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The thing on the walls spoke with a thousand mouths, all at once. It was a cacophony - vocal cords of animals led to human lips, tongues struggled with forming the sounds of long dead languages and dialects and underneath it all ran the low keening of the things that weren’t quite mouths yet.
The flesh-covered walls shuddered as the terrible chorus fell quiet again. On the far side of the cavernous hall, a single eye blinked open. Its pupil was slitted horizontally, like the eye of a goat - no white was visible at all, the whole eye filled with a pale, sickly, but oddly luminous, yellow. Its gaze darted around, seemingly unseeing.
Then, with a grating groan of pain and distress, the eye rolled back and a single, enormous mouth formed underneath it, baring too many teeth.
In the fraction of a second the eye zeroed in on him. With its attention came the crushing weight of an enormous presence pressing in on his mind.
The pupil widened, and the mouth opened to speak.
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Isaac woke with a start, scrambling out of his bed, the beast in his head in a nearly blind panic howling to get away, away, away.
He was nearly halfway across his room before he caught himself and managed to stop his mad dash to get… away?
“Away from what?” he asked the empty room.
Unhelpfully, his beast had fallen quiet again - he had fed only the night before, so its silence was frustrating, but not surprising.
“Huh.” Isaac straightened out from his crouch on the floor. What an unpleasant way to start his night. He wasn’t proud enough to deny how much his… dream had unsettled him.
Although he was no stranger to insomnia and nightmares in his mortal life, the brief years of his unlife had been blissfully void of any trouble sleeping or falling asleep - the daysleep was, to his knowledge, always supposed to be deep and dreamless.
Maybe the malkavians had dreams and visions while in stasis, but he hadn’t talked to one long enough to question them about their bedtime habits.
Mentally, he added it to the lists of things he needed to bring up the next time he visited Vaclav. The unsettling contents of his strange dream and a general sense of unease followed him the entire time he dressed and on his way down the stairs.
He was so wrapped up in thoughts that he nearly missed Serif, who leaned out of the room he had given to her.
“Hey, uh, Isaac?” she was suspiciously chipper and put together for how early it was in the night - maybe she had slept over at the house of one of her friends, surely close-by (to already be here), and probably not in a sewer (or at least an exceptionally clean one). Observing and cataloging the behaviors of people normally came as natural to him as breathing once did, but he was too distracted to really care where Serif had spent her night.
“Yeah, so I was thinking about puttin’ up some more of the art you have lying around, is that like, uh, cool with you?” she rocked back on her heels and grinned up at him.
He stared at her for a couple of seconds. Her grin became a bit more forced and she started fidgeting with her hands.
Odd, Isaac thought, she normally wasn’t this nervous to ask things of him.
“Ah. Yes, as I said when I showed you around, you pretty much have the run of the first two floors, except the rooms of Angela and Michael. And… do be careful while handling the art pieces - some of them are the property of my sire and as you know we are…” Isaac smiled. “...rather possessive of our things. But - I do appreciate the effort you put into, ah… livening up the place.”
She kept looking at him, her smile now completely frozen.
“Is everything alright?” he asked, still smiling down at her.
“So, I…I dunno how to say this but is that” she gestured vaguely up to her face “like… on purpose? Looks great! But its a bit… eyecatching.” She winced.
He kept smiling, but furrowed his brows. “Is what on purpose?”
“Oh. Oh! Ok, so I’m gonna guess its not then? Maybe you should uh… take a look in a mirror real quick?”
He tilted his head, looked at Serif for a moment longer - obviously confused and apprehensive - and then turned and walked to the bathroom down the hall. He knocked, conscious of the fact that Angela and Mchael normally didn’t expect him or his coterie entering the bathrooms, and entered only when no reply came.
Looking in the mirror, it took him a moment to notice the change. His face was almost the same, including the subtle changes he had made only a couple of nights ago, but his eyes…
They were noticeably bigger and stood further forward than before. But the most striking thing was their color - yellow, almost glowing, the pupils a a black horizontal bar. They were ttwo almost perfect replicas of the eye that had pinned him down in his dream.
“Oh.” His mouth fell open in surprise, revealing significantly more teeth than he went to bed with in the morning. Oh no.
Almost instinctively he called upon the vitae in his system and directed its power to his face, starting to carefully revert the changes he had, apparently, unconsciously made during the day. He could feel the all-familiar hunger stir in him again. His beast also made itself known for the second time that night.
Ah, my darling boy… What have you gotten yourself into now? Unfortunate that young Serif has seen proof of your weakness… You know what you have to do, to once again be STRONG. Drink from her… Drain her!
Isaac didn’t grace the beast with a reply, to focused on the delicate work that was pulling back and dissolving his new and unwanted teeth.
He only came back to himself fully maybe ten minutes later, after he had made the last minor adjustment to the shape and slant of his eyes.
The face looking back at him from the mirror was once again familiar, and no longer a haunting reminder of a dark hall of flesh and bone.
Isaac caught Serif lingering behind him, still in the hallway. Her expression was inscrutable, but definitely not upset. It was more of a cross between intrigue and contemplation. Only when she noticed him looking at her did her face return to a passable impression of mild horror and concern.
Fascinating - he would need to keep a closer eye on her in the future. Her outward facade of naivete covered a cunning he couldn’t fully trust.
“Wow! That was… so cool! Gross. But cool! So yeah, I’m gonna head… and… yeah!” she gestured behind her and hurried out of his sight, presumably to her room.
Isaac sighed. He straightened up and threw a last glance in the mirror. The list of things he needed to take care of seemed to grow longer and longer each night.
It looked like he would have to pay his sire a visit again, sooner rather than later.