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Vere liked nice things. It was a consequence of having lived so long and seen so much. Even that wretched doctor would agree, he suspected. No matter how much simpering, sickeningly guilt-driven goodwill he tried to hide under, his clear taste for the purest of golds, the softest of linens, and the finest of oils combed through his hair — one of the few things Vere actually appreciated about him. He found it to be unique to those who have lived a terribly long time; upwards of, say, ten human lifetimes? He found that with great age came a peculiar kind of longing. Mortal philosophers and academics, drivelling and farcical as they were, often attributed the base and carnal sensory desires of thrill and pleasure seeking to some peculiar human notion around their fleeting little lives. The theory, then, was that as one aged, they detached themself from petty inclination and debauchery alike. True for humans, perhaps, but only in the sense that they forced it, needlessly, upon themselves. Pushing down any and all yearning under the weight of creaking bones and pockmarked skin. Vere had never found himself in such a state of mind, or such an utterly humiliating state of body, for that matter. Conversely, as the ages of his life had built, he had found that longing shaped, honed, strengthened.
Vere fancied that, had he been born some dreary, dull-eyed mortal, he might have been an aristocrat. Not some tittering Senobium quack, but instead some droll, painfully idle heir. He wondered if the same craving for flesh, at once violent and sensual and downright hungry, would have taken him. If his mind were so weak, would he have surrendered to orgiastic melancholy, and wiled away his short years in a cloud of pungent turpentine, sweet roses, and the musk of hot bodies? Would he have possessed the same wit, the same love to play and twist and meddle, or would all intellectuality give way to the allure of the senses? Would he be so short-tempered? Shorter, he thought. Indeed, he found himself to be quite lenient, as much as anyone else would digress. Whomever he might have been, Vere suspected his fantastical human self would have a taste for the finer things. But that would be mere prepossession.
Even in such universally appealing pursuits, the youthful palette was far less discerning. The finest vineyard meant nothing if the wine was not aged and curated just so. Any fool could swirl their glass and wax poetic about the flavour, but only a sommelier could truly discern its notes. And a sommelier, Vere was. To the unrefined, mortal mind, his tastes might seem the antithesis of ‘nice’. But when one had lived for so long, so far removed from the utterly human notion of morality, the succour of warm blood and the glory of viscera painted upon smooth cobbles was just as ambrosian and divine as the finest of delicacies Eridia had once offered at its zenith. The last shiver of breath as life slips away from a pitiful excuse of a carcass was just as sumptuous as the glide of the most lustrous silk. He would concede that with age, his mind had perhaps become somewhat addled. To no degree of incapacity, but simply a malcontented boredom. But perhaps it wasn’t the dreary slug of time, but rather the pitiful consequence of being collared. Enslaved. It had only begun since, after all. The mundane and routine mottled and blurred together so that at times, all but the most exquisite ecstasies were an afterthought to the revels and rages of his mind. The pleasure and pain of death, little and large alike, moulded together into the shape of a figure, a coalescence of shadows not quite material enough. Not quite visceral enough, for his tastes. Nothing was, now. The raw vigour of life was dulled under a cage, no matter how immaculately carved.
He had felt more alive in recent years. He had more cause to pull against his leash, rear his head and slaver for flesh, blood, bone, pleasure, pain, devotion, freedom. The newcomers, probably. One decidedly appealing, one decidedly not, and one he hadn’t quite made up his mind about yet.
The Senobium, in all its countless failings, afforded him some little pleasures, a pittance of sorts. Devoted as they were to paltry desire that they disguised as reverence and mysticism, each of the many handlers (Vere could never quite stop his lips from curling in distaste at the word) had possessed no shortage of social contraband and favours from others of their woefully excessive ilk. They wielded him as a weapon, yet fell victim to the siren’s call of his charm all the same. With each coy wink and curved smile, he demanded, silently or in sultry whispers, more and more from them. It took little more than the mere suggestion of his hands on them, however violently he might imply it, and he would have all the luxuries hightown could offer. The Senobium was a product of uniquely human greed, and scrabble as they might for tears of knowledge from their mighty past, few possessed any idea of what Vere was truly capable of. Fewer cared, preferring to turn the other cheek with their noses in the air while Vere did their dirty work. His decadent suite had been obtained early on in his enslavement. His wrath had simmered down fairly fast into seething contempt, and it was not difficult to disguise that under an alluring veil to get what he wanted. It had been his second or third real attendant (he’d killed the first five so fast that it wouldn’t really be fair to count them), and she had been of a fickle, trite disposition, given easily to temptation, and even easier to suggestion. It had taken little more than a claw trailing over her cheek, just soft enough that a bead of sweet blood had trickled down the quivering skin, and a honeyed murmur into her ear, and his cell was left far behind him. But as easy as his handlers were to toy with, no amount of baubles truly elevated his position. He lay on a chaise lounge of embroidery so fine its like had not been seen in a hundred years, gorged himself on vintages from so early in his imprisonment that their gilt labels could hardly be read, but he remained a slave. A falcon in an ivory cage, let out of his blinders long enough just to kill, never to truly hunt.
While there was an overlap in their appreciation of the more classically sublime, and at times even in some shallow portion of the grotesque and cruel, the spectrum of his persuasions seemed dichotomous to most. Most being humans, of course. They rarely sought to understand the intricacies of monsters, as they so liked to call them, as though nothing beyond mortality could ever have existed before the Fogfall, as if that twisted madness had not festered in the heart of the earth itself, as if he was nought but a mindless beast, driven by bloodlust alone. For most, those assumptions would not be far from the truth, but Vere was not most.
Neither was the newest object of his so greatly desired attention. Nor were any of the newcomers, really. Ais certainly wasn’t, he was multitudes and paradoxes of the most exquisite sort, the depths of which even Vere was not yet privy to. All wrapped up in cigarette smoke and a gravelly drawl. Mhin, although far less pleasant company, was a rather interesting specimen, even when one had to skirt precariously around sharp knives and ruffled feathers. But that bandaged fool was something altogether different, and a veritable treat for the senses. Nearly cadaverous in both appearance and demeanour, with a burning roiling madness simmering not only beneath the skin of their palms, but pressing against the forefront of their mind. A dulled, incanting voice, the edge of which seemed just slightly to expect the listener to kowtow before them. Throughout it all, the balm of sheer anguish, sorrow, loss, suffering was rapturous on his tongue.
Cornered in a wide open thoroughfare, or crowded against a dank alley wall, he supposed they were pleasing in the conventional sense. Underneath the lack of sleep and travel-worn exhaustion — and those hideous clothes that just stunk of the doctor — he could imagine committing their features to paper. Had their life been one of facileness, their beauty would have been of some note, but it was that sharp undercurrent of misery, the tantric glaze of their eyes closing over woeful depths that made them truly tantalising. They were wary of him, only an idiot wouldn’t be, but they were shockingly quick to trust him. Disgustingly, they held some foul notion of pity for him. Even as he held their bandaged wrists in a grip so tight their bones creaked, they gazed at his collar with a doleful look of sympathy, nearly of empathy. For a brief moment, he almost imagined that they could understand his shackles, his servitudes. Their pain was clear enough, expansive enough, but no, they were a slave now only to their curse, as they chose to call it, no matter what pitiful, humane front they chose to display, they didn’t understand him. They certainly might believe so, wrapped up as they were in sickening moral convictions. It created a rather amusing contradiction; their words were oh-so righteous, but that flicker of insanity wanted sweet, bloody revenge.
They desired him. That much was clear, expected, even. Their shockingly unabashed, bumpkin-like curiosity was even more palpable. As their fear of his shadow dissipated at their first meeting, their eyes were like dinner plates, roving over him, at once ashamedly salacious and openly agog. Even as they batted his goading back at him, with their slow, mellifluous voice, they seemed even more entranced with his ears and tail than most. When his attendant for the day had arrived, they had spent almost as much time gazing keenly at the cleric’s neatly pressed robes as they had at his lazily stretching form. Such wide-eyed wonder was curious indeed in a soul so wretched, so appetising.
With all good meals, one had to savour them to the fullest. Vere was still debating when would be best to devour this one. He almost had, when they had fallen silent and shaking beneath him, neck bared and lips parted, but at the last second they had reminded him frantically, breathlessly, of that damned lutist. As irked as he had been at the time, he was rather grateful now. He quite wished to unravel their secrets in full, to understand every last drop of torment in their soul, before swallowing it all. He imagined it would be quite pleasant, earning the trust, perhaps even the feeble heart, of that paradoxical, pitiful, bandaged little martyr. Almost as pleasant as the end would be. And, oh, Vere did like nice things.