“Ho-hooo,” Gizmo looked at the antler with a fair bit of respect, “I wish you had the mouth to tell me how you got your hands on this, my much-grown friend.” Indeed, the whole expedition had turned the slime into an even larger blob.

Moving around in the house began to become a bit awkward, as the environment clearly wasn’t fashioned for a creature that was wide rather than tall. It really was a shame that changing its shape was such a headache. Apexus was, for the many forms it could imitate, not actually a shapeshifter. While it could stretch out parts of it and even modify its measurements to a large degree, maintaining such things was like running around with a turned neck and a clenched jaw. Immediately unpleasant - long-term painful.

Still, the slime turned into a cone-shaped thing, its newly acquired cat eyes sitting at the front of the head-like bulge at the top, and watched Gizmo do his work. “This is as well,” the old man waved around the ivy, “I am not sure how the summer god will react to having a minor vampire sacrificed to it. Maybe he will laugh. Anyway, let’s see…”

A process that Apexus watched with great impatience unfolded. It started well, with Gizmo simply putting the stone to the east, the bark to the west, the plant to the south and the antler to the north, with Aclysia’s mummy at the centre. He used a small compass for that endeavour. Then he began, with much ‘mhm’ and ‘hum’ to adjust their positions ever so slightly.

“In any ritual, you need a circle that represents the space,” the old man explained, just to fill the silence and to give the urgently staring slime some explanation. “The smaller the ritual, the smaller the representation needs to be. For most rituals, you draw something on the floor and place items as representations of the room’s furniture or whatever direct surroundings you have. This allows the called souls from the root dimensions to create a hole in the dimensions. Like a pore in a leaf, in many ways.”

The slime got about half of that, magic mumbo-jumbo really wasn’t its cup of tea. Gizmo continued nonetheless. “Since we want to call to a divine being, we best put up the biggest circle we can. Thankfully, we are in a leaf created by the god we are wishing to contact, thus, this whole world is our basic circle,” the old man checked the compass and slightly shifted the stone position further north and closer to the mummy. The whole thing was very asymmetrical. “So the things on this table represent the four large landmarks of this dimension. The mountain to the east, the coral continent to the north, the white wood city to the west and the great forest, which we are inside of, to the south. We just got to place these things relative to our own position in this world and then…” the golden writing on the mummy began to glow, “…then the rest should take care of itself.”

The materials on the table disintegrated into particles of black and white, slowly swirling upwards in a vortex that gathered in a single point. From the chin upwards, they constructed a face. It had empty eyes and was more of a mask without a wearer, white with black lines on the left side and symmetrically inverted on the other. When it spoke, it lips open and closed as if it was merely emulating speech, the movements not matching up with the syllables that came out.

“Apotho, brave of you to call on me,” spoke a voice, reverberating with quiet authority. The kind that didn’t need to be raised or bolstered by gestures or rituals. It was just natural that the speaker was mighty, almost almighty in some ways, and that everyone who heard him understood.

“Please,” Gizmo glanced over to Apexus, “I no longer go by that name.”

“Yet I see that man inside you still,” the 33rd god ridiculed. “The coward and the sinner. Only in your last breaths will you change, old foe. Alas, I think I understand the situation and you are a mere pawn in it, by your own design. What piece will you be exchanged for, I wonder?”

“As you say,” the old man lowered his head respectfully and gestured at both the slime at his side and the mummy on the table. “I have been giving aid to this creature in an effort to restore what it lost. Will you be so kind to grant it to it?”

“Of all the things you would use their essences for, it is selflessness,” Hashahin’s projection shook its disembodied face, “I approve, yet this turn of fates is leaving me speechless. What a bitter victory for me. However, I will grant this one its desire, for the sins of the mentor should not be the sins of the student. May you find peace, Gizella-Morha, greedy one.”

The mask developed a series of symmetrical, grey cracks around a vertical split right down the separation between the black and the white half. Finer and finer became the cracks until the gaps between them were so small that it almost seemed entirely grey. Then, it shattered into thousands of ephemeral pieces. Like a hail of arrows, they bombarded the lying mummy, copying the outline of the cracks onto it. Ultimately, the cloth that enveloped Aclysia’s body met that same fate and disintegrated into nothing.

Into view came the metal fairy in her old glory. Her pale lids were closed, but her sleeping face was beautiful, from the surprisingly fine nose to the light pink’s lips, open only a small gap. Her long white hair was as orderly combed backwards as always, leaving her short, pointy ears visible. Wearing a shoulderless one-piece dress, that span over her average sized chest over her flat stomach to her wide-hips, her slightly awkward angle revealed white undergarments. Legs and feet were covered in a layer of black, running from just below shoulder and hip to the tips of fingers and toes.

Her chest raised as she drew breath and Aclysia’s upper body rose from the table. Raising her arms, moth-like wings of white and black fluttering testily, she stretched. “I awaken once more,” she said and opened her eyes, the brilliant green shining out of her otherwise so colour neutral appearance like a polished emerald out of a field of pebbles, “an unexpected, but not unwelcome, turn of events, I admit. You have grown quite a lot, awaka-“

That was as far as Aclysia got before Apexus suddenly splat on top of her and gave her the deepest, most sudden slime-hug anybody had ever experienced. The metal fairy simply let it happen, with the patience of a person who just had gone through a very long and nice nap. In the first place, this wasn’t new for her and it was like getting a full-body massage.

After a few minutes of this, however, Aclysia was too curious to just stay inside. She moved until she could gently pop her head out of the slime’s membrane. “My god is a cryptic one, he told me to be wary of you, but not why or who you are,” the metal fairy stated towards Gizmo. “Nevertheless, you have my thanks for recovering my vessel. It would have taken years past the death of this awakener for me to regenerate normally.”

“You should be wary of me,” Gizmo shifted with visible discomfort. “Besides that, Apexus, may I suggest you stay with me a while longer?” Aclysia tilted her head for a moment before she realized that her awakener was being addressed with a name. “Just long enough for you to learn how to communicate with people who aren’t me. Basic writing and some more listening.”

“My awakener has a name?” Aclysia blinked rapidly. The vulture-deer-snake construct looked at her and nodded. “And he understands my words? It seems a lot of things have happened whilst I was gone.”

“I have been teaching it for a few weeks now…it is not particularly skilled at writing,” Gizmo admitted and the slime, finally tired of holding its cone shape, collapsed into its usual elliptic form. “With time, he may become passable. So, what say you, Apexus?”

The slime nodded. It liked the old man and writing sounded like it would be necessary so it may communicate back to Aclysia’s words. Although it wasn’t quite sure how it would do so without paper.

“Splendid!” the old man seemed very happy. “Then let this old man eat some herbs and then we may start. There are many things to learn about this Omniverse of ours.”