Ari Kasabian

Overview

Archivist, curator, Settite.

Dr. Kasabian believes all vampires share one thing: a hunger, and it has nothing to do with blood.  Each has their own - a need, a desire, something that drives them, something that they can't seem to get enough of.  For Ari, that hunger is for knowledge and the secrets shrouded by antiquity are a siren song he cannot resist, a draw he finds powerful enough to sacrifice even his humanity for.

Basics

Attributes

Abilities

Advantages

Merits & Flaws

Rituals & Paths

Experience & Derangements

Expanded Backgrounds

Rights & Possessions

Blood Bonds/Vinculi

Description

History

“I don't believe in magic.”  The young boy said.

The old man smiled.  “You will when you see her.”

He was seduced.

Oh, not by the mysterious and enchanting Naïma and not in the conventionally imagined way, though even now he and his sire dance around each other as if such a thing were genuinely a possibility.  But by the city.  Cairo.

Cairo captivated him utterly.

It was, in retrospect, his own fault.  He came to that ancient metropolis starry-eyed and filled with eager wonderment.  In fairness, he practically handed his heart over, gift-wrapped.  No youthful researcher since the days of Howard Carter arrived in Egypt a more ready and willing devoteé, more eager to discover the wonders and uncover the mysteries yet unrevealed even after over a century of study and pursuit by the field’s most eminent scientists.

And he was not disappointed.  Mysteries he revealed.  Wonders he uncovered.  Enough to secure him an inviolable reputation among his colleagues and even some small acclaim outside the relatively insular realm of antiquities scholarship:  a series of podcast guest spots, an article in National Geographic, a stint as consultant to a Hollywood film director whose story was outlandish in the extreme (vampires, indeed) but whose historical details, thanks to the eminent Dr. Kasabian, were spot on.  These glittering successes were only incidental and of little importance compared to the rush of true discovery.  He continued to work hard, devotedly.  In this the city continued to provide him his greatest pleasure and the purpose of his life.

And yet he came to have the sense, as time passed, that the object of his ardor was holding something back from him.  By day he traveled from home to university to museum blithely and with a zeal and sense of purpose.  But Cairo by night left him anxious, fidgety and feverish with the deep, unacknowledged certainty that around every corner lurked a wonder that he did not, could not know.  He was like a lover denied the fulfillment of his passion.  He had been in the city almost ten years when the strain of this denial intensified distinctly.  Sleep eluded him.  He began keeping late hours in the echoing museum and in the small neat space of his office at the university.  His theories and lines of inquiry grew more and more obscure.  At last even his health was impacted - he grew thin and haggard, his researches more and more frantic.  He felt as if he was drowning and somewhere out there among the mysteries of this ancient land was a lifeline he must find or die trying.

He did not, at this time, know Naïma Amin.  But she knew him.  And later, she told him the truth.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

His mind settled slowly, following the arc of the moon as she descended toward the desert horizon, returning to sensibility from the ecstasy where it had wandered.  The first of his senses to return was smell and by this he knew she held him.  She smelled like wind on the river and blue lotus.  He did not smell blood and by this he knew the remains of his first meal no longer lay slumped beside them.

“Is it… is it always like this?”  His voice was barely a croak.  But strength was buzzing through his limbs rapidly and now when he looked up he could see her smile.

“Shhhh,” she murmured like a zephyr over the dunes.  “It can be.”  She chuckled then, a purr that he felt as much as heard as she held his head against her breast.  “But you do not need me to tell you that.  Stop asking so many questions, far fuduli, and accept what you already know.”

By now he was able to sit up and he smiled back at her, ran his tongue over teeth new and unfamiliar, preoccupied now, at first, with changes physical.  The other more esoteric changes he would consider with time.

“Then tell me what I do not know,” he said with a laugh, for that request had been for some time now a shared phrase between them.

They both stood then.  He marveled at the swiftness with which the strength flooded his body and was eager to test his senses.  She took his hand and they moved to the deeply recessed window with its intricate lattice.  This she drew aside and they looked out upon the teeming ancient city and the desert beyond.

“Hm.”  Her smile was one of deep satisfaction.  “Very well.  I will tell you the truth.”

“I assume you always do,” he rejoined, quite seriously.

“Yes.  But I do not tell you everything, nor should I.  Nor should you wish me to, though I believe I cannot prevent you doing so.  I have made you as you are, and taken responsibility for you, because Ari, you are a dangerous man.”  They watched the moonlight highlight the dunes, shapes and curves suggestive and fleeting as the night waned.  She named a date almost exactly two years ago.

“Do you recall what happened that day, in the archive?  No?  That was the day you found a certain manuscript and then, as only a scholar with your intuition could have accomplished, the corroborating carving.  And you placed yourself upon the very threshold of many things we of the Temple did not wish you to know.  And it wasn’t the first time.  You had a way of delving where we most wished you not to.”

It was a curious sensation, that his heart did not beat and yet he still felt a tremor of excitement.  He laughed lightly to dispel the nervousness of it.

“Where angels fear to tread, eh?”

She did not roll her eyes.  But he knew the flick of eyebrow in the moonlight meant the same thing.

“That is why I was sent,” she went on.  “To stop you.  And more than once in the weeks that followed I could have killed you.  I was expected to do so, you know.”  And she fixed him with a keen-edged gaze.  He felt his obligation to her like a fine-edged cut, stinging, signed in blood.  She allowed the tension between them to ebb and stirred from the window.  She did not like to watch the progress of the moon.  They sat.  Her chairs were very old and very beautiful.  Her room was golden and drapery and stone.

“I am trusted.  And so I am allowed to exercise a certain degree of judgment.  That is why I decided to let you live.  There was, of course, only one way in which this could be done.”  She paused to blink slowly at him her great golden eyes.

He nodded.  They were quiet for a time as he recalled the days she referred to.  The draining of his health.  The frantic desperation in his work.  And her face appearing as if by chance seemingly everywhere he went in the city.  The things she told him.  The things she showed him.

“That was you.  The… whatever was happening to me.”  She was quiet and let him follow up the trail on his own.  “You… were feeding on me.  And when I found the temple…”

“We let you find it.”

She stopped him then with long cool fingers against his lips.  He thought it would feel weird to close them over his teeth but it didn’t.

“You promised,” she admonished.  And he had.  Promised to never speak, even between the two of them, of what he had seen and learned at the Temple of Set.  He was quiet a moment with the memory, then went on.

“You orchestrated it all.”  No judgment, nor even, with the assurance of hindsight, much surprise.  “Until you knew there was no way I could refuse.”

She looked pensive for a moment and he did not know what that meant so he asked,

“Are you sorry?”

The luminous gold of her eyes hardened to desert stone.  “Promise me something.  Promise me and never, never disappoint me in this:  Never be sorry.  For anything.”

He has yet to disappoint her.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Temple required her in Baltimore.  Where she went, he followed.  And so they came.

The night before their departure from Cairo they stood again at her deep window and looked out over the city that had been the love of his life.

“Will it break your heart, to leave her?” she asked.

He sensed the test in her question but had gone too far for it to mean anything now.  It was just nonsense.  He had no heart.  He turned to her and took her hand.

“Stop asking silly questions, alluwts alzarqa', and accept what you already know.”