Excerpt from Yenna Bookbinder’s ‘A Travelling Mage’s Almanac.’

“Would that I could describe the state of that room without recalling the horrors of what took place there. The academic in me soars at the knowledge I’ve gleaned from those walls, but I shudder to think what horrors were inflicted to come to those findings.”

---

“Well, I feel rather silly.”

Mulvari, now thoroughly cocooned in enchanted mud, wore his capture with good grace. He sounded mildly embarrassed, as though he had worn the wrong kind of lace to a formal event and had been called out on the matter. Yenna was not so calm, staring down at him with an intensity that would have set any of her former students to scurrying.

“Stop struggling. You can’t escape.” 

Nervous energy left Yenna’s breathing ragged, and her body twitched with adrenaline—the mage had expected Mulvari to somehow burst free, or reveal some other trick up his sleeve. She watched him for a good minute straight, the whipping winds enveloping her body keeping the sickly gas from coming any closer. Eventually, the stillness and relative silence convinced her body to stand down, to pull back and observe the world around her. Before she could do anything to help Jiin, Yenna needed to make sure Valkh was safe. Before that, she needed to get rid of this gas–

“Hoping to get rid of the compound?” 

Yenna looked down at Mulvari, eyes flashing. Her dagger appeared in her hand, ready to defend herself—but Mulvari was still trapped, almost entirely enveloped. His mask, and the cold grey eyes staring out, were the only parts of him left free.

“Is there a…” Yenna struggled to think of the word. “Counteractive reagent?”

“Oh, gods no. Never had time to make something like that. I just use the fume exhaust. Register command–”

The beginning of a command sequence triggered Yenna’s reflexive instinct to stop him. Before she had a moment to properly think about it, the mage wove together a hasty spell of silencing and lobbed it at Mulvari’s head. The man flinched, then frowned and rolled his eyes as he realised what Yenna had done. The mage also frowned, unhappy with how tightly strung her nerves were. At least I didn’t stab him.

Mulvari’s flinch had been telling—if he had a means to stop Yenna there, that would have been the time to show his hand. Perhaps his trick was whatever the command sequence did? Yenna stared down at Mulvari again, her gaze narrowed as she scrutinised him.

“I’m going to remove the silence field, then– agh, crap.” Yenna buried her face in her palm, recalling the rather fundamental two-way issue of a field of silence. Readying her dagger in hand, Yenna dispelled the field.

Mulvari didn’t speak. Yenna breathed a small sigh of relief—the mage worried that she may have done something drastic if he tried.

“I’ve removed the silence field. Don’t activate anything or I shall… do worse.”

The alchemist sat there for a moment, trying to move– trying to nod his head, Yenna realised, before groaning out an OK.

“We needn’t be enemies here, mage.” Mulvari’s change to a more polite tone hadn’t gone unnoticed. “I really do just want to activate the fume exhaust. I can’t imagine what all that compound is doing to your unprotected friend. And, ah, the spirit’s vessel is… well. I suppose it is happier possessing people, hm?”

Yenna wanted to scream at him, but didn’t. She tamped down an insane urge to trample him underhoof, but he did have a point. The mage turned a concerned eye to Jiin, the stonecarver still serenely unconscious—the contents of the tank would have to wait.

“Tell me how the exhaust works.”

“Ah, quite simply!” Mulvari was all smiles again. “There are all sorts of commands in this chamber, so you have to wake it up by saying–”

Yenna cut him off with a glare.

“Don’t activate anything. Not until I’ve inspected it.”

“Of course, mage, of course!” Mulvari’s tone was starting to remind Yenna of an over-eager student before the head of the school—living in hope that a show of acquiescence would smooth over prior transgressions and limit future punishments.

“On the walls are a variety of permanent symbols, with space in between for alterations. Had to dip into the enchanted blood to prepare this set up, heh! Good thing I came into a surplus in advance, hey?” Mulvari gave a wink, a shared joke that sailed over Yenna’s head. She hoped very sincerely, for both of their sakes, that the blood hadn’t been Jiin’s.

“The command sequence to wake up the walls–” Mulvari continued, wincing at Yenna’s sudden scowl, “I-I’m not going to say it, mage, just imply it. You know how this kind of magic works, surely. The command must be registered first, which allows the enchantments to prepare for your change—we can’t have them listening all the time, hey?”

“Stick to explaining. I haven’t the time for your jokes.” 

“Naturally! Now, after the register, you will simply say– not going to say the command! No, no, you will simply say, ahem, the name of the function we both desire to use. Then Air-aligned scrubbers shall cycle all of the air in the room through purification fields, destroying the compound. I wanted to work in a capture system, but there were far too many issues with this old setup to make that feasible, heh–”

Yenna stopped paying attention to him. The far walls were still obscured by the oil-slick fog, but in her bubble of turbulent air Yenna could see the symbols across the floor. Reading them still gave Yenna the same sandpaper sensation, but with time to stop and understand them she could at least categorise her disgust. The symbols used resembled common components used in magecraft, though each of them was distorted in unusual ways. Some looked crushed down, smeared out, or rippled as though drawn on the surface of a turbulent river. Strangely, it was the symbols drawn in blood red that held the most benign functions—construction, conjuration, a torture room repurposed towards… well, slightly less torture.

As sickening a thought as it was, this was still the laboratory of a researcher. A vile, disgusting creature, researching all the paths to misery and death, but a researcher nonetheless. Still, Yenna was a researcher too—she was going to approach this methodically.

“Register.”

Probing out with her magical senses, Yenna attempted to decipher a reaction beyond the noisy flow of magic in the room. The first word of the command sequence hadn’t provoked any response that she could discern, so its two-word command was likely a failsafe–

“The two-word command acts as a failsafe for accidental usage–”

“Oh, shut up, you… gremlin.”

Said gremlin, suitably cowed by Yenna’s disdain, was silent.

“Register command.”

Aha. Every symbol in the room lit up slightly to her magic sense, introducing an odd series of fluctuations in the already messy whirlpool of magic in the room. Yenna was starting to get an idea as to why it was so chaotic in here—every command activation caused the structure to listen with every surface it had available, and left no place for that magic to go. It was further evidence that Mulvari wasn’t magically inclined himself—no self-respecting mage would perform any experiments in such a chaotic environment. In the back of her mind, a summer’s breeze likened the place to sowing seeds at the shoreline at low tide. Yenna wasn’t sure what to make of that, but she was glad Demvya agreed.

With a spell circle in hand, Yenna readied to activate the exhaust—and to manually deactivate it, should that prove necessary.

“Register command: fume exhaust.”

Most of the symbols on the walls faded, releasing their grip on the ambient magic. One symbol, glowing bright enough both magically and physically to be seen through all that obscured Yenna’s vision, began to process a complicated series of magical effects. To the mage, it was a fascinating yet mystifying process—the singular symbol somehow contained instructions for several distinct spells, including timing and automatic sensing of work completion. Yenna observed it through all available senses, and wished fervently for her journal to be returned to her.

In rapid sequence, the symbol observed its surroundings, determined the nature of the fume hazard in question and pulsed out a wave of elemental Air magic—or, Joy, Yenna mentally noted, just done the mage’s way—to force the oil-slick haze to wash down across the floor, up against the opposite wall and then to roil up across the ceiling in one great curling wave. Yenna was thankful for her own protection—the cloud of gas had passed by quickly, but it presumed that whoever was in the room didn’t have much else to lose from having it wash over them one last time.

Then, by formation of a tiny vacuum-void in the air immediately in front of it, the symbol made a horrendously loud tearing noise and sucked all of the offending gas into a miniscule pearl of roiling rainbow. On the table, Jiin made a sickening gasping noise—the exhaust had robbed the room of its air supply, too! At least, it had thinned the air enough that it was dangerous. Yenna hopped to her feet and pressed her bubble of whipping wind closer to the unconscious woman, her hand hovering over Jiin’s mouth. By the time Yenna had managed to do so, a quiet hissing sound alerted her to the fact that the symbol was now conjuring out fresh air—though conjured air was about as fresh as a dusty old room that had been locked shut for years. Stuffy old air, or no air at all? Hardly a debate in this situation, I think.

“There– cough, cough! There. Safe as can be, no?”

Mulvari was, thankfully, still trapped in his little cocoon. Yenna shot him another glare, and felt she was getting rather good at those. With the room clear of toxins, she could at least retrieve Valkh before seeing to Jiin. Yenna knew she was going to have to interrogate Mulvari on what he had done to her, formulate some kind of counter to whatever awful poison the man had infected her friend with and–

Yenna felt a tugging at her caparison. A small hand trying to get her attention gently, without alarming her frayed nerves, though it took a moment for her to realise the tugging wasn’t literal—it was Demvya, trying to make herself heard. Looking inwards, the presence of the goddess—no, spirit—was a warm blanket to her tightly wound emotions. There was another tugging feeling, ever-so-gentle, an insistence of a kindness that could be done if only Yenna would just hand over the controls–

“Demvya! I can’t lose– I’m not going to hand it over.” Yenna hadn’t meant to say that part out loud, and flushed with embarrassment. A soothing wind washed over her mind, carrying promises of swift and safe action. A whispering reassurance in the smell of fresh bread—Demvya would never do anything that Yenna would disapprove of, and would always hand back the reins the moment she desired them.

The mage couldn’t help but bristle at the feeling—and once again understood why Jiin had so enjoyed the spirit’s presence. Yenna went to turn back to the door again, and felt another tug at her consciousness. A little more insistent, but no more demanding, closer to pleading—a bracing wind that promised a storm on the horizon, a need to act before things got worse. Communicating with the spirit like this was difficult, but she didn’t want to hurt herself employing the same accelerated consciousness trick again.

With a deep, shuddering sigh, Yenna dispelled her wind barrier, stood down her bristling arcane defenses, and decided to trust Demvya. The being who had never shown her or any other living being an ounce of hate, who worked hard to be understood and be helpful, that being wanted control of Yenna’s body, and the mage was willing to lend it… temporarily. Yenna let go, and Demvya stepped forward.

It was uncanny—Yenna’s body straightened out of the slightest hint of a slump, her muscles relaxed out of their readied tension, and she could feel the muscles of her face dip into a gentle, neutral expression as though reading a report on it all after the fact. The sensation of playing passenger in her own body was so unnerving that Yenna almost demanded the controls back, and Demvya was about to hand them over again without question. Getting over her moment’s panic, she bid Demvya to do what she needed to do.

Demvya stepped over to Jiin’s unconscious form, hooves clicking against the stone floor. She laid a hand on the stonecarver’s forehead as though feeling for a temperature, then stroked her cheek with all the reverence of a forlorn lover—internally, Yenna flushed at the intimacy of the moment, a feeling of second-hand guilt as she recalled the argument between Jiin and Mayi. Then, the spirit spoke.

“I APOLOGISE. PERMIT ME TO PASS ONCE MORE.”

As soon as she did, with her hand cupped against Jiin’s cheek, the spirit flowed out of Yenna’s body. Yenna nearly stumbled, leaning heavily against the bench as she followed the action. Through her magical sense, the mage watched as Demvya overflowed around the already-full cup of Jiin’s magically awakened form, resting against her body as a shimmering cloak. Then, Demvya’s form tore, fragmented into square-wave spirals through the wires. Yenna followed the motion of these torn fragments of Demvya, watched as they coalesced back into the object hidden in the murky depths of the glass tank nearby.

“Wh… Demvya…?”

Next to her, Jiin stirred. She attempted to lift an arm, but could barely move. Instead, she opted to tilt her head to one side. Upon seeing Yenna, she smiled a soft, almost drunken smile.

“Oh… ye’re here…”

“Y-Yes! Jiin, oh my goodness, you’re awake, um, don’t move! I don’t know what will happen if– agh, just don’t move!”

“C’n do…”

To her credit, Jiin didn’t panic—she laid her head back and stayed there, as still as could be. Yenna admired her calm, though she couldn’t help but imagine some lingering drug after-effects had a hand in her reactions.

“Looks like Fate’s finally listening to you again, hm?” Mulvari’s voice rose up, chuckling at a joke only he understood. “I reminded them that you had seen the Word. Was only a matter of time before it swung back into your hands. Ah well, no one listens to Mulvari.”

Even through the small goggles in his mask, Yenna could see that the man looked thoroughly defeated. She wanted to ask about that—Fate? The Word? If only there weren't a myriad other things that I need to do this very instant! 

Demvya seemed to have settled into whatever it was inside the tank. Whatever ‘vessel’ was in there, Yenna got the feeling that Demvya didn’t want to simply leave it behind—perhaps it was what she had wanted all along, a physical body of her own to reside in. Or, perhaps it was another living being, butchered by Mulvari but kept alive by Demvya’s presence. Yenna shuddered at the thought, once again wished she had more time to stop, to research, to ask questions, to solve things. Why does everything have to happen at once these days?

Yenna headed back to the door. I’ll retrieve Valkh, question Mulvari on how to free Demvya from that tank, remove the wires from Jiin and do something for whatever’s afflicting her, then I can–

The mage’s thoughts crashed to a halt at the sight on the other side of the door. An enormous mass of deep blue muscle, the bared flesh of a war goddess topped with the predatory gaze of every nightmare beast that lurked in the darkest forests, stood like a guardian statue at the entrance to some demonic temple. Before Yenna could so much as scream, two hands shot out and grabbed her by the wrists. She spoke with a voice like honeyed death.

“Hello, little prey. Who let you out?”