This was the original breach: the Mouth Below. Where the Hollow Eye once wept prophecy into the sea. Where hags had bled futures into bowls of saltwater and called it mercy. Where names were stripped away and replaced with use.

Aamon Athanatos, one of the younger, most certainly one of the dumber Athanatos men, had washed ashore on the slick black stone, coughing seawater and bleeding into the water. Eventually Aamon would call or cry out and when he did something would hear him: Victor Moore.

Victor Moore had died many times. The first time was clean: a curse, black blood, betrayal, and fear. He was only 11 and he was a bully, picking on someone who did not know how to fight back but more than deserved it. He, Vladimir, was an Athanatos after all. Victor had no way of knowing that Vladimir would resort to a deal with a hag to punish both him and Marion. Yes, it was not revenge, it was punishment, an Athanatos specialty it would seem. Victor suffered a terrible end but it was the kind of death that should have ended things. The kind that leaves a ghost, if anything at all.

But death was not the end for Victor Moore. Vladimir, the meddler made another deal believing that the 11 year old could out-maneuver century-old hags. He couldn't. He didn't. But the hags brought Victor back as requested, more a cruelty than a kindness. He would meet death time and time again. At the hand of those that did not trust him because of Vladimir. At the hand of whatever Vladimir had agitated. By means of that same black curse once again. These were not deaths, they were interruptions.

Yet the hags had dragged him back wrong again and again: stitched, sometimes full of crawling insects, sometimes not at all. The resentment festered as the cycle went on until even Vladimir Athanatos could no longer pretend it was salvation. Each time Victor was destroyed, something of him was stripped away, pared down, sharpened. What remained now was not a boy - it was a wound that remembered names.

The hags learned something in those repetitions: that Victor's hatred was durable. That it endured even mutilation, even erasure. And so, when the redundancy bored them, they changed their method. They did not resurrect him again. They seeded him. Aamon’s blood reached the stone altar first.

Victor reached him second.

The possession was not immediate. That was how possessions worked in the movies, in books, in fictional accounts meant to entertain or educate. The act of possession was more like a creeping illness.

Victor slipped into Aamon the way dampness creeps into the walls: a slow, invasive process that goes unnoticed until the rot finally shows and the wood crumbles in ones hand. Aamon was unconscious for most of it, fevered and broken on the floor of the cavern. He would not even be missed until two days after the wedding when the remaining staff noticed that the boy had not taken any meals. In fact, he was not even in the same country. They would find him via scrying, in the cavern a generation had forgotten. His father, of course furious but there was no wrath to be spent on the comatose youth. Aamon's body was dragged from the cave by house elves sworn to secrecy and silence. They returned Aamon to the Cloister and eventually his home pale, breathing, alive.

Everyone thought it was a miracle. Everyone less Thaddeus Athanatos who knew the secrets of the Mouth Below and of the lands he had taken as his own. Of the blood pact each generation paid for immortality and of his own simmering paranoia. It was Thaddeus who incited the hags those years ago. He had in fact outwitted the crones many decades ago, but these fiends were hardly idle creatures willing to accept loss. Women were no longer welcome in the main line, too easy to corrupt, too weak, too... malleable to the very sin they were wrought of.

The charms that had sealed the Augury must have faded, lapsed. But when? For how long? Questions Thaddeus and his men would find answers to in time, the ritual site too powerful to destroy and too dangerous to ignore.

In the days that followed, Aamon dreamed of drowning without water. Of hands inside his chest. Of laughter echoing where his thoughts should have been. He woke speaking words he did not remember learning. He stopped crying when he should have. He stopped flinching when he should have been afraid.

Initially Victor did not erase Aamon, he sat behind him. Watched. Learned. Savored and became. but control would slowly slip as summer faded and fall approached. Aamon became the observer and then even his ability to watch became garbled, muffled, dark. On that day the hags had achieved something exquisite: a soft boy wrapped in a legacy of iron carried a revenant shaped by vengeance. What Aamon did not realize was that the opening creatures such as these require is sin. That he was no longer that 'good child' that could be made only to bleed. Love, if one could call it that because it was not, had twisted into fixation and possession. Kindness had corroded into entitlement. Now, with his innocence hollowed just enough, it was time to let something else steer.

This was better than simple possession: this was moral rot.