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The touch of a Mistress grants life. That is what Victor had told him. That is what everyone kept telling him. He had dutifully done as asked, gathering tokens from the other young women in town. Following the riddles everyone in this town seemed to speak in, he eventually finds her at the Cape.
The tomb of Nina Kaina is imposing. A great, unyielding structure, set aside so only those with prior knowledge would find it. And yet, even as it hides itself from the path, it casts a tall, cruel shadow over the surrounding landscape. Diamonds of crossed iron are the door of the enclosure, the interior of which was barely big enough to fit two men standing. All of its construction purposeful. Reminding you that Nina Kaina's body is immaterial. She has ascended past the physical, and cares not for the restraints of the mortal flesh.
Past those bars, he found himself encased in chilled marble and metal. The outer world, the physical, mortal world, no longer existed within this space. His vision of the world narrowed to a pinprick of light in this one small place where he now stood, face to face with Maria. There was no discernible light source, yet he seemed able to see perfectly. Her eyes like black pools, reflecting light he didn't understand. They lingered on him, washing over his face and down over him in thoughtful consideration. He spoke to her, trying to explain, trying to ask - but her words were crude oil, slippery and mirrored and multicolored. He would not be getting a clear answer about anything from her.
If indeed it was even "her" and not her mother speaking to him from her lips. He had never known Nina but he had known Maria. This did not sound like her but, what? He was speaking to an apparition? A generational ghost? As far as Daniil was concerned, he spoke with the woman in front of him. Something was changed in her, he just did not know what. But it was her.
Her words rose and fell in a strange rhythm, elongated syllables pulling at his mind. Hums and murmurs leaving a void like spilled ink crossing through his thoughts. "Touch my body, and you will feel only air." She said, her gaze sliding off him to wheel around the room. It was not hard to believe. The only heat he could feel was the prickling of his flesh. Her body had no presence, no warmth. It was cooler than the slabs of stone hemming them in. A puff of air, nothing more. Or maybe his mind was playing tricks - he felt feverishly hot, trapped here in the cold in the late of the evening. His body was flushed, his palm sweaty around the relics.
Without a word, she offered him her hand. Fingers pointed down, wrist limp and delicate. A noblewoman offering her knuckles to be kissed. His shaking hands rose to take it, and he slipped the Saburova ring on her milk white finger. Her huge dark eyes watched him and, without knowing what possessed him, he bowed his head to press his lips to metal and skin. A soft sigh of approval ruffled his hair and he could barely breathe. The room oppressed him, pressing into his very soul. With effort, he released her hand, looking up to her face again where she regarded him with something inscrutable. She tilted her head, baring her throat to him, and he undid the crude clasp and delicately slid Olgimskaya's necklace of bone around it. The back of his hands brushing her ink black hair.
He leaned in to fasten it, his face so close to hers, and the coolness of her skin scared him. His eyes flit down to avoid hers, instead catching on the dark scarring on the side of an otherwise perfect neck. Angry red marks, raised along a half moon shape on the graceful curve of her neck giving way to the collarbone. He must have made a gasp or noise of surprise, as her hands are caught him at the shoulders, stroking upwards and cradling him towards her chest. He tried for a moment to push back, very aware of how intimate they're rapidly becoming, but for all the softness in her palms her hold turned unyielding and he couldn't move an inch. His breath shortened, and her nails trailed up the side of his throat, tracing a mirror of her own scars.
"Daniil." His name caught on the end of a lovelorn sigh. Fear rose in him, alarmed and overwhelmed. This was wrong, he didn't want to be with her, he simply wanted to help. This isn't what he wanted. But the thought was so difficult to hold on to when her body was here, pressed against his. Not warm, but not cold either. Pleasantly cool - soothing the fever that gripped him. Warning him that if he pulled away now, the sickness would overcome him.
"You're sick. The Plague has risen to meet you in all your efforts, and now it lays you low before me." She was so restrained, but he could hear the deep sorrow, the mourning in her voice. She regretted her hand in this. It ached in her that her requests had exposed him to such danger. She wanted to apologize, to help. "I can help, en-Daniil. As Mistress, I shall rewrite your body to expel the pest. My glory cannot coexist with such a thing." Her words dripped through his head like syrup, the stagnant air inside Nina's monument making his head spin. Overwhelmed with the smell of iron like blood and stone like chalk in his mouth. He could feel his dry mouth prickling with drool and he swallowed noisily. Her nails dug into his flesh, pressing inwards into his nerves, his bones, his soul. His voice quavered when he spoke.
"How.. Is it possible? Burakh has been looking for this, the panacea, how can you.." His words dwindled into nothing, his sight narrowed into the white of her skin and the black of the walls until he felt his vision swimming.
"He is of the Earth, of the dirt and soil, these things I have told you of. He can be built upon, but he is not the arbiter of truth. For in my utopia, en-Daniil, even death will hold no fear for us." Her voice soft, but to his ears it echoed off the sides of the enclosed space like song in a theatre hall, clear and true. He breathed heavy, held to her, by her. And then glass tipped to his cracked lips, and he half-gasped in surprise, feeling the movement of something in the vial being pressed to him. "For your life. For our utopia. Daniil. Drink. I can save you still." Trusting, trusting beyond his limits because he knew she was lying. He knew there was another way, there's always another way. He knew this was her magnetism, her sick powers bending him before her like the town under a tyrant just as they all warned him would happen if he helped in this idiotic fetch quest.
He drank.
As soon as it hit his tongue he wanted to cough, to shove back and splutter and let the vial fall to the stone ground and shatter and to break all this spell she'd woven over him. But her lips met his throat just as he tasted the familiar copper salt of blood and he gasped at the sharpness of her teeth breaking his skin. Needles between her soft, wet lips, and her blood followed his breath inside him. He choked, tears welling in his eyes as he swallowed another gulp of what could only be Maria's blood, and he felt the heat of his own spilling down his neck and the following hungry swipes of her tongue as she licked it off him.
He was not a fool, nor a virgin. He knew what a love bit felt like. Flesh worried under the blunt teeth of a lover, a pinching and bruising that made him squirm. This was something else entirely. This was the bite of a too-large needle pressing through the layers of his skin, piercing, popping, with each press downwards until it reached its quarry and blood drew up and up into the syringe. His blood pouring out because of the facts of pressure and displacement, unstoppable. Her teeth dug into him and rent him open, leaving him spilling over into her mouth uncontrollably. And she revelled in it. She sighed against his wound like the night breeze on the heather.
"Days, nights.. Time became meaningless as I burned. My throat scraped raw with thirst. All as I waited for this day." She broke off, the softness of her mouth on him again and when she spoke again, her voice was thick as with liquor. "Now, finally. Finally. The work comes to its conclusion. And yet, my blood.. It still burns. I can feel it coursing in me. Mine. And yours too, Daniil. It sears my body, hot and hungry." One hand of nails gripping into him, the other tipping the vial, giving him no choice but to keep swallowing until he could breathe again. He could feel the tickling, cold feeling of her blood dripping down his chin, overflowing from the sides of his mouth and smudging over his face. He didn't want to think about how he looked - some sickening mockery of decadence. His lips kiss-swollen and dripping with the blood of a young women he sought to help. A caricature of science, of hubris, of hunger. A shame to his position and the trust it was meant to instill.
He felt he was drowning. And then, finally, the vial was empty. He could have cried with relief - if not for what followed. Fabric rustled and he turned his head in vain to look, only catching a glimpse of blood on white skin before she gripped him in both hands and shoved him gracelessly into the side of the enclosure.
The grave. That they were both standing in.
And with that thought, he felt he might truly fall to his knees and retch. Expel all she had forced upon him, inside him. But his body leaped ahead of him. She latched herself more thoroughly on to his throat with a wet sucking sound, and he felt the breath knocked out of him. His dizzy mind reeled as he breathed in short bursts, sickness rising. Her hands on his body, pressing into him, fumbling at the buttons of his waistcoat as he felt the fire she spoke of flaming up in him. He must have made a noise, as she pulled her fangs from him and cooed.
"That's the sickness, Daniil. The disease growing in your blood, being burned out by the righteous truth of a Mistress." Her hands slid under his layers and layers of clothing to touch his bare skin. They petted soothingly over where her nails had ripped into him, over the hair raising in fear. His body feared her, the animal response of prey, but her hands and her voice and the air culminated in his conscious fears being swept away. Slow and quiet, with the swish of the water on the bank, her hands the waves that rocked him.
"You will be something greater. You are. With the blood of the Kains, of the dark Mistress, bright in your veins you will be unstoppable. You will save us all." Her nails trailed up his bare stomach with a possessiveness that made him shiver against her. He turned to her, body shaking and mouth half-open, and saw what he had feared.
Her mouth was a massacre, blood smeared over her lips, her chin, her entire lower face. Flecks of spray adorned the curve of her neck, adorned over the swath of starlight skin above the scoop of her collar and running little streams and gruesome rivulets down between her breasts to hidden places. His blood. He felt faint at the thought of losing so much blood. He shouldn't be alive.
Then he was struck by another strange sense of vertigo as he realized he didn't feel faint. He felt… Better.
His nausea was gone - and not just the nausea at the scene before him. The nauseous feeling that had plagued him for the last handful of days was gone. His vision was clearer, he only shook from a last thrust of adrenaline his body had dumped when she grabbed him.
His throat felt raw, but not where her fangs had ripped him. The inside of his throat felt unfathomably dry. And hungry. He wavered on his feet and tilted his head back to look at her head-on, meeting her black eyes. She licked a rolling drop of his blood from her upper lip and smiled back at him.
"You see?" Victor's words reverbrated in his head. She is becoming a wonderful creature. With the hum of her voice against him, his mind broke through to give him that. She was, indeed. A wonderful creature, of cold hands and dark eyes and bloodied lips. Is that what he was to become, too? Something animalistic, deep in the back of his mind, quailed at the thought. But he was smarter than that. He had to be. That was why this town hated him - this town full of animals, people driven by instinct and feelings instead of the facts of the world. The Kains understood this. Maria understood this. This was a gift - to be taken into their fold so wholly. He shrugged off the clamouring, terrified parts of him and breathed in the dead air as she held him fast.
Unable to meet her eyes, his gaze traveled over her marked neck, the wide low neckline of her dress, painted with drops of his lifeblood. So many misgivings deep in his heart still, but it was done. It was done, no matter what he felt.
"Thank you," He paused and breathed out through his nose in a sigh and said in a voice, low but still a bit stiff, "Mistress."
She smiled again, wide. Wide and fanged and pleased. She cradled him against her like a child, like she his mother. His maker and unmaker. "You're welcome."