NOVEL NEXT 69. Compound 36-A-12
Excerpt from assorted notes attributed to an unknown Miluran alchemist.
“Compound A-1: subject suffered severe chemical burns. Too damaged to be reused. Disposed.
Compound A-2: subject succumbed to slumber from which they did not reawaken. Disposed.
Compound A-3-5: subjects all had memory and mobility issues. Wiped and released.
Compound A-6: melted through its phial, not used on subjects.
Compound A-7a: …”
As vibrant smoke the colour of an oil-slick rainbow filled the room, Yenna’s fight-or-flight instinct kicked itself into gear. Adrenaline flooded her body, her mind prepared clean, segmented partitions of packaged concentration—yet, Yenna could not achieve mental acceleration. The feeling was akin to having one foot tangled in some momentarily unseen tripping hazard, not enough to cause total collapse but enough of a problem that it demanded attention. As her eyes darted around, attempting to catch a glimpse of a lurking shadow in the smoke, her mind queried that sticking point.
Confused alerts came in, all hands reporting different tales. Fatigue, from lack of meaningful rest, assaulted both her body and her thoughts. Confusion and stress eroded at the fundamentals of her techniques, nudging the fear-response hijack mechanism out of place with their urgency. A gripping feeling in her chest demanded the entirety of her attention—Yenna couldn’t breathe!
With extreme effort, Yenna pursed her lips and finished the last few fragments of her held spell-circle, defining it into another burst of wind. This one she aimed at the ground, forcing the flow of air to push the smoke away in an expanding ring around her. Mulvari was not revealed by the maneuver, likely somewhere in the back half of the chamber—with the sloshing, disturbed magic in the room compounding against the odd oil-slick clouds, the man was as well hidden to Yenna’s magical senses as he was to her mundane ones. At the very least, she had room to breathe. Conjured air was better than nothing, though it wouldn’t be long until the smoke settled itself back across the room once more.
Yenna began to edge towards the door. As quickly as she could, Yenna readied another spell-circle to react to whatever Mulvari’s next trick was as she attempted to shake off the warnings and complaints of her body. The mage agreed with her sore muscles and sleep-deprived mind—she was not built for endurance.
“I’ve been meaning to try out this compound.” A muffled voice emerged from an indistinct point on the other side of the room, as though spoken through a pipe. “Compound 36-A-12, an airborne sedative and contact-based hallucinogenic agent. Would you mind terribly if I named it after you?”
The man’s voice was a sickening mockery—it echoed strangely through the room, not quite anywhere in particular. Still, he has to be over there, over that side of the room!
With the tip of her dagger Yenna scribbled the final symbols into her spell and confirmed her choice. A spread of conjured stone projectiles, to either knock him out or force him to flee. Forming from invisible motes of dust, a halo of perfectly spherical stone chunks appeared to orbit Yenna’s hand. A single metaphysical flick of will would send them flying forward, but hesitation grabbed her hand. It took a moment for all the diasporate parts of her mind to come together and explain why she couldn’t fire blindly into the fog—what if I hit Jiin, or Demvya’s containment tank?
What would even happen, Yenna wondered, if I were to shatter the container? Would it free Demvya in a shower of alchemical agent and divine retribution? Or would it leave her without a vessel, subject to the roiling waves of magic that crash across every surface of the room?
That thought held her metaphorical trigger finger tightly in place. It was her fault that the spirit had been taken out of her safe, if dull home there in that hidden grove above the valley of her former people. She was not going to risk the life of a sentient creature, the life of a friend, on the roll of the dice. There were too many factors, no chance to study the bizarre contraption. But perhaps, Yenna grimaced, I can rely on my overly talkative host for clues.
“Mulvari, I have a spell prepared right now to stop you. It is fast, repeatable, not reliant on my being conscious to harm you.” The man had proven that he could detect Yenna’s lies, so she opted not to. “However, I do not want to harm my friends by accident. Tell me, what happens if I break the glass tube?”
The oil-slick fog was getting dangerously close to enveloping Yenna again, the heavy compound already lapping around her hooves. It felt unpleasantly cold where it touched her flesh, leaving behind a feeling of pins and needles.
“Ah, then your friend may die. Or perhaps the spirit will be freed, if she has adapted to her new form already. What kind of spell do you have?”
New form? Yenna had more questions now, but didn’t like her odds of hearing a satisfying answer.
“One that will break your bones if you do not stop this.” The fog was starting to reach halfway up Yenna’s legs, tendrils floating down towards her from the collapsing wall of smoke ahead of her. The mage frowned—it wouldn’t be too hard to blow the smoke away again, but it would necessitate dropping her projectiles. Right now, Yenna had to assume that Mulvari was only remaining in hiding due to that threat.
“Do you have any alchemical training, witch? I could simply tell you the reagents and ingredients of this particular compound, to allow you to synthesise a counter-active agent, at least if so.” Mulvari was… to Yenna’s left? Her right? No, the door and wall was to her right—she had nearly forgotten about the door, distracted by everything else.
“I’m not a witch,” Yenna grumbled. “And yes. Tell me.”
“Hm-hm!” A disgusting giggle, all innocent and child-like. “It’s getting hard to think, isn’t it? You should put down that spell, before you accidentally hurt someone. Protect yourself from the compound—oh, but, how am I to name it after you if I don’t know your name?”
There was a feeling, a presence—Mulvari drawing closer, though his voice came out as indistinct as the haze drawing up to Yenna’s waist. He was right about the spell, as much as she didn’t want to admit it. Drop the spell, and Mulvari could dive right in—keep holding it, and the cloud of alchemical compound would get her instead.
Wait, can he not see me? Yenna realised that Mulvari hadn’t moved closer until they started speaking, that he had never once spoken to the specifics of Yenna’s spell. If she could simply cast a spell fast enough, then she could transition straight back to holding up her projectile defense—but her whole body felt lethargic, gripped tight by gravity. Yenna could feel her legs wobbling under her own weight, a sure sign the poisonous vapour was doing its vile work.
“Perhaps I’ll call it Witch’s Nightmare,” Mulvari continued. Yenna whirled to release her stone spell in the direction of his voice, but her arm felt as heavy as lead. The man’s voice sounded so far away, disappearing into the distance—could there be a secret passage, somewhere near the back? Perhaps Mulvari was simply stalling, covering for his escape!
Yenna made her decision and dropped her spell. Closing her hand into a fist broke the circle, harmlessly dispersing the motive energies into ambient magic. The conjured stone projectiles clattered to the ground with odd muffled tak-tak-tak noises, echoing oddly—Yenna felt as though someone had stuffed her ears with wool. Moving as fast as her sluggish hands would allow, the mage altered an existing spell. Her kinetic barrier, designed to repulse blows by slowing them to a halt, currently did nothing to protect her from the slow-moving gas that soaked into her skin. With an infusion of Joyful wind, Yenna’s clothes began to ripple around her—red hair and blue robes billowing in magical wind.
It had the desired effect—the cloud of alchemical agent parted and retreated from her. However, it revealed a changed world. The rune-etched stone floor extended out further than Yenna remembered it, even as she stumbled forward. The walls and the roof all looked much further away, as though the room had expanded greatly within the mist. The door was so far away, barely visible in a haze of oil-rainbow mist, while Mulvari and his alchemical contraptions were nowhere to be seen.
This must be some illusion. Yenna’s eyes flicked back and forth, trying to catch the tell-tale signs of altered reality. The gas is affecting my mind, and Mulvari is using some magical tool to influence my perception. Is that even possible without the ability to personally use magic? Perhaps he has an ally, hidden in the mist?
Yenna poured her concentration into observing through her magical sight spell. The effect was thoroughly disorienting, the churning instability of the ambient magic leaving the spell with nothing but nonsense data, a psychedelic swirl that hurt to even look at. The mage wasn’t even sure if she was really seeing it properly. Mulvari had mentioned his alchemical compound was hallucinogenic—Yenna didn’t have the magical tools to cleanse herself of poisons or drugs any more than she did to heal wounds or fly through the air.
While considering what to do, Mulvari reappeared. Or, something resembling him—an impressionist painting of Mulvari formed from the mist itself stalked forward with arms outstretched, a walking smear of oil-paint threatening to grab with all-too-real claws. Yenna swiped at it with her knife on instinct, and the vision faded. Until she could trust her eyes, she had to assume anything approaching was real—better to slice at air than ignore a real threat.
Yenna concentrated on what she could tell was real. The feeling of her heart beating rapidly in her chest. The leaden weight of her limbs. The smooth metal of the dagger in her hand. Even the whipping winds that made it hard to breathe—the daft, drug-addled thought to dispel that annoyance was summarily discarded, put aside until such time as it could be proved that everything was fine. Yenna held fast to a small list of objectives—find Jiin and Demvya, stop Mulvari, escape this place. She would have put Valkh on that list, but right now she had to assume the murmuring woman was at least safer out in the corridor than in here amidst the mind-bending fog.
Another image approached Yenna, a stained-glass fractal towering in shades of green. Yenna nearly struck at it before she realised that she was the one approaching it, not the other way around. Her addled mind put together what she could recall of the room—this must be the tank of green fluid right by Jiin. When Yenna looked down, following the copper glint of wires through a world of haunted mist, it was all she could do not to scream.
Jiin was there, no longer the untouched sleeping figure Yenna had seen when she entered the room. Instead, she was the summation of Yenna’s deepest fears. No painted abstraction or hazy image, Jiin’s body—her corpse laid bare with all the care of a drunken butcher. What Mulvari had done was indescribable¹, an affront to all things good. Yenna held back a scream—or maybe she did scream, she wasn’t sure. She didn’t care. Emotions whirled around inside her like a storm, hideous dark-tinge hijacking the conduits of witchcraft as the colours of magic forcefully manifested themselves. Lightning as black as the depths of the night sky scorched at her arms as the winds surrounding her simply faded, too weak to go on. Yenna felt the power of the dark-tinge of Pride in its fullest—she was held firmly in the grips of Despair.
With the winds gone, the coloured fog bore down on Yenna with a vengeance. No cavity of wind-pressure held the gas from its natural desire to equalise, and the nightmare vision of Mulvari’s mutilation slipped into the mist. Yenna stumbled, her whole body wracked with the crackling of black lightning. As she fell, the mage reached out for a hand-hold both literal and figurative. Instead, she hit something hard and smooth face-first, found herself tangled in wires as she collapsed. Reality faded away once more, and Yenna was once again unconscious.
¹ - This is one of the few times Yenna abjectly refuses to record what she saw. All later explanations from the mage herself insist she couldn’t remember properly, though many commenters through the ages have held the belief that what she saw was bad enough to become a repressed traumatic memory.