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Caitlin does not know when she will see Zakarias Lomidze again, but she gives his cunning the courtesy of certainty that she will - which is more than she gives most. Sometimes the memory of how this started comes uninvited, surfacing through the floor of her like damp through stone: a hovel with its wards blown wide, a witch already going cold, and the dial sitting in the wreckage like it had been waiting all along for someone with the nerve to close a hand around it. Caitlin had the nerve. She has always had the nerve - it's the one thing she was born holding that nobody managed to carve back out of her, and God knows the carving was attempted. She took the dial. She tucked it against her ribs where it has lived ever since, warm only because she keeps it warm, and she ran.
She's been running ever since. She's good at it; it's the family trade, after a fashion - Siltshore women have always been very practiced at being chased by witches, by hauntings. That's the part he doesn't understand, she thinks, Lomidze with his thousand years and his funeral patience. To him the chase is a marathon is a siege is a slow tightening. She wonders if he thinks he can simply outlast her, the way he's outlasted empires and clerics and whoever else's blood went into the mortar of his pretty foundations. He waits for her to tire. But jokes on fucking you ZAK - Caitlin does not tire the way the dead expect the living to. She gets fast. She burns hotter the closer the end comes, a star streaking white across the black, beautiful precisely because it is busy destroying itself, and far too bright by then to catch.
Georgia. Moldova. Romania. A smear of border towns she couldn't name now if you asked her, and wouldn't bother to. She moves by day, while he's tucked away from the sun like a coat folded into summer storage. The night is slow, and the night is his. Cait has stopped being interested in anything that belongs to him. Cait turns meters into miles.
But it is night now, months later. It is always night when it counts.
It is slow enough that by the time the shape of him finally cuts itself out of the dark at the edge of the graveyard, Cait has been keeping vigil for hours at the Siltshore mausoleum. She has crowned herself with a wreath of funeral lilies already going brown at the edges, and she has been talking to the dead women when the shadow of him haunts her doorstep.
There he is. Filling the doorway he was always going to fill, eventually. A silhouette poured into the threshold, funeral-black layered on funeral-black, every elegant centimeter of him as still and fucking annoying as a parasite that won't leave. He's just as she remembers. Cait inhales, and then throws her head back and laughs.
The sound tears up out of her and goes climbing the vaulting, doubling, coming back down at her in the voices of all her quiet dead - and for one bright unhinged second Caitlin understands, truly understands, down in the animal underneath her, why wolves must howl at the moon. It is so far past mirth it loops the long way round and comes back wearing mirth's stolen face. It is the body forcing the breath out so the everything inside has somewhere to be, so she can stoop and gather it off the cold marble and string it and draw it back and loose every trembling grain of it, elegant as an arrow, straight at the thing standing at the threshold of her family's land.
"Did you come all this way for little old me?"
The words come out warm, sweet as the rot of the lilies against her temple. He's followed her home to Port Leiry, then. When he asks - and he will ask - she is going to lie to him. She is going to look him dead in those drowning eyes and tell him she does not have the artifact he's looking for. She'll say it with the dial purring under her ribs. So let him. He can tear every stone of this mausoleum down to read her grave himself; Caitlin is very bad at staying dead.
"Do you think you'll kill me this time? I don't know if you've heard," she says, sweet as the lilies rotting at her temple, spreading her arms wide to her whole congregation of dead, "but I'm an unkillable rat." And rats, she'd be the first to tell him, have always done their finest work in tombs. Hers most of all.
In the months of them becoming shadows of each other's intention. They have become the centre of a ley line; an X, torn up from the roots; a collision that leaves a mark, and then a sudden seperation. Until the next, and the next. Zakarias cannot cast magic, nor has he ever feigned to. But if Caitlin Siltshore had a single page of his memory, she would know more than her lifetime has ever dared to know. It's important, because they're both acutely aware that he will not cross her threshold. He has seen the birth, and fall of great minds; the mausoleum is her domain, and his power cannot strength its way out of whatever binds she will carve into her stone, or whatever blood she will spill to boil his. It's a dance, now. Her laugh is their music.
Blackened eyes, charred like coal, watch her in her tomb; her voice is the beating of wings bouncing between bricks. A predator toys with its prey, on occasion. Who eats who? They'd disagree if asked.
But he'll bite, just once. "I had begun to believe you could have been the apogee of sorcery." Not close, but the point stands, and his lips curves. "In Moldova. Almost impressive." Le Fay. La Befana. The Endorian Girl, who had tasted of ripened grapes, and currants in a frostbitten winter. Aradia. Corey. The list of formidable practioners across centuries is extensive. He'd toed with plenty, and known the blood of even more. It's how his fascination has never dulled; his thirst for more than wine, and instead for knowledge of potential beyond the immortal stillness. But Caitlin Siltshore; she's untested, to him. Still a thief who would lose her hands, in another world. She already appears to have had a tryst with a small guillotine to have knuckles bare of phalanges. She could not afford to lose more, without making sacrifices that burrow deeper into the skull, and burn away pieces of sanity. It happens plenty, to even capricious minds.
Zakar has barely begun. Hands stuffed in pockets, and waiting to be offered a drink for their conversation. Siltshore hospitality amongst a graveyard of the rotted dead? He's on her grounds; that makes him a guest, does it not? Without that, he's merely a man without invitation, which means he can shatter the walls of her temple-tomb, if he so wishes. He's never quite done. "You remind me of someone I once knew; Renata, she refused to rot in the earth, too." Not die. She had done that, several times. It never held her, like it held most. Caitlin exhibits a similiar brevity. "Eventually, in the cross between your world, and the peeling of the layers. The mind withers, in small rivers, at first." Madness takes root, in all of them. "You know this as well as I, that you are inconsequential in our game. What you possess, however," he surveys the crass little scene, reeking of sulphur and decay, "There is a line needle thin, that will spare you." Zakarias would leave her to her devices, just to see what time does to her. But he would erase every connection she ever built, or desires to bridge between herself and another until the end of her days; until all she knows is herself and her own drive; nobody would know of her potential, except him, and her. What is worse than being remembered only in death? To him, it's never feeding a beast like ego, or glory whilst still being alive to feast; the kind of secondary power he believes that Caitlin pursues with a sword drawn, and a bloodied athame. Isolate her, so all she knows is that, and nothing else. She has even laid herself in her own grave, willingly.
There a hundred means of nullifying power, but none as mythic as the piece of one she is now hiding. He'll let her weave all the lies she wants, because he has heard them all.
When it is clear they communicate better in blunted terms, Zakarias smiles and a finger flicks at the edge of the masoleum entrance; the stone cracks through the centre, and the walls shake. Less magic. More ancient than her. Not a challenge; he's merely testing the boundary. Tittering, "Rats. Plague. You. Blood wasted. Need we continue?" He could, because if he wanted her dead, he would have found a witch to poison every path she dared cast upon; he would have spiked every drink she ever dared to make with his blood, drowned her in the crossing of countries, and watched the light of her power vanish before he reduced her to dust. Zakar thinks threatening is a childish act, when it's so very evident that they would kill, before they would concede. "Delusion is a killer, Caitlin." His hand flips, palm up, fingers half curled as if she's going to hand over what he wants as easy as that. It's amusing, if nothing else. "I have a sister to greet, and your lifetime is lessening by the second. Call it a night already." A beat, because he's jabbing, back to back, with a faux courtesy; he'll bear his vulnerabilities, because Caitlin is not a match for things beyond her young mind. He imagines she is not the type to be percieved as weak. But she is mortal, with magic that'll surpass her. Then, hospitality, just so she knows what it looks like: "You're welcome to come home for dinner. I expect she'd be delighted by you; we can see if she still hangs trophies on her wall." Perhaps a language she favours, then. Ab uno disce omnes. He thinks, if they were not on their respective sides of a veil. "Audeamus."
Hand lowering, he steps back, allowing a porch step of room for her to escape her haven of safety. Caitlin Siltshore does not favour safe, or else she would have never crossed him. But neither of them admit to being fools, either.
It was not the first time someone had come calling this week. Viktoria was starting to think she had become quite the popular clan representative (or other some such ridiculousness) in her time faffing about with the snow dragging the entire city down.
Her little human bug was supposed to be here later - if travel (and her husband) permitted, of course - which meant the large home needed to be heated sufficiently. At least the rooms in which they'd frequent. The fireplaces are lit, the gas stoves are on. Central heating and air was a blessing, but she often opted for cozy and classic. And, well, it wasn't quite as reliable with the power flickering as it tended to do with the pile ups of snow drift around their home.
She opens the door with a smile. It quickly fades as shock takes over. It's not that she isn't glad to see her brother, it's that she wasn't expecting him. Or the pile of crumpled human in his arms. Her gaze dips down to the shock of brown hair, and the bleeding on her neck.
For a moment, she forgets herself and nearly goes to grab the woman - Sadie, is she okay? What did you do? - from him, but stops. Instead, her hand finds her pocket. Her fingers find her phone, and without looking, she taps a quick warning to the youngest sibling: He's home.
"Zakarias." She finally says, no breath for sighs or shock. But she does step forward and kiss his cheek in greeting. "..I was expecting - Well. Her." She looks down towards the bleeding woman.
The blackberried Merlot had whimpered for Viktoria between shallow breaths. A stuttered whine of protest that had been short-lived. She stained his tongue, and bled through the cracks in his teeth when he'd put his mouth to her throat. The stone fountain out the front of the Lomidze Manor was overgrown with ivy; it had been almost romantic to drape her over the edge and let droplets ripple the surface. Tendrils of hair dampening to the off-coloured liquid. The water cooled his fingers in the act of enjoying an appetiser dipped between him, and the marbled stone.
Zakarias wondered if there had been a connection between his little cultist and the Merlot, given his sister's name from a blueing mouth. Clawed hands had battered his arms, before weakening, and succumbing to the inevitable. He'd stopped, because his sister had more of a hold on him, than the half-alive woman cared to know.
He'd caught her eyes, between them fluttering closed and her confusion. Told her to walk with him to the doors. To listen carefully to what he says, and behave for him. She does. Because she had little choice in the matter. Fickle mind, but appealing for the delight in her blood; if Viktoria had a thrall, she has maintained reasonable taste.
By the time they had reached the door, the Merlot had been unable to stand. So she had become a new bride in his grasp. Eyes closing, and chest heaving; head hanging over an elbow. Zakar addresses his sister, as if they must remember one another, across the centuries. There is a sense of completion, in her company.
"Viktoria." A smile against her cheek as he greets her all the same. The dismissive nod comes quick after, gesturing to the woman, "A pet of yours?"
If she were important, he imagines that a sister would have come running at the whispered plead of her name. She hadn't. So, he almost drops her like a sack of bricks at his sister's feet; no longer worth the minimal efforts to determine her value.
Zakarias' thumb grazes over the hair, by the girl's ear. He wonders if she might continue to entertain, if Viktoria keeps her around. Her mind malleable enough that he imagines, under compulsion, she would dance for hours, until exhaustion. He comments, with little interest in holding the girl steady much longer, "She tastes better than your last one." a beat, "You can finish her off, if that's what you were waiting for, sister."
It's a little hard not to be aimless when you're two of everything - Blue felt like she'd been doing a decent enough job until just now. "You get used to it," she says, an overshare of her general outlook on life. Port Leiry is dead is something that's kind of been going around lately, what with the snow and the weird scents that haunt the air and the fact that the woods aren't quite The Woods anymore.
But, if this guy asked her, which he didn't and probably wouldn't, she'd say Port Leiry was kind of dead always.
Well, she'd ask who says banal first, actually - what had his question been?
"You'll have to excuse me, I am -turnt- the fuck up, my friend." She says. Her eyes do search for Paige, because frankly this guy gives Olympic Medalist levels of stranger danger and, well, she's not that kind of turnt. She slurps at the spill dripping down her hand and glass. "I mean, you're here, aren't you? Like don't that say just as much about you as me?" Banal. Psh.
A single line of a confession opens her up like a scalpel through a chest. He can see the hopelessness, and the missed occasions of importance, a small lifetime of let downs. It makes her vulnerable, and Zakar pulls at threads of weakness like he is plucking chords. Music he will dance to, until there is no notes left. He would play the puppets of the world, like they were toys for his entertainment. Most of the strings snapped too early, and the bones of the marionette's often broke easily; they were not much for longevity, mortalkind.
"I wouldn't know." He does, because he has a young sister who has carved up his heart a dozen times. Pained him, when she forces his hand, despite the belief she might grow out of the childish phase of her misdirection. He sees a similar trait, in the scattering of this girl, clumsy enough to gain his attention. If not for the theft, he may have spent more time, wondering what cocktail of science runs in her veins.
What she does not know, in her assessments of him, and inebriation; the longer he stands on the yacht, amidst the rowdy desires, the more likely he is to slice the throats of every living, and dead thing that dares to cut too close to him. A reddened ocean, suits the sinking ship. A deck of ghosts has a story that he's glad to tie his name too; a favour in making it quick for them, instead of letting it lie beneath the sea, flailing bodies, drowned.
"Not quite enough, it seems. You still know where you are." So he presumes. But he allows her in on a secret; a jest, if there ever is one. He sips the drink in his hand. "I find the less you recall, the more creative the story your mind concocts for sunrise." Who knows what she might percieve this conversation as tomorrow?
"You're observant." It's the second joke, as he moves the conversation to his priority; it's not her. But she can be his scapegoat, if there comes need for one. "Shall we find our friends?" Back to the reason he is there, at all. "Mine have the tendency to lose their heads, if left alone."
@zlomidze / if you think this song is about you, it probably is by destroy rebuild until god shows
Darkened alleys and tunnels through the city were a breeding ground for those who were hiding from the light of day, and those who had a reason to go to ground and stay hidden. Thao had envisioned a lot of scenarios since she had died, but not one of them had included laying eyes on one of Skinner's old crew. Anger flashed through her, and before she could really think things through, she was following the beast into the underbelly of Port Leiry.
Catching up to him, she attacked from behind, pinning him up against the closest wall and shoving his face into the brick.
"Be honest, did you ever mention my name?" She spat, shoving him again as though the brick would give way to the thick skull in her grip. "Do you even remember me? Are you hiding because you got sick of the shame? I remember you."
A growl left her lips, her free hand digging into his back, nails slowly breaking skin that gave way to flesh that should have been long since dead.
"You told me to stay put, reminded me why I was there. It was a chance to prove who you were, who you could be for him." Thao lurched forward as his hand broke through muscle and bone, fingers finally clamped around the heart in the other's chest as blood pooled around her wrist, dripping to the floor.
"Did you lie on your back like a whore?" The fledgling snarled mockingly, spouting his own words back to him, words he had spoken when he couldn't believe someone like Thao was at the right hand of Skinner. He was given no chance to reply, his heart ripped from his chest, his body falling to the floor with a thump once she let go.
She turned, almost unbelieving of what she'd done, as the heart rolled from her grip to join the lifeless body, eyes locking with a stranger watching her.
A passionate affair with revenge is cheap theatre when one could build a castle of intention in its stead. Impulsivity is costly, when it looks like it might spill dark into day. But there is a certain appeal to the stakes of risk, dancing on the knife's edge and hoping it will not cut. He watches the prideful assault as a heavy shadow beneath the streetlight. It appears unchorographed, a slash, and a crash; he is the soon-to-be director, watching an audition. Flesh slathered across brick, and bitter words ripped from a scorned woman's lips.
Zakar taps a cigarette out of a box and props it between his lips, eyes flicking up and down the alleyway, during the scene. The smoke stays unlit, even as the box vanishes into a coat pocket once again. He does not have the script or the blueprints to follow along with her story.
But it is no matter, when a heart sits blackened in an angry palm.
It would have always ended this way; the opening monologue had been needless. A youthful dead girl, still on the backend of a war she's refused to let go of.
"Well, which one of you laid down first?"
Deserve has no purpose here. Zakarias thinks that is an inconsequential detail. Dust does not get to have regrets, or a changed fate. Ash is ash. Did her man expect to taste brickdust, since he conceded so blindly to this woman. If that is the case, what is deserved is not an immortal existence if he squanders it with quick, lazy gratification.
There's poetry to a pile of dist between them, and it provokes Zakar to finally light the straight in his mouth. Fire is the start and end of many things; symbolic, magical, in some regions. A habit that is smoke rings, and half-smiles. In this case, it's boredom.
"And who would you belong to, that lets you roam so carelessly?" He says, around the smoke. She's making messes like she is an animal; if that s the case, she could eat and choke on the ash of her fallen, so she knows to clean up her trail of breadcrumbs. Two fingers pull the cigarette from his mouth, "Let me guess," It isn't hard. "You like to think you belong to nothing." A free agent, which means she is protected by nothing, too.
His shoulder remains pressed against the streetlamp, and his eyes train on the killer of her own kind. He's found that Port Leiry is a cesspool of ferality, and draws the shadowed belly of the underworld to whatever ley lines, and power linger beneath the soil. He knows why he has returned, but all else does not share his reasoning. He knows that, the same as he knows the stillness of his heart, and the violence of his mind.
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Like a memory, oozing from the cracks of a mind's purgatory — he can still taste the bitterness of the Georgian witch he had left behind, a month prior. If she was not already rotting bones in a library that would never be found, he could have continuously found her across any ocean of this plain. A waste, now buried beneath the desert of dust, and stone. Swallowed hole by the sands of time. He would blame a sister, for the intrigue of power outside of the blood, and he'd pursue its secrets beyond life and death, until there were none left to unearth.
"I know this earth, and I know when power is born in its soil." A beacon attracting an immoveable force; silent; unwavering; absence all life. It knows when something threatens to unravel the order. Not of magic. But there is some version of it, within his blood, for him to exist at all.
"It does not belong in the hands of—"
No. But it fit perfectly. "It has always been mine." A piece of myth; more ancient than Babylon, and written about only in languages long dead. Lines of script, destroyed and burned. Erasing its very existence from paper.
But even time eventually bends to hands that force the steel. Disturb it enough, whether mythic, or mortal and it falls out of worn grimoires, and flutters beneath floorboards, crinkles and cracks under candlelight. A Georgian witch should have known in their failure, that they would draw eyes, ruby red and black as night.
A dial; marbled and bathed in chromium, had laid in his palm like a pocket watch. An object he'd never wield in its singularity, but a catalyst forged in irony. The power to salt the soul of ever being tainted by the blessed or the cursed touch. Not the blood, where he would consequently destroy himself. But an impervious charm beyond immortality. A legend that even Zakar had doubted; belief without cause had been carved out of him, long ago. In the hazing of clerics, and the erasure of cassock-wearing fanatics. Briefly, across a great portion of the northern hemisphere. Their blood had marked the foundations of many great monuments.
Whilst he expected that in the wake of a fractured spell, that he — a creature barred from ever understanding the intricacies of that power, would be the only being drawn to the sanctum, hidden away from keen eyes. In her blast, the only thing she had destroyed, had been her wards that kept him out.
Had she never tried to equalise the order and kept the broken piece of a myth in her charge for another millennia, she may never have been found. Lomidze never would have stepped over the threshold of an unprotected hovel, to know what her life tasted like; an aged wine, ripe for him.
He hadn't been the only death-touched curioso to chase the pieces of an artefact that could swallow magic whole.
"And you are, exactly?"
Georgia, Moldova, Romania —
She's spritely, in a war across borders. Her by day, him by night. Distance that he cannot cross, without suffering the infliction of the light. Caitlin Siltshore does not have such restrictions. It is how she turns metres, into miles. Zakar has not laid chase against a youth, in quite some time. And she is unbound — in their battle, across the many months, he has not learned of one thing she cares about more than her own self-preservation, and her own lust for power.
She does not pause to reunite with loved ones, or cease to stop her attempts of ensnaring him in latin-laced hexes. Traps that he is too old to kneel, and bow into. No threads to pull on her heart, or her mind. No obvious tells of leverage he would exploit. They are a match that stretches across continents. Because he has family where she is heading, and he is not blind enough to believe that coincidence has no part in the artefact key she has siphoned away from him.
Zakarias is patient, but he is not without his impulses.
In Port Leiry, there is less places to run and hide. If this is where she must be to complete their shared spell, then he will be here too. Siltshore; he had thought the name had been a repeated carving on a gravestone of the thousands; she has a mausoleum of the same. He does not possess the power to feel energy he's always imagined as a pulsing vein, even if he knows the essence of how it works; the foundations of Lomidze architecture are rife with it. He expects it lies here, too.
Draped in funeral black; camel coat, and dress pants, with the undercut of a deep grey shirt. It feels fit for a Siltshore, who has given him more scars than most mortals have ever landed one. He wonders if hers have healed so kindly, in the overlap of their international greetings.
In the quiet stroll, there is one woman that refuses to be anything else.
“The taste of blood and that annoying sting of a bitten tongue.
Once man got the taste of blood there was no going back,
like a serpent circling itself eating its own tail.”
― Brandon Garic Notch
VIKTORIA LOMIDZE ; The Second Lomidze
“Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss?
I mean pure psychedelic inebriation.
Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you.
Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again - the first kiss of the rest of your life.
A kiss that confirms that the universe is aligned, that the world's greatest resource is love, and maybe even that God is a woman. With or without a belief in God, all kisses are metaphors decipherable by allocations of time, circumstance, and understanding”
― Saul Williams
ÇASKA LOMIDZE ; The Third Lomidze
“Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you.
Seal my ears, I'll go on hearing you.
And without feet I can make my way to you,
without a mouth I can swear your name.
Break off my arms, I'll take hold of you
with my heart as with a hand.
Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.
And if you consume my brain with fire,
I'll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.”
― Rainer Maria Rilk
While Lomidze is one of the oldest clans in the world, it is also one of the smallest, largely limited to the Lomidze family and their various allies, vassals, and charges. Though they are small in number compared to most of the other clans, they are also quite powerful owing to their cumulative age and longevity. Their origins lie in the Caucasus and Iberian Peninsula, where they set their roots in the unliving embrace of two siblings by an elder third. The Lomidze clan treats vampiric embrace as an heirloom, and Lomidze vampires are expected to seek the permission of one of the three siblings to bring another vampire into the fold, though this permission is not always sought.
The Lomidze clan fosters a natural rivalry with both Pretorius, from whom it descended, and has recently seen an end to its rivalry with Kanemaru, owing to the departure of the first Lomidze from the city and the untimely fate of the last Kanemaru clanhead.
Blue hadn't expected to be partying on some stranger's yacht in the middle of this weird fucking winter apocalypse, but you know, life leads you strange places when you hang around with vampires and witches and werewolves with more money than sense. It'd been Madison's idea - she hadn't expected to be hanging out with Madison either. It's a little awkward, given she knows Madison Paige mostly through two angles- someone who knows Remi's (because of course) and the fact 90 percent of their interaction so far has been her buying papers or the occasional brownie from the smoke shop across the street from a place she'd used to work at.
She's not super concerned - the party isn't a snoozer - better than the flatline you'd in the Port Leiry club scene with all this fucking winter bullshit. Seems like a fair few creatures are here too, which comes in handy both when you need the extra oomph to get fucked up and also in case somebody needs to hold your hair because you overdid it on the whatever.
So she coasts through the crowded boat, trying to decide if its the sway of the boat of her rapidly pickling brain that's making it a little hard to see straight as she tries to find her way back to the redhead for more of that alone together energy where she can hug the wall while Madison tries to find a neck to bite or whatever. She trips on somebody though, nearly spilling her drink before she manages to keep it classy. "Heh, sorry," she says. "Nothin' like a yacht party at the end of the world huh?"'
There's a design flaw; a poorly executed load bearing beam in the hull. A single strip that might have been laziness, or short-minded intellect of its craftsman. What could have been a long lasting pleasure project would sink the next time it meets low tide, or graze a hidden rock pool below the surface. Instead of gliding along the sharp edges and tip to avoid its wrath, it'll be gutted wide. Like a knife in the belly of a fish, left for the sharks in the water to feast on. It's the reason the vessel sways so keenly with a hundred bodies dancing beneath the moon. Docked, it is merely a symbol of status.
It would be a shame if someone's else's power painted it ruby. But the ocean will steal that right, before anyone else gets the chance to make art, he imagines.
He's not on board the yacht for personal entertainment, it's business. It often is. His family like this town — so he hears, in letters and messages, and already in the three hours he has landed, he has found it quaint, and uncivilised. A package stolen, which had meant to be delivered to a home his sisters have staked claim to.
He doesn't believe that the owner of the yacht is responsible — but a hand of theirs, trying their luck with a man on new soil. Underfed thralls were reckless, Zakar would know. It's the same reason he has a tracker on his case, that has led him to a party. He'll believe it is a mistake too, if that's the story he's told. Merciful, isn't it? He'll spare the culprit, because it is worse to know that they lived, whilst all the things around them are killed. Maybe they thought they were smart enough to win.
He helps himself to a drink, to stop idling hands from getting ideas. He’d draw them out, if he had to. Slipping between drunks, and dancers, he begins searching for the crew, or the owner of the soon-to-be-sunken yacht. Theft used to cost a hand, he remembers. Sliced clean from the wrist. He'd settle for that compromise, too.
A shoe knocks against a brogue, and he lifts a glass to avoid spilling it on himself, whilst he turns to acknowledge a girl and her clumsiness. His suit pants are safe, as is the sweater below the camel coat. She's lucky he's already occupied his mind with something else.
End of the world, she says.
Hardly. But he'll humour her, for the effort to salvage his favour. "Quite the disappointing ending to your story, is it not?" If her sarcasm is real, then he wonders why she cares to indulge the banal act of being present at all. "A yacht in the night, with strangers for company." A quirk of his mouth, hidden behind the tip of his glass. Eyes as dark as the sky, and hair slicked back in the shadows and neon. Perhaps their versions were different; most often, they were worlds apart.
And he's assuming she's alone, because of how aimless her direction had been.
Lomidze is a name immortalised in ancient stone; constructed into castles and palaces across millennia. Monuments of grandeur; beaten rock, and marble that stood through the centuries, long before blood of the architect ran cold. The eldest son of diplomacy's birth would only forge greatness from the natural elements. It is written in the stars, the same way scars are carved into flesh and bone. Before aristocracy had fineries and gilded robes, there stood a family who bled their name into history with minds that rivalled philosophers, and mathematicians.
Zakarias; an eldest son, a brother — a husband, promised to another with a mind that claimed to admire his. Children who aimed to satisfy parents, like any other. Childhood is not a luxury that stonemasons, and diplomats can afford. Status, in a town where the young die before they could walk, and foreigners pass through on horseback, taking all they want. Lomdize children were told one thing, and it was not to throw mud in the wrong faces. Two sons and a daughter only listened as far as their parents could see.
And then, mud and stone became iron and bronze.
The eldest was eventually trained for war; because the Roman Empire never gave up. Those castles he helped build, whilst his siblings ran off to chase the dust of a battlefield — a younger brother who shrunk away from responsibility; soft-minded and obviously so. Zakar watched the walls of control crumble. Like with anything beaten enough times. It cracks, and weakens. A man can only endure so much, before the taste of blood sticks like mortar between his teeth. In age, came understanding, as did the knowledge of how family expectations were so high — almost impossibly so, that they would never stand as tall as their elders. If time had been his ally, then he could have built Iberia into a new age, instead of watching it burn under new rule in the decades that came. He could have been more, if loyalty among siblings was parent deep.
Siblings that got older, and learned that brutality was not just hereditary. A brother vying to protect another from a mother who played favourites. A father aging, and applying pressures to the oldest who spent days staring at the walls of fallen palaces, imagining what it would be like to encase the Romans within it, and let them starve. He could have led the charge against the invasions, if he survived a little longer.
He had wanted time, and power; had dreamt of victories in his sleep. An impenetrable kingdom, with Lomidze on the throne; building the greatest city they had ever seen, with belief and his bare hands.
Instead, Zakar had become a corpse on the muddied floor of war, with a Roman soldier, soaked in his blood, as his final living memory. He awoke in a pile of the dead, breathless, and trembling with a hunger that drove him mad enough that he would devour what was left of the Romans, in his wake.
Lomidze would be remembered, because he would deliver the power to siblings who shared his name; he would tie their loyalties to him, so they could build a new world, with them all at the helm. Relish in freedoms that Mtskheta did not offer them; a town lost to time. Zakarias practiced first — managing the hunger terribly, first on a mother, and then a father. They did not come back to reap their vengeance, like he did. Whatever the soldier that drove him through had done to him, it was not in his power to grant so easily to another.
Shalaçaska and Viktoria would not meet that fate. So, Zakarias would find a way to immortalise them, too. And when he discovered the potency of the blood of the undying, he understood all that he had missed. Because being driven through by a sword did not end him, and the wound healed like he had never been struck. Zakar delivered his gift to the siblings that he refused to lose. A life they could start, without the hands of elders driving them.
In the change from a man to something other, a forgotten wife was bearing his child. She was begging for a man to become a father. But she did not sway his thoughts on the pursuit of new discoveries; in becoming the architect of a world that could be. Zakarias offered immortality to a wife he felt nothing for — but he did not expect her refusal, or her fears about the child she carried to suffer in the wake of what he had become. She fled, before he could become a sire.
Zakar would not risk that response with his own blood. Shalaçaska, he turned whilst he slept, and Viktoria he sold the darkness to, on blood, and power; immortality that could see Lomidze through the fracturing of their lands. He did not detail that he had learned that the shadows were all he could step into, or that he seemed unable to know the light again. He remembers when the Persian's came, and when cities fell. The rise and the fall of empires in which he'd never see, if he'd remained mortal.
There were as many disputes over land, as there were beliefs. Zakarias had not realised how single-minded mortality had been, until he began to weave himself into the courts, and architect for a kingdom that did not know he would write only his name across their walls. He would paint the bricks with their blood, when he was done with it.
By the 10th Century, his homeland is the Kingdom of Georgia. But he had long left for other exploits in Eastern Europe. A sister that had taken interest in cultists, and rituals. He would gift her grimoires, and books to sate her fantasy of mythics and magics. He would give attentions to a younger sibling, who filled time with wastrel things, like love and commitment. All his efforts to show them a world, beneath their thumb fell short. Zakarias remembered the first time Shalaçaska shared the blood for a companion, and he had never known a rage, or a betrayal like it. Sacred. He'd said, for Lomidze, and no other. A bloodline untainted by unworthy outsiders.
He did not think himself cruel. But they survived on discretion, and hunted in the dark. Losing them to powers that they could not trust, would be the end of them. Zakar would not allow that to tear down the kingdom he had built for them. In wealth, and in the manors he had constructed, in wagon trades, and in the centuries, it became business; a life beyond death that offered them freedom across lifetimes. Zakarias' kindness is punishing; a fractured little brother, who he had boxed away as a lesson, once, twice as a reminder that the world they have is not the worst of agonies. Zakar had imagined Romans caged, much like the Greeks, and those who would oppose him; an architect of imprisonment, as much as he crafted homes, and palaces of beauty. Things that would outlast Lomidze, or exist just as long.
With centuries, and then millennia as company. Sibling's commit atrocities, and sometimes, they are upon one another. Zakarias had only grown more determined in his powerful circle; agreeing to share Lomidze blood, for the right cause. And he will be the executioner for the wrong kind.
In the new century, he is an architect, specialising in renewing ancient structures, as if they were still in the civilisation they once belonged to. Time, however, does not spare him the same resources. But, he is formidable for their design, and meticulous execution; he spares no expense, or shortcuts. A businessman, with skeletons in every closet; a weakness in his siblings, that he would sooner remove himself, than let anyone else derive the pleasure of doing so.
Zakarias would convince even the greatest minds that he played a considerable part in the construction of some of the great wonders of the world; he would never tell which. But he'd say he has a style, that only ancient materials could ever match.
Whether he's used his real name, Lomidze is attached to plenty of skyscrapers, and hidden mansions across the globe, where Zakar has been paid fortunes to design and construct. He'd (humble) brag that he had worked for Kings, and Sultans, in the past.
Zakar is a traditionalist, with some modernist views. He would prefer to always make the first move, in any capacity. Touch, before being touched. Bite, before being bit. A gentleman who would open a door, just to see an enemy's back. He leads from the front, but knows when to direct from the wings. Calculated, when allowed. Impulsive, when his hand is forced.
His sisters are a constant point of contention. A thorn in his side, as a weakness that never heals. But a power in numbers, where Lomidze is selective as a clan.
Zakarias does not know it, or acknowledge it — because he'd claim to fear nothing, but he is afraid to walk the world without his family. That they would do something to drive him to end them, for certain. The name scratched out, to only him and his would be a tragic affair. Loneliness is easily filled, but blood is not replaced. No one else knows Lomidze as thoroughly as they do.
Zakar has holdings in all his architectural projects, and often self-manages his workload which eats up his time for long periods. Time, however, is not something he is short of, and sleep is not a burden. His company has changed names on paper, a thousand times, adjusting for the modern world. Currently, all building projects, and private masonry proposals are stamped under: LOMIDZE ARKITEK.
WANTED CONNECTIONS
THE ROMAN SIRE; the soldier in the second century, fighting on the other side in Iberia. They would have turned Zakarias, whether by accident, or on purpose. That's up to the player. They would be ancient and older than the Lomidze's, and would likely need to be discussed with admin approval, also. [ *plotting needed ]
THE FORGOTTEN LOMIDZE; safely assuming that Zakarias' first wife is long dead, the story of what happened to her child (and Zakar's) is open; he could have descendants that he does not know about spanning over two thousand years, or something could have happened to the child, and they could be some version of immortal, and looking for Zakarias through the ages. Maybe they've bided their time, and desire revenge for abandonment. Open for discussion.
A REASON TO CHANGE; King of detachment, he prioritises his desire for his family, and his ambitions to enjoy life's privileges. He is unlike his youngest sister, who craves love, and he is not so caught up in pursuits of mythics like his other sister. He is steadfast in his reason, and his logic. He engineers and builds towers of stone, and has always been the architect of the future. Someone who challenges that, or wedges themselves in his world, and gives him a reason to care about something other, would be impressive.
THROWN ASIDES; exactly what it says on the tin; those he has used and abused throughout the ages, or more recently. Whether for pleasure, or to gain favour in the political, or diplomatic world. Zakarias is no stranger to abuse of power, or arrogance in careful design.
A DENIED FAVOURITE; a vassal that Zakar likes to drink from, he keeps them around or tolerates them for reasons unknown. Open for disussion, maybe there's chemistry, or maybe they're just annoyingly willing (or pretends to be) to gain his favour.
POLITICAL PURSUITS; connections that aid him in the long game of chess he has always played. He enjoys the status that Lomidze brings, as a name, and as a clan. And he is forever looking to greater the name, and strengthen the connection between his namesake. Those with project proposals, or renovations on old architecture that would gain his interest; those who could qualify as an acquaintance, or dare he consider a friend, holding good standing with him, is a bonus.
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