Grimm

“It’s all grist for the murder mill!” Or, at least, it’s all fodder for Grimm’s cauldron...

The cauldron itself is larger than he is, large enough that he can climb into it and let the bubbling mixture close over his head when he needs to perform a ritual of rebirth. It’s not the same as bathing in the blood of your enemies - it’s better. Blood on its own would be too weak for Grimm’s purposes. Blood mixed with marrow, mixed with herbs, mixed with brain matter? Oh yes...Far more powerful. And in Clan Nekrós, power is everything.

The dizzying fumes from the smoke help unlock his inner eye, making a haze of the material world so that Grimm can better concentrate on the voice of the Plague Mother, whose commands are given in every Plague dragon’s heartbeat. In the swirling, acrid froth that bubbles on top of the brew, he can see the dead; both those whose flesh went into the cauldron, and those who will soon be added to its grisly mix. They speak to him in the crackling of the fire and the scraping of his bone spoon against the cauldron's metal; they whisper of things to come and secrets that they took with them to the grave, tongues now loosened by being chopped off and added to the brew.

It is the Plague Mother’s voice that he listens to the most intently. She speaks to him rarely, but he takes a single sip from his cauldron every day in hopes that she will grace him with her words. The spoon he wields is of polished bone, made from a fallen lover’s femur. He scraped and carved it himself before throwing her carcass into the great pot. The spoon holds very little liquid, but that doesn’t matter. Even a drop is enough. All he needs to do is drink of death, drink of contagion, and wait for the heat to throb through him, the rising fever and itching scales that signal Her presence.

Her voice sounds like coughing, like the moans of a dying creature, and her words stay in his veins like poison, long, long after he has dutifully reported them to Titan.