Precipice
Tenth Day of the First Month 294 AC
Naath, Laboratory of Wyla Drekelis
There was, Wyla admitted,
a certain irony to her current work. She who had once walked gleefully in death and supped upon the blood of the living like wine, she who had turned her back reluctantly from that path, now on the hunt for a way to drown out the madness and the hunger, to draw from that howling vortex some semblance of sanity and order.
Maybe I could have my wings back, the part of her that remembered flying free upon the night wind, that which was once the cold and choking mist that heralded death to so many whispered between the rustle of parchment and the pained gasps of her test subjects.
"My lady I see... I see..." one manged to force out through gritted teeth. They were all volunteers, paid more for a few weeks of admittedly painful experimentation than they would otherwise see in their lives and no one would walk out of her laboratory with any permanent scars. They would not even have to walk out with the memories, though few of the test subjects took her up on that offer.
"Cut the feed," Wyla sighed. Arcane runes carved into the pale limestone fell into quiescence and lines of dark fire faded. It had not taken Wyla long to realize that it was not exposure to the energies of unlife which created undesirable feedback loops. Feed them yes, sustain them, like a thorn bush watered with blood, but the seed of madness lay elsewhere, in the very moment of transposition. It was what Dario, may daemons of his foul goddess feast upon his soul, called True Birth.
Wyla thus needed to replicate that moment as best she was able in living minds, to then study the memories of the events, the fleeting dreams of darkness, the fire of unlife left behind in fleshy forms.
"I saw myself withering from within and there were worms growing under my skin, pale and black and filled with old blood, they burst out of my skin, withering and writhing..." the young man recounted to the scratching writing of her little golden assistant. "They wanted...
they wanted to gnaw me up forever and ever, to eat the world..."
Again that phrasing. The power almost seemed disappointed when none of the volunteers actually died and rose again, but Wyla knew enough of both magic and the tricks one's mind could play on one to understand that was anthropomorphizing the phenomenon. The dark fire did not want to drive people mad anymore than water wanted to sink a ship when it seeped between the planks.
Wyla Drekelis, a daughter of Braavos, knew something of how to handle water in the bilges, you build a pump.
***
Twenty Sixth Day of the First Month 294 AC
The skeleton exploded with a blast of balefire and a shower of bone fragments and molten lead. "A little too energetic for a pump," Wyla sniffed dramatically, to cut the tension and fear behind the hardened glassteel. Most of the other mages present had not even been in proper battle, much less faced the perils of magical experimentation.
"Maybe we should have tried it on something more intelligent," one of the bolder mages interjected. "The balance of the animus would be different..."
"And if your guess was be wrong you would have to explain to Lady Lya how and why it was you ripped a thinking soul apart," Wyla cut the girl off. "Well, that is if you were lucky. If you were not, you would be explaining it to the king."
The silence that followed spoke louder than words.
"Log, experimental report one sixteen, catastrophic loss of integrity," she narrated for the diligent calligraphy wyrm taking all this down. "You can handle the resonance tests, I will be checking the auguries..."
Stabilization of sentient Undead progress 20/30
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OOC: Yes, Wyla built a near-death-and-reanimation device to study the process of mental alteration that comes with becoming undead and figure out how to compensate. Not yet edited.
