Kiril/Overview
Kiril was born in Varna but grew up in London, the son of Ana Ivanova and a father that she has steadfastly refused to talk about for the entirety of his life. A Bulgarian immigrant, she worked hard to keep food on the table, entertaining her young son with stories from traditional slavic folklore — it was really all she could afford. But Ana carried a darkness with her, always seeing visions of things out of the corner of her eye, hearing whispers. She tried to hide it from Kiril, but it wasn’t long before she noticed that he was seeing similar things, the dark, stalking shapes that plagued her waking days running amok in his dreams. Turning to the only source of protection she had, Ana did the little rituals passed on from her mother and grandmother for protection against evil through the rudiments of slavic witchcraft she still remembered or was able to find information on.
As Kiril grew older he tried his best to support her, working odd jobs and eventually finding his way into construction and building maintenance in his late teens. As it turns out, all you have to do is drop a few line of Bulgarian and nod along when people say things to you, and nobody bothers you for anything outside the bare necessities of communication — a situation which Kiril found perfectly acceptable. It was easy money with no extra social obligations.
When Kiril was 19, his mother died suddenly. It happened in her sleep. Doctors suspected an aneurysm, as there were no other outward signs, but Kiril always suspected something darker -- that one of the things only they could seem to see had come and stolen her in the night.
The nightmares grew worse with the loss of his mother, and its wasn’t long before Kiril spiraled into self-destructive behavior, turning to drugs to ease the pain and make extra money, as well as whatever he could scrape up on the side through petty crimes, sex work, and the odd maintenance or construction job that let him keep a small sliver of pride, however slim and diminishing it might have been at the time. It’s no wonder that the combination of a partial overdose and a screaming nightmare rocketed him right through an Awakening, kicking and screaming.
London, at least, has no shortage of mentors to be found. It wasn’t long before someone noticed the newly Awakened Orphan trying his best to put a name to the new senses of reality, blundering his way through magic with all the grace of a sledgehammer. As a stubborn student, though, he would go through a few preliminary mentors. His visions seemed a good fit for the Dreamspeakers, but it wasn’t long before someone realized that his talent with manipulating spirits was utterly lacking. The small rituals that his mother taught him might have made him a good fit for the Verbena, but the disjointed teachings and seemingly random smattering of dozens of pagan practices were too unstructured for him to make much in the way of progress.
Perhaps to everyone’s surprise, the young man finally settled on a mentor he found almost by accident. An Haoyu, a young man from Taiwan, practicing martial arts and yoga in the park, drew Kiril’s attention like a moth to a flame. A saw something in Kiril too, as the pair hit it off almost immediately. A member of the K’an Lu Ecstatics, A taught Kiril that he could find inner stillness through outward movement, freedom of mind through strict ritual observance, and mastery of the self through surrender. He taught Kiril the secrets of eastern practices that he had picked up along the way — tantra, taoist alchemy, the power of ritual and symbol. How seemingly opposing and opposite forces can combine to create something distinct from either, and how substances can be transfigured through a quiet effort of will to have a sympathetic effect on the body or outside world.
Kiril studied under An until it was safe to be released to his own devices, with An returning to China to try to reconnect with other persecuted members of the K’an Lu, attempting to aid them in their efforts to find freedom, but has been out of contact for some time. Kiril, meanwhile, has recently joined with the Circle, using his knowledge of drugs and alchemy to try to perfect himself and others.
