"I hope, for your sake, that you didn’t eat all of Calvus’ souldregs,” Krahe thought as she walked, directing it towards Barzai. If the eidolon had indeed devoured them, she would need to source another hand and souldreg pair. Not difficult, but an irritating detour.
“I had a taste. Bland, detached. Accepted his fate without emotion. He had anticipated it far in advance. Half-repentance through acceptance at fate’s end. No true anguish, no flavour,” the eidolon replied in thought-speech. The tone of his thoughts was one of distaste, but it also gave Krahe a window into Calvus’ thought process. In some ways, it wasn’t so different from her own. As bitter as it had been, her death had not been a surprise — the circumstances of it perhaps, but not the method or causality of it. In the same manner, she would not be surprised if she eventually met her end in this world as a result of getting too careless, meeting too strong of an enemy in open combat, or diving too deep in pursuit of greater strength or greater secrets. Live by the sword, die by the sword. It galled her that even one of the four rapists had the presence of mind to come to peace with his own end, though. He, of the four, had the self-awareness to understand his actions and their ramifications and make peace with the consequences, and in some way, that made him even more repulsive than Aldritch, who was more akin to a mutant, a vile creature wrought from broken parts to begin with. Calvus had a foundation of awareness and perspective, and still chose to partake in the gang’s vile activities, time and time again.
Krahe spat into a nearby sewer grate. On the way, she stopped by a butcher shop to purchase a meat-smoking tripod. The apostate evoy proprietor was visibly on-edge the whole time she was there. It was actually impressive that he nonetheless attempted to upsell her on a more expensive model.
Upon reaching Sorayah’s house, Krahe found it untouched. As she approached the door however, she realized it would likely be better going forward to think of this property, and thus refer to it, by its actual address, seeing as it was now her own in every way that mattered. The church knew of it, and nobody had come forward to dispute her claim, even if it would be another few years before the statute of limitations on such a dispute fully elapsed. This was St. Kannan Street, that she knew, but the house number was nowhere to be seen. The plaque turned up inside the door leaned against a wall – it was a brass plate so badly oxidized it looked overgrown with oversaturated lichen, bearing the number 55 and a scratched-out name below it. Of the four holes in its corners, the top two were split and the bottom right corner was missing entirely. After a few moments of consideration, she decided to have it replaced, to help the house better blend into its surroundings. For all she knew Sorayah might have told someone she trusted that her experimentation site was a house with the number plate removed, and even if not, the one house without the plate would stand out. There was also the matter of finishing up the proper warding of this property, but, considering that the basement cell was already sufficiently insulated, she left it for later. Time was precious right now.
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She brought out an inert vessel of brass, a sort of miniature cauldron, densely embossed with Zaveshian imagery of the man-god performing the very acts for which the vessel had been created: Anointment, and the preparation of anointing oils and unguents, in the sense of transforming flesh into workable graft material. Tied to it by a red ceremonial cord was a rod of brass the length of her forearm, at once a stirrer and a wand, its handle heavily-adorned while the rest of its length was smooth for practicality’s sake. The Sorcerer’s Hand barely qualified to be described as a grafting anointment ritual, but in Firminus’ eyes it shared the fundamental principles, and so he had given this to her alongside the reagents, and so here she was, teetering on flagrantly misusing an object of religious provenance. Alongside the vessel, she brought out her reagents, then got to work.
After wiping down the vessel’s interior with “holy spirit,” — blessed medical-grade ethanol — she poured in Graft Embalming Fluid #14. It was a slightly viscous and strongly fragrant oil, purplish in colour, and unmistakably the self-same substance that had contributed to the staining of Firminus’ hands not long ago.
Then, came xanthous gum, a bright yellow powder. Shieldback molting bile, from a third molt cycle, also yellow. Unguent of Nug-soth to bind it all into a paste, a small amount of which she spread out in a thin layer in the shape of a circle a little wider than the wrist of Calvus’ severed hand, in order to measure how much to set aside.
The bulk of the paste went into the vessel and dissolved remarkably quickly; she stirred for only a few minutes before it had completely unified with no bubbling or other fanfare. The result was a reeking paste whose invisible fumes stung the eyes, its colour a bright, saturated yellow that somehow held within it a sense of… Not decay, but of the most disgusting forms of transformation, of the leaking of pus, sloughing-off of flesh, the changing of ways and of things in the most drastic and traumatic manners imaginable.
The process of embalming the hand was a touch messy, as she had to remove it from its wet-storage capsule and inject it with the solution, causing a mix of blood and preservative fluid to ooze out of the stump. Afterwards, she sealed the stump with the paste; all said and done, putting the stench aside, the whole preparation stage didn’t take more than fifteen minutes. Next, she rinsed the vessel and piled in her Zkauba Shrub Roots, setting them alight just enough to get them smoldering before she hung the hand over the vessel from the tripod. Krahe passed the four hours drawing talismans, seeing as, on one hand, there wasn’t much that could go wrong with this, but on the other hand, she did need to keep an eye on it.
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