Origin Witch - Wolf Carcass on the Mud

Garrett’s team dragged the Timber Wolf carcass to the base of the Spire an hour before dawn, and it was still warm.

Corinne hovered two feet off the mud and leaned over the gray-furred bulk, the Moonstone Carver notched for the first incision.

The beast was huge. Nearly ten feet from snout to tail-tip, with shoulders as broad as a draft horse. Garrett Thorne’s team had dragged it to the base of her tree an hour before dawn as part of their trade payment for twelve vials of Grade-E Health Potions.

“Clean cut,” she grumbled, her voice raspy from the cold morning air.

She pointed her black frames at the wolf’s neck. A blue text box hovered over the dark fur:

[Timber Wolf Alpha Carcass (Grade-E)] [Status: Decapitated / Internal Organs Intact] [Yield: 40 lbs Raw Monster Meat, 3x Gallbladder (Intact), 1x Heart (Intact), 12x Fang (Sharp)]

She pulled her Moonstone Carver from her waistband. The transparent crystal blade shimmered under the pale morning light, its Strength +30 enchantment making the nine-inch knife feel almost weightless in her hand.

She did not waste time with a butcher’s saw. She drove the crystal tip into the wolf’s sternum, slicing straight down the center line of the belly with a smooth, wet shhhrrrk.

The hide split open like wet cardboard.

Corinne reached into the chest cavity with her bare hands, her fingers digging through the thick layer of white fat to pull out the heavy, dark-purple heart. She slid the organ straight into her Pouch of Preservation, where the internal stasis field immediately froze the blood before it could spoil.

Then she moved down to the stomach.

The wolf’s gastric sac was bloated, huge, and hard as an old leather football. It smelled foul, a sour, violent mixture of half-digested rabbit meat, stagnant swamp water, and old bile.

She raised her Moonstone Carver to slice the stomach open, intending to scrape out the bile salts for her slowness decoctions.

Thump.

Corinne stopped her hand. Her thumb froze against the leather hilt of her knife.

She squinted through her spectacles at the dark, rubbery wall of the gastric sac.

Inside the bloated organ, something moved.

It was not the slow, squishy shift of half-digested meat. It was a sharp, rhythmic kick, a tiny, desperate twitch that hit the inner lining of the stomach wall from the inside.

Thump. Thump.

“What the hell did you eat?” she muttered, her brow furrowing behind her wire frames.

She carefully angled the crystal blade, making a shallow, three-inch incision along the top curve of the wolf’s stomach wall, careful not to puncture whatever was inside.

Dark, foul-smelling digestive fluid trickled out, sizzling slightly as it hit the cold mud below.

Corinne reached two fingers into the opening, pulled the wet stomach lining apart, and reached inside. Her fingers brushed against something hard, slick, and covered in a thick, gelatinous gray slime.

She pulled it out.

It was an egg-shaped gastric sac, roughly the size of a grapefruit, coated in a tough, rubbery membrane that had protected it from the wolf’s digestive acids. Through the semi-transparent gray skin, she could see a faint, rhythmic pulse of pale silver light.

She sliced the outer membrane open with her fingernail.

A wave of cold, slimy fluid poured across her palms, and out tumbled a tiny, shivering creature.

It was not a fish. It was not a lizard.

It was a bird, a tiny, newly hatched chick no bigger than Corinne’s fist. Its body was almost completely bare, covered only by a sparse layer of stiff, metallic gray fuzz that looked like fine steel wool. Its large, round eyes were closed tight, its beak opening and closing in tiny, breathless, silent gasps as it shivered violently in the freezing morning air.

Corinne held the wet, slimy chick in her open palm, staring at it for five full seconds.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she rasped.

She pointed her spectacles at the tiny lump of wet, steel-like fuzz:

[Aurora Owl / Glacial Strix Chick (Grade-B / Elemental Beast)] [Status: Critical Hypothermia / Suffocation / Near Death] [Talent: Aurora Manipulation (Grade-B – Unawakened)] [Note: A rare night-predator indigenous to the high peaks of Kaelum. The egg was swallowed whole by the Alpha Wolf less than an hour ago. The tough membrane preserved the embryo, but the creature will die of cold within three minutes without magical intervention.]

Grade-B. An elemental night-predator.

The chick let out a tiny, pathetic keek sound, so weak it sounded like a dry pine needle snapping underfoot. Its tiny, metallic-gray head dropped sideways against Corinne’s index finger, its breathing slowing down to a faint, erratic shudder.

Corinne looked down at her muddy hands. She looked at her white dress, splattered with dark wolf blood and stomach acid. She looked up at the high, imposing silhouette of The Spire rising thirty yards above her head into the cold sky.

She did not need a pet. She did not need another mouth to feed. Pets were things rich people kept in suburban houses with fenced yards, not things crippled girls in high towers looked after while brewing poison in ten-gallon cauldrons.

“Useless,” she grumbled under her breath.

She reached into her spatial bag, pulled out a small glass vial containing ten milliliters of Grade-E Health Potion, and popped the cork stopper with her teeth.

Holding the wet chick in her left palm, she used her right hand to dip the tip of a clean wooden tooth-pick into the ruby-red health fluid. She brought the tiny red drop down to the chick’s closed beak.

The chick did not move for two seconds. Then, its small, dark tongue flicked out, touching the liquid magic.

Gulp.

The red drop vanished into its beak.

A tiny, faint flush of warm pink light washed through the chick’s translucent skin, running down its neck into its frail chest. Its breathing smoothed out, the rapid, ragged gasps turning into a steady, rhythmic rise and fall.

It opened its eyes.

They were huge, disproportionately large for its tiny head, and colored a deep, luminous amber-yellow, like two polished beads of raw honey. The chick blinked twice, cleared its dark beak with a tiny chuff, and then rotated its entire head a full ninety degrees to the left, staring directly into Corinne’s black frames.

“keek!” it chirped, louder this time.

Corinne stared back at the honey-colored eyes.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she muttered, her voice rough. “You’re ugly. You look like a pad of wet steel wool somebody dropped in the sink.”

The chick did not care. It wiggled its tiny, featherless wings, dragged its wet body across her palm, and crammed its small, cold head directly into the hollow between her thumb and index finger, seeking warmth.

Corinne hung frozen in mid-air for three seconds, her hand held stiff in the cold morning wind.

She let out a long, heavy sigh that turned into a cloud of gray steam in the freezing air.

“Fine,” she grumbled, pulling a dry cotton rag from her tunic pocket and wrapping the tiny bird loosely like a small, gray burrito. “Fine. But if you crap on my spellbooks, I’m throwing you to the wolves.”

She tucked the warm, rag-wrapped lump into the front pouch of her tunic, right against her ribs where her body heat was strongest.

She grabbed the wolf’s liver and remaining bile sacs, shoved them into her spatial bag, and used Zephyr Float to shoot thirty yards straight up into the high canopy toward her third-floor bedroom balcony.

Ten minutes later, she was settled inside The Spire.

She had set up a small, temporary nest on her wooden bedside stump using a soft wool scarf she had traded from Jasper Finch two days ago. Inside the nest, the chick, now cleaned of stomach slime and thoroughly dried, was hopping around in energetic, clumsy circles, its tiny metallic feathers fluffing up until it looked twice its actual size.

“Steelwool,” Corinne said, tapping the bird’s round head with her index finger.

The chick stopped hopping, rotated its head a full hundred and eighty degrees until it was looking at her upside down, and let out a raspy click-click with its beak.

“That’s your name,” she said, leaning her chin on her palm as she watched the bird attempt to peck at a small scrap of raw wolf liver she had placed on a wooden plate. “Steelwool. Because you’re gray, scratchy, and annoying.”

The chick snapped its beak shut on the piece of raw liver, swallowed the meat whole with a frantic gulp that made its small neck swell, and then let out a satisfied, rumbling keek-keek before curling its body into a tight, gray ball inside the wool scarf.

Corinne watched the bird’s feathers rise and fall in a steady sleep rhythm.

Outside her glass sliding doors, the morning rain had started again, dropping heavy, cold sheets of water against the high wooden roof of The Spire. Deep down in the valley to the south, the faint sounds of shouting and iron weapons clashing near the creek ford were completely swallowed by the steady roar of the falling rain.

She pulled her spectacles off her nose, set them beside Steelwool’s nest, and pulled Basic Mana Circuitry onto her lap.

She had sixty vials of slowness decoction to package, forty iron array plates to carve, and an entire sector’s worth of gang wars to profit from before sunset.

She picked up her pen, dipped the tip in dark ink, and went back to work while the rain washed the wolf blood off the balcony floorboards outside.

— Origin Witch —