Initiated into the Order together the two often worked together and they quickly fell in love. They were married a year after their initiation. Ivan, however, was never as content as his young wife. Everything seemed to come easier to those around him, the magic just never seemed to bend in quite the way he wanted it too.
Pyotyr grew up surrounded by the Order, or at least by the modest chantry the Order maintained in Moscow during communist times. His own awakening would almost certainly have been gradual, were it not for his father's hunger for power.
Driven mad by his own fear of inadequacy, Ivan turned to dark and forbidden arts. He moved his growing family out of the chantry and into a dacha in the countryside around Moscow. Pyotyr was 11 when he was forced to watch helplessly as his father sacrificed his mother to the dark powers.
After that awful night Ivan finally had the power he'd craved, although it came from a fell and unspeakable source. Left motherless Pyotyr raised his younger brother, Yuri Ivanovich, as best he could. Whatever humanity might have once been in his father's heart was gone.
Pyotyr defended his brother from their father's depredations, taking more than one beating for it. Demons often visited the house, their father was always summoning something or other, and even had several lesser demons bound throughout the house as guardians and slaves. Their numbers only grew as Ivan bartered away more and more of his soul.
When Pyotyr was 17 his father again decided to sacrifice a family member, this time the young Yuri. The demonic slaves chained the brothers within Ivan's dark temple, Yuri to the black altar and Pyotyr to the wall, he would be forced to witness the horror again. Pyotyr watched as his father readied the sacrificial knife, the same blade which had murdered his mother years before.
Something deep inside snapped. He strained against the chains with all his might, tried to free himself, tried to get to his brother. Suddenly it was as though a door deep in his mind had been shattered by something huge trying to beat its way into him.
His body shifted and melted away from the chains that held him. Pyotyr dropped to the floor, a man no longer. A huge wolf leapt at Ivan's throat, but the infernalist stepped to the side and sliced his son with the sacrificial blade he held. A burning rage filled Pyotyr, and he remembered all the spells he'd heard his father cast. A gravely wolf voice, which shouldn't have been able to speak, chanted out a call to the fires of hell, and Pyotyr felt them respond, welling up from inside of him. He spit forth a great ball of flame upon his father.
Ivan cried out in pain as his hair and robes caught fire and burned. He fell back. Pyotyr knew though, that he could not defeat his father. He instead ripped apart the imps, which held his brother to the sacrificial stone and then fled with the young boy, into the wilderness.
Pyotyr fell down in pain in the snows outside the house, and felt his body forced back to its human form. He stood though, and carried his brother all the way to Moscow. There he found the chantry and sought succor.
They were leery of letting two so soaked in evil as he and his brother into their chantry. Pyotyr told them all that had happened with his father, told them of his infernalism, and of his inhumanity. Finally they relented and let the young brothers in.
In the chantry of his youth Pyotyr learned of how to work magic, like his parents before him. Pyotyr learned of Vim, the raw energy of magic which the proper words and gestures, and sometimes the right items, could focus to generate any effect desired by the mage's will. He learned of the different houses of the order, but none truly appealed to him, or to his Avatar. It was a great beast all fury and instinct, he could feel it pacing always within his heart.
In a book of ancient lore he stumbled upon a story that struck him as being overly similar to his own. The tale was of a Pyotyr Volk of House Bjornaer. His father was also and infernalist, and he also lost his mother to his father's evil. The beast within his heart stirred as he read, in its way it told him that he had been with that man as well. Unable to resist his heart beast's call Pyotyr declared himself the last survivor of House Bjornaer.
With that declaration he learned quickly of his past lives, and learned from them much of the magic which he had once known. He knew how to call the fires of hell to him, and learned how to alter his shape by releasing his heart beast into his flesh. He learned far more rapidly than any of the other mages in the chantry, and the jealous spread rumors that he himself was now following in his father's footsteps.
He and his brother lived at the Chantry until mid-1990, when disaster again came into their lives. Their father it seemed was not going to let them go so easily. Late one night the demons broke into the chantry, slaughtering all those they encountered. Pyotyr sat up from his sleep, somehow sensing the invading force; he took his brother from the bed next to him and vanished quickly into the umbra. In a fit of rage at his children again escaping him, Ivan destroyed the chantry and sacrificed every last mage to his masters.
Soon after the destruction of the chantry the Soviet Union fell, and Pyotyr took advantage of the confusion to smuggle himself and his brother to America, hoping that perhaps their father would not follow them there.
In America, Pyotyr secured a job, and enrolled his little brother in the school system. They lived in the slums for a time, but eventually Pyotyr raised enough money to open a small occult shop in downtown Boston.
There was a Hermetic chantry in Boston, but after what happened in Moscow, the rumors of Pyotyr's infernalism had grown to the point where none would trust the Moscow Chantry's sole survivor. It was all he could do to keep them from running he and his brother out of town.
Again their father found them. Late one night as Yuri slept in their loft above the store, and Pyotyr studied a book of ancient lore, the demons came again. Pyotyr fled before them once more, even though his power had grown, their father was resorting to more powerful and dangerous demons to destroy his progeny. Pyotyr took his brother and fled into the spirit world, a trick he had only recently learned.
Life destroyed by his father again, Pyotyr took it upon himself to study the demons, to learn their weaknesses, and to hunt them, so that one day he might destroy his father and ensure his and his brother's safety.
Yuri and Pyotyr fled from Boston to San Francisco, and their, with the insurance money from the destroyed store, Pyotyr opened a new shop. It was what he was best at and he still needed to provide for his brother. He let his brother run the shop after school and he took advantage of that time to stalk the Umbra, as the shifters he had been meeting called it, hunting down and destroying demons, banes, and any other evil spirits that crossed his path.
The Virtual Web fell, and the Hidden War came, but Pyotyr was not invited to the party. He watched the war wage across the near umbra, and didn't care. He continued to stalk the Umbra searching for demons, and eradicating them. When the Scouring came Pyotyr was one of the first to know. He was deep in the Umbra, and he saw the demonic hordes advancing. He knew that he could not hope to defeat so many, and so again he fled before the demons. He fled back towards the Gauntlet trying to dispatch warnings to the Traditions, but his reputation kept them from listening.
He crossed the Gauntlet and prepared his shop to repel the demonic horde when they crossed into the physical world. Certain that he would lose his life to the legion, and that the end of the world was at hand, he was determined to destroy as many of the beasts as he could before they could bring him down, and to defend his brother to the end.
But they never came, he waited for a day before returning to the Umbra. There he found only the destruction which had been wrought. He sought out Horizon, and found there only a few survivors, none of any great power except for the Son of Ether known as Lord Chuang Tzu. In one day the demons and their fallen masters had ended the hidden war and left only a pitiful handful of survivors.