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[Fool]

Leviathan Cross: Secrets Not Bled, A Stone Cannot Breathe

Iron, peter of salt, vitriol’s venus.

Qalqad render, mix with bithwort’s uterus.

Make into paste, binding mordant.

Shavings of a knife, ash from a pot, chalcant.

Six parts, six parts, two.

Do not make,

Into a brew.

—Excerpt of the Al-Khemia et Mysticka (956 A.E. print by Tyren and Sons Co.), required study of Academy meisters in the Royal Art; a common rhyme warding against brewment of the unholy substance of devil’s powder, recited by the guildam-seal-bearing grandmaster to the magistrate upon the steps of the Iron Bailid every Evening Star on the twenty-seventh day of the month of Our Lord since 510 A.E.

The Tunnel Rat Mageling - 5th of Mead’s Tap, Year 1125 A.E.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, thought the Rat, nerves a tad bit acid.

Eiden gathered his wits to speak; it was not an easy feat, no matter that he and the Exorcist held rapport. The tyranny of rank was carved into the Kedweni soul; even those without a mother knew it to be true. To transgress upon a decree made by those above one’s station, blatantly before them no less, a sentence of death.

Worse still were magickers; always a blue-blooded lot, higher in caste than most other nobility so long as they did not possess some magicking themselves.

“Sir,” Eiden said, the honorific foreign on his tongue, “you said there were things you couldn’t tell me. About the sorcery, and whatever else. But what can you tell me? I need some safe harbor in this magicking sea I’ve lost myself in.”

The Exorcist lay against his arms, looking out into the shining wine of the sea outside the window. Salt came with the licks of wind into the inn’s room, sharp in smell and soft against the skin.

“Not gonna bite ye. Calm your rump, Laddie.”

Fin let out a fit of air, aura deflating just a notch in sympathy. If anger roused the shroud of one’s subtle body into the equivalent of a startled badgermole, all hackles and hiss, then melancholy did the opposite. Placid; even as stillwater; sterile.

Sniffing at his mentor’s spirit further, Eiden felt a single, concentrated emotion hidden under the apparent skein of sadness. Like picking at a scab to the raw wound beneath, desolation bled from the depths of the Exorcist.

“I knew that ye’d get spooked at one point or another,” Phineas continued, fretful in tone. “I had hope, though, that ye wouldn’t.”

“That I wouldn’t.” He said under his breath before he returned to speak at a proper volume. It was a faint thing that Eiden would’ve never thought to be able to hear, at least not before now, with him having just started to cultivate spirit.

“But that were the beggar’s faith talking; not my better sense, that one. Don’t worry about offending me or stepping on any toes. Drop the honorifics, ‘sir’ this and ‘master’ that. I’ve had my fill of them, more than enough for five lifetimes. Speak with me as you have spoken with me since just now.”

The emotion that sprang from the earth of the Exorcist’s self like so much water had disappeared just as quickly as it came to be known. Not even the melancholy laced into his superficial spirit were present any longer, gone with the girding of his aura.

The control alone, of being able to bring his spirit to heel no different than houndmaster to his hound, was impressive. A blink and the Exorcist had made what was once the medium for his emotions into a veil for them.

Eiden could not resist; he exerted his will over his aura, spreading his sway along the channels carved into gross and subtle twain. With each beat of his heart, blood ephemera carried tendrils—nay, chains—of dominion throughout the spirit just beneath the waking world.

Once the bonds had saturated every morsel of flesh and every ounce of spiritual tissue, Eiden pulled. He wrung himself into the shape he had seen the Exorcist employ, into the stillwater that ran deep and unknowable.

It worked, if for but a handful of breaths before the mageling began to feel without air. The billowing vapor of his aura, petrified to mountain face that hid its core of unquarried stone.

‘There is no blood to be had from a stone. It cannot bleed its secrets’, the sorcery in his veins whispered, having come awake for just a single blink and returned to dormancy within once again. It had not been proper thought nor possessed his inner voice, yet the mageling understood the ken offered to him readily.

He knew without knowing that it was from himself and not another, that this wisdom’s origin was borne. Not some ghast, or sprite, or fairy. Beyond this, the Rat did not understand much more, especially not the entirety of the veiling he had copied from the Exorcist.

The auric technique had underlying machinations of which Eiden could only just barely grasp, but one thing was certain: this was not how a man’s spirit should behave.

‘A stone cannot either breathe,’ the mageling realized, a dull dread accompanying the thought.

It felt like death and dying. For a blink before Eiden let go of the technique, the world around him was weightless, time stretching along a momentous axis he could not comprehend. His sight was pulled between the opposite extremes of sharp relief, the edges of objects honed to the brittle, and obtuse blindness, shapes turned blurry and melting into one another’s forms like so much wax and seifar.

A leaf unmoored from the earth, floating on the wind and without self-recourse.

It felt like that accursed night all over again.

Quickly, as a wife hurriedly takes clothes off the line before the second omen of storm, Eiden let go of that chain of thought just as he had done with the auric working. They were like flame; he could not help but recoil from their touch, a marrow-of-the-bones-deep instinct, autonomous to himself, forbade anything else.

Fin turned his head from the window to pin the Rat with a glance bordering on the contemplative. Yet the Exorcist, being astute as he was in the ways of the spirit, did not make known whatever he felt from Eiden. He returned to look out into the sea whose sun had arisen from ruddy firelight to late-morning cold, harsh white.

A moment passed without comment, of which Eiden was grateful.

With a cheap pipe full of peace-weed that the Rat swore had not been there a second before, Fin turned to face him, body and all. The Cyroshi pauper’s kief had already been lit with a sparked tinder given the little ember beneath the slightly-resinous powder, the smell just-now reaching the Rat’s nose.

It smelled like it always did: like an old rag left out on the line to dry after having been used to soak up a spill of particularly-herbal and odorous teh. Or, in less words, the Seventh Heaven Itself.

The Exorcist blew out a quick puff before he continued.

“Let’s get to your questing. I had planned to go over it anyhows, but it escaped the both of us with the impromptu spar and subsequent clean up.

“I’ll thread and bind some ken I know you’ve stumbled upon so far. I’ll even throw ye a bone and make some things clear that you’ve yet to figure out. You may ask questions in between the lulls and I shall answer them as I can.”