The diminutive figure of a humanoid raven stood stone-still at the center of the angle-web, meeting its contractor’s gaze with a single eye. To the world, it seemed as if the ritual halted for a mere handful of seconds, enough for perhaps two breaths, only to resume once again with an incomparably greater intensity than before. Out of the angle-web’s lines, a tremendous surge of power poured out, distorting the air and coagulating into the form of jet-black pitch that ran with the consistency of blood, spreading until it completely filled the angle-web’s inner volume. The twisted, dysgenic chimera that Barzai had become melted into the bloody tar, and from the tar arose a shining jewel of reddest red, seething with heat and lashing at the puddle beneath — it was a half-sized apparition of the Daemon Core’s anathemic core. Following in its wake, six rods of black stone also rose, and one of red crystal, imitations of the Atomica and its Six Control Rods, downscaled imitations resembling the originals but not quite matching them. These rods enclosed that core, and tendrils of tar and panels of smoky jade emerged from the tar to enclose the sphere completely. It hovered there, crackling and seething with barely-contained empyrean force.
Painstakingly, with painful struggling and twitching, as if being formed through a series of seizures and heart attacks, another version of Barzai’s crow-man image came crawling from the black, as if clawing its way out of a sinkhole. Barely coherent, the shape lacked a midsection altogether, upper and lower halves joined only by a thrumming tar-tendril in place of a spine, and into the gaping hollow in its gullet it shoved the apparition of the Daemon Core. The moment the core was in place, hundreds of tendrils rose up from the tar and rushed in to fill in the rest of the gap, sending Barzai stumbling to-and-fro like a man encircled by a firing squad.
This went on for the span of nine breaths.
All incoherence, all struggle and painful effort to merely exist washed away in a burst of scarlet light, and Barzai’s new body dropped to the clean stone floor.
It was a muscled shape of raven and man seamlessly twisted together, a hunched over posture belying a shapely, even magnificent anatomy. Feathers and soft down covered half the figure’s shape, this being the sections most clearly belonging to a raven — the back, wings, undersides of the thighs, tail, and head. The remainder of the body was shod with darkly-gleaming scales from whose surface protrudes subtle spikes, akin to those of a desert-dwelling lizard. Bird-like thighs gave way to lithe, yet still powerfully muscular raptor calves and four-toed feet with claws akin to curved knives, whose surfaces shimmered with strange, rune-like patterns, as if an embossed pattern had grown alongside the claw itself. The feathers and scales scarcely covered the work of muscles and tendons beneath; his flight-feathers were a lustrous black, gleaming with shades of green and purple in the light. These luxuriances only formed a more unsettling contrast to the he empty pits that he had for eyes, within whose depths burned the flames of Cthugha itself, or the razor-teeth within his beak and the muscle that rendered them more than a hollow threat; indeed, his skull was substantially more imposing than of any raven, with prominent bone ridges above the eyesockets and behind the lower jaw, with a beak the shape of a polished warpick, yet one that was supported by muscle suitable for a warhound’s jaws. It was as if the skull of some antediluvian raven ancestor that made its living tearing out the intestines of dying dinosaurs. Threads of smoke arose from each surface of his form, and his scales possessed an oily sheen.
Barzai, now truly transformed, straightened his posture and spread his wings, each as long as he was tall. Despite being a little less than a meter tall, the raven nonetheless possessed an imposing presence.
Krahe, snapping out of her trance, squinted her eyes, observing Barzai’s figure as she tried to recall something. She raised her left hand, performing the Sign of Closing; a gesture formed using the thumb and pinkie together in a ring, using the three middle fingers as a baton, much like the gestures Yazata Heptaxia often used. The Sign of Closing itself was meant to signify the end of a ritual, its motions directly based on the movements of the ritual itself, and therefore based on its angle-web. As she drew out the motion in the air, she invoked, “Oxas Zaegos, Pioth, Amrakas.”
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The non-avian aspects of Barzai’s form melted into heavy, black smoke that dispersed rather quickly, only for this substance to be sucked back in to reform a fully animalistic shape. This “raven,” now the size of a harpy eagle, took off, and flew headlong towards its contractor’s midsection, diving into Krahe’s stomach. She knew, logically, that he would simply enter his eidolon vault as he had done many times before, but she nonetheless instinctively wrenched open a wound-like grin down the entire length of her chest, the gaping maw pulling apart her bodysuit and exposing sections of the Liminal Coil, her organs conspicuously absent inside the cavernous gap into which Barzai vanished.
Krahe staggered backwards, once more grasping her stomach as a burning heat spread out through her chest, a discomfort she had come to expect, a common side effect of particularly substantial eidolon evolutions — as common as an exceptional instance of an already uncommon event can be, at least. It wasn’t unexpected, but it wasn’t pleasant, either. As she came to terms with this temporary discomfort, she turned her attention inwards.
Barzai’s system readout had only changed somewhat; it was frankly not very useful, in large part due to the fact Barzai was something altogether different trying to shove itself into the mold of a True Eidolon. From what she had read, the system was supposed to detail the general characteristics and abilities of any given True Eidolon’s manifestation or manifestations.
As of his evolution, the only major change was the addition of a second Astral Morphology and a slight change to the whole category. Not particularly useful, but she couldn’t reasonably expect it to be, after all the system wasn’t built to accommodate a case like this.
Krahe almost wanted to see if she could push her luck a little further by attempting the Zor’Aguhastra dive ritual right here and now while she had access to the ritual chamber, but she thought better of it. The Sorcerer’s Hand would take some time to prepare and the ritual itself would also require preparations. Not only that, the dive ritual wouldn’t particularly benefit from an extremely well-built ritual site such as this one, if anything its very nature might cause the chamber to interfere with it.
As far as she knew, the dive ritual would work regardless of location so long as it was prepared properly, as it was fundamentally just a basic full dive with some additions to allow the guidestone to do all the heavy lifting. There was no need to rush just for the sake of using this ritual chamber, so she decided not to. It was as simple as that.
There was also the small, tiny issue of her rapidly-fading consciousness.
That was the issue with communion of this kind. Preparing the ritual was one thing, as was the strain of carrying it out, but few could withstand without consequences the forceful initiation of an eidolon evolution ritual, followed by spiritual communion, followed once more by the strain of being made to accommodate a burgeoning “eidolon’s” newly-expanded astral body.
It was a small mercy, at least, that it wasn’t painful; Krahe simply felt suddenly overcome with a floaty fatigue, wakefulness slipping between her fingers like jelly, slipping away all the more quickly as she gripped tighter to hold on to it. Along with the fatigue came a sense of distended fullness, altogether forming a sensation akin to an impending food coma.
She awoke in an unfamiliar bed within the Invisible Temple, simultaneously feeling fantastic and fuming with rage. As she shook off the morass of slumber and came to her senses, her right cheek twitched, just below her right eye. The room was fairly small and sparsely decorated, containing a bed, a desk, and some Twin Churches iconography. A censer, a pitcher and glass of yellow herbal decoction, and several miscellaneous ritual implements sat neatly arranged on the bedside table.
“Two months. No meat for two months,” she seethed.
An anguished croak sounded in her head.
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