Carving runes into people is not at all like painting. The brush does not flow smoothly – you must slowly drag it through the resistance of flesh, angling and tilting the blade into and against the meat, lest you make a permanent mistake. Mistakes are not allowed. And neither does the brush lay any ink, rather, the ink wells up from within the canvas to make a terrible mess of things.
Or it should, and normally it would, but not in the case of the meat of Gregor, who had taken measures to dissuade the blood. The blood was still there, seeping out slowly and staining the stencil parchment that guided the stokes of Mildred the Artist, but it was a trickle as compared to a river.
The hydra saliva responsible made his scalp tingle with curious coldness, which was an odd amalgam of feeling when combined with the lines of hot pain that Mildred painted.
“Pain-ting.” Gregor muttered into his faceful of thigh.
“Don’t speak, it makes your head move.”
It wasn’t pleasant, being cut up, but it was very definitely better than the time his bones had been etched. Kaius had insisted that he be conscious.
Mildred had begun at the top (her top, his bottom), and was working her way down very carefully (or up), mindful that all of Gregor’s work would come to nothing if she botched the runes even slightly – the back of the head is where the brain does all of its seeing, Gregor had explained, so the runes could not go elsewhere. They simply wouldn’t work, so she knew that if she ruined this patch of flesh, the only solution would be for her to scratch the enchantment onto his skull, and neither of them really wanted that.
Little by little, Gregor felt the runes take their proper places. He picked them each out of the design, judged them, felt their neat shapes in his meat, and found that Mildred was doing well.
Eventually, he was all carved up. Mildred then took in hand the little vial of shimmering jewel dust and began again at the top with a grimace. She removed her stencil and started parting the cuts to tap in pinches of the pigment, which was a glittering dull white and would actually be rather terrible for the purposes of a real tattoo.
In a few places, Mildred could see bare bone.
It was with some pride that she managed to remain undisgusted and unhorified, and was able to see the task through in a manner that felt almost professional. She didn’t balk, her hands didn’t shake, and no nausea bothered her, though it might later. She was steady and serious.
Mildred had changed a little more, and it was no slight difference to merely be guessed at and suspected, or to be vaguely entertained in thoughts of the past, and neither could it be denied, nor wilfully hidden from notice. No, she had truly and clearly changed, not that this kind of task would have previously rendered her uselessly nervous, but she knew that she certainly wouldn’t have found herself so cool-headed, or taken to it so readily.
Adversity, it seemed, had tempered Mildred’s sensibilities and made her a more versatile person.
She supposed it must be like what happens with soldiers new to the profession – young men spend some time learning how to shoot, how to march, and how to follow orders as a group, then off they go to war, and they find themselves digging for days, then struggling with the baggage train in the mud, and then hauling their newly legless friends back to a tent filled with corpses, and then sometimes needing to decide whether or not the surrendered enemy in front of them might just be worth shooting anyway. Eventually, they begin to form a habit of rising to the occasion, no matter the occasion, because what else could they do?
Pausing her work to squint at the things in her mind, Mildred considered this for a moment.
…Perhaps the experience of a soldier was not so similar as she had thought.
“Gregor, never let me go to war.”
“What?”
“Quiet.”
He gave a short snort into her lap, but remained otherwise silent while she worked.
Some of the crystal dust had come from the ruby, which was significant for the purposes of the enchantment, but the rest was an amalgam of various stones of sufficient density. There was a good pinch of diamond, a large amount of topaz, and a little of spinel and a few others. It was a expensive recipe, and made for powerful runes.
Magical academia hadn’t yet deduced why, Gregor and Kaius included, but there was a large correlation between dense crystalline structure and magical conductivity. For this reason, the heart of the tower had been wrought from diamond, and it was a great fortune for Mildred to possess a chunk of corundum large enough to become an eye.
The inking progressed, and after a while, Mildred had worked all the way back down to the bottom. She began giving Gregor the once-over, checking that the runes were all filled and that the lines of pigment had no gaps. It was anxious work, and she was actually a little hesitant to call it done, because what if it wasn’t?
Eventually, she concluded her over-long deliberation. “You’re all… enchanted.” She said, though Gregor already knew it. The magic was coming from him, and he felt it twisting around beneath the pain in a neat circuit.
“How do I… uh… what do I do now?”
He provided Mildred the half-bottle of clear spirit he’d plundered from the train and had her wipe away the hydra saliva so that the cuts could scab and close. Acting on her own initiative, she bandaged the area.
Unexpectedly, Gregor then flipped over, produced a little mirror and a razor, and began shaving off his right eyebrow.
“More?”
“Only a few.”
***
Gregor looked up at Mildred, and she looked down at him, still laying in her lap.
In place of an eyebrow, and extending a little above and a little below where an eyebrow should be, was now a line of dense runes that looked almost like written script. It hadn’t yet begun bleeding heavily, but it would.
Beneath this faux-brow was a faintly glowing orb of brilliant red. Looking deep inside, Mildred saw a dense lattice of luminous glyphs which had somehow been magically faceted beneath the surface of the gem.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
“Mildred.”
“Yes?”
“I have two eyes again.”
He blinked them both.
She blinked too.
“Do I look red?”
She did not. “I owe you a debt. A large one.” Gregor declared in his typical non-sequitur fashion.
Without missing a beat, she responded in kind. “I owe you a healer.”
“Not anymore.”
Mildred blinked again.
“…Golly.”
“You gave me an eye, which is something a healer can’t do.” Looking up at Mildred with two eyes, Gregor found that the enigmatic freckle had migrated to new lands, or perhaps it hadn’t. Perhaps it simply seemed to have moved in the new light of proper perspective. “We originally agreed on a healer, and you have given me more than a healer, so now I owe you the difference.”
“You really don’t.”
“I really do.”
She frowned down at him, and he had no idea why.
“Are you an accountant, or a wizard?”
“In either case, I would be very poor at my job if I failed to keep track of who owes what to whom.”
Mildred pursed her lips, clearly a little less than happy for some incomprehensible reason. “If you really insist, we can… balance our books once the job is done, but I don’t plan for you to owe me anything.”
Gregor shrugged, detecting even with his blunt social instrumentation that further words of obligation would make Mildred upset for reasons unknown and unknowable. And, for reasons far more knowable, he didn’t want that.
Night came and went, and day ushered them further westward.
A remarkable portion of Gregor’s body was now covered in bandages. So many had been used that they actually didn’t have any spare, and in the future Gregor would need to launder them and reuse them on the spot, or else wrap himself in whatever scraps of fabric he could scavenge.
As they rode, he spent quite a bit of time looking at things. Just looking. It was strange, suddenly seeing so much more of the world. Even though this wasn’t exactly new to Gregor, it was a very odd feeling, and he found that he had been unconsciously turning his head slightly, so that his formerly single eye could see more of what was in front of him.
It was a habit that he would now need to remind himself to correct.
Further, most people never notice, but a person’s sense of distance is very heavily a product of comparison between the slightly different perspectives of each eye. It is a kind of intuitive triangulation that helps the eyes to focus, and allows the observer to better build an unconscious understanding of their surroundings.
Gregor did notice.
He noticed when he lost it, and he noticed when he regained it. He noticed how very different the world is and was for a monocular man.
Stranger still, he didn’t feel very much like he had returned to normalcy. The ruby was functional, but it wasn’t an exact imitation of his prior organ. It didn’t swivel in its socket, and it had no pupil to contract; it didn’t really look at things in particular or in general, it just saw all there was to see, and the magic tricked his brain into acting as if everything were normal, which was hard, because some abnormalities were impossible to ignore.
It was heavy – a noticeable weight which he supposed he’d eventually stop noticing, and his visual field was slightly larger, with everything in always in focus. It was strange, and felt… incorrect, but not nauseating, and he could see, so he counted it as successful.
“Gregor,” Mildred spoke, interrupting the wizard’s passive observation of the world around him, “I need you to tell me something embarrassing about yourself.”
He gave a lazy ‘hmm?’ and turned to the right slightly to glance at her, finding that things which should be exceedingly peripheral were now possible to see clearly.
“Your request contains an inherent presupposition. You presume I have embarrassments.” He responded, not without some confusion about the topic.
Mildred raised a brow. “Are you implying that you’ve never done anything you wouldn’t want people to know about?”
“I do not possess the capacity for regret. By design, it is one of my few imperfections.”
“I’m not asking about regrets, I’m asking about embarrassments. Different things entirely.”
“…Why?” He asked in a very wizardly tone, using the opportunity practice sneering suspiciously with two eyes, rather than just one, despite the fact that Mildred was riding behind him and couldn’t really see his face.
It was oddly difficult to re-learn expressions. Though, he supposed, he might not need to – his glowing red eye was probably sufficiently evocative all by itself. The rest of expression might not matter so much.
“Just balancing the books.” She answered lightly. “Making even that which is not, as is proper.” Followed by a shrug. “You know quite a bit more about me than I know of you, past-wise, I mean. You’ve even been party to some of my bigger embarrassments. It's only fair.”
This situation was completely new to Gregor. It was a form of socialisation, he was sure about that, but he got the vague impression that Mildred was motivated by some uncertain manner of offence. Was she… upset? Peeved? Was this some kind of sarcastic repartee, or had she become genuinely concerned with obtaining social equivalence in reaction to some perceived imbalance?
The true nature of the situation being opaque, Gregor opted to play it safe.
“…Very well. Never share this.”
It was then Mildred’s turn to wonder at Gregor’s words, as she often did. It was almost a hobby by this point.
The things he was open about were usually very strange and a little terrible, so then, how bizarre must be the things he bothered to keep private?
Sitting up straight and tall, and using one of his more arrogant voices, Gregor spoke.
“I am responsible for the creation and proliferation of an invasive cat fish species in lower Staltland.”
She gave one of her big blinks. “…Pardon?”
“Unfortunately, this is a shame for which no pardon can be given.”
“Catfish?”
“No. Cat fish. Part cat, part fish. Cats don’t like water, and fish can’t live without it. I had to know what would happen.”
“…You are responsible for an invasive population of Cat Fish?”
“Yes.”
“You created cats that are fish."
"Yes."
"And this embarrasses you?”
“Among sorcerers, it is considered shameful to allow your creations to escape.” He explained, or attempted to explain. He wasn’t sure that it was possible to for her to understand the nuances of the situation.
“Gregor, they’re fucking fish.”
“No. They are cats with newly infinite agency to access fish. Apex predators surrounded by choice prey. That ecosystem will never be the same, and they’ll spread because I was too young to think to make them sterile and Kaius did not interrupt instructional mistakes. They’ll likely make it to most of the freshwater on the continent in under a century. I have created a plague.”
“…Huh. Cat fish. You know, your embarrassments have a little more of a grand scale than mine.” Mildred then gave her own feminine hmm, as if considering something deeply. “Very well,” she said declared, “you are now forgiven.”
Forgiven for what? He had no idea.
