Meredith had always known about magic. Her family was magic, one of the most powerful mage lines out there. Having lost her parents to all the fighting though, she stayed far away from it, focusing on school and lading a primarily normal life.
Unti...
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Slipping through the concealment spell around Paul's apartment took little work as the entire thing was from a totem of Damien's own making. When the man had moved away from living with him, Damien had given it to him as a means to hide himself. It was a small ebony elephant standing on two legs and flaunting its trunk, but inside of it, there was an infused spell.
It took extremely high skilled mages to make talismans and other solid totems that could be used even without the mage who made them present. It had never been Damien's own personal calling, but he'd learned the ways of making items anyway. It had been one of the many skills that he'd mastered in his time on the battlefield.
Arriving at the complex Paul lived in, he ascended in the elevator. It was strange, but Damien could feel the man's existence, always. When he had first encountered him in that alleyway all those years ago in the rain, it had been from an energy pulling him onward, right to Paul's feet. It was an interesting feeling, as if the man's presence was an absence of essence, sucking in the energy around him like a vacuum.
It had been several days since that disgusting vampire had reclaimed his daughter, and he had something to do now. It was something only Paul could do for him, so he had to rely on his friend. For the first time in his life, Damien had to ask the Nothing who he'd sheltered from the mages to do something, something only one of his kind could do.
In a way, it felt like a betrayal. All this time, he'd kept Paul at his side, never wanting to have to subject him to the cruel way mages used Nothings, and yet now, wasn't that what he was doing? Using him for his powers, even though he hadn't told him in the last two decades that he was still alive.
It had been painful, asking Paul to leave him and escape from the descending vampires. The man would have died along with him had Damien only begged for it, but he'd cared for Paul too much. So the man had left him, bleeding out onto the forest floor, to escape to safety, and then Vincent Arc had found him, only moments after he'd finished using what was left of his energy to cast the Haze Spell. Vincent Arc would have recognized Darc Aurion, so he'd had to conceal his true identity in order to survive.
How he'd survived though, he'd worried for years that his daughter would end up loathing him, hating him for switching sides. That surely would have happened, if she'd been incorporated into the mages organization, but she'd hidden herself from it. That made him happy, the fact that she was not so biased against what he'd become, but also terrified that she did not have the correct fear of the man who was holding her.
What would Paul say? Would he be disgusted that his closest comrade had accepted the darkness to stabilize his insanity? After all, he'd become the thing he'd hunted, lived side by side with Vincent Arc, and now he was painfully attached to Neil in a way he didn't think he had the heart to separate himself from. The boy needed someone right now, lost without his father, raised to be vicious and unkind. Without him, Neil would become his father, fall into the habits of power and control, and then Damien would have to kill him.
