Skip to content
Public archive · works of fiction
Six teaching plates
07 / 84HHDRVVampires

Pallor. A sweet-sick smell.

Fig. VII · HHDRV

Plate XIV · teaching

Waste sinks

porphyric oil and the bone sink

Oil and bone. Mass is conserved.

What goes in has to go somewhere. It leaves as a film on the skin and as plate in the bone.

  • Oil

    dermis

    Porphyrin fragments esterified into a cutaneous film. Pallor. The sweet-sick smell.

  • Bone

    mineral sink

    Residue packed into the thoracic armour. The organism wears its waste.

Urea

almost none

CO₂

~10–20%

Porphyrin

industrial

Invoices of the same engine

Porphyric oil and the bone sink

Metabolism · Dermis and bone

Filed reconstruction · HHDRV · Porphyric oil and the bone sink

Conservation of mass is not optional. Folklore smelled pennies and floor wax and called it unnatural.

Conservation of mass is not optional. Blood enters. Energy is stripped. The exhaust must leave. The profile produces almost no urea and perhaps ten to twenty percent of baseline CO₂, but it produces porphyrin fragments in industrial quantity — the empty rings left when iron is torn out of haem. Hepatic haem oxygenase cannot keep up. Excess porphyrin is esterified into a waxy lipid matrix and excreted through modified sebaceous glands as a cutaneous oil. It films the entire skin. It is the pallor and the odour.

Mineral residue that cannot be oil is deposited in bone — the same osteoblastic programme that builds the thoracic armour. The organism wears its waste as plate and as sheen. Folklore called the sheen unholiness. It is an excretory pathway. It is not an optical coating.

Ch. 13

Vampires in Theory