( This isn't Peter's memory.

He knows that as soon as he opens his eyes and you open yours beside him, both of you taking in your surroundings. You're in the room of a home: big and old and faded. The sunlight filtered through the curtains reveals dust collected at the corners where wall meets floor, and an odd heavy stillness hangs over — as though no one's been living in this house for quite some time, even though an entire family has been. The floors of this room, like the rest of the house, are wooden and scuffed and cold beneath your feet.

The room is very empty. Its walls are blank, save for a mirror hanging up. There are a few pieces of dated furniture, and a photo or two.

On the surface, the room may seem innocuous, but perhaps you immediately see what's strange about it, what suggests a connection to something dark and dangerous and ancient. The triangle etched into the floorboards. The chair that faces the corner of the room, looking towards where one of the points of the triangle gestures to. Someone must have sat here, staring in that direction.

Perhaps, if you are inclined to such things — sensitive to them — you can feel that something lingers.

The young man beside you (tall, thin, hair a mess of wild curls and tired eyes circled in dark) certainly seems affected. He's just staring, gaze wide and nostrils flaring slightly, breathing in and out through them like an animal, tense and strange and looking around. Is it that he recognises this room, or is it that he's a stranger to it? It's hard to tell by looking at him, but he's clearly disturbed. )

This can't be right. ( He says, quietly. After a moment, he repeats those words again. Clearly, he doesn't seem to think he should be here. But inside of him, someone else flickers gently like a humming lightbulb within Peter, watching, sensing. Someone who knows this room very well.

Beside you, the person this memory is connected to (he, she, they) makes a sudden strange sound. A very soft click of the tongue. )

( It's been building over time. At first, impossible to detect — the symptoms of it are so like Peter's usual existence now, after all. A perpetual illness, a consistent exhaustion. Lapses in time and memory and self. For so long now, there have been days he's woken and had to work to remember his own name. To try to separate himself from the tangled pieces of Other wound within him. That isn't anything particularly new for Peter these days, even if it's nothing he could ever really get used to — the cold hazy fog within, the feeling of never truly being himself anymore, not fully. This place has made the demon's presence within him even more clear, no longer trapped within a dreamscape.

It grows worse. Pain makes it grow worse like it always does, hollows Peter out more and more until he's emptier and emptier, the way he was made to be two years ago in order for the demon to successfully be locked into him. (His fate.) Those things rip at him again over the course of November: things like pain and loss and guilt and ache and terror. The sleeper farm, the zealots, the loss of one friend and the near-death of another. By the time the cold white of December sets in, the middle stages of his Corruption have sunken inwards like a disease, and he doesn't know it until he's barely even Peter anymore, most days.

He's something else. Something that comes up from the well deep inside of him, quivering with an increasingly growing aggression, scraping wildly with fingers curved like claws and the scream of Other filtered so horrifically through human vocal chords (his mother chases him like an animal, beyond the capability for speech, growling and snarling and screaming; her teeth are bared, the whites of her eyes are wide and wild, she barely looks like herself anymore; she chases him up into the attic and claws and bangs her head against the bottom of the trapdoor so fast that it becomes a rapid, inhuman rhythm; he cries and moans and pleads Mommy, please stop, but his mother is gone and the howling thing in her place is so hungry to consume him: not to swallow him whole but to peel him open and get inside him where it knows it belongs. He can't wake up, he can't wake up, the nightmare won't end.)

(Was he always afraid of her, or afraid of becoming her? The same way she feared becoming her mother? A horror, a deep dread, passed on and on and on.)

Through December, he often goes to the places Paimon knows, whether drawn towards people the demon has a positive connection to or a negative one. It could be anywhere at all, but he can often be encountered out on the streets as he wanders, unfeeling of the cold. He generally won't attack without some kind of provocation — but this could be in the form of someone shouting too loudly, or dropping something with a clatter, or any kind of abrupt shift in the energy he's so sensitive to. It could be that he sees someone Paimon's on bad terms with, or otherwise would have a reason to confront aggressively. It could be that you're a Vileblood, and aggression ripples in him towards you like instinct; the hunt is on, after all, and the demon is primed to stalk and kill. There are many reasons that Peter — now so much more demon than Peter — would give pursuit, but you might find yourself the unfortunate victim.

Perhaps you hear him first: an angry cluck of the tongue, an alien-like chittering coming from upwards. Perhaps you see him, then, clinging to the side of the nearest building, long limbs bent at odd angles, eyes swollen with black, nested in shadow. Perhaps you make eye contact, and perhaps that's when he springs — launches, sometimes scuttling down the side of the building, sometimes falling from it with a loud thud like the swollen body of a spider. Sometimes flying, limbs scrabbling. However it is, he'll end up on the ground and he'll give chase. Hope you're a fast runner.

Or maybe you encounter him when he's not outright hostile and instead just generally being really spooky. A twitching thing that looks like the young man maybe you know, but a tremour consistently convulses down his nerve endings, leaves them raw and buzzing like a live wire. You might see him... floating around, hovering several inches off the ground like a spectre, eyes held wide. Or maybe you hear him speaking in tongues, a garble of languages and not-languages, an amalgamation of ancient things and sounds inbetween them: hisses and slurps and chirps and clicks and growls and wheezes. Maybe you see him bent inwards: all six feet of the boy's height curled like a crushed spider, moving around on the floor with his head hanging upside down. This is... fine.

Or maybe you just.... see him up in on the ceiling somewhere. A shop (your shop???) or inside one of Trench's other establishments; he could be anywhere. He doesn't seem to be doing anything, just tucked up against the ceiling with his back pressed against the corner of it, staring down with unblinking eyes. Hostility might be on the brink, however, depending on how you react to him, or if he knows you (or doesn't know you). .....He seems to be staring at your throat.

"Peter" isn't completely gone, however. Not just yet. Peter comes back sometimes, rarely — as though in a dream, and unable to recall the name "Peter" unless it's explicitly coaxed out of him, sometimes not even then — but there will still be some times the uncharacteristic anger quells, and he's simply left strange and confused and bruised soft. Especially when he starts to see physical changes beginning to happen towards the end of the month — the skin of his hands and feet starting to stain black as though ash is creeping up over them, slowly consuming more and more of his skin. It also begins to spread from around his eyes, the tips of his ears, his tongue.... It frightens him — terrifies him — there might be enough left of himself to accept help.

But in the time it takes for help to actually be attempted, his demon side will take over again, and it won't understand the concept of help; it will resist attempts to calm it with teeth bared and blackened hands ready to claw your eyes out. ......Maybe you try to wrangle him anyway. Maybe you've had the misfortune to have to deal with Paimon in his more Feral Moods before and assume you can again — but by this point, no matter your connection to the demon king, he will react unfavourably. There is no reasoning with him, no coaxing down from this frenzied state. Easing the Corruption within Peter will require stronger methods: blood ritual or ministration, medication.... brute force or spellwork to get him held down. Though Palebloods might actually be able to assist with calming down the effects of The Hunt in him, at least, leaving him.... slightly less feral but perhaps still prone to smashing his head into yours. )

WILDCARD / ETC