(Continued from Oriel) Staring up at the ceiling of her bedroom, Rae feels no small amount of anxiety as she lays impatiently waiting to receive a text from Aubrey. Thoughts of Aubrey discarding her, of losing her new dear friend, swirl in her mind and make relaxation a near impossibility. She decides to go for a late night jog to help distract her when she feels a sudden chill. Sitting up from her bed, Rae moves to stand when she feels the sensation of being pulled from the center of her sternum. It reverberates through each layer of flesh and bone, an unequivocal invocation of some deeper essence of her being. Reaching down, she feels the point of origin to find that it is deathly cold, even by Kindred standards. The tension of the pull is not in a straight line, and as she follows it with her eyes, it terminates in one of the dark corners of her bedroom. Ever mistrusting, she quickly moves to exit the room but the pull only grows in intensity, budding into a sharp pain that stabs through the muscle of her abdomen. Hesitating, she turns back to the corner, and feels her Beast react in a puzzling manner. The Beast had never had any kind of visual representation in her mind’s eye, it was merely an awareness. Like a lumbering carnivore that stalks just out of sight, its influence is an indisputable projection of intent. Her Disciplines were the employment of that intent in line with her own will, while hunger and Wassail were assertions of the will of the predator. But now the Beast felt as though it had been seized, arrested in its tracks. It was all so strange, unlike anything she’d experienced, and the Mekhet need to comprehend overtakes her paranoia. Stepping closer to the shadow, the pain dulls, but the cold becomes outright frigid. Reaching out, the shadows reach out for her in return, and she is aggressively pulled into them. There is no sight in the beginning. Rae only feels the gelid shadows moving across her body, working their way through her clothing and into her pores to saturate her very soul. Simultaneously, she is aware of a similar maltha overcoming her Beast, enveloping tooth and claw and primordial need in a living dark. The Beast struggles against this to retain its original nature, and it reaches out for Rae to aid it. She watches it struggle, distantly considering helping it, when the transfiguration reaches a jolting end. The invasion of her cells and soul complete, she is newly concordant with something so ancient and inscrutable that all she is able to do is marvel at it as it takes its first breath within her frame. She feels for the thrashing of the Beast, and pulls the shadows in all around it to drown it in the gunge that clung to it. Seconds later, the darkness recedes, and the Beast has been made anew. Still powerful beyond knowing, it shares her new nature, as Rae and the shadows of the world are now honorably coterminous. Her vision returns to her, and she surveys the room that had disappeared around her only moments ago. Stepping forward, her body congeals from pure darkness back into her original form. Standing steady, she takes a deep breath. Where the fuck did that come from. Walking over to her many stacks of books, Rae begins to look for some manner of explanation to what she just experienced.