The Varaev clan of magi can trace its beginnings to the early 1800s, to a man named Vakha Varaev. He was a simple man from an unremarkable family, with only one thing that set him apart from his fellow villagers in Chechen-aul. He possessed a small amount of magic circuits, the first in his family to do so. Vakha was a humble man with no greater ambition than protecting his family and livelihood, and he merely used this surely God given blessing to learn a meager handful of helpful spells from the village's local mystic.
When the Russians invaded the Caucasus Mountains in order to annex them, Vakha joined his people in standing up against them, becoming a soldier for the Caucasian Imamate. In the bloody Murid War that followed, the farmer with a kind heart was forced to witness countless lives being lost, many of them by his own hand. The rudimentary magecraft he had learned merely to protect his loved ones ensured he survived longer and killed more than his fellow soldiers, after all.
Vakha had once been a hearty and cheerful man, but the despair of war ate away at him. He had been a devout man, but now he began to question his long held beliefs. What was the meaning of all this senseless death? Where was the hope in the ending of lives? How could there be Paradise after this?
It was on the day that Vakha returned home to his village to find it sacked that he caught a glimpse of the answer he sought.
As he wept over the bodies of his neighbors and friends, brothers and sisters, wives and children... in the corner of his eye, he saw something.
Perhaps it was revelation. Perhaps it was hallucination. Perhaps it was nothing more than wishful thinking distorted of grief.
Yet what he saw regardless were seemingly angels of death, more beautiful than anything he had ever witnessed, bear the souls of his family away into the sky.
For the briefest of moments, the agony in his soul was soothed.
That was the moment his journey, the journey of what would become a clan of mages, began.
Vakha had found solace in seeing the angels, in so much as glimpsing for the merest moment part of God's plan. He had found hope in the end of life, found peace even after everything had been taken from him. But he couldn't merely leave it at that. He wanted to glimpse this hope again. He wanted to somehow share it with all those who suffered the pain of losing loved ones, to convey to those who had been like him the peace he had felt at witnessing the greater meaning of it all.
And if he could not do it, then his descendants surely would be able to.
Vakha spent the remainder of his life questing in search of a means to witness again the path of the angels, the journey that he believed all souls would eventually take. To witness it as a soul would require merely ending his life, but what he sought was to witness it as a human... or, perhaps, as an angel of death itself.
He found that means in a single black feather, one he found on the bloodiest battlefield on Earth, at great risk and cost to himself.
A single feather, perhaps, from Azrael, the archangel of death himself.
Islamic angels were made out of light, but it was not unheard of in stories for them to take humanoid form when visiting the human world. And certainly, the Qur'an itself attested to their having wings. Whether it was from Azrael or one of his attendants... it was surely what Vakha had sought.
Though Vakha passed away shortly after his discovery, the single black feather would become the core for what would be the Varaev Magic Crest.
Vakha's great hope as he passed away was that his descendants would be able to see what he had seen, to find peace with the seemingly senseless death of the world around them as he had, and to perhaps share that beauty with the rest of the world.
His children, weak as magi and surrounded on all sides by bloody conflict as the Russian subjugation of the Caucasus continued, invited proper magi into the family. They used the potency of what would become their crest as leverage, and over successive generations, their ability as mages grew.
And so too did their ethos as mages.
The proper magi who entered the family, and in time their own children, scoffed at the founder's simple sentimental dream. Certainly, there was potential in its base concept. In Islamic theology, the angels of death alone were responsible for carrying the souls of the deceased to the afterlife. They alone could travel this path from the human world to the world beyond. Without the capacity to deviate or disobey, they ceaselessly ferried souls. A fundamental conceit of magi, of their understanding of the world, was that all souls went to Akasha, to the Root. Then, was it not possible that the very paths these angels made as they reaped the souls of the living could serve as paths to the Root as well? If they could deceive the World into believing they were the messengers of souls, if they could emulate an angel of death so closely as to be recognized as one, then they could gain access to the paths the angels traveled.
If the Varaevs were to be magi, if they were to fulfill the promise and potential of this Crest, there was no room for their founder's sentiment.
And so they killed.
They killed and killed and killed and killed, seeking to forge themselves into pseudo angels of death.
It was easy enough to do so amidst the Russian subjugation of Chechnya; people died in such numbers that a few hundred more would go without the slightest notice. Still, Vakha's sentiment lingered among a number of his descendants. Some would come to leave the family that had become nothing more than a charnel house, that had deviated so greatly from the dreams of the man who had founded it.
Those that remained grew ever more determined to eliminate such weakness from their ranks.
If they were to achieve their goal, they needed to produce an unparalleled killer.
And thus when Izaket was born, the declining clan saw its last chance to steer itself back on track.
From the time she was old enough to walk, she was made to kill. The chubby hands of a toddler were guided to end the lives of men. Corpses were her only constant companions. Brainwashing and every other means available to create mental associations was readily and unhesitatingly used to associate killing with joy, to associate killing with contentment. Yet, even that much was not nearly enough for her parents. To be a true angel of death, an instrument of God that was only capable of obeying without deviation, there could not be the slightest hesitancy in killing any human on Earth. There could not be the slightest discrimination between lives.
Izaket was permitted to attend an elementary school as a normal student, and despite her complete and utter lack of proper human interaction beforehand, even an eccentric like her was able to find and make friends.
And then she was made to kill each and every one of them.
Izaket had not yet lost most of her humanity, most of her childishness, despite the living hell that had been her life up to this point. She begged for the lives of her friends. She wept as she never had before.
But all of that collapsed under the contradiction of her feeling happiness as she killed them.
Ah, so that's how it is.
I never had the capacity to escape my duty to begin with.
They were my friends, so... wouldn't they want me to be happy?
This is for the best. This is for the best. This is for the best. This is for the best.
Unable to bear the contradiction, unable to bear her guilt, Izaket herself completed her final transformation into an imperfect
.
The drug of
kept her from breaking apart completely.
Over the course of the following years, Izaket became a splendid killer.
On her eighteenth birthday, she was officially recognized as the head.
Izaket tilted her head at her parents.
Mother, Father, now that the Magic Crest is fully passed onto me, is there anything else you're able to teach me?
Naturally, Izaket killed both of them when they answered in the negative.
It was odd that they hadn't expected it.
After all, it was them who had ensured she could kill anyone without discrimination.
And with their Workshop in Grozny well hidden with Bounded Fields, nobody would ever be able to find the bodies.
She wasn't motivated by hatred.
After all... such a thing was not permitted to her.
An
did not deviate or disobey.
That surety of purpose was surely why they were beautiful.
After burying her parents, Izaket traveled to London and enrolled in the Clock Tower under the
Eulyphis
Faculty of Spiritual Evocation,
taking great care not to demonstrate the true extent of her abilities. Her social awkwardness and her restraint meant she went more or less unnoticed, which left her rather lonely... but that definitely suited her just fine.
All that was necessary was to fulfill her
Yes... that is what the self proclaimed optimist told herself.