Frost 65, 124
“The trick isn’t bleeding.” the witch told her familiar, “It’s easy to exsanguinate yourself. The trick is in not dying afterwards.”
“Mrrwl.” Kitty concurred, in a concerned tone of voice.
Imogen turned away from the shadowy cat, lounging on his box against the wall of her office and returned her attention to the box sitting there. It was a wooden crate, packed with straw–clean straw, too, high quality, nothing mildewy or wilted–and smelling like fresh-cut grass. And there, in the middle of the package, was the container she’d spent a year’s income on.
It was a lead crystal philter, a bottle just about right for storing a double-container of fine rum or brandy, and it sparkled beautifully in the light cast by the gaslamps. The witch reached in and lifted it carefully, marvelling at the solid weight of the thing as it rested in her palm.
And there, sunk into the bottom of the crystal bottle, was a thumb-sized red gemstone.
It hadn’t been easy to acquire this, but thankfully she still had contacts with the Railrunners. Even with that in, the thing had cost a premium, and she wasn’t surprised; there was pretty much no innocent reason to possess something like this. Doubtless if she’d come across it in someone else’s home, she would have assumed at once that they were of a particular persuasion. The blood-sucking sort.
So it had been expensive to get this through the sorts of channels she could be sure wouldn’t come back to bite her in the ass. It wasn’t financially ruinous, especially not with the Coven’s stipend covering many of the costs of running Sharp’s End, but she certainly hoped she wasn’t going to have to pay these kinds of commissions every day. Or every year, for that matter.
But that was the easy part.
The witch removed an ancient leather-bound manual from the shelf behind Ge- behind her desk, and laid it carefully on top of the wooden crate. Die Biologie der Tiere, the cover proclaimed in great, blocky insets. Once, the words had been dyed a rich red, to match the dragonshard in the bottle below, but they had faded over the decades to something closer to pink.
“According to Professor Achim, Das Blut einer Kreatur besteht zu acht Prozent des Tier.” she stumbled a bit, for she read Gelerian better than she spoke it, “And most animals go into shock at 30% blood loss. All die at 40%.”
Kitty yawned, looking a bit uncomfortable with this line of discussion. That’s what made him such a good assistant- he was always willing to keep the researcher grounded.
Imogen flipped through a few more pages, her lips moving silently as she tried to work through some of the more unfamiliar terms. “Obviously I haven’t a proper scale–and I don’t think the academy would fancy an inquiry–but the hydra’s form is certainly a few thousand kilograms. After all, it carried the boulder pretty well. Let’s err on the side of caution and call it five thousand.” She paused. “Well, I think that’s an undercount. It’s certainly heavier than an elephant.”
But it was better to be wrong in one way than the other, here, and frankly the witch wasn’t at all sure of most of her calculations.
“So we’ll put that at… what, seventy gallons of blood?. So safe extraction… maybe ten.”
That was workable, but not ideal. The promise she’d made was enough blood ‘to drown a battalion’, which was, in the best tradition of such payments, a completely subjective matter. You could drown in a teaspoon of any liquid, if you did it right. Still, she wasn’t looking to make an enemy of… whatever that thing in the Void was. When you had a debt, it was best to pay it properly.
“The hydra has extraordinary regenerative abilities.” she told Kitty, “But there are two problems. First, the energies of the gallstone focus on the flesh, which is built to channel them. Wounds close, limbs regrow, but I’m not sure that blood is replenished much faster than any other creature.” The book was useless for this, unfortunately. Although Professor Achim had written a chapter on hydras, he had never actually had the opportunity to dissect and experiment on one.
“The other problem is metabolism. Hydra eat big game to build their strength very slowly over time. Even if I bought a herd of cattle, I’d be limited by the digestive cycle.”
Unfortunately, by this time her assistant had gone to sleep. It wasn’t that Kitty didn’t understand her words; he was a very intelligent beast. It was simply that the big cat had no particular interest in the science of biology. Well, who could blame him? She’d fallen asleep more than once while trying to get through Die Biologie der Tiere, as several pages now lightly stained with drool could evidence.
“But fear not. As ever, the answer to my problems lies with religion.”
“I really don’t know why I agreed to do this.” Lt. Tilman complained as he watched Imogen bustle about the greatroom, loading up suitcases. She was still disguised as a human woman, with travel dress and the sunhat she’d come to love.
“Because you truly care for me, deep down.” the witch responded, “Because it’s the duty of any higher-ranking officer to see to the welfare of their juniors. Because a few weeks of vacation on a tropical island you’ve always wanted to visit is infinitely better than whatever shit you’d be doing otherwise.”
“Ah. Right.”
The witch finished her preparations and hefted her bags easily in her left hand, causing Tilman to raise an eyebrow. Animus was not particularly popular among her fellows, and she doubted he realized it could work like that. Well, whatever. Things were about to get weirder still, so far as he was concerned.
Imogen raised her right hand and rapped smartly upon the doors leading deeper into the manor, tapping three times.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
She felt a distant rush as a power she barely understood answered her request, Slipspace twisting and reorienting as aether poured through it, reshaping and folding things. Not that it was immediately apparent to the eye, but her sixth sense, her map of Slipspace, was roiling.
“That can’t be it.” the Lieutenant protested, “No invocation? I know you love the rhyming couplets.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Til. It just works.”
As if to illustrate, Imogen reached down and turned the knob, opening the door to reveal the tunnel of shimmering light beyond where Ailos had reached out and established a tunnel to itself. Tilman squinted into it, looking a bit disturbed.
“Well, come along. I promise you won’t get stuck partway through or anything like that.”
Lieutenant Tilman gave Imogen an annoyed look, but he complied. A moment later, both witches were surrounded by the swirling dimensional meniscus of Traversion, though no aether passed from Imogen through the Cardinal Rune.
She had no real explanation for this state of affairs. Some spirit within Dawn Peak must have some access to her mind, which was disturbing… but then again, all it ever did was provide her with doors on demand, so how could she complain? As a witch, perhaps she should be looking into the matter with more urgency, but it seemed like something was forever coming up.
They walked in silence through the path of light, even though neither of them had to spend any concentration on the spell. Both were fully familiar with travel through the Slipspace, as any Sunsinger would be; the Railrunners really were just that prevalent throughout their work. Still, it never quite felt wholly right. A little bit at the back of the mind insisted, again and again, that there was something desperately unsafe about the whole place.
After all, it would take just one step out into the void beyond to be lost forever.
But this day was not the day either of them would be lost to the void. Instead, after some interminable journey, the two witches stepped out of the terrible white space and into a worn marble shrine. There were no lights within the old building, but it was bright anyway; sunlight poured through the window arches at the top of the walls from every direction, illuminating the carvings and frescos left by the long-vanished cult of Ysandre.
Despite the light, the building was cool and quiet, and the witches took a moment to rest on some of the dilapidated stone benches. By the time they looked back towards the portal from whence they came, it had vanished, the power flowing out of the mountain having vanished away.
After a few minutes had passed, Tilman got back to his feet. “Refresh my memory on what you need me to do, here?”
“You’ve got the easy job.” the other witch responded, “I’ve got a magic bottle in this bag here- all you need to do is cut open a vein, collect the blood, and keep it flowing.”
“And you’re going to do this as a giant snake.”
“Right again!” Imogen said brightly, “More blood that way. We’ll do it up near the top of Dawn Peak, but a little ways off the trial, so we don’t disturb anyone’s pilgrimage. I figure three times is the charm- we do the bleed, send you off to visit the Temple up north, and you come back once a week to do it again. I brought some books to read while here.”
“Can giant snakes read?”
“...” the witch hadn’t really considered that, “If not, it’ll get a bit boring.”
Lieutenant Tilman sighed at this, but it wasn’t really a dealbreaker for him. He opened the bag she had indicated and pulled out the bottle, grunting with surprise at the weight of it. He peered inside, giving the sanguinyte a dubious glance.
“It’s hard for me to believe that this is really the best way to handle this.” he said, “But I’ll do what I can to keep you from bleeding out, for fellowship’s sake.”
“Thanks, Lieutenant. I mean it. We’ll give it a shot tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Tilman peered out the window, “It’s still daylight now. Why wait?”
“Well, I need to spend the night turning into a snake.”
The next day, Imogen was a big snake.
It had been almost two years since she’d hunted the hydra in the far reaches of northern Karnor, and it had proven to be an absolutely invaluable totem. With its regenerative skin, she’d shed the metallic scales required to forge Uncertain Death. With its size and strength, she had devised the chimeric beetle form which had carried the radioactive stone across the wilds of Southern Ecith. With its Gallstone, she’d stored up sufficient vital essence to survive months of fatal drain from the Aether Creep.
But to date, she’d found no situation which was actively improved by becoming a gigantic serpent. The transformation itself was draining, of course, but worse yet was how distinctly limiting the body’s capabilities were. Hydra limbs were so stubby as to be useless for most things, and so her facility with weapons meant nothing. It had powerful, fast jaws, but ultimately it failed to leverage its own enormous bulk like other sorts of large fauna like elephants or dinosaurs could.
It did, however, have one definite upside- it was really big.
Imogen’s version of the huge serpent was wider than a horse and long enough to swallow a merchant caravan. The totem had been a northern hydra, which were white-scaled and larger than their southern swamp cousins, but her scales were iridescent, a little tribute towards her natural form’s bloodline. Altogether, she thought she made for a fairly convincing beast of myth, though the totem was far from the absurd sizes of some dragons and primals she’d known.
She had located a wide, flat area, partway up Dawn Peak and safely away from the pilgrim’s road up from the valley, so that it was unlikely anyone would stumble upon her and panic. There, she curled up over various deposits of unrefined dragonshard, letting the light bounce off her scales from above and below at the same time. It was invigorating- she just hoped it would be invigorating enough.
“Damn.” a voice came from the corner of her senses, and she ponderously turned her serpentine head until she could just see Lt. Tilman, who was eyeing her up and down.
“That you, Imogen?” She nodded, slowly, unfamiliar muscles waving her head up and down. “Well damn, you’re bigger than I’d pictured.”
Tilman approached cautiously. Even knowing about all this in advance, you couldn’t just ignore the part of your brain which didn’t much like approaching a monster of such scale. Slowly, he hefted the bottle, so she could see it.
“We ready to start? You’re not going to roll over on me when I make the cut, are you?”
The snake shook her head as best she could, but it wasn’t a very natural movement for a hydra to do. Still, the other witch took her meaning well enough. She didn’t even feel him as he set up, running his hand along her scales, pulling at them to search for veins beneath the skin.
“Well, let’s begin. We’ll start with twenty liters, like we discussed. Okay? Three… two…-”
And then pain erupted at her side, and all of her concentration was given to forcing herself to stay still.
“Mrrwl.” Kitty concurred, in a concerned tone of voice.
Imogen turned away from the shadowy cat, lounging on his box against the wall of her office and returned her attention to the box sitting there. It was a wooden crate, packed with straw–clean straw, too, high quality, nothing mildewy or wilted–and smelling like fresh-cut grass. And there, in the middle of the package, was the container she’d spent a year’s income on.
It was a lead crystal philter, a bottle just about right for storing a double-container of fine rum or brandy, and it sparkled beautifully in the light cast by the gaslamps. The witch reached in and lifted it carefully, marvelling at the solid weight of the thing as it rested in her palm.
And there, sunk into the bottom of the crystal bottle, was a thumb-sized red gemstone.
It hadn’t been easy to acquire this, but thankfully she still had contacts with the Railrunners. Even with that in, the thing had cost a premium, and she wasn’t surprised; there was pretty much no innocent reason to possess something like this. Doubtless if she’d come across it in someone else’s home, she would have assumed at once that they were of a particular persuasion. The blood-sucking sort.
So it had been expensive to get this through the sorts of channels she could be sure wouldn’t come back to bite her in the ass. It wasn’t financially ruinous, especially not with the Coven’s stipend covering many of the costs of running Sharp’s End, but she certainly hoped she wasn’t going to have to pay these kinds of commissions every day. Or every year, for that matter.
But that was the easy part.
The witch removed an ancient leather-bound manual from the shelf behind Ge- behind her desk, and laid it carefully on top of the wooden crate. Die Biologie der Tiere, the cover proclaimed in great, blocky insets. Once, the words had been dyed a rich red, to match the dragonshard in the bottle below, but they had faded over the decades to something closer to pink.
“According to Professor Achim, Das Blut einer Kreatur besteht zu acht Prozent des Tier.” she stumbled a bit, for she read Gelerian better than she spoke it, “And most animals go into shock at 30% blood loss. All die at 40%.”
Kitty yawned, looking a bit uncomfortable with this line of discussion. That’s what made him such a good assistant- he was always willing to keep the researcher grounded.
Imogen flipped through a few more pages, her lips moving silently as she tried to work through some of the more unfamiliar terms. “Obviously I haven’t a proper scale–and I don’t think the academy would fancy an inquiry–but the hydra’s form is certainly a few thousand kilograms. After all, it carried the boulder pretty well. Let’s err on the side of caution and call it five thousand.” She paused. “Well, I think that’s an undercount. It’s certainly heavier than an elephant.”
But it was better to be wrong in one way than the other, here, and frankly the witch wasn’t at all sure of most of her calculations.
“So we’ll put that at… what, seventy gallons of blood?. So safe extraction… maybe ten.”
That was workable, but not ideal. The promise she’d made was enough blood ‘to drown a battalion’, which was, in the best tradition of such payments, a completely subjective matter. You could drown in a teaspoon of any liquid, if you did it right. Still, she wasn’t looking to make an enemy of… whatever that thing in the Void was. When you had a debt, it was best to pay it properly.
“The hydra has extraordinary regenerative abilities.” she told Kitty, “But there are two problems. First, the energies of the gallstone focus on the flesh, which is built to channel them. Wounds close, limbs regrow, but I’m not sure that blood is replenished much faster than any other creature.” The book was useless for this, unfortunately. Although Professor Achim had written a chapter on hydras, he had never actually had the opportunity to dissect and experiment on one.
“The other problem is metabolism. Hydra eat big game to build their strength very slowly over time. Even if I bought a herd of cattle, I’d be limited by the digestive cycle.”
Unfortunately, by this time her assistant had gone to sleep. It wasn’t that Kitty didn’t understand her words; he was a very intelligent beast. It was simply that the big cat had no particular interest in the science of biology. Well, who could blame him? She’d fallen asleep more than once while trying to get through Die Biologie der Tiere, as several pages now lightly stained with drool could evidence.
“But fear not. As ever, the answer to my problems lies with religion.”
~~~
“I really don’t know why I agreed to do this.” Lt. Tilman complained as he watched Imogen bustle about the greatroom, loading up suitcases. She was still disguised as a human woman, with travel dress and the sunhat she’d come to love.
“Because you truly care for me, deep down.” the witch responded, “Because it’s the duty of any higher-ranking officer to see to the welfare of their juniors. Because a few weeks of vacation on a tropical island you’ve always wanted to visit is infinitely better than whatever shit you’d be doing otherwise.”
“Ah. Right.”
The witch finished her preparations and hefted her bags easily in her left hand, causing Tilman to raise an eyebrow. Animus was not particularly popular among her fellows, and she doubted he realized it could work like that. Well, whatever. Things were about to get weirder still, so far as he was concerned.
Imogen raised her right hand and rapped smartly upon the doors leading deeper into the manor, tapping three times.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
She felt a distant rush as a power she barely understood answered her request, Slipspace twisting and reorienting as aether poured through it, reshaping and folding things. Not that it was immediately apparent to the eye, but her sixth sense, her map of Slipspace, was roiling.
“That can’t be it.” the Lieutenant protested, “No invocation? I know you love the rhyming couplets.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Til. It just works.”
As if to illustrate, Imogen reached down and turned the knob, opening the door to reveal the tunnel of shimmering light beyond where Ailos had reached out and established a tunnel to itself. Tilman squinted into it, looking a bit disturbed.
“Well, come along. I promise you won’t get stuck partway through or anything like that.”
Lieutenant Tilman gave Imogen an annoyed look, but he complied. A moment later, both witches were surrounded by the swirling dimensional meniscus of Traversion, though no aether passed from Imogen through the Cardinal Rune.
She had no real explanation for this state of affairs. Some spirit within Dawn Peak must have some access to her mind, which was disturbing… but then again, all it ever did was provide her with doors on demand, so how could she complain? As a witch, perhaps she should be looking into the matter with more urgency, but it seemed like something was forever coming up.
They walked in silence through the path of light, even though neither of them had to spend any concentration on the spell. Both were fully familiar with travel through the Slipspace, as any Sunsinger would be; the Railrunners really were just that prevalent throughout their work. Still, it never quite felt wholly right. A little bit at the back of the mind insisted, again and again, that there was something desperately unsafe about the whole place.
After all, it would take just one step out into the void beyond to be lost forever.
But this day was not the day either of them would be lost to the void. Instead, after some interminable journey, the two witches stepped out of the terrible white space and into a worn marble shrine. There were no lights within the old building, but it was bright anyway; sunlight poured through the window arches at the top of the walls from every direction, illuminating the carvings and frescos left by the long-vanished cult of Ysandre.
Despite the light, the building was cool and quiet, and the witches took a moment to rest on some of the dilapidated stone benches. By the time they looked back towards the portal from whence they came, it had vanished, the power flowing out of the mountain having vanished away.
After a few minutes had passed, Tilman got back to his feet. “Refresh my memory on what you need me to do, here?”
“You’ve got the easy job.” the other witch responded, “I’ve got a magic bottle in this bag here- all you need to do is cut open a vein, collect the blood, and keep it flowing.”
“And you’re going to do this as a giant snake.”
“Right again!” Imogen said brightly, “More blood that way. We’ll do it up near the top of Dawn Peak, but a little ways off the trial, so we don’t disturb anyone’s pilgrimage. I figure three times is the charm- we do the bleed, send you off to visit the Temple up north, and you come back once a week to do it again. I brought some books to read while here.”
“Can giant snakes read?”
“...” the witch hadn’t really considered that, “If not, it’ll get a bit boring.”
Lieutenant Tilman sighed at this, but it wasn’t really a dealbreaker for him. He opened the bag she had indicated and pulled out the bottle, grunting with surprise at the weight of it. He peered inside, giving the sanguinyte a dubious glance.
“It’s hard for me to believe that this is really the best way to handle this.” he said, “But I’ll do what I can to keep you from bleeding out, for fellowship’s sake.”
“Thanks, Lieutenant. I mean it. We’ll give it a shot tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Tilman peered out the window, “It’s still daylight now. Why wait?”
“Well, I need to spend the night turning into a snake.”
~~~
The next day, Imogen was a big snake.
It had been almost two years since she’d hunted the hydra in the far reaches of northern Karnor, and it had proven to be an absolutely invaluable totem. With its regenerative skin, she’d shed the metallic scales required to forge Uncertain Death. With its size and strength, she had devised the chimeric beetle form which had carried the radioactive stone across the wilds of Southern Ecith. With its Gallstone, she’d stored up sufficient vital essence to survive months of fatal drain from the Aether Creep.
But to date, she’d found no situation which was actively improved by becoming a gigantic serpent. The transformation itself was draining, of course, but worse yet was how distinctly limiting the body’s capabilities were. Hydra limbs were so stubby as to be useless for most things, and so her facility with weapons meant nothing. It had powerful, fast jaws, but ultimately it failed to leverage its own enormous bulk like other sorts of large fauna like elephants or dinosaurs could.
It did, however, have one definite upside- it was really big.
Imogen’s version of the huge serpent was wider than a horse and long enough to swallow a merchant caravan. The totem had been a northern hydra, which were white-scaled and larger than their southern swamp cousins, but her scales were iridescent, a little tribute towards her natural form’s bloodline. Altogether, she thought she made for a fairly convincing beast of myth, though the totem was far from the absurd sizes of some dragons and primals she’d known.
She had located a wide, flat area, partway up Dawn Peak and safely away from the pilgrim’s road up from the valley, so that it was unlikely anyone would stumble upon her and panic. There, she curled up over various deposits of unrefined dragonshard, letting the light bounce off her scales from above and below at the same time. It was invigorating- she just hoped it would be invigorating enough.
“Damn.” a voice came from the corner of her senses, and she ponderously turned her serpentine head until she could just see Lt. Tilman, who was eyeing her up and down.
“That you, Imogen?” She nodded, slowly, unfamiliar muscles waving her head up and down. “Well damn, you’re bigger than I’d pictured.”
Tilman approached cautiously. Even knowing about all this in advance, you couldn’t just ignore the part of your brain which didn’t much like approaching a monster of such scale. Slowly, he hefted the bottle, so she could see it.
“We ready to start? You’re not going to roll over on me when I make the cut, are you?”
The snake shook her head as best she could, but it wasn’t a very natural movement for a hydra to do. Still, the other witch took her meaning well enough. She didn’t even feel him as he set up, running his hand along her scales, pulling at them to search for veins beneath the skin.
“Well, let’s begin. We’ll start with twenty liters, like we discussed. Okay? Three… two…-”
And then pain erupted at her side, and all of her concentration was given to forcing herself to stay still.