At this point, Krahe had completely surpassed any form of surprise or disbelief, finding it both easiest and safest to simply move with the flow of events unless something unprecedented or obviously dangerous presented itself. So, she simply nodded in agreement.

  “Now, then,” the Queen said, trailing off. Then came the barest crack, the subtlest parting of her lips, for she had spoken until this point without even having distinguishable lips, and from her mouth issued the name of F———A. No sound nor booming voice, only the Name.

  With the Queen’s soundless invocation of that name, Krahe felt her thoughts cast towards one of the sigil-moons wheeling above Zor’Aguhastra, towards them and past them, to a comet-like body orbiting the vast city faster than mortal sight, a half-molten boulder of burning-blue glass. Upon it, at its rear, the origin of its immense thrust, there was a dark crater, and within that crater, in the storm-eye of its thrust plume, there was a building the size of a city, a temple of fantastic architecture, dream-like, unreal, with curved angles and alien geometry of sinister beauty.

  In that temple, there dwelt F———a, King Regent of the Fire Vampires; a living conflagration, a maelstrom of pale-blue fire, centered around the sole distinguishing feature of a vampire-fanged mouth.

  There was no doubt. This was Fthaggua.

  About her swarmed the Fire Vampires, and they, too, were just as featureless, having only large mouths and elongated bodies of flame, flame that blazed with preternatural heat in a manner unlike their King Regent. They were Lesser Eidolons equal to Krahe’s own eels in their status as the pinnacle of the smallest mountain, the greatest of the small, the strongest of the weak; that is to say, the apex point of what a Lesser Eidolon could become without surpassing the boundary of evolution or making the yet greater leap of transcendence to Greater Eidolon. Were she not already accustomed to the Chthonian Eels, she would have strongly considered divesting herself of them in favour of these Fire Vampires; in the future, she would certainly seek to obtain at least a handful. There was no doubt in her mind that having a contract with F———a would render them a better choice than most other Lesser Eidolons.

  The royals had made clear that Fthaggua qualified as a Greater Eidolon by a small margin, and certainly, the magnitude of its being was indeed far lesser than that of Y——kh; where Barzai felt nearly perfectly real and Y——kh was approaching that point, F———a felt noticeably ethereal, as if she was “stretched thin.” Even so, F———a was to the Fire Vampires as the sun was to a candle. The leap of eidolon classifications was just as much of a qualitative transformation as the difference between unrefined thauma and Six Maxims Thauma.

  Krahe willed herself back to the throne chamber as the King of Many Colours began speaking once more. In the middle of the chamber there now hung a projection of the scene she had just witnessed, F———a burning upon its altar as countless Fire Vampires swarmed around it.

  “F———a is weak, for she is young. Therefore, her power is formless and readily fills any vessel, as you have observed with Ktynga, the comet that is her current home; she shall confer the characteristics of “Palefire” and “Pyrovampirism” to any vessel into which her power is poured. Theurgies cast through her strength may erode the strength of others to replenish your own, or to sustain themselves for longer than they otherwise could. Should you wish it, she will devour the astral bodies of others to replenish herself and to grow. The King Regent of Fire Vampires; a pale, undying flame that devours life and grows in perpetuity, yet which never rages out of control; that is F———a.”

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  There was an undeniable sense of pride in the King’s words, entirely unlike his tone when speaking of Y——kh.

  “I have witnessed the inhabitants of Zor’Aguhastra summoned by a witch and bid to devour the astral bodies of condemned prisoners. How does this “Pyrovampirism” differ from that devouring?” she asked.

  The King thought for several seconds before he replied.

  “One is brute force, a method which scatters much of that which is devoured in the process of digestion, breaking down the devoured and using the lowest-order energies for the devourer’s benefit. It is a capability inherent to us all just as eating is to you. Those whom you have witnessed are merely those of us who have developed their inherent ability to “devour” to an exceptional degree. Y——kh’s devouring, while more refined than most, is also of this type. F———a has developed an altogether different method.”

  The Queen spoke up to fill in for her husband.

  “Pyrovampirism, the means of digestion through combustion, smelts-subjugates-transmutes what is devoured into a form best suited to the devourer, discarding a far smaller proportion. Palefire, furthers its efficiency, for it is uniquely suited to "digestion by fire," breaking down that which it burns without destroying it; it could be said it cooks in place of burning, or that it pre-digests the victim as a spider would. We have judged this to be the ideal pillar to support the Lesser Heterodox Cycle and to ensure that you, the contractor, do not meet an untimely end.”

  “Y——kh to cripple them, F———a to drink their blood, the cursed raven to consume their corpse,” the King chimed in, audibly suppressing disgust as he mentioned Barzai.

  “It ought to be comparatively simple to determine a suitable contract name for F———a,” the Queen said. Krahe wasn’t sure whether there was a veiled request within that statement, but it didn’t matter either way; she didn’t see any reason to reframe or reinterpret F———a’s vessel as she had done with Y——kh’s vessel.

  As she had done before, Krahe cast her mind back into the mythology of her own world, to the Old Ones and Outer Gods that, to her, had been mere fiction. She considered if perhaps their existence in her world’s fiction was some ephemeral consequence of its cosmological proximity to Zastreon’s reality within the sea of Kenoma, but that was not the matter at hand at this moment.

  F———a, as an eidolon, was one suitable for theurgy in the sense of lesser eidolons, of scrolls and talismen, of direct instructions and vessels that gave instruction to the eidolon’s power, allowing it to influence the outcome, but not to steer it entirely. In short, while Y——kh would do best if she summoned his strength directly, F———a was fluid and best used to empower other things. This line of thought led her to the idea of divine invocation in the esoteric sense, of a remote force descending its power unto others, perhaps even of an official invoking the power of the emperor through the imperial seal. The mental image of a solar eclipse stuck out in her head, of the manner in which Aztec astrologer-priests had callously invoked its occurrence as proof of their and their liege’s authority. An eclipse was indeed a potent omen, one with real weight in this world, and so Krahe allowed that image to influence the vessel that she formed for F———a.

  In fact, to say she formed the vessel was somewhat inaccurate; there was no iterative process, as with Y’Alha’Zor. The mental image snapped into place, and well before the throne chamber could respond to her thoughts, she already had the name on her tongue.

  “The contract name is Zhah-Rhan-Thule,” she said. Despite its compound nature, Krahe found it remarkably easy to pronounce.

  A crystalline sphere of iridescent-black, shrouded by blue flame that formed the shape of a vampiric mouth. The alchemical sigil of Phlogiston was inscribed upon the sphere’s surface; three circles joined by lines into an upright triangle, with a plus-sign extending from the triangle’s bottom face.

  The sphere in its totality was half a meter across.

  It formed from nothing at Krahe’s intonation of its name, crumbling in reverse into existence behind her head, the unnatural darkness of its surface giving it the appearance of a pale halo formed by the eclipse of a blue star; in other words, a black sun, and Krahe was its high priest.

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