what

𝔢𝔞𝔯𝔩𝔶 𝔬𝔫

V's eye didn't need to bear the silver mark for those around him to consider him an odd child from the very beginning. He would hear things sometimes—neither human whispers nor clear voices; strange hums in tones and language V could never pinpoint, yet understood in fragments he would forget not long after. They would slip from his memory like remnants of some fading yet complex dream, leaving V with little more than a feeling of strange absence in the place of clarity.

On other ocassions, he would sense the presence of something, even in empty rooms, as if it called to something in him, beckoning him closer.

None of these things would happen regularly to properly disturb the rhythm of his life, but they took plac often enough that he'd started to notice.

The first few times he brought it up to the sisters who ran the orphanage, with all the trust of a small child who hadn't yet learned how to fully suppress questions and fear. Naturally, the nuns brushed it off as typical make-believe. But the more the pattern persisted, the less it made sense to keep blaming V's overactive imagination, and soon the culprits ranged from the boy's bad dreams overstaying their welcome, to straight-up demonic possession.

That quickly taught him to keep quiet and try to resolve the matter himself. He would find himself internalising the adults' feedback; It's just your brain acting up. This is what you get from reading so many books, from asking so many questions. La curiosità è figlia del peccato.

He would try to pray it all away or (briefly) convince himself that perhaps those were some kind saints or guardian angels leaving him little signs—but that assumption felt arrogant, too dangerous to make. So he just let the signs pass—let them happen, let them disturb him sometimes, and then let them fade into monotony. It's not like they happened everyday, after all. It's just that some days proved more challenging than others.

Perhaps everyone experienced something of that sort at least a few times in their life, he tried to tell himself, and they simply felt too ashamed to tell anyone. Or perhaps he was cursed. Perhaps he really was imagining things. Or perhaps those were all symptoms of his soul's unrest and the need for holy healing. Or nothing, or nonsense.

He ended up traversing his previous life more or less accustomed to that weirdness. It never genuinely interrupted anything of importance anyway; it merely remained, the way some currents may be temporarily halted, yet refuse to properly shift.

𝔭𝔬𝔰𝔱-𝔲𝔫𝔟𝔞𝔭𝔱𝔦𝔰𝔪

Imagine V's surprise upon discovering a religion, an entire community, that doesn't negate or simply acknowledge those odd traits of his, but openly celebrates them. Considers them blessings, signs of favour.

He begins to learn how to tune into them, or how to tune them out on occassion, but this time without the harshness of his younger years. And after his unbaptism, after having his soul torn open anew and letting the black light in… the signs amplify. Mutate. Unspool. They seep in bit by bit, extremely subtle until they're too apparent to ignore—and yet, they always feel like they were meant to take place. Like nothing has been added nor taken away, only illuminated.

The subtler ones are usually fairly easy to disregard, or even just miss—unless you're around him often enough and pay close attention: his skin being two or three degrees colder than most humans' (very useful during heatwaves...); his silver eye not only reflecting light but seemingly glowing with one ot its own; shadows moving and bending oddly in his proximity.

Corvids are oddly aware of his presence. It's something people only realise after having spent more time around him. Sometimes there's a crow or two perched nearby, just staring. Every now and then, they may bring him little trinkets: tiny bones, weirdly shaped beads that could be rocks or disassembled jewellery or merely glass shards smoothed out by time and rain.

Other changes V experiences more deeply just because they happen within his body rather than around it.

For example, one day someone notices that his pulse feels… delayed. It beats just a moment slower than expected, or may sometimes be felt in the wrong place (temple, wrist, but faint and misaligned).

Also, his wounds don’t bleed at first; there's a strange pause, followed by a slow oozing, as if his vessel's reluctant. Afterwards his skin might knit oddly, cleanly but without the sense of urgency.

I think the best way to summarise how I want to write "creature" V is uncanny valley? Hardly any of that is intentional and honestly the first few times the "bigger" changes happen the poor man is genuinely unsettled.

They, to quote my dear friend, "make his adjustment to the Church twice as complicated—he's not just adjusting to a new belief system, environment, and people. He's also adjusting to a new way of being him. Of how his body works, how he interacts with the world."

Imagine accidentally nicking someone mid-kiss because suddenly your fangs have grown. What if they don't always retreat back to normal right away? What if at one point they just stop mid-transformation and stay that way, and now you're stuck with your teeth forever suspended between human and something else entirely—

On that note, I don't think V needs blood, but he may want to drink it. Whether because he's not fully human or just because he's a sicko is completely up to you.

I think his choice of costumes is a blend of living finally out his gothic diva dream and also embracing those non-human aspects of himself, even if he doesn't necessarily have all the features we've seen in the photoshoots, such as an actual tail or wings. Probably.

His claws do make an appearance every now and then! They're just a rarer instance than the literal demon teeth + not something he can control particularly well yet. They're also shorter than what we've seen in the promo pics, though their length varies.

That's the thing: V's most noticeable physical creatre-shifts aren't consistent and are mostly temporary. Unlike a typical werewolf or kelpie transformation, there is no specific set of features that appear every single time a change takes place, because the process itself is not as much about shapeshifting as it is about the human body bending the rules of how it should function, in order to make space for something else.

Anyway, he purrs sometimes. It doesn't sounds exactly like a cat's purr, but it's not too dissimilar either. Have you ever heard a bat purr? Yeah, it's a little like that. Predictably, it happens when he feels safe and content, away from strangers' ears or eyes. It's also easier for him to get under wraps compared to some of the other changes, so if he notices his partner finds the sound soothing or pleasant, he may bring it out/emphasize it to some degree.

Another sound he sometimes makes: chittering. Clicking. It tends to veer into insectile or resemble the whisper of a rattlesnake's tail, and thus can be rather disturbing. It's also pretty much beyond V's control, especially since it happens in much different settings than the purrs. The circumstances primarily involve layered overwhelm of some sort (be it physical, emotional or spiritual) + more often than not appear alongside claws, oddly shifting eyes, various distortions: splintered voice, bones bendt at unnatural angles; breath turning freezing like a gust of catacomb air; shadows pooling along his skin in a way that's just not right.

He fixates in that state sometimes. Might not fully realise what's happening. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's best for the right person to be nearby until it passes.

𝖙𝖆𝖌 𝖑𝖎𝖘𝖙: @necropolitus ⛧ @genuinezenith ⛧ @sakuraspoke ⛧ @1800villageidiot ⛧ @genxgigi