Keys of Life and Death
Twenty-Fourth of the Second Month 294 AC
There was nothing quite so quite so frustrating as looking through thousands upon thousands of abstract permutations and practical tests only to find the ultimate answer had been staring you in the face all along, Wyla Drekelys thought as she literally closed the book on the last test of the day with a thump of heavy covers against parchment. Well, other than continued failure she supposed, that would have made for a worse accounting to the king. Still, to have the answer handed to her by a new assistant's idle thought rankled.
Why don't living men have flowers bloom under their feet if they are full of the bright power as the Dead are filled with the dark?
The simple answer, the one most priests and scholars would have given would be 'because the energies of unlife are unnatural', but to Wyla that seemed as hollow as claiming that flames burned because they were evil and you really should have eaten the rabbit raw. There had to exist within the minds and bodies of not just humans, but indeed all living things, contingencies to prevent undue spillage of life force, either into the world, making proverbial flowers bloom or into the mind leading to obsessive behaviors and ultimately madness. If such could be found they could be adapted to the unliving.
The experiments began with small highly destructive tests on spiders, partly because Wyla had hated them since she was a child and partly because the girl Vee would not object to torturing bugs the way she would do using a dog for like purpose. Speaking of dogs, they had moved on to observing the interaction of animus and soul in dogs and cats once they were certain they could do so safely.
What they had found was that the living animus did influence the soul, specifically it was responsible in part for the instincts to survive, reproduce and protect the young as well as, in social beings, the capacity to place one's self in another's shoes, empathy. The dark fire of unlife forged its own instincts in return, to destroy, to devour, to unmake.
For a long span working the night through and getting back to exploding lesser dead they had feared a second roadblock, but that was when Wyla herself had a small epiphany.
She had watched her assistant fumble with the keys to the restricted stores, fatigue making her clumsy and careless. He was using the wrong key, worse still, rather than simply failing to open to door, he had actually jammed it into the lock, damaging it.
That had been the answer, it was not simply the existence of instincts aligned with death and unmaking, it was that those instincts unwittingly replaced on a basal level the instincts of life. Of course one would not, for instance, suddenly cast all self-conservation to the winds. It was in part learned behavior but the dissonance between what the mind willed and what the new animus
desired would bred madness.
Armed with the knowledge of where the trouble arose, it was a matter of days to use Lady Lya's compilations of soul magic to weave a metaphysical veil that would allow the hierarchical interactions of animus body and soul without the overlap that had caused so much harm. The best part was that the chance was so small and unintrusive that it could be applied to those who already walked in death. It would not, of course, heal a mind that had already been eroded, but it would prevent further harm and make true healing possible if the individual sought it. The chaotic surges of dark energy and unseen stresses upon the mind could finally be laid to rest.
Stabilization of Sentient Undead Complete 37/30: Prevent Undue influence on the mind from the state of undeath
What next?
[] Receive an operational report (Interlude chain)
-[] City of Brass, where the foundations are laid for a most perilous raid
-[] Slaver's Bay, where devils plot in the shadows
-[] Qohor, where dreams of madness spill into the waking world
-[] Vialesk, where enemies overt and hidden move against your envoys -
-[] Investigation into the hostile fey of the Braavosi hinterlands
-[] Write in
[] Receive a research report (Interlude chain)
-[] Study of the Serpentstone
-[] Spell-forging hostile translocation
-[] Developing Imperial Powered Armor
-[] Write in
[] Continue with Viserys
-[] Write in
OOC: I hope the talk of metaphysics was not too drawn out here. Not yet edited
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