As part of his payment, Grigor sat through the anguish of having his Adam’s apple branded with a dirty needle covered in ash and urine tied to an ancient split twig. His vocation is now official, with the death’s of the snitch’s family he is now a murderer for hire.
In 1919 the Soviets take Russia. One of the first thing they do is essentially eliminate crime. They did this with over four million Russian citizens convicted for a wide variety of crimes. This breaking of the criminal element of Russia forced them to evolve. It forced them to become hard. It forced them to organize. It forced them to form the вор в зако́не (Thieves of Law).
Alexei had been struggling with heroin for a while and it has become time that anyone working with him had to be informed that he was not reliable and was not to be trusted, and as such.. his shame was made flesh by the image of a snake coiled it’s way around his neck issued forth from an ancient and crude twine wrapped stick.
The Thieves of the Law spread through out Russia with their own code and laws outside of society. Crime in Russia was refined to absolute efficiency under the crucible of the iron fist of Communist USSR. One fortune day an inmate palmed a small twig from a sapling in the prison yard. He secreted it away to his cell and set to work turning it into a a tattoo needle. It was here the some of the first now infamous “Russian Mob Tattoos” were born. Clean skinned men found their way into the Gulags, a place beyond the reach of the KGB and society. Where men walked in, killers walked out. This was a different and terrifying world.
In a cruel twist of fate, Yuri was still alive after five years. The things he seen during his time there, the things he had done to survive there, and yes.. in the end the things he had seen himself do to survive there, like a numbed passenger on a story he’s barely watching… all had taken it’s toll and shown palled horror in his cold dead eyes. Yuri barely flinched when the dirty piece of wood made a chain around his wrist.
When you are marked by the вор в зако́не, it marks a point in your life. You are now no longer an innocent. You are now clearly marked as a drug addict, a homosexual, a killer, a thief, a monster. Slowly bit by bit the horror of what you had done, and what you are becoming kill you inside. Every time. Every new tattoo, you feel yourself slipping away. That is a lot of raw thaumaturgic energy. The aforementioned twig applied the first tattoos, and due to the importance of tradition, it was passed down over the decades. It was repaired. It was re-wrapped with twine, it’s various needles replaced.. but the twig remained. It always remained. Aroused by the pain of the tattoo and using the blood as a conductor, the stick drank deeply… lapping up all the pain and the death over the years, waking up more and more as it does. For nearly a century.
Vitaly didn’t even do anything. He was an accountant in good standing with the party. It was only through accounting error that he was charged with embezzlement. By the time the error was corrected, Vitaly was already misplaced somewhere in the gulags, and was getting his bow tie tattoo in the cell of a stranger.. with two large men holding him down while a third jabbed at his collarbone with an old dirty stick. He cried out not from the pain, but rather the knowledge that his life, all that he had worked for.. all that he had dreamed of.. was all over.. for no reason what-so-ever.
While a certain bone white violin, made from the bones of vivisected victims could be seen as a aristocratic china-mask wearing 18th century french diabolist.. this thing is a pit bull. The thaum energy that fed the violin were fed by it’s victims. The thaum energy that bore the wand was taken from killers. Rigidly refined and groomed and brutal killers. For nearly one hundred years. It is aggressive. It is brutal. It wants, no it needs to eat souls. It needs to eat the souls now. I SAID NOW CYKA. The Magic Wand (Volshebnaya palochka) hungers, and it knows no satiation. It eats souls, merely by being pointed and and aimed with the will of it’s wielder.
