NOVEL NEXT 81 – Left Arm of the Engine Beast
It was even visible, a hair-thin silver conduit on her arm taking on a barely-visible glow. Being so shallow, the cut resealed almost seamlessly when she let go, leaving behind just a lingering pain and a black seam.
“The trait listing says it consumes either Aether or Vitae, though I can’t quite remember what the second one is…” she said as they all watched. “What is Vitae?”
“It’s a semi-transparent pinkish essentia composed of uh…” Makhus squinted, drinking some citronade as he thought. “Seven parts Viriditas and two parts Rubedo, I think? When you drink a Viriditas elixir your body turns it into Vitae. Huge pain to work with in its pure form, denatures so quickly it’s almost impossible to stabilize without specialized equipment, but Vitae-based elixirs are factors of magnitude more effective and faster-acting than Viriditas-based ones.”
The four of them finished breakfast and gathered in the basement. Sigmund was particularly insistent on being there, stating that he was the only one with official field medic training and therefore the most qualified to cut open Zel’s stump, though he made no attempt to hide his curiosity.
Makhus allowed his pride to shine through by remarking in a snooty tone on the way down, “And yet it is I who can induce instant coagulation.”
Makhus had Zel sit on a mostly-clear table, to her right a tall flask stand with a corked flask, containing light-green liquid. Below it was another cork attached to a spool of transparent tubing, tipped with a thick needle. To her left was a shallow glass tub shallowly filled by what smelled like alcohol, and behind it were lined up flasks. Some contained the familiar emerald-green of pure Viriditas, others with translucent greens, yellows, oranges, and off-reds, and in the middle, a larger bottle bearing different seals from the others and half-filled with something luminescent green.
There was a ritual circle drawn around the tub in silver-gleaming chalk with a squiggly swirling pattern of symbols closing in on the tub, going over its edges, and into its center, connecting to a long oval outline.
He asked her to pull her severed arm out of Fog Storage and strip it of the harness, which was achieved through a concerted effort between Zel, Zef, and Sig, at which point the limb was lowered into the tub while Makhus continued pouring alchemical liquids in until it was submerged. The liquid somehow took on a very pale lilac shade, with threads of blackness seeping out of Zel’s arm.
“I didn’t know we had a reserve of that stuff,” Sig nodded towards the tub
“It’s just a composite disinfectant and regenerative solution, easy to make when you’ve got all the base materials on hand…” Makhus said, turning the arm over in the solution with his bare hands. One could see small cut scars and minor chemical burns fading from his skin moment by moment. “I wager it’s the necessity of a Philosopher’s Heart and the liquid Aether for the Greater Rejuvenation Elixir that makes it so expensive, plus storage and transport difficulty. Stuff’s so unstable that the first batch just evaporated after ten minutes.”
While Makhus talked, Sigmund dug around in the lab looking for medical equipment, returning with a leather case of basic tools and a tourniquet. Before he could even ask for it, Zefaris had already pulled a medical kit out of Fog Storage and put it on the table. A few minutes passed of Sigmund disinfecting the tools and Makhus cautiously looking at Zel’s severed arm as it soaked in the tub while occasionally making a gesture that somehow made the ritual circle pulse with light and caused the blackness in the tub to bubble up in ribbons of foul-stinking Nigredo. It was a reassuringly small amount of the substance, however.
“Right, I think it’s ready. Hasn’t even entered rigor mortis yet thanks to the time dilation,” Makhus said, looking at Sig, who nodded in turn, binding the tourniquet around Zel’s stump, then taking up a long scalpel in one hand and a pair of long pliers in the other.
“Say when it starts to hurt,” he said as he started shaving away the thick outer layer of the stump bit by bit, and it felt like a whole lot of nothing. Like it was just a centimeter-thick layer of dead skin. She eventually began to feel it, with flows of blood spurting out onto the table from holes in the artificial scab, only to be staunched when Zelsys drew in a breath of Fog and burned it to fuel Eternal Beast.
Sig glanced at her, and at a simple nod, he sped up his grizzly work in shaving off the rest of the artificial scab. It took a very noticeable amount of Fog to impel her blood into forming a sealed layer of blood over the exposed stump, but once it was in place, maintaining it became far easier - perhaps helped by the fact that at this point in the procedure she transitioned to Engine Breathing.
“Get ready to pull off the tourniquet,” Sig told Zef, to which she nodded sharply and quickly walked behind the table, reaching over to get her fingers around the leather cord’s buckle.
It was then that Sig stepped away as Makhus hefted the limb out of the tub - sending liquid splashing everywhere in the process - and pressed it to Zel’s stump. Zelsys funneled every bit of Fog in her lungs into the single-minded intention of mending the limb back where it belonged. A mighty river of arcane energy flowed through her body to reach the site, and the thin layer of semi-coagulated blood became a mass of whipping tendrils that grabbed her severed arm and yanked it out of Makhus’s grip with such force that it put even him off-balance.
Searing pain shot through her as bone scraped against bone, soon followed by a deluge of ache and violent pinprick sensations when Zefaris unbuckled the tourniquet and the sensation of her left arm rapidly returned.
