Pillar

Chapter Twelve

The alchemical experiments proved successful, and Vivian was surprised at the results. The goo, when separated from the blood and water, was slightly green and still held a charge of Astral energy, despite being refined and boiled. This meant that the material wasn’t organic, and that it was magical.

“The amberum was in the stomach and throat, where it was charging this goo to do… something.” Vivian said, chewing on length of Rekham sausage, a soft-boiled egg sitting in a small basket with a loaf of fresh wheat bread and several hunks of cheddar cheese. Bo had scrawled a message on a piece of parchment stating Jack was ready to do the tattoo which only infuriated her. What was supposed to be a basic community service was now turning into an in-depth study of human anatomy and how it all worked, while trying to find what the mystery unguent was that had coated the interior of the stomach?

“I swear, it’s like this is some brand-new substance made just to piss me off,” Vivian muttered, leaning on the table as she watched the bile bubble with the lye, destroying the two chemicals while “cleaning” the magical substance free of any residue. After confirming it was magical, the experiment proved to her that the lye/bile treatment would work, given time. The open vent leading topside allowed the noxious fumes to flow freely away, making it easier to deal with the gel containing the saliva.

A simple cleaning spell incanted with the Aqua Lord’s tongue had rid the goo of saliva and charged it significantly, which had made it expand and grow like a tumor gone mad. Noting the reaction, she dissected the goo and took a sample of the charged substance and, after having Buspi bring up a severed hand from the former guard, had inserted the slimy substance into the cleanly cut hand.

“Now,” she said. “Let’s see what you were supposed to do.”

Powering up her rings she laid them over the hand and allowed the growth to gobble up the Astral energy, wincing as she felt it writhe and wriggle within the gray hand, several ropey strands slinking out in search of… something after a mere three minutes of continued charging. Vivian calculated that, given the amount of Astral energy shining down from Selene right now, the goo would have spread throughout the bodies within an hour if left unchecked.

Using her tweezers, she poked the hand once to see if there was any response. It jerked, like a dead frog’s legs would after salt being poured over their skinned meat. “Huh…”

Vivian made another note in her journal, the sketch of the hand crude with diagrams highlighting the skeletal structure and muscles connecting to the joints. She’d flayed the hand partially, and using her tweezers, she pulled back the skin with despite sticky resistance.

Inside were new veins of pulsing green slime, pumping around the hand as they slowly rooted into the muscles. A brief diagnostic spell told her all she needed to know, bringing a foul word to her lips. She picked up the bread and pit into it angrily.

Buspi walked into the room with a bucket full of crystallized amberum. “You were right! This was in the blood I pulled from the muscles, leftover after I boiled it!”

“Tell me Buspi, what do you know of the undead?” Vivian asked, her voice hollow and dark.

“Oh, just the common lore for vessels. Hollow shells that have souls born from magic rather than the divine, unable to speak a language save for their own, which they know instinctually. Unpleasant to be around and can be quite hostile if not approached in the right way. Why?”

“Because the hand you delivered to me is the hand of a freshly born Vessel, an Addled.” Vivian said, flipping a few pages back in her journal to an entry she made when she was camping with a band of Vessel hunters. She’d traded silver for information, each grizzled hunter chiming in with a tidbit of information as they spoke of the undead. While she knew their point of views were skewed, she took the various lessons they imparted as gospel when she aided in taking down three Addled that were roaming the woods near a remote village closer to Cascade’s Gate, the city that sat at the base of the next plateau and guarded the elevators up to Silver Sierra, the sister city to Cascade’s Fall on the Plateau of Rolling Hills.

“Addled are like the toddlers of the Vessel family, hungry and ignorant of how the world works. The lurk and shamble about, eating anything they can catch, until they absorb enough life force to force them into the secondary stage, where the attain higher consciousness.” Vivian said with a trace of disgust, “they try to play at being innocent, but they all start as bloodthirsty animals, very well capable of overpowering a man and consuming him until they have naught but bloody bones to suckle on.”

“Oh my… and you say that all three were going to become that?” Buspi asked.

“Not were,” Viviane said. “They are going to become Addled. Right now, they’re slowly charging up the teleplasm in their system, delivered by something that forces it down their throats, along with a good deal of watered down amberum. If they were under the light of Selene right now, they’d be up and trying to chow down on the fine folk of this down, transferring teleplasm with every bite to create more Addled.”

“Great Emir, what can we do to stop this?” Buspi asked.

“Get the Royal Guard over here to stand watch over the bodies. We need to know how long it takes one to charge enough to awaken when kept away from Astral superchargers like the moons,” Vivian said, “then, when they become Addled, sever the head and burn the body. Scatter the ashes if you like, but the body needs to be nothing, but ash so be certain their dust before you even so much as touch them.”

“Got it, I’ll alert the guard right now.” Buspi scampered off into the hall, his limp more pronounced by his urgency clearly keeping him from caring about his aching leg.

“I should have asked for payment for this,” Vivian said, rubbing at her eyes. Her chest throbbed, her head hurt, and her stomach was heavy from her meal, so she was yawning. How long had she been down here?

Her thoughts were broken when she heard a scream break through the still air, followed by low groans. “Spirits!” Vivian said. “They’ve risen already!”

Grabbing her staff and channeling out three defensive orbs of roiling air from her staffs gathered Astral reserve, she ran down to the morgue to find Buspi lying between three nude figures, all on their knees, shoveling bloody fistfuls of meat from the old man into their mouths. He reached out an arm to Vivian, blood trickling down the side of his head and out of his mouth. “P-Please… help m-me!”

Vivian waved one of her orbs at the back of the slimmest Addled, blasting open its back in a shower of green sludge and odorless gray flesh, chunks of bone falling away to cripple the abomination now that its spine was severed. The other two looked up, half-chewed meat falling from their blood-smeared faces, blank eyes staring. They rose on shaky legs and rushed towards Vivian, closing ground between them rapidly. She waved another orb and smiled as it blasted apart Horace’s knee, sending him toppling some fifteen feet away. Willing the last orb to form a semi-barrier around her of volatile wind, which the Addled butted against before sliding a few feet back, obviously confused.

Readying her staff, Vivian darted forward, the winds rippling over the Addled as she brought him close enough to paw at her. She rolled her shoulder to loosen the grab and brought the butt of her staff to its midsection, doubling it over from the force of the blow. Striking down with the head of her staff, she cracked the back of the skull open enough for charged teleplasm to leak out, sending the Addled to the ground twitching. Looking over at the crippled Addled, still eating Buspi, and Horace, who was trying to drag his opened body closer towards her, she pulled the leftover energy and stored it in her staff.

“Clay!” She called out. “Tobald!”

She climbed the stairs and took the passageway to the opening, where the two Royal Guards were standing while listening to a pompous man dressed in similar garb, but with an emblazoned crest of the Royal Guard over his breast, and a cape of deep purple with gold trimmed shoulder pads. He had a shrewd face with a black ponytail and a scar under his left eye, which seemed to twitch every few seconds as he continued lecturing the two men over something.

“Guards!” Vivian called out, switching to a more formal tone. All three turned to look at her, two with looks of relief, one with a look of disdain. “Come quickly! There are vessels down here that need to be taken care of, and I discovered how the men died.”

Both Clay and Tobald sprang into action, lowering their spears and rushing through the opening, over the grate, and into the hallway past Vivian. “They’re in the morgue!”

Looking over at the scarred man, she gave a false look of terror. “They were eating Brother Buspi when I found them, and they just rushed me.”

The man’s eye twitched. “You seem fine for someone attacked by the living dead. How did you escape?”

She motioned to her staff, which had a bit of blood staining it on the head. “I’m a wizard, so I could handle them enough to get away. I was only able to fully dispatch one, but I crippled the other two.”

“I see,” the man said, eyes narrowing into slits. “Come with me so we can see the vessels ourselves. What’s left of them, at least.”

Vivian nodded and, after noting the man wasn’t leading the way into the temple, walked in with him trailing behind. She wasn’t comfortable with the leery man being behind her, but figured he was a member of the Royal Guard if his uniform and the way he was treating Tobald and Clay were any sign. He had to have rank over them, but in all honest she didn’t know about this kingdom’s way of ranking their guard and military.

Vivian turned down the hall before descending the stairs, thankful for her belt buckle once again as she caught the scent of exposed ectoplasm: advanced decay and raw eggs. She found Clay with the butt of his spear in the back of the crippled Vessel that had been eating Buspi, while Tobald had already beheaded the holy man. The one-legged Horace had been crippled further by having his arms removed at the elbow by Tobald’s sword and was now rasping and groaning from the floor where it continually leaked the brilliant green “blood”. She heard the scarred man gasp at the sight of the vessels, muttering a quick prayer to the spirits. Vivian turned and gave him a smile before extending a hand.

“My name is Vivian, by the way. Wizard-in-training.” She said, c*****g her head to the side with a grin. “And I have some findings to share with you about these killings.”

“Killings?” The man repeated.

“Yes,” she said, motioning back towards the three dead men, two of which were still moving. “Those three. They look a tad recovered in the mouth region, but that’s the work of the teleplasm repairing the body enough to function once more in a biological state, fascinating really…”

“The killings, you mean murders, don’t you?” The man asked.

“Oh no,” Vivian said, “the killer isn’t human, so they can’t be labeled a murderer. You’ll be amazed at what I’ve uncovered by dissecting just Mr. Elkhorn over there.”

She motioned to Horace, who was extending his one good arm out at Clay plaintively. He turned and winced at the sight of the man before putting the boot to his face and shoving him back a few feet, movement which was aided in him sliding through the slimy teleplasm staining the morgue’s stone floor.

“Horace?” The man said. “That… thing is Horace Elkhorn? We had him under suspicion of bribery at the gates. I had him moved to the River District to keep him out of trouble.”

“Well,” Vivian said, turning back to give the man a half-hearted smile. “That didn’t pan out so well.”