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 boneFiled 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