they were a mere extension of his own body. Then, when the connection was firmly established, he reversed the ether flow with the technique of leeching. The blood began to regurgitate from their very roots. The blood came back to his wounds, flowing into his veins and sealing them up. He leeched their ability to drink in blood and absorb it, and took it into the wounds she'd cut.
Several Acolytes gasped as they beheld the terrible vision unfolding before them. Laora, to her credit, remained with her back to Rakvald. Whatever faith preserved her must also lend her a certainty of fate. Belief in fate, and trust that whatever came the Wounded God willed it. The bitch was insane, for lack of a better term. But Rakvald could respect her tenacity and innovative attempts to destroy the mage, if this is what she intended. Then again, an axeman would do for him as well as any bagging and dragging to this place for a few scratches and casual blood drinking.
He wasn't given too long to linger on those thoughts of why she was doing what she had, before something began changing in him. He felt the shift in his flesh, the flesh of his face before it began reforming to those ancient geometries of primordial blood drinkers. His nose flattened and twisted into that of a bat-like shape, with a singular, wide nostril that stretched from one side of the nose to the next.
Then he felt his teeth extending into fangs, sharp fangs with grooves in them, the better for siphoning the juices from prey. Then he felt around his eyes, a sudden sinking, as if he were aging several decades in one moment, and his dark blonde hair began to shift into slashes of gray on black. He screamed with every new revelation of new flesh being born on his visage. His scream took on a high pitch, impossibly off register until his voice cracked and he could do nothing but feel the pain.
Finally, at the last moment he fell unconscious, and the abyss took him with his chains, as his wounds closed and his face solidified in the new corruption. His body was wracked by the pain of having leeched out and taken on the bloodlight's knowledge for his own flesh, until in unconsciousness, he relinquished it. So it flowed back to the plants, withered and guttered out husks that they had become.
Laora woke him later, he was unchained. His first instinct was to reach out and throttle the naer bitch, for what she'd forced him to. But at the first touch of her hand, she hemmed in his feelings of betrayal, anger, and helplessness. Momentarily taken aback by the sudden lack of these motivating forces, she didn't waste any time before soothing him by emphasizing the strange sense of satiation that pervaded his being. He sniffed the air in futility, for he could not smell much at all with the newly formed nose. It became numb to the scent of shit and blood that surrounded that chamber.
He tried smelling her, but no scent returned. His clawed hands grasped for her ivory flesh, which he found unfettered in the darkness by clothing. The nails dug into the flesh of her shoulders, and he showed her his face. She smiled demurely at him. An expression that seemed oddly out of place for her, yet put him at ease, and hemmed in his hostility even further. His hands drifted from her shoulders, toward her neck. He wanted to see if he could just wrap his hands around, and either drive the claws of his thumbs into her carotid artery, or else squeeze until she was deprived of air.
Instead, she drew near him, and began pulling him into an embrace. Her arms wrapped around his rough hide, playing with the shreds of clothing that still clung to his body. She traced a clawed fingernail against his sternum, trailing it upward toward his neck, and then cupping his newly deformed face.
The flesh of his face, he didn't know what it looked like, but he knew well enough based on how his graft magic gave him insight into the shape of things, the geometries of life, that it was all wrong. Not who he knew as himself. Yet she seemed not to care. A thread of acceptance and tolerance grazed the edge of his consciousness, and he felt himself melting into her arms, sinking like a babe that had fallen to sadness.
She tsked, and rubbed his back with her wounded forearms, sliding the silky skin over the thick hide of his upper back. He barely felt that, but what he did feel was the emotional manipulations she was weaving into and out of his mind. She severed several threads of renewed hostility and resistance, until he became as her very own child, reduced to the emotional frailty of a young boy in a mother's arms.
"There, there. Now, what have you to confess?"
Rakvald looked up at her, and was able to make out the outline of her ivory skin, which was nearly translucent in the darkness. He blinked several times, then opened his fanged mouth, trying to find the words. But he didn't know what she expected him to tell her. That was a revelation that would come later, he supposed, after they commenced the devilry of this twisted communion.
