The Homunculus Knight

Chapter 15: Ritual work

“Takezo of the Five Cuts, Sword-saint and sworn brother to Dragons stood alone against the Yokai and its traitor witch mistress. Armed with his two killing edges and armored by a warding pentacle, honorable Takezo faced the fiends on the red-stained fields of Azusa. As was his nature, the Sword-saint felled the Yokai with five strikes. Proving the truth known to all honorable masters of the cutting art; only those who can cut nothing can cut everything.” - Book of the Sword-saints.

:: A field in the Southern Marches::

Spring rain beat down on the Eastern Marches, turning fields into fens and streams into swamps. Beneath this icy downpour, a cohort of corpses and soon-to-be corpses trudged along a muddy road. Grinners and Screamers, united in slavery, shambled after Aloysius Wolfgang as he searched for a place to continue his research. The Black Fly sat in a small buggy drawn by two skeletal horses; his bodyguard, Cleanor the Lamia, was curled up in the seat next to him.

Staring out at the drenched plains around them, Wolfgang fiddled with his glasses, peering into the Aether. He was looking for a place soaked in suffering; somewhere, the plague inflicted a particularly ugly tragedy. The ritual gifted to him by Lady Takiya called for such a location, but so did most Necromantic rites. Ritual magic worked best in places Aetherically sympathetic to the spells being used. Which for Necromancy usually meant locations of death and decay.

As he scanned the fields, Wolfgang found what he was looking for. Reaching down to his horses’ reins, he sent a spark of intent along the rune-inscribed leather, giving the Undead equines new orders. Glancing behind him, he checked the hundred and twenty-five research subjects trudging after the buggy. He’d hoped some of the Screamers survived to their destination, but in this weather, it was unlikely. Ten of the plagued had already died from exposure, now raised up and shackled to Wolfgang’s will before they even cooled.

Glancing at his bodyguard, who slept beneath a thick blanket, Wolfgang said. “We are close.”

Cleanor’s slitted brown eyes snapped open, and she let out a hissing sigh. “I hope someone tries to kill you tonight, Little Fly.”

Watching the undead horses as they pulled the buggy down a muddy path and toward their destination, Wolfgang asked. “Why?”

Pulling her head fully out from beneath the blanket, the Lamia said. “Otherwise, I’d have no reason to be out in this cold. Why do humans insist on nesting in such horrid locations? Don’t your kind descend from jungle apes? Surely, a nice rainforest would be better than this miserable place.”

Ignoring the insult, Wolfgang remarked. “Warmer clothes would help.”

Cleanor scoffed and pushed her blanket aside, revealing her practically naked form. An ornately woven brassiere, loincloth, and heavy jewelry were all that covered her. Gesturing at herself, the Lamia snapped. “The skin half of me actually stays warmer! It's the scales that really suffer! I can’t exactly wriggle my way into some massive stocking, can I?”

Deciding further conversation on this front would be pointless, Wolfgang pointed at a pile of rubble barely visible in the heavy rain. “That’s our destination.”

Crossing her arms and peering out at the ruins, Cleanor said. “No heat, no light, but a lot of death magic.”

Wolfgang nodded as the buggy trundled closer to their destination. Cleanor’s ability to sense the Aetheric currents and body heat was another reason her kind were prized as bodyguards. While no Lamia could compare to a trained Magi or Priest, the ‘bestial intuition’ they possessed was more than enough to sense most magical dangers.

Now, just a stone’s throw away, the identity of the stained location became clear to Wolfgang. Scattered stone and splintered timbers marked the remains of a destroyed farmhouse. Pulling himself from the buggy, Wolfgang stepped into the pouring rain and went to examine his prize. The small horde of Grinners and Screamers shuffled towards the farmhouse as well, the usually energetic monsters’ kept sedate by Wolfgang’s tight control.

Stepping onto the surviving foundation, Wolfgang examined the destroyed farmhouse and understood what happened there. Hunks of incongruous masonry were scattered about, the type a catapult or trebuchet might use as ammunition. Moving over to a splintered beam, Wolfgang used a little blood to kick the water-logged wood, rolling it a few steps. A broken Ghoul stared up at him with burst eyes, its jaw pointlessly opening and shutting. Looking at the sky, Wolfgang said. “Skorg Trollbreaker used this place as target practice.”

Cleanor had slipped out of the buggy and slithered closer, an oilskin wrapped around her upper body. “The idiot you bought the Wyverns from?”

Nodding, Wolfgang elaborated. “When he realized he couldn’t sell them as mounts, Skorg started looking for other uses for his investment. Raining down rocks like this was one of his ideas. Not a completely foolish notion, just underwhelming.”

Skorg was an up-and-coming Strigoi of the Clawbrother Knights, a prodigy at breaking monsters to his will but otherwise not particularly bright. When the Duke called his banners, Skorg leaped at the call, eager to prove his strength to the court and his fellows of the ranging order. He’d found three great broods of Wyvern’s and broke them to his will. Bringing them to the first muster in an honestly impressive showing. But the old adage ‘only a Wyrm can control Wyrmspawn’ proved true, and the enslaved Wyverns proved erratic to the point of being useless.

After two prospective Wyvern riders fell to their true deaths and another was eaten, Skorg became desperate to part with his monstrous thralls. It took Wolfgang an annoying amount of politicking and several favors to acquire the surviving Wyverns. The wyrm-spawn were teetering on the brink of full mental collapse by the time Wolfgang took possession of them, and only Skorg’s skill got the Wyverns to carry out Wolfgang’s orders. Still, they succeeded, spreading their cargo and diseased flesh all over Vindabon.

With a thought, Wolfgang ordered his servants to start clearing away rubble. Under his command, the Ghouls and Screamers worked quickly, hauling away debris with ragged hands and stiff muscles. By the time a seven-meter by seven-meter circle was exposed, Wolfgang was suffering a minor headache. He lacked experience controlling this many Undead, and his mind suffered as unused muscles might after exercise. But the task was done, and now Wolfgang could move on to the interesting work.

Clambering onto a pile of rubble to get a better view, Wolfgang started his experiment. Twenty-one Ghouls stepped into the cleared circle and locked hands, forming their own ring of dead flesh. Thirty more Ghouls formed a second ring, then forty-eight more created a third. Of the remaining Ghouls, Wolfgang ordered ten to retrieve the luggage strapped to the buggy’s rear and continue preparations. Some of the worker Ghouls dipped their rotting fingers in jars of cremation ash and started marking the circle Ghouls; others unsheathed strange eastern swords, especially forged for this event, and a single Screamer stepped into the center of the three circles, ducking under linked arms and kneeling between the corpses.

Peering into the Aether, Wolfgang started collecting strands of power, weaving currents together in a cyclone of mortal echos. Whoever lived on this farm died in it, turned by the plague, and crushed beneath dropped stones. A slow march towards dreadful death interrupted by casual violent cruelty, a fitting atmosphere for the ritual.

Holding his arms up like he was reciting a benediction, Wolfgang started the rite. Speaking in the ghost tongue of Takiya’s homeland, he started to recite story-spells as the elder Durugo instructed him to. He wove tales of despair, destruction, death, and desolation, infusing his words with magic as his Ghouls followed his orders. As the first story ended, one of the circle Ghouls was decapitated, its head struck from its shoulders by another Ghoul wielding an eastern sword. The severed head was placed before the kneeling Screamer, staring up at it with undead eyes. By the time the Ghoul’s body was dragged away, the second story finished, and another Ghoul was decapitated and its head set by the Screamer.

Four hours later, all ninety-nine Ghouls were piled nearby, their severed heads placed in rings around the kneeling Sceamer. As the last story rolled from Wolfgang’s lips, the Screamer unsheathed a one-sided shortsword and plunged the blade into its gut. As sick blood and rotting guts spilled out onto the rain-soaked ground, the cyclone growing in the Aether shrunk, collapsing under its own weight into a singular point. So dense and so putrid, the Aetheric current was visible to mundane eyes, a sphere of greasy darkness coming into view.

Wolfgang watched with sickly fascination as the sphere of darkness transformed into an alabaster human skull. With every second, the skull swelled, growing from human-sized to ogre, then giant. Once it was the size of the buggy Wolfgang rode to this location, the skull opened its mouth and let a stream of black ectoplasm dribble out onto the severed heads below it. The Screamer corpse and decapitated heads were swallowed by the shadows. Reality bent as the offerings sank into solid ground, leaving an oily mirror of darkness.

Wolfgang gazed down into the pool of rotten ectoplasm and saw the giant skull’s reflection. The mirror depicted a monumental skeleton attached to the skull, a colossal Rattler submerged up to its waist in reflective darkness. The giant skull shut its mouth with a snap, and its mirror arms reached to either side of the pool and braced the skeleton. The crunch of rubble and wood caught Wolfgang’s attention; he looked up from the reflection and saw parts of the floor were cracked, the parts the reflected skeleton was putting its arms on.

The old stone of the farmhouse protested as the giant skeleton pulled itself from the portal. Wolfgang’s eyes flicked up and down as the Undead horror extracted itself. Outside its reflection, the monster was simply a colossal skull floating high in the air, but its true body could be seen in the mirror. As the monster stepped from the pool, Wolfgang watched soggy timber and piled corpses burst under colossal invisible feet. Even if the monster’s body couldn’t be seen, it could be felt.

Staring up at the monster, Aloyisus Wolfgang spoke the Undead’s name and completed the spell. “Gashadokuro.”

The Gasha’s jaw started to open and shut in a rhythmic clacking as its eyes came alight with green witch-fire. Staring into those eyes, Wolfgang felt a connection between him and Rattler snap into being. Sending his order through the link, Wolfgang watched as the fifteen-meter-tall semi-invisible monsters stomped over the sodden ground toward a nearby tree. Hands that weren’t there gripped the old pine and yanked it from the soil. As Wolfgang directed, the Gasha threw the pine like a javelin, sending the entire tree flying into the rainy night.

Cleanor, who’d been watching this from the buggy, having returned after the twentieth story, slithered free and said. “Well… that is certainly impressive.”

Staring up at the baleful Gashadokuro, Wolfgang allowed himself the tiniest smile. “It’s a good start.”

:: Tenth Temple of Vindabon ::

The third day of Isabelle’s possession was proving to be dullest for Natalie. There were no arguments, explosions, armed clashes, or awkward romantic discussions. The third day proved to be a time of methodical research and experimentation. Hour after hour, Isabelle poured over alchemical texts, making minute adjustments to her concoctions. At first, Natalie actually enjoyed the peace and quiet inherent to boredom. But after four hours of Isabelle repeating the same basic methods repeatedly, an emotion other than boredom was rising in Natalie: worry.

+ Are you stuck? +

Isabelle hesitated, her index finger tracing a line in a dense text on bane brewing. + I’m working with limited resources, and it's slowing me down. +

Natalie knew what Isabelle meant by ‘resources.’ Glynn still refused to let Isabelle conduct humanoid trials, and the elder Vampire was utterly incensed by this fact. She’d been making do with a cage of rats and vials of blood, but as Isabelle loudly complained, this was no substitute. The Hierophant was unmoved by any of Isabelle’s arguments; his moral compass and the three rats Isabelle cooked from the inside out were all the justification he needed to limit her options.

But at this point, even Natalie was starting to wonder if Glynn was being overly cautious. In a little over forty-eight hours, Isabelle had already developed multiple methods of treating and preventing the pestilence. She’d just not found the silver (or, more accurately, iron) spear-tip to fully cure the plague. If Isabelle was finally reaching the limit of what theory and animal subjects could teach, Natalie thought it was time for something new.

Natalie’s eyes, controlled by Isabelle, flicked to Glynn, sitting in one corner of the laboratory. The Hierophant poured over a scroll detailing the origin of the Buboes, looking to find any connection between the accursed plague and the Fae. As Keeper of the Anchorites and, by extension, the archives, Glynn was a talented researcher, a skill Isabelle wasn’t arrogant enough to dismiss. She’d set the quarter-elf on several obscure but possibly useful trails.

Opening her borrowed mouth, Isabelle said. “I need to find more volunteers. Without better test subjects and more samples, I might take weeks to break through this deadbolt.”

Glynn looked up from the scroll and said. “How did the most recent rat trials go?”

Isabelle clicked her tongue in annoyance and gestured at the cage containing a quartet of ill but still living rodents. “Nine and Ten are alive but still sick; the treatment purged the Gallarwyll and slowed the infection but didn’t stop it. Eleven and Twelve are still infected but show no worsening or improvement.”

Getting up from his chair, Glynn watched Rat Eleven and unconsciously rubbed his left arm. He’d undergone the Faerie extraction to render himself immune, and his forearm carried a fresh wound as proof. “Can you replicate this?”

Tapping her fingers on the top of the rat cage, Isabelle said. “Yes and no, Eleven and Twelve were infected and treated in concert. I fear if I continue to experiment with rats, I might fine-tune the Bane for rodent biology instead of humanoid.”

Natalie could follow this exchange fully and was pleasantly surprised by that fact. An unexpected side-effect of events was Natalie’s growing medical knowledge. She was learning terms and concepts at a breakneck speed, her own curiosity and some mental bleed from Isabelle facilitating things. Everything Natalie learned showed how much more there was to the world, and it was humbling. Especially since Natalie got the impression much of Isabelle’s knowledge was unknown outside the most talented Magi and scholars. Infinite Hells, Natalie suspected some things Isabelle knew weren’t even written down anywhere outside Aunt Seeress’s library.

Glynn started to open his mouth to answer when the laboratory door opened to reveal a haggard-looking Cole. Stinking of cleansing chemicals, the Paladin held a fresh bandage over one arm. He’d been called to help with an outbreak of Screamers and clearly hadn’t come through it unscathed.

Eyes sunken with physical and emotional exhaustion, Cole held up his bandaged wrist and said. “I got bit, and something interesting happened.”

Isabelle and, by extension, Natalie rushed over to Cole. Quickly removing the bandage, Isabelle examined the bite. It was right on the wrist bones, and it was a small miracle Cole hadn’t broken anything.

As Isabelle checked his injury and prepared a healing spell, she said. “You aren’t reinfected, but that’s to be expected considering our earlier experiments. So what happened?”

Wincing as Isabelle used a bottle of disinfectant and a skin-growth cantrip, Cole said. “The outbreak was in Walltown; some poor sick fool helped prepare a meal for a group of refugees and turned close to six dozen of them into Screamers. I went with some plague wardens and helped keep quarantine until a Seer arrived with a sleep spell. A couple of us got bit, and I started cleansing people.”

Flexing his wrist, checking the newly grown skin, Cole received a swat on his arm from Isabelle. “Don’t do that; you know how easy it is to tear fresh skin.”

Gesturing with his uninjured arm, Cole pointed to his bite. “Some of the plague wardens were among the bitten, but not all of them were infected.”

That caught everyone's attention. Isabelle’s eyes widened, and a smile spread across her face. Turning to Glynn, she said. “I need to examine them!”

Cole pulled a crumpled note out of a pocket and handed it to Isabelle. It was a list of the plague wardens at the outbreak, documenting their names, professions, and infected status. Looking at it, Isabelle deciphered Cole’s scribbled notes in the margins. Writing with a bitten wrist didn’t lend itself to an easily understood script, but Isabelle was used to terrible academic scrawls and could understand what Cole recorded.

“Grief… they’ve all lost someone.”

No stranger to this kind of work, Cole found a common factor between those uninfected. Hunting the Undead was more often a matter of investigation than strength of arms; not that good steel didn’t hurt. So Cole spoke with the plague wardens and discovered what they shared. The first batch of plague deaths was hitting the city, claiming the old, the young, the sick, and the poor. Every warden not reinfected counted a loved one among that grim tally.

Quickly taking the note and returning to her equipment, Isabelle read and reread it in a motion Natalie once would have found nauseating before her extended period of possession. Isabelle’s smile slowly turned to a frown, and she muttered. “This doesn’t make sense. All my experiments and research show rage should be the infused emotion, not grief. The Gallarwylls can’t feed on rage, and the treated rats are showing signs of improvement. What is going on here? A plague like this should only have one proper Bane, not this level of variation!”

Information flicked through Isabelle’s mind as she assessed events and tried to understand the nature of this new phenomenon. Natalie caught fragments of this deluge, and two in particular stuck out to her: A familiar hillock and an unfamiliar cage filled with dead rats. She knew the hillock, so the fact that memory stuck out didn’t seem strange; the rats, on the other hand…

Tentatively unsure of what she was doing, Natalie poked at the memory, reaching partially into it. If her earlier experience with entering memories was like diving headfirst, this was more akin to sticking in a hand and groping around. Still, Natalie got results as flashes of recollection danced through her mind.

* Isabelle dissecting a rat with black gunk oozing from every orifice *

* A twitchy rodent dropped into a cage of its fellows; they shy away from their shaky cousin *

* Rows of vials, each containing a specific type of death. The rows form a shelf; the shelf forms a wall, and the wall forms a collection. *

Pulling herself free from the vision, Natalie couldn’t understand why the memory stood out to her. It just seemed another example of Isabelle’s strange experiments.

+ What are you doing? +

Startled, Natalie quickly tried to compose herself. + Something stuck out to me in your thoughts, and I touched the memory. +

Isabelle was silent for a moment before asking. + What memory? And did you find something? +

Natalie shrugged internally and decided honesty was the best course. + Something to do with rats and vials of pestilence. +

Waiting with bated breath, Natalie hoped Isabelle didn’t think to focus on this. Natalie just decided to keep her ability to dive deeper into Isabelle’s memories secret and not to use it unnecessarily, so failing both goals so spectacularly would truly sting.

The memory of the rats surged up again, and Natalie caught more of its content. Isabelle was working on creating a plague capable of targeting or sparing certain populations. Something Natalie guessed was the bedrock of how the current pestilence avoided Thralls. Deciding not to think what reason Isabelle might have to be concocting a plague of that sort, Natalie had a burst of intuition. The two memories she’d connected to were both key elements to two different projects; bits of both were stolen to create the Screaming Plague. Despite dealing with magical diseases, the schemes were radically different. Each a product of different periods of Isabelle’s unlife, only united by their genre or horror and creator. Natalie's flare of intuitive reasoning started to burn brighter as she considered a possibility.

+ Hey… What if the two aspects of the plague aren’t as connected as you thought? +

Isabelle’s attention refocused on Natalie, and she asked. + What do you mean? +

+ Well, you did research with Faeries and research with plague immunity, but you never connected them, right? +

Natalie was playing dumb while trying to be smart, which was proving difficult. Isabelle did connect the Faerie and plagues, but not the immunity research; at least, Natalie didn’t think so. + Maybe this ‘usurper’ could not connect the research completely, and this isn’t as advanced as you think. Didn’t you just say a pestilence has only a single true bane? So what if the faerie and plague aspects aren’t as interwoven as you’d thought? +

Without a word, Isabelle approached her cage of fresh rats and grabbed a squealing rodent. She quickly injected it with plague fluid and shoved the irate rodent into Glynn’s face. “Cleanse this for me.”

Raising an eyebrow but still cooperating as the rat was shoved closer to his face, Glynn let holy power pass over the rodent. With a punch of will, Isabelle knocked the rat out and set it nearby. Glynn snapped. “You could have done that before brandishing the thing at me.”

Ignoring him, Isabelle went over to one of the control rodents, a hissing spitting Screamer rat caked in blood, both its own and its fellows. Peering into the Aether, Isabelle saw a tiny malformed Gallarwyll clinging to the rat, its shrunken form a testament to the weak animal soul it anchored to.

Knocking this rodent out as well, Isabelle plucked it from its cage and turned to Glynn again. “Can you cast an iron dirge ward?”

Thankful she hadn’t left the insane rat awake, Glynn nodded yes. Isabelle pointed at the rodent. “Create one around the rat.”

Glynn complied, locking the rat’s soul and the parasite attached to it inside a metaphysical cage. Once that was done, Isabelle said. “Don’t drop it until I say so.” then snapped the Screamer Rat’s neck.

Whirling on Cole, Isabelle glared at him and hissed. “Do not interfere; I know what I’m doing.”

Both Cole and Natalie were stunned by the venom in her voice. From her unusual vantage, Natalie quickly realized the words weren’t meant for Cole. Isabelle wasn’t addressing the Paladin; she was speaking to the God who could see through him.

Shutting her eyes, Isabelle hissed words that hurt the ears to hear as a stream of black fog billowed from her mouth and into the rat. Glynn and Cole both reacted to the Necromancy and the impossibility of it working inside a Temple of Master Time. Shakily, the undead rat spasmed to life, and Isabelle went over to the clean rat cage and plucked out another rodent victim. Slamming her will against the control rat’s mind, Isabelle brought the two rats together and forced them to stare into each other’s eyes.

“Glynn, drop the ward now,” Isabelle said as she wove a bridge between the two animal minds under her control. After a moment of hesitating, Glynn complied, and the iron dirge ward faded. Everyone in the room watched in the Aether as the suddenly freed Gallarwyll fled its dead host to the prepared soul. Utterly enslaved by Isabelle’s magic, the living rat let the parasite worm into its soul and take up residence.

Isabelle let the undead rat fall to the floor, where it scampered over to a waste bin, its broken neck flopping as it did. Holding up the mind-broken, Faerie-infected rat, Isabelle smiled manically. “Getting a rat with the plague but not a Faerie was easy. Getting a rat with a Faerie but not the plague proved a bit more difficult.”

Using the empty-minded rat like a pointer, Isabelle gestured to Cole. “I’m sorry for my harsh language; I needed to do a little necromancy and needed to let the Tenth know quickly.”

Turning the rat towards Glynn, she continued. “I’ve been approaching this incorrectly. I’d assumed the plague-smith was clever enough to interweave both elements of the pestilence perfectly. Doing so would make finding a bane more difficult, and that is what I would have done. But my enemy isn’t as smart as I am, and my pilfered notes can only do so much. My blockage was caused by trying to find a single bane when two were required!”

Looking down at the rat, Isabelle said. “I’m going to need more of these; I hope you can cast more wards.”

Eight hours and thirty rats later, Isabelle Gens Silva stared down at two vials sitting on her desk. The first was a mixture of the rage-infused Sting byproduct, iron salt, and artificial tears. The second was Cole’s blood taken while he was focused on loss, mixed with ground-up rat bones and healing mold extract. Vial one would force the Gallarwyls to detach from a host and then hopefully protect them from re-infestation. Vial two would stop the plague from spreading to new tissue and dramatically boost the body's ability to purge the infection. Banes for the Screamer plague, created from Isabelle’s genius, Natalie’s intuition, and Cole’s observations.

Five tired rats sat in a cage nearby, enjoying the lump of cheese awarded to them for surviving Isabelle’s experiments. All five were infected and dosed with the two vials at different points. One right after infection, two were cleansed and then dosed after three hours, and the last two were allowed to become Screamers before treatment. All five were now in good shape, the plague steadily being purged from their bodies as they nibbled on cave cheese.

While gesturing at the rats, Isabelle snapped at Glynn, who stood beside the cage examining the rodents. “Now, can we move on to proper subjects?”

Elvish beauty was cracked by mortal worries as Glynn frowned down at the rats. He’d been rattled by Master Time allowing Isabelle to practice necromancy inside the Temple. Isabelle hadn’t even been certain the Tenth would listen to her request, but the God's quick response was tantamount to tacit approval of Isabelle’s work. Which, while she’d never admit it, rattled her as well.

Jerkily, Glynn nodded. “Yes, I think it's time.”

Picking up both vials, Isabelle turned to Cole, who was slumped in a nearby chair. Yet again, he was low on blood, his ichor siphoned for Isabelle’s magical and medical use. Blinking up at her, he grunted and got to his feet. “To the Screamer ward?”

Isabelle nodded and turned towards the door; they needed to see if the cure truly worked before she could tackle the headache of mass production. The two Banes were difficult to produce, relying on rare ingredients and fairly complicated alchemy. Hopefully, the blood of anyone immune to the plague would work for the second Bane; Isabelle was loathed to ask Cole for more of his blood. It was one thing to feed on him a little and take medical samples; it was another to bleed him dry to help an entire nation.

Quickly retreating from that painful thought, Isabelle left the laboratory, Glynn and Cole flanking her. Yara was still sleeping off blood loss and general exhaustion by Natalie’s order. Thralls generally could produce more blood than normal, a side effect of the Sting, but it wasn’t comparable to Cole’s atypical biology.

It didn’t take the group long to reach the Screamer ward, and Isabelle proactively shut off her sense of smell before they entered the rancid prison. They easily passed the tripled guard, Glynn's presence smoothing over any issues before they could arise. Still, as the reinforced doors clattered shut behind Isabelle, she heard one of the templars mutter. “I hope the crazy bitch doesn’t summon up another jagging Faerie.”

A mental push from Natalie got Isabelle to drop the idea of turning back and forcing the soldier to shit himself. The gentle but firm prod of her student brought up another concern to Isabelle. Something odd was happening with Natalie; the linking of their minds was producing unusual results. Isabelle was confident she would have reached the conclusion Natalie pushed her towards eventually, but the younger Vampire’s prodding helped her make the intuitive leap. It seemed Natalie found a connection Isabelle’s unconscious mind created and pulled it to the forefront before Isabelle could; something about that was deeply concerning.

A haggard-looking plague warden met the group and guided them past lines of cells packed with drugged Screamers. Mass administration of soporifics seemed to be the method the Temple used to keep the feral infected under control. Still, as they delved deeper into the ward, Isabelle noticed dozens of glazed eyes following their progress and twitchy limbs occasionally jerking towards them.

The plague warden guide spoke then. “We are quickly running out of room; the newest patients are confined in a storage closet.”

Glynn wanted Isabelle to test the cure on the freshest Screamers, hoping their marginally better health would handle the Bane better. They entered the storage closet and found six Screamers tied up and chained to the floor. These fresh monsters weren’t yet drugged, snapping and wailing at their approach. With a thought, Isabelle ordered them to stop their struggle and approached the infected. With deft hands and basic telekinesis, Isabelle filled syringes with the Banes and prepared them for use. Leaning down over one Screamer, Isabelle got it to expose its neck and then injected her creation.

Licking her thumb and using her saliva to shut the injection wounds, Isabelle stepped back and let her control of the Screamer fall. Instantly, it started to thrash and snap at the humanoids in the room. Isabelle, Cole, Glynn, and two wardens watched with bated breath as the Screamer twitched and wailed. For a long, perilous moment, there was no change, and just when Isabelle felt the first hints of doubt wriggle free, the screams stopped.

Suddenly, like a candle being doused, the Screamer fell silent and stared at the floor with glassy eyes. The twitches and shakes of the infected steadily slowed, ending after perhaps a minute. Then, in a voice shredded by screaming, the infected woman said. “H-he-help me.”

Glynn and the wardens rushed to her side, examining her condition. Isabelle watched as Cole’s eyes glowed with silver light, and a slow frost-kissed exhale left his lungs. “The Gallarwyll is gone, and the infection is already receding.”

Smiling with all the warmth of Cole’s god, Isabelle addressed her distant foe. “I win.”