As quickly as it had begun, it ceased. With a sound somewhere between a wheezing inhalation, the scraping of glass, and the creak of a bone being slowly bent to breaking, the unlight was drawn back into Yao’s left eye socket, once more sealed away.
“It certainly matches your description, for better or for worse. I cannot guess what form it will take upon its evolution, but I shall gain a deeper understanding given some time to examine it more thoroughly,” Yao said. She turned to Krahe, who had by now hopped down from the window. “Have you brought the hand as well?”
Krahe shook her head.
“It would have left a trail.”
“And you did not wish to bring both items, just in case,” Yao added the quiet part, walking over to the table. She set the Hexkey upon it, and brought out six talisman papers. “How large is the container?”
She conjured the book closest in size, stating: “Same height, slightly wider, two and a half times as thick. The internal volume suffices to fit a man’s severed hand in a loosely curled-up position without much free space.”
Manipulating the papers in mid-air, Yao added several more, going well past the point where they could cover the whole thing. Then, she arrayed them in mid-air and got to work. Grinding up a red ink stick into a small puddle of scarlet liquid with a few meticulous motions, Yao pulled droplets into the air and using mere gestures manipulated them into forming complex symbols upon the paper. She turned the talismans into indistinguishable copies of one another, with complex patterns that exuded a powerful, pure meaning. Krahe’s instincts told her to avoid getting them on herself, that they would cripple her ability to dissipate Isotope and expel Anathema in any form, even if temporarily.
With a wave of her hand, Yao collected the papers into a bundle and set them at the side of the table where Krahe had sat.
“I would ask that you bring the hand,” she said. “I would like to keep the Hexkey in the meanwhile so that I may examine it, but I shall not stop you if you wish to take it with you for safety.”
Krahe suppressed the part of her which intensely distrusted the unsettlingly familiar stranger that Yao was, and just took the papers while leaving the Hexkey where it stood.
She left Yao’s home without a word, with the talisman mistress turning her attention to examining the relic in greater depth. Yao wasn’t at all offended or put off by her guest’s behavior; they had interacted a grand total of once before now, and even then, Yao had offered up admittance of her position in relation to Krahe as a token to buy some trust with. Despite it being the purest truth, Yao had taken Krahe’s measure, and she was not surprised that it had curried her only tentative level of trust. It would take substantive shows of trustworthiness from both sides before they truly trusted one another. Building trust was, in fact, Yao’s main reason to suggest hunting a soulbeast for materials. Such an outing would be the most expedient way to increase trust and bond with her new, fate-ordained allies.
Even still, in the here and now, Krahe showed more trust than Yao had expected. She nearly double-took when the anathemist took off and she realized the Hexkey was still there, on the table. Yao made her way upstairs, where she took to carrying out a deeper, more conventional examination of this voidkey, forgoing the use of her Left Eye in favour of the skills she had developed over centuries prior.
As she made her way through the city back to Gashward 94, Krahe quickly came to understand what exactly Yao had meant when she spoke of the battle whipping up arcane winds that would scour away any signs of their anthrocite transmutation ritual.
The air was thick, an almost oppressive, dense feeling pervading every breath. Her heretofore unnamed sense for magic was completely dulled, much like the sense of smell would be prevented from detecting subtle, weaker scents in a place consumed by some overpowering stench. She even felt the waxing and waning of the “winds”; it was a nonphysical pressure that, with its stronger gusts, sanded away bits of her wards.
Yao’s sealing papers demanded some finesse to use properly, and Krahe spent a few minutes meticulously activating each one before plastering it onto the fake book-box. Despite expecting something to go wrong, nothing did; Krahe reached Yao’s residence without incident, though she took a roundabout path. Several streets away from Yao’s place, Krahe noticed one of Yao’s talismans stuck to a wall amidst old posters and charms. As she neared the place, carefully observing just how far and wide Yao’s talismans were spread out, Krahe came to the conclusion that Yao likely had an area larger than Slaughterhouse 9 locked down as her personal fortress without most, if any, of her neighbors being aware of this fact.
Upon her return, Krahe found that Yao had left her main defenses inactive. Instead, there was a fake wall. It looked convincing from a distance, and it nudged one’s gaze away from itself, but, perhaps due to being a welcome guest, Krahe had no issue discerning that it was an illusion. She walked through, feeling a brief bout of confusion as she entered the next section, somewhat like walking into a room and forgetting the reason. This also passed quickly.
Yao called her up when she entered her home, and Krahe heard the monstrous defender puppets stirring back to motion as the door closed behind her.
“I expected the confusion array to slow you down more,” the talisman mistress stated plainly, glancing up to meet Krahe’s eyes, then down at the box in her hand. Krahe placed the box on the table, and with a snap of her fingers, Yao made the talisman papers go up in golden flames. Krahe then unlocked and opened the box, leaving Yao to examine the hand while her own attention was drawn to the Hexkey. It was suspended in mid-air in the center of the room, revolving clockwise while six rings of faintly-glowing talismans revolved around it, themselves also spinning at various rates, much like an armillary. The whole array was contained inside a pillar of floating talismans, emitting a deep, yet noticeably muted hum. The light, much in the same way, was also muted such that one could look straight at it without issue. It reminded Krahe of an innovative 3D printer design that was bought out and subsequently permanently shelved by the dominant 3D printer manufacturer, Vishvakarma Manufacturing.
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