Work Text:
Victor sat alone in the niche behind his manor.
His cigarette’s filaments drifted between his slackened fingers as autumn leaves drifted down towards the Gorkhon, drowsy with twyre and swevery. Often at this hour Victor heard shouts of laughter from children playing in the Bridge Square. Those children now legion in his sons’ princedom, cavorting about in waking dreams given breath by Scarlet Nina, whose arms kept them from that pathogen passed through the touch and breath of she birthed as herb called forth from Suok’s gut. She blackened and red all over, bloodied knees and hands, a little sparrow flitted to the blackbird’s roost to be her spurious brood.
Victor bled fast from the heart that he could not enter that specular chamber where she lie by the Stamatins’ writ, as though she had only turned away a moment. Not brought low upon Death’s dread bridal-bed, where Victor would that he fall into her arms as a mariner swept to the depths, to the heart of her older and fairer than all that is earthly; adored alike by man and heaven. He touched the cheek which oft she kissed, and whispered sweet against. What corridor of his body could not recall her? When the body holds its memory fiercer than the brain; does not give up its dead. Nina red-threaded through their wedded vein and artery, he the consecrated earth wherein she lay sepulchred, in the carnal dominion of Eros and Thanatos.
Victor lifted his face as the Crucible gate creaked. He put out his cigarette and stood as the Bachelor crossed the yard. Victor’s bright excitement burnt out in looking upon him—his face handsome with studious fatigue gone delirious and deathlike, with contused tear-troughs sunken beneath eyes wracked raw by exhaustion, his skull struck with cacophonous clamors for sleep.
“Victor. I hope you can forgive this intrusion.”
“Your company is never an intrusion,” Victor said. “How may I help you?”
“I… May we talk? Inside?”
“Certainly.”
Daniil halted in the anteroom to Victor’s study. The desk was scattered with sketches of the Specular Tower, more fastidious and fanciful than those by Peter’s hand. Victor paused at Daniil’s shoulder and touched the illustrations with the sort of affection owed to a lover.
“I know you were looking for blueprints for Aglaya, if I am not mistaken, but those are simply my… idlings, not the Stamatins’ work.”
Daniil raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t take you for an artist.”
“It isn’t my primary occupation,” Victor conceded.
“In any event, I’m not here for blueprints,” Daniil said. “Pardon my saying so, but you’re the only one in this family who seems to speak with any modicum of sanity, so I trust you might be able to help me understand all this madness. That is… How could any of this be? The Polyhedron? Your son said a number of strange things to me when I visited; most of all, he seemed shocked that I saw paper, as if the structure were made of its own designs.”
“Is that what you saw?” Victor asked. “I suppose that means my wife is favorable towards you, but I’m inclined to doubt that’s the explanation you were hoping for. By way of proper explanation…”
Victor gestured Daniil to his study. The corner cabinet groaned at its hinges as he withdrew worn works penned in his elder brother’s hand.
“My interest in the arts is, as my brothers,’ not confined to the aesthetic.” Victor placed page upon page of drawn-up dream-designs before Daniil. “We found that architecture is the only medium capable of manifesting Focus in a consummate manner; as a building, a strictly manmade body. My interest in the body was thus, I suppose, practically an architect’s interest.”
Aspity’s whispers in that dank cottage which smelled of its stone foundations and rot taken root in indelibly damp wood; how Plague courted her infected as seducer Death whispers inside the head—then it moves in completely. For a while. The body makes for lousy lodging—it breaks apart all too easily. Eva’s words as she dearly held Daniil’s hands crossed his thoughts’ threshold as spirits do at the witching hour: Death isn’t an external affliction, is it? It knocks on your head, knocks from the inside, having appeared within you…
Daniil smothered Vlad’s mad utterance that the Sand Pest infected those who merely thought of her.
“Tell me more,” Daniil said.
Victor stood beside Daniil to conduct him through Simon’s calculations. “From the family archives. I had my brother’s permission to remove them for you.”
Daniil met Victor’s eye expectantly. Victor felt faint pleasure at their eyes’ each meeting, for Daniil’s reflected his every reverie of another world awaiting, of a dream longed for since his youth’s first hour, and so was all he had ever known. His attendance of dissections in the Capital had long struck a chord in his temples, one dissonant with the theories of which he whispered with his brothers. His fascination with anatomy’s mysteries cultivated in his artistic interests; and when he lie in Nina’s arms, Victor gained more impassioned disdain for the philosophical thought that the body is base in of itself.
Nina, who had shown Daniil Utopia’s most intimate anatomies, for Daniil stepped to Victor’s counter-melody, to curiosity for all incongruent with his avowed rationality. Took Victor for clever Mercury with his caduceus—he had whispered to the dead, and they whispered back in his ear; his mouth that stately Gate of Horn whence passed the Manes’ reveries. Daniil shivered in desire for Victor to confide in him every chimera dreamed up by the dead.
Victor looked back to his brother’s work. “Simon’s abstractions of Focus, in its earliest, most theoretical form. Calculations which he defined as an attempt to construct ‘the existence of man outside his natural limits.’ Familiar, I am sure.”
Victor smiled at Daniil. He questioned whether he had ever seen Victor smile. At least in this manner, which appeared almost—though Daniil would not deign to assign the word to such a man—playful.
“As for precisely what Focus is, Simon defined it as an absolute concentration of human spirit. And I must say, Simon’s progress with this work astounded even Georgiy and me. His early constructions, that is—the mirror structures. One even fit inside a walnut, and another is in our wine-cellar.”
“A dwelling place for the soul,” Daniil murmured.
“Yes. Just as the body, hence my fascination.”
“May I see your works?”
“If you wish, but I doubt they will much interest a man of medicine as yourself. They mostly concern the anatomical.”
Victor gathered further faded paper from the cabinet and set them before Daniil. He admired Victor’s handiwork, his beautiful portraiture of the body’s angular pulchritude. But amongst the anatomical and architectural was a woman, and at once Daniil knew her beautiful imperial countenance for the prophetess whose spirit bridled the Gorkhon nights.
Who had held the threads of the Universe in her hands, breathed life into the town as a god inspires his priestess, she god and priestess both. Her spirit unquiet on the Plutonian shore, her discordant cries from the other side outpoured between her daughter’s nervous hand in the epistles of her diaries; thus the Kains kept close their dead. As spoke the little graveyard grim who tended her garden of the dead sprung as herbs up from Boddho’s skin; who laid graves with loaves of bread, and soaked their soil with milk or twyrine; who with frail fingers amongst sighing swevery insisted that not everyone died forever, that you always have to knock from this side so that they don’t fade away.
Just to look upon her in chalk and ink, Daniil felt as Actaeon caught before the huntress-goddess naked amongst her sacred cypress. That hunter whose hounds howled the fate authored by Diana’s rage, sated only when those hounds rent their master limb from abdomen. Actaeon’s fate befall any man who beheld divinity in indecency, befall Daniil for looking upon divine Nina.
“My wife,” Victor murmured.
“Yes, I’ve heard tell of Nina,” Daniil said. “Were these… when did you draw these?”
“Recently. From memory.”
Victor touched the sketch. Nina in the last hour of her youth, as on the first night he had drawn her. When Nina idled over his illustrations from dissections while the voyeur mirror bore her as a dreamy figment in its frame. Her dressing-gown caressed each elegant lineament of her body as lovers doted on tender and deadly Dolores des Sept Douleurs; the silk elicited masterful statuary, whose diaphanous drapery evokes in the brain sensations of sanguine heat warm in the body beneath.
“Will you ever draw me, or is dead flesh too alluring a subject?” Nina lie back in bed beside him. “Don’t you know how many men have practically begged to paint me?”
Victor wound an adoring hand into her hair and ran his thumb along her cheekbone. “How could I ever do you justice, my darling?” He brushed Nina’s cheek with his nose. “You would make Venus ill with envy.”
“Trying to distract me with flatteries, I see.” Nina poked his chest with a playfully accusatory finger, her dark tresses fallen about his face as the streams of sea.
“Or perhaps I just like to compliment my beloved.” Victor stroked her breast through crimson silk as Adonis adoring Venus in her furs. “Frankly, I thought it would be trite to ask. But if you will allow me, it would be my pleasure. On the condition that you don’t make me show you my first attempts, because they are liable to be dreadful.”
“A fair condition, though I doubt that.” Nina loosed the knot of her dressing gown, and with one lithe movement cast the fabric to the floor. “So long as you show me all your subsequent masterpieces.”
Nina grinned and arranged her winsome limbs with lovely poise upon the bedsheets, where with each utterance of his name upon her lips, Victor’s blood longed yet more madly for her touch, to answer the yearnings of the deep dear sea—blood or seawater, their bitter salt would sate the same. Victor hurt with how he loved her, made lovelier and lordlier than all wrought of Prometheus’ hands, all His dreams still held hot-blooded in her heart. Victor bowed to Amor’s valor and spoke his lovers’ prayers as accustomed, in a kiss, and only set to his composition once Nina kissed him breathless by lips bitten raw. A composition now cloistered amongst opera tickets and old photographs, Nina’s every letter and telegram.
Victor lightly traced the fine details of her which evaded chalk or charcoal; touched the covert clerestories and traceries where muscle binds by sinew to bone, and so understood how those most intimate intricacies of her beauty. Her eyes’ archways with voussoirs formed of nose and orbital bone, adorned by silken sable lashes above her mouth handsome in rose. How her throat rose from her collarbone in a soft v-contour, and her shoulder sloped down to her breasts laid along the rib-vaults of her chest’s nave, which with faultless grace descended from abdomen to hip and the elegant length of her legs.
Nina smiled to Victor’s gentle, inquisitive fingertips against her skin, blood-blotched by the affections of his teeth and tongue. His touches and the whisperings of his sketching made her lowered lids deliciously heavy.
“Oh, if only this weren’t so relaxing,” Nina said. “I’d rather not sleep just yet, but you tired me out.”
“I tired you out…”
Nina chuckled as Victor set chalk and sketch aside. She shivered as he lightly traced her spine’s sceptral column, then kissed up her back to her neck; swift flittings of his lips which tickled the skin beneath her ear. Nina’s lively laughter kindled delight in Victor’s heart.
She rolled over and wound a leg around Victor’s waist. “You’re so gorgeous, Vitya…” Nina sighed once more, heartsore with all her roseleafed love. “Oh, I love you…”
Victor’s heart mourned in coupled dolor cut down by Daniil’s voice.
“She’s very beautiful.” Daniil spoke awkwardly for lack of any astute comment. “I can see you truly loved her.”
“I do.”
Daniil reddened. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Implying that you no longer loved her. My past tense.”
Victor waved it away. “But that is the natural turn of the language, is it not?”
Daniil glanced towards the corridor. “Did you paint that portrait of Nina, too?”
“Yes,” Victor said. “Soon after she died, over many nights. Not that I would have slept much in those days, anyway—my son wasn’t even yet a year old.”
Sunlight had ever been hateful to Victor, but that mourning month he all but fled for night’s cloisters. Wiled away the length of his living hours in drop-clothed parlor at high midnight, amidst scents of paint and turpentine, amongst hypnotic nocturnes. Legato wound with a woman’s voice in ethereal leitmotif fit to raise the hairs on the back of one’s neck; but Victor adored those desolate tones to which he worked over canvas after canvas.
Victor only parted from his painting to quiet Kaspar’s cries, walking the Crucible corridors amongst dust motes suspended in ghostly moonlight. He was a more fitful child than Maria, and though Victor reasoned this was simply his temperament, guilt weltered from his every bloodflow that he could not quell his son’s sorrow any more than his own. And when Victor held him, he hurt as with Nina’s wish to cradle their little boy, to sing him asleep as she had their darling daughter.
Maria alike haunted the Crucible: nightly crept its halls but to watch Victor paint her mother. Whom all held as a cruel Cybele crowned in her lion-led chariot; Maria the most fervent faithful of the invulnerable and infallible Magna Mater. The warm murmurs of brush upon palette or canvas soothed her as the sea’s sounds, and lulled her down to dreams, to her mother’s arms. One night slept as Kaspar snuggled asleep against her chest, his head tucked under her chin. Victor had forgotten his every preoccupation in love for their children, dreaming peaceably at the fireside while blustery rain lamented to the river. He kissed their heads in turn before returned to paint and palette.
With each night Victor’s forsaken portraits piled ever higher—her eyes were never right. Even when paint and turpentine glittered wet in nightly lamplight, those were not his belovèd’s eyes which once had lived and loved. Frustration so blistered his blood in its stinging foam and froth that Victor later cast the canvases into the fire. Maria touched those ashes with anguished cries, as though it were her mother’s burnt bones beneath her fingers; and all the nights after, she spurned Victor’s parlor for Nina’s tomb. Stung with a welt of guilt, Victor forswore his portraiture to paint a little locket portrait of Nina, which he gifted Maria before her mother’s crypt; as she stood beneath the iron-thorn coronet one day to crown her blest brow.
Victor toiled two months time in this insomniac monomania. Ambition and anguish its crucible, whose insistent steel spurred Victor between the ribs and spent every resource of brain and body, whose faltering roused utter contempt in Victor. His health troubled Simon, who looked after Kaspar all during the day to let his father rest. Maria kept to the cell of Georgiy’s study or read his every chthonic theory curled up alongside Nina’s tomb. So went the daytime rhythms of that house of mourning which Victor scarcely saw—only when December dawned with newborn snow did Victor at last lay down his brushes. In that final hour, he relented and left her eyes shuttered; Nina’s only open-eyed portrait that locket painting nestled amongst all Maria’s dearest possessions.
“So your portraits,” Daniil began, “were they an attempt to utilize other arts?”
“In part, but more so to satisfy some curiosity—experientia gratis experientiae,” Victor said. After all, it’s often repeated that muses will live through eternity in their author or artist’s works, and while I do find that frankly mawkish, I don’t deny some parallel to Georgiy’s theory. Indeed, through literature or visual art we may hear the voice or see the visage of someone dead a thousand years. Their memory endures in their work, and is that not a form of immortality?”
“I don’t deal in ephemeral immortality,” Daniil said.
“‘Ephemeral immortality,’” Victor repeated in quiet amusement. “What a phrase.”
Daniil blushed a little. “I meant immaterial.”
“Even so, that oxymoron isn’t all incorrect,” Victor said. “As I told you, Simon was not immortal. The nature of my family’s achievements over death leaves us perpetually liable to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The process is precarious, entirely dependant on one’s capability to retain another’s Memory.”
“Georgiy did describe Focus with fairly ephemeral metaphor—that it’s is a sort of instrument, and the soul like music. And, of course, music is the most ephemeral art form, particularly before our ability to record it, as it only existed when played. Only through conscious and active effort,” Daniil thought aloud.
“It is indeed an exhausting effort,” Victor said. “An intense concentration of attention and mental faculties which, I admit, is often nearly unbearable. But it is in this way we may keep the dead among the living.”
Daniil looked to him, but the sketches of Nina kept Victor’s attention. Maria’s whispers rattled about his brain—I can barely hold on to the memory of my mother… soon my father will take her away from me. Forever.
“Isn’t that painful?” Daniil whispered. “Isn’t it… Well, isn’t that functionally perpetual mourning?”
“And should a task being arduous compel one to abandon it?” Victor asked. “I doubt you would adopt that line of thought. At least, I hardly got that impression from our prior conversations.”
Victor’s countenance was stoic, but heartache draped from his eyes’ eaves. Daniil would that he possessed a better bedside manner, a gentler deportment and sympathetic sophistry to remedy a careworn heart. He thought to place a hand upon Victor’s shoulder, but Victor would surely abhor any pity for his blessed beloved burden; would draw back if Daniil sought to comfort him.
Gloom congealed in Daniil’s veins at that thought. Perhaps it was he who wanted comfort, to at last lay down his body weary from twyre-tired September: Suok’s vapors, hard-fisted marauders, the shabnak’s whisper in the ear; an excess of ferromycinium in the liver, and breath labored from ailing lungs, intruded upon by fits of coughs which wracked the ribs. But Daniil would not collapse against any whose arms would have him—he wanted comfort from Victor alone.
“You know, perhaps I do agree, but I prefer to conceive of the ‘soul’ as ‘intellect’,” Daniil said. “I know some might think that’s just semantics, but I don’t consider them neatly interchangeable.”
“But of course. The intellect is in the domain of the rational sciences. The soul… that is philosophical, even religious.”
“Well, yes.”
“I concede that language confines us. We are forced to assign names to phonomena, if only to talk around them. Alot them whatever name you prefer, that does not preclude their existence.”
“Isidor told me almost the exact same thing.”
“I’m sure he did.” Victor spoke fondly. “I’m curious: if you disdain the word ‘soul,’ what name would you call the immaterial part of us? What is ‘spirit’ to you?”
Daniil considered Nina’s face. “I never did lose my curiosity about… magnetism, given that not even psychiatrists and neurologists can truly explain cognition. There must be something more, like pneuma,” Daniil said. “But there’s a reason beyond skepticism that I never entertained these thoughts much: fascinating as philosophy is, it’s almost always impractical, and, in consequence, never truly leads to progress. We are material, physical, so I doubt the answer to our mortality is metaphysical.”
“That was not really what I asked,” Victor pressed.
“Well… I don’t know whether I believe that there’s a truly immaterial part of us,” Daniil admitted. “We feel emotion bodily, after all. Anger, fear, joy, sadness, etc.—each elicits a particular physiological reaction. That and the psychological theories being published nowadays convince me more and more that the body and intellect are inextricable. The body itself—its inherent frailty and inevitable decay—certainly influences peoples’ behavior, to the point that I think if a person were reproduced in a vessel like your Specular Tower, they would cease to truly be ‘human.’” He spoke as if in some recognition. “More like the aforementioned poetry or paintings, or a voice on a wax cylinder.”
“Only an echo,” Victor supplied. Daniil nodded. “But is triumphing over these unfortunate mechanisms of the human condition not Thanatica’s foremost ambition?”
“Indeed, I live to conquer death, but…” Daniil addressed the wood-grain. “I… I only want to make it so that people can live longer—my primary venture is to improve human longevity. But as Aglaya recognized, I thought if I found a sensation, some ostensive proof of my theories, I might continue my research. I hoped to find that in your brother, but now I see it wouldn’t have mattered even if Simon were every bit invulnerable as Georgiy claimed.” Daniil cleared his throat. “May I ask you something else?”
“Please be so kind.”
Daniil smiled slightly. “Your family’s philosophy seems to disregard the body entirely, but shouldn’t it hold some importance, given that your architectural experiments apparently prove that Memory requires a physical vessel to be reproduced? Do you consider the human body is an inadequate one?”
“I rather doubt we could arrive at a consensus about that,” Victor said. “Georgiy indeed sees the body as an instrument, if in a more… poetic, or simpler, parallel to your view. I am more inclined to Simon’s thought: the body is not akin to an instrument or a phonograph, but rather a study or creative laboratory, if you will. A place wherein one can experience reality to its fullest. Thus I prefer ‘imperfect’ to ‘inadequate,’ because, as you observed, the soul is too much influenced by—and, from my lacklustre medical knowledge, likewise influences—our perception. But the wondrous souls we must preserve… These are exceptional instances. These spirits require a body not entirely human, but for most, I would more eagerly look to your efforts. The physical; the ostensible practical.”
“Certainly, I follow the scientific parameters of life, but I’m not a positivist. That wouldn’t exactly become someone in my line of work, would it?” Daniil’s little smile deeply charmed Victor. “There is indeed something to be said about about arts and literature. Perhaps it’s only an echo, but I do believe that as long as something is remembered, it isn’t truly dead.”
“There is still some pulse left in it?” Victor mused.
“Something like that.” Daniil stared at Nina’s face caught between pages of Polyhedron draft sketches. “But nothing can truly be forgotten. The past lives in the present and defines the future.”
Victor smiled warmly. “I see why Isidor held you in such high esteem.”
Daniil blushed down to the throat. “Speaking of Isidor, I’d appreciate your opinion on some of his notes, if you’re willing.”
“Of course, but might we move to the parlor? It’s quite a bit more comfortable.”
Daniil agreed. He followed Victor past Nina’s portrait to a door off the entryway, through which awaited a pleasant sitting-room. Daniil sat on the sofa and rooted through his bag for Isidor’s writings.
Daniil sat near Victor, that he might demystify Isidor’s more peculiar notes. Victor’s voice caressed Daniil’s nerves in soft spoken explanations, accented with the pitter-patter of velar and hushed with the rushes of sibilant. And as Daniil looked from print to Victor, his lyrist heart composed choriambs on his countenance; he Prometheus and swift-footed Mercury, who walked the land where dwelled the dead. Daniil felt with faint pleasure Victor’s fingertips against his thigh when he lightly touched the pages. How he ached to be graced by Victor’s body, for many a trite but attractive figment of courtship lurid in his brain.
Of hearing Victor’s pen essaying away in study or laboratory before each fell into the other’s arms between warmhearted bedsheets; where they spent the rest of restlessness speaking close in the dark until whispers waned to soft somnolent breath. Victor’s head upon his heart while Daniil read aloud to him, idly stroked silvered strand at Victor’s temples as down fell the rain. Daniil sitting at the table over the day’s notes, exchanging hypotheses with Victor as he prepared dinner and the radio crooned with some old composer of whom both were fond. In sensuous repose under Victor’s eye, patiently posed until Victor rose to kiss his beloved muse of strange science.
Victor felt how Daniil leant ever nearer to him, and through those mourning doldrums which deaden the soul, affection inspirited his heart’s vaults. One woken when first they spoke, and Victor caught his reluctant intrigue as a heartbeat beneath old floorboards—systole, diastole, selfsame signature as his own. And for once since Nina, Victor was caught in the muttering matters of his heart, lingering over longing for this scholar with the face of loveliest Vanitas, that transient muse coveted by any artist’s hand. Immortal in oil tempered in turpentine: posed upon velvet rich as ripened pomegranate, flushed in ecstasy over his own beauty, as the smoke of candles upon books of learning perfumed the surrounding stagnant air, and he sung an elegy whose melodic contour echoed the chorus of clockwork.
“Victor?” Daniil looked to Victor in the hearthlight. “Can a body itself be a Focus? That is, not your own? I hope I’m not talking nonsense, it’s only that Maria said something about Nina, which— She said you would ‘take her mother away from her forever.’”
For a moment Victor merely listened in on the fire’s musings and mutterings.
“Yes. Though it certainly has the least… efficacy, shall we say.”
“A lousy lodging,” Daniil muttered.
“Quite. As is evident in that psychic girl, two souls cannot inhabit one body—a person cannot bear that tension long. Not even the Polyhedron can boast this ability, but there is a difference between reflection and reproduction of a soul.”
“...By ‘reproduction,’ do you mean ‘reincarnation?”
“Would you credit it if I said yes?” Victor sighed beneath his breath. “I did hope to avoid such talk, but… Indeed this—your victory—requires my and Georgiy’s deaths.”
“Don’t talk like that, Victor!” Daniil snapped. “Is everyone here such an incurable fatalist? Georgiy was right—you’re all calling this upon yourselves, the way you’re all consigned to death and talk on about the end of days.” Daniil grasped Victor’s hand. “I won’t let you die. I promised Maria, and those ridiculous actors you have gallivanting around your streets, and, and myself. If I can’t even protect those who need me in the Capital, I—”
Victor held up his hand. “Please, Doctor. I was marked for death long before you entered this stage.”
“Nothing has happened until it’s happened, and even after that, you can still change it.” Daniil’s grasp began to make Victor’s hand ache. Despair embittered Daniil like bile salts in the throat, but he bit it back and swallowed it down—hopelessness would hold no dominion over him. “‘Dum anima est, spes esse.’”
“‘While there is spirit, there is hope,’” Victor mused.
“‘While there is life, there is hope.’” Daniil’s hand gentled on Victor’s. “Oh, Victor, I wish I had met you before this madness.”
“As do I.” Victor brushed his thumb over Daniil’s knuckles. “Perhaps our meeting would play out differently in another performance.”
“I wouldn’t count on Immortell’s playscripts,” Daniil scoffed. “Nor the imaginations of the Powers That Be.”
“No. Perhaps not.” Victor’s voice was scantly breath.
And at some plagal cadence played upon their heart-cords, some light tilt of the face and lilt in the breath, their mouths met in the half-dark. Daniil lay Isidor’s papers upon the hardwood and hastened off his gloves, which he dropped atop those notes to cradle Victor’s face and nape. Victor’s leisured languid mouth upon his warmed Daniil as mulled wine. He lie back, a hand at Daniil’s waist to hold him close, and Daniil felt beat Victor’s heart against the bone which bore his own pulses. That internal mechanism tuned to the arteries, whose heat lovingly lent itself to Daniil’s veins so atrophied in fatigue; and his every enduring ache made Victor’s touch all the more pleasurable in counterpoint.
At the closing of their kiss, Daniil garlanded him in his arms and nestled his cheek to Victor’s chest. Victor’s knuckles followed along Daniil’s temples and stroked his cheekbones. His kiss had left lip balm upon Daniil’s lips, and Daniil slackened his mouth to Victor’s finger-touch, lilting along his lips as he smoothed almond oil into skin split by want of water. Daniil hurt to Victor’s attentive affection; his fingers’ loving lingering along his Cupid’s bow, his quiet caresses upon Daniil’s face laced with his warm lips while he stroked Daniil’s hair, nails rustling against the strands as a gramophone’s crackling. He wound a steady clockwork about Daniil’s forehead and temples as when his own head ached in study; so soothed him with the dotings he delighted to bestow upon Nina.
Daniil’s mouth was soft upon Victor’s before idling to kiss his heart’s tremor in the throat. With his forehead at Victor’s throat, Daniil’s lips lay upon his pulsepoint blushed by its beats, where his cologne had dried down to its heart notes. He held Victor dear as the lee shore where the weary brother mariner may find his rest, and Victor quieted his heart’s lament that this night could number only one other. Victor rested his chin upon Daniil’s forehead and stroked his back as Daniil’s heart and lung-tide turned slow and somnolent.
Victor drowsed as the hearth burned down to fire-coppered coals, roused when Daniil stirred to the Cathedral bells tolled an hour to midnight. Before he rose, Daniil stroked Victor’s hair back from his brow and kissed him. The longing breath of Daniil’s lungs betrayed itself upon his mouth, in his lovesick sigh when Victor drew back. Daniil offered a hand and brought him upright.
Doctor and necromancer stepped out into fast-fallen night, faces made spectral in the Polyhedron’s grim gold. And as Daniil beheld Victor below the Polyhedron’s shadow, he felt as though Scarlet Nina were breathing down his neck, that the woman living everlasting in Victor’s art lie in the hollows of his pupils and stared back as does a star-filled abyss or gaping maw.
“I’ll remember your company fondly when this nightmare is over.” Daniil touched his wrist. “Please, write to me if you need anything. I’m always happy to assist you.”
Victor thanked him. “And you, Doctor. Though I imagine what you want of me now is simply to sit at home, out of harm’s way. But expect my couriers—I trust we will see each other much in the coming days.”
“Daniil. And that is some modicum of comfort,” he said. “Goodnight, Victor.”
“Goodnight, Daniil.”
Daniil kissed Victor’s cheek, then turned his step towards the theatre.