The person on the table struggles weakly at the bindings, her face partially covered by a gag. Her nose and eyes are red, as though she’d been crying before my arrival.

The person who dragged me onto the table walks over to the gagged woman. All I can see is his back, garbed in a pair of khaki trousers and a black argyle sweater. I’m not sure what I expected him to be wearing–perhaps something similar to the black robe I always spawned onto the dinghy with.

I notice a small cart next to him filled with trays carrying assorted metal instruments. He unhesitatingly reaches out for a scalpel, holding it in his fist like a dagger. I’ve never used a scalpel before, but it’s obvious that his grip is unconventional. He leans forward over the table, blocking the woman from my line of sight.

I hear a series of muffled squeals and wet slicing noises. I’ve witnessed, experienced, and perpetrated no small number of violent acts while in the loop, but I’m glad I don’t have to watch the woman’s butchering.

When the man steps away a few minutes later, I see that the woman’s bare upper torso is covered in familiar-looking inscriptions. They weep profusely, trailing rivulets of blood across her legs and pooling on the ground, where I now realize a rubber tray has been placed. The cuts don’t look like anything a scalpel would produce, their edges jagged and deep, as though the intent wasn’t so much to carve as to torture.

The woman’s eyes are manic, nearly rolling back in her skull. The man returns after half a minute, now wearing a black smock over his sweater and a pair of plastic spectacles. I catch the briefest glimpse of his face before he resumes his gruesome task, though it’s not enough to recognize whether the man is a stranger...or someone I know.

Time suddenly jumps forward. The man is gone, leaving the woman’s figure unobstructed. Inscriptions cover nearly every inch of her skin, giving the impression that she’s been painstakingly flayed. There are some thinner lines traced across her body as well, these ones looking like they might actually be the work of a normal scalpel.

With a jolt, the head of the vessel rolls and lifts off the table. As the vessel, I feel myself walking over to the still-breathing–though unconscious–woman like an overgrown toddler, my legs shaking beneath me and causing my vision to lurch forward. I stand over her, then cock my head.

Without any warning, my sight lunges forward. I feel a jaw I didn’t even know I had unhinge; sharp, jagged, splintery teeth dig into tender flesh. It takes me a solid second to comprehend what’s happening: the wooden vessel is eating the woman.

Y’jeni, I’d really like to skip viscerally devouring the now-reawakened, terrified woman. I have a general sense of how to cut off my connection to the vessel, to end the vision; however, I’m wary of doing so without seeing the vision through its entirety. It’s possible the vessel’s perspective will allow me to see the face of the necromancer.

She’s not real, I remind myself as the vessel rips at her intestines.

A few minutes later, after only blood and bits of gore remain, I hear a sharp clapping sound come from behind. The vessel freezes in place, its head sagging slightly. I can see part of the vessel’s body, noting that the inscriptions from the woman have somehow reappeared on its surface.

“What a mess you’ve made...” the necromancer’s voice calls out. As though following an unspoken command, the vessel’s torso bends at the waist, its head squarely facing the floor. “Let’s clean you up a bit.”

The leftovers of the woman rise off the vessel as though freed from gravity, and I hear them dripping down across the room. The vessel straightens a bit, and a piece of flowy, black cloth drapes over its face. After a brief period of tugging, the cloth is pulled down and away; I see that the vessel is now dressed in the black robe it wore at the Bridoc Yacht Club.

The man clears his throat; I can hear him stepping back and flipping through the pages of a tome.

“Yz’vor, maru gorem, shanadel’ora’we.”

I can barely understand a few of the words; the man is reciting an archaic dialect of Swellish. It’s something like, ‘Something, mage moment death, binding something something find.’ What I understand only serves to confirm that the man is articulating ritual verses.

“Gor ren nais, gor ren sum. Skoda’nel no’we.”

The next line I almost entirely understand: ‘Man is born in a moment, and man dies in a moment. Something not missed.’

The man walks in front of me, though the slack head of the vessel is angled such that I can only see the point of his clean-shaven chin.

“Devesta ti erterra ashar’le.”

‘Save to earth our ashes.’ Perhaps, bury our ashes?

“Vara skai’sum’we!”

‘Go forth and raise death!’

At the utterance of the last syllable, the vessel’s head creaks forward.

Look up! I shout mentally. Up!

As though reluctantly heeding my words, its head hinges up, giving me the first clear view of the man’s face.

I feel oddly relieved to discover that the man is completely foreign to me. He has pale skin, black hair, and black eyes flecked with green. He appears to be middle aged, though has aged well, still bearing the figure of someone far younger.

If I saw him on the street dressed in the very same pair of trousers and sweater, I'd have no reason to suspect he practiced necromancy. Just who is this man, and why did he create the vessel? Why is he targeting my family?

The man lets out a soft sigh and removes his blood-speckled glasses.

"Yes, go forth. Let's see what mischief you cause."

He begins to clean off the glasses, wiping them on a patterned handkerchief.

As the vessel turns toward the exit, the necromancer falls out of view. The vessel’s motions have become more fluid since devouring the woman, though it still struggles with using its fingers to open the door. It eventually makes its way into the hall; after following the familiar floral carpet around and down the corridor, it stops to open another door.

The vessel walks outside, closing the door behind it and ducking into the shadows covering most of the street.

I nearly have a heart attack.

It's the upper, sun-kissed boulevard of the thrice-damned Flower District...forever the root of my problems.

—

The vision ends, the world seeming to distort into a swirl of color before my perspective returns to my body. I hold my head and take in a deep breath, wincing at the throb of a headache. The vessel is standing next to me, its face devoid of features, its demeanor harmless; it’s unsettling to know that not only can its eyeless facade see, but that its smooth wood hides a mouth...

I take a few moments to orient myself and think through what I should do next.

First, I try to understand just what the vision was. I frown and run my hand over the vessel, trying to get a feel for the energy radiating out from the oval embedded in the hollow of its neck. It feels tainted, distressed; it’s almost what I’d imagine a soul gem to feel like, if made from the energy of a creature tortured to death. I’ve killed practically everything imaginable to make soul gems at this point, and my gems never had the same wretched taint.

I pluck at the energy swirling slowly around the oval, pulling out little wisps of gray-black. Removed from the oval, they begin to smolder and fizz away into nothingness.

I’ve never tortured anything to death, I think coolly. But then I pause, wondering at the truth of that statement. What qualifies as torturing something to death? I’ve never flayed anything like the necromancer in the vision, but...there were times, in the first loop layer...

I scowl. Perhaps it’s something aside from the method of death that’s affected the taint of the energy. Maybe it’s the fact that the woman was eaten alive as part of the ritual?

I tighten my grip around the stone, trying to angle my nails under the groove where it lies embedded. I wither the wood around it, giving myself enough purchase to yank the stone free. As I do so, the vessel lurches forward and hangs limp, its head nearly touching the ground.

The stone fits comfortably in my hand, about the size of a typical woman’s brooch. I spend the next half hour meditating with the stone in hand, moving death energy between it and myself.

Suddenly, a thought comes unbidden into my mind: “Help...”

I freeze, my eyes opening. I concentrate energy over the stone, eyes narrowed in concentration.

“Kill...me...”

My nostrils flare. Whatever consciousness the stone possesses, it doesn’t seem to be aware of its current state. It’s as though it’s stuck in the moment of its death, begging for–yet never granted–release.

I have the odd sensation that the stone is leaking something oily onto my hand. I drop it on instinct and it falls onto the grass. A moment later, it trembles before flying to the vessel and latching onto the neck where it had rested before.

This is some crazy shit, I think bitterly to myself. All of the more ritualistic pursuits are a bit odd, from elementalism to enchanting to necromancy. Glossy programmatics is itself a form of ritualistic inscription, though is easily separated into three parts: design, compilation, and inscription. My degree just teaches the former, modern technology enabling compilation of human-readable commands into indecipherable script.

I spend the rest of the evening both surveilling Zebede Dunai’s estate and inspecting the carvings on the wooden vessel. I decide to leave the stone alone for now, instead directing my attention toward understanding the inscriptions causing the shadowy obfuscation effect. I ruminate on blocks of similar script, passing Death energy along the inscription conduits and trying to sense deviations. I figure that if two bits of scrawl look similar, with minor differences, I might be able to start making sense of what function they perform.

However, when Germaine and Julia emerge from the party a little before 2 am, I haven’t made much progress. Even though the obfuscation effect is disabled, I grow distracted after staring too long at the inscriptions, images of their hewing onto the woman’s skin bubbling to the surface of my thoughts.

“What happened to the vessel?” Aunt Julia asks.

“It’s no longer so shadowy,” Germaine observes.

“I accidentally deactivated it. I ran my hand over it and pressed some button or switch.”

“Did it only deactivate the exterior?” Aunt Julia wonders.

I nod. “I depleted the interior cavity of all Death energy earlier; it’s just the exterior that appears to be cut off from the power."

Germaine comes up to the vessel, seemingly no longer hesitant now that the shadows are gone. She runs her fingers along a jagged, illegible scrawl of text over the vessel’s shoulder.

“What do you think?”

She turns toward me. “I wonder how they got these kinds of grooves in the wood. It would be pretty difficult to carve this; you can see here how the wood grain is actually deformed in a few areas.”

I open my mouth to speak, then pause; it might be better to explain back at the hotel. “It’s complicated.”

Aunt Julia narrows her eyes and comes forward, inspecting the vessel. “These inscriptions don’t look like they were carved in wood.”

“That’s because they weren’t.” I take a deep breath. “They were transferred onto the wood from the skin of a person.”

Aunt Julia recoils. “These inscriptions were carved on...a person?”

I nod.

“How do you know?”

“While investigating the vessel, I entered into a vision, taking on its perspective for a time. Within, I saw a necromancer conduct a ritual to empower it with a human sacrifice.”

“Did you see the face of the necromancer?” Aunt Julia asks.

“I did, though I didn’t recognize him. I also saw that the place where the necromancer performed the ritual is in the Flower District.”

“That’s quite close to the wedding,” she observes.

Germaine's face lights up. “Isn’t that the place where that plague came from, in the first loop layer?”

“One and the same.”

Germaine sighs, rubbing at one of her eyes. “Looks like we’ll be up early tomorrow. We should see if we can find the necromancer’s place.”

“We?” I murmur, looking between her and Aunt Julia.

“We,” Aunt Julia repeats firmly. “Now let’s backtrack a bit; what did you mean by the plague starting in the Flower District?”

Germaine and I share a knowing look. I didn’t give Aunt Julia as detailed an explanation of the first loop layer.

“Let’s go back to the hotel first.”

“What are you going to do with this?” Germaine cradles the vessel’s head in her hand. I can almost imagine its jaws swallowing her unsuspecting arm.

“Couldn’t I just bring it to the balcony of our room directly?”

Germaine deflates. “...Sure.”

Aunt Julia chuckles, bringing the first bit of mirth to the conversation. “What were you expecting, that the three of us would have to explain why we’re bringing in a necromantic vessel through the hotel lobby?”

I can just barely see Germaine blush in the dark. “It’d be more fun that way! Think of all the gossip we’d start...”