Chapter 17- Crawling Chaos

Everyone seemed a little shocked by my outburst, myself included. Simon snorted, clearly amused. Helen looked offended, and Edith looked at me with an expression I couldn't make out. Without a word, Helen crossed the room and grabbed my face, just over the right eye. I felt a searing, coiling pain as she held on for but a moment, before withdrawing her hand. "It's him." She announced, as I reeled from the pain and struggled not to vomit from the smell of charred flesh.

My vision blurred, and I lost my footing, but I felt Silas grab my collar. "Helen, enough!" He barked. I stood up, feeling the already scarred-over wound splashed over my right eye. It was the unmistakeable indentation of the Yellow Sign.

"Silas, look." Helen protested sharply. Silas looked at me, and back at Helen. "Yeah, I know, did you have to burn half his face off to prove it?"

"Oh please, Silas, are you saying if you saw someone claiming to have made Dracula reincarnate you'd just take their word for it?" Helen argued.

"There's more chance of us having a repeat of 1861 than Dracula coming back." He hissed.

"Oh you'd like that, wouldn't you?" Helen began.

I turned to Edith. "Context?"

Edith rolled her eyes. "You can't figure it out, hmm?"

"If I knew I wouldn't be asking, Edith." I told her.

The pair continued bickering for wuite some time, I stepped out, not quite sure what else to do, although Edith remained in the kitchen.

I made my way to the nearest bathroom to examine my burn. Looking in the mirror, it had already scarred over, although my eye had taken on an odd quality, now vaguely iridescent, as if oil swirled beneath the surface. My pupil seemed to grow into a vaguely triangular shape, before returning to normal in a gentle pulsating motion.

The scar itself was strange too, pulsing in and out of visibility. It seemed the greater my stress, and the more I tried to assert some form of control over the alien magic, the more it became obvious, likewise, when I composed myself it receded.

I re-entered the kitchen to see Silas rubbing his beard, eyes trained on the floor, while Helen stood, arms folded, in an apparently victorious stance. "Fine." He said. "You can train him, but don't expect a miracle. We have no idea of his ability level."

"Excuse me?" I cut in.

Silas raised his head. "Aspen... I may have made an oversight in training you. The Haunter in Darkness is an unknown element as far as I'm concerned. Helen has... correctly... pointed out that she is a better candidate to teach you to cater to your... unique abilities."

Edith spoke up. "I recieved Aspen's blood, does that mean I need to do the same?"

Helen looked Edith up and down. "No, you are his dhampir, not a vessel. You may continue training under Silas."

Edith was put out over this. "Of course..."

Silas snorted. "Chin up, you havent been killed yet." He then stood up, laying out the dinner. "But for now, we're all going to have some food like nice, civilised people... and Helen."

Helen extended one finger and a tiny spark zipped across the room, hitting Silas in the neck. "Ow, fuck!" was his response. The small burn vanished quickly. "See what I have to put up with?" He complained to either me or Edith, I couldn't tell.

After that incident, we sat down to eat, where I began to tell Silas about the angels. I explained the fact that the body was, for the most part, excellently preserved, albeit entirely dessicated. I was, however cut off some way through by Silas waving downward while looking at me through his eyebrows. I only then noted the assembled guests' looks of revulsion. I remained silent for the rest of the meal, while Helen made conversation with Edith about her home in Wales.

I didn't know whether or not it was appropriate to make mention of Dublin at this point, as for reasons beyond me, it was both socially appropriate, and socially inappropriate to bring similar personal experiences into a conversation. Silas didn't mention Wallachia, so I followed his lead. The conversation thankfully never turned to appraising the lives of other people, as they often did elsewhere.

The conversation then turned to the matter of supernatural beings, and their taxonomy. "While exceptions exist, we can group supernatural creatures into a few different categories." Silas explained. "Higher vampires, alongside merfolk, liches, lycans, dopplegangers and the like, are called anthropoforms, essentially, we're human-like enough to have societies, language, tools, essentially all the human traits." Edith and I nodded. Helen rolled her eyes.

Then we have the anthropophages and necrophages, who eat people or corpses, as the name suggests. These are a major threat to nearby humans because a lot of them are fairly intelligent. Wendigo, snatchers, ghouls, strigoi, essentially if it walks on two legs and isn't a human or a bird, kill it.

There are also xenoforms, like the Deep Ones, and Shoggoths, these are designed beings, if you will, by one powerful entity or another, and really the category is a dumping ground for things we have no clue what to make of."

I was fascinated. "I need to see these for myself. Imagine how this could change medicine! I need to find specimens. Even cadavers, if I could perform a dissection it'd be..."

Helen gently leaned in my direction. "Control yourself. There's a reason we haven't already done so. In many cases, the only good monster is one beheaded and burned. Many a would-be monster biologists fell victim to a "dead" monster suddenly waking up."

I was a little put out by this, but not deterred. I had to get creative.

"Anyways, there are loads more, like psychoforms, and apparitions, and symbiotes and dæmons, too many to cover all at once, but anyways, no need to worry about that now. Finish your food, you'll be training under Helen afterwards."

After dinner, I found myself in the expansive back lawn of Silas' house, with Helen looking at me disapprovingly. She hadn't said anything yet, but I could sense her eyes boring into me, the stifling heat she seemed to radiate in stark contrast to the cool evening.

"What are you supposed to teach me?" I asked.

Helen seemed to rouse herself from deep thought. "Hard to tell, I have no clue where you stand. Your raw  strength, your magical knowledge, that sort of thing. If you try to tap into the Haunter's power without the appropriate control and strength, you will, most likely..." she trailed off.

"I'll what?"

"Well, to put it bluntly, the "you" will cease to exist, and your body will be either overtaken or become the focus of a portal to the outside, which would be less than ideal for everyone." She explained.

"Right." I murmured.

"That said, with the Haunter's blood in your veins, you have been handed the potential to bridge the gap between the human and the eldritch. If you could make use of the Haunter's knowledge..." she trailed off once again.

"You'd have your mentor back?" I offered.

"Not quite." Helen corrected me. "Think of the Haunter less like a teacher and more like a sponsor. I actually seek to break a curse it created. I have no desire to see or interact with the creature, I just need the means to break the curse. As such, it's mutually beneficial to teach you how to control its powers, given your infestation in London."

"Did Silas make me to do that?" I asked.

"Doubt it. Silas does nearly everything on a whim, plus, he's an egotistical twit, he did it because he could." She snorted. "Anyways, its time to gauge your ability for myself. I'm going to summon a blood golem, and you're to defeat it, with your sorcery. Hand over your weapons."

Reluctantly, I turned over my knives. I hadn't taken Luis' pistol outside. Taking a few steps back, I watched Helen bite her thumb, a drop of blood pooling at her feet, expanding and from it rising a faceless being, seemingly comprised purely of muscle, connective tissues and bone. Its face was entirely blank bone. Biologically, it shouldn't have been alive, but then again, neither should angels, or me, being fully honest.

Before I could properly observe it, the golem had lurched forward at blinding speed, punching me square in the jaw. I felt the bone split at the point of impact, knocking out teeth and sending me sprawling back. Recovering, I felt the intense heat of my jaw knitting back together, no worse for wear. I braced against the next savage punch, blocking it on my forearm, dispersing the impact which wouldve killed me if I was a human. I gathered my psi and released a wave of it at the golem, launching it back some fifteen feet.

The golem seemed undamaged by the impact of the blast. I gathered that my attack was akin to kicking a leather sandbag. It wasn't brittle or dessicated like an angel, and it was likely that I'd overestimated my burgeoning abilities.

From what i could gather, the golem's body was suffused with psi, further reinforcing its thick sinew and muscle. Perhaps it would make sense to try and disrupt that, but how?

I kept my distance from the golem, sidestepping and weaving its strikes as best I could while I tried to figure out a strategy. My defence was less than perfect, and during my observation I felt the sickening cracks of my ribs and collarbone.

It hit me at that point that I'd managed to somehow disrupt the psi of those Deep Ones in London. I had no knowledge of psi manipulation then, yet I had managed to do so naturally. Psi was like heat, and what I had done was introducing cold to consume it. If I could not just supress, but drive my own psi into the negative range, it would have a similar disruptive effect.

Backing up enough to give myself room to focus, i forcibly reduced the intensity of my psi, folding it into itself, feeling the antithesis, the null, replace it. I braced against the golem's next attack as I deepened the abyss.

When the next hit came, I dodged and struck the golem in what would have been its liver, if it were human. The strike seemed to bypass its defence, sending a shock up through its body.  I guessed it had no organs, but the obvious dent seemed to indicate I had done damage.

It had to have some form of bones, even if they were thickly swaddled in its stringy flesh, because it was able to move. While I couldn't discern if it had a circulatory system, i guessed a nervous system was also present. Given that, my best option would be to break the femurs and humerus, and the take my chances smashing the skull.

With access to a blade, I could've slashed the tendons and probably had an easier time, but said blade was currently in Helen's grasp. When the golem next reached toward me, i grabbed its wrist, pushing it aloft anf using it as leverage to both smash its left humerus with my fist, and stomp its  left femur with the heel of my boot.

The golem collapsed to one side, prompting me to waste no time in condenming its remaining limbs to the same fate. Once it was adequately immobilised, I drove my palm-heel straight down on its frontal bone, shattering the skull in a sensation akin to breaking a glass wrapped in cloth.

As soon as it stopped writhing I stood up, watching the depleted creature melt away into bloody tendrils that coalesced and formed a crimson sphere floating above Helen's outstretched hand.

"Well, you managed half of your task." She announced, voice devoid of emotion. "And... credit where it's due, you did figure out how to switch polarity by yourself, but still, you barely made an attempt to use sorcery."

"My powers didn't work." I protested.

"What powers, you used basic force projection, anyone can do that. Didn't Silas teach you how to..." she began.

"No, he just dumped us in the cave, no explanations or anything." I told her.

"Of course... this IS Silas, after all." She sighed. "Right, forget the golem, I'll teach you the basics. First off, although I am biased... pyromancy."