Aaron Drachmen's page

His mother, meanwhile, was anything but. Maria Smith was an archaeologist and theologian, who traveled the world to various sites of religious significance (to any culture) and would try to uncover their secrets. She was highly intelligent, and well recognized in her field as one of one of the foremost experts on ancient religions, including the roots of Christianity. She loved her son, of course, and he loved her. Until, shortly after he graduated from high school, she disappeared without a trace. Neither her friends or colleagues knew where she might have gone, and the local authorities never found her during their search. A more wide reaching one wasn't feasible, and so it was dropped.

Aaron dropped everything to begin the search for her, against the advice of everyone. He traveled to her last known location (a small town in northern Egypt), and began the hunt. The people were less than helpful, to start, but someone managed to point out the last potential site she'd been surveying, and he went there.

He searched the area for hours before finding what he was looking for: the remains of her camp, almost completely covered in sand. nearby was a likewise submerged entrance to some sort of structure, a small room containing nothing but an opened lead box with a small circular indentation in the cloth lining it.

This was the first and last concrete clue Aaron received on his initial search. After a year of fruitless searching, he mourned her death and returned home, starting college that fall. It was another few years before he would be dragged back into the world he'd touched only the periphery of.

Halfway through his sophomore year a Russian man showed up on his doorstep to ask for his help tracking someone down. At first Aaron was confused...until the man showed him a picture of his mother traveling with some strange man. The timestamp was recent, only a few weeks ago. His spirits soared...then abruptly sank again into confusion. His mother was alive, and not apparently under duress. So why had she disappeared?

He begged Sanya to allow him to come along, and the man (after some silent contemplation) said that it would be necessary that he did. After that, he dropped everything again to begin traveling with this "Sanya", the strange man who carried a sword of all things in his travels. Over the course of the next few weeks he learned much, including the basics of how to defend himself with the knife Sanya handed him, telling him it would be useful.

Aaron found these things odd, but figured they were precautions for some of the rougher areas they traveled through. He had a rude awakening once they finally caught up to Maria and her traveling companions.

At first things were peaceful. Sanya and the two men talked a bit, while Aaron's mother remained silent, no matter how much he tried to get her attention.

Things went downhill quickly. The two men transformed into a horrifying gorilla creature and a feathered, be-tentacled...thing. Aaron stepped back in horror as his mother ran to him, arms outstretched, and eyes wide in what Aaron assumed was fear. He reached out to her, and her hands clenched around his throat, choking the life out of him. He looked at her in horror and begged her to stop, but she just tightened her grip, and grew larger and scalier slowly.

In desperation he decided this was no longer his mother and swung his knife into her throat, once, twice, three times. On the third it dug in and he dragged it across her neck, hot, scalding blood spilling all over his face and into his open mouth. The last sight he saw before he passed out was the cut closing shut as fast as he tore it open, and the scaly face of whatever thing had devoured his mother looking at him with its dead eyes.

When he awoke only he and Sanya remained, swathes of blood the only indicator of what had happened. Sanya explained it would be a bad idea for Aaron to accompany him further, and put him on a plane back home.

That evening the changes started.

It started that night as he lay in bed. Every creak, every squeak of the house sounded like thunder in his ears, and the room seemed far too bright. Soon the symptoms faded, however, and he put it out of his mind as a reaction to stress.

When he woke the next morning, he knew it must be something more. His hair started to fade, from its natural brown to a lighter shade, noticeably so. His eyes shifted from green to more of a hazel, and some of the heightened senses he'd experienced the night before had returned, though less intense.

Aaron stayed in, afraid of what was happening to him, and things began to get worse. The sounds grew in intensity again, and the room became unbearably bright. Every scent was nauseatingly strong, and the rooms swirled with deep reds and bright purples and colors men cannot even name, because they've never seen them. Driven to near madness by the overwhelming stimuli, Aaron lashed out, barely registering that he tossed the couch across the room like it weighed nothing, or that when he stumbled and fell onto the brick fireplace it was IT which was damaged, and not his head.

Finally, exhausted, he passed out again. When he woke up for the third time things seemed to have stabilized. He could still see and hear and smell all the same things, but he found if he concentrated he could tune them out and not let them distract him, just like he could with his normal human senses before. He also found that the physical changes, while minor, had completed. His hair was a stark white, with a faint metallic sheen and his skin had bronzed in an unnatural tan. Most noticeably, his eyes became reptilian slits, and glowed faintly yellow-orange as if lit from within by fire.

Over the next few years Aaron came to terms with his new talents, and decided to put them to use. He learned all he could, his unnatural looks giving him a "pass" into the supernaturally community. Particularly, he learned of the Knights of the Cross, and the Denarians they fight, putting two and two together to discover who the mysterious Sanya was, and what his mother had become. He vowed to destroy the demon that possessed her, and others like her, and threw himself into training. He found his new strength and toughness was accompanied by an increase in almost all of his mortal faculties to some extent or another, increased flexibility, speed, and an unmatched memory all accentuated his abilities to make him a fast learner, only needing to be shown a move once and practice it a few times to master it. While by no means a master swordsman, he became adept enough, and his natural talents made him a formidable fighter beyond his skill.

Both as a cover, and to make money and gather further information, he opened a book store that catered to both normal people (albeit mostly fans of fantasy literature and myth), and more surreptitiously to the occult community, selling the occasional arcane text to the discerning buyer, though only ones he felt he could trust not to misuse such things. Both to distance himself from his mother and because he thought it would sell more books, he changed his last name to Drachmen (of Drachmen's Books), a bastardized spelling of the Latin word for dragon, the creature he came to figure out he most resembled in ability.

His partner in this endeavor was a man named Odd John, who is as strange as his name suggests. Aaron has made it his side mission to find out exactly what the dwarf's story is, suspecting a similar, albeit even more traumatic experience made the man what he is today.