Unsleeping Patron - Reconstituting the Flesh

Without leaving a seam in the grey twilight, the silver rift sealed shut. in the grey twilight. Silence settled back over the flattened citadel, heavy and cold as wet slate.On the compressed marble floor, thirty paces from the crushed wall of the plaza, lay the red stain. It didn’t seep into the stone; the pressure of the titan’s foot years ago had sealed every pore of the marble, leaving the pool of black-and-crimson fluid, shattered white bone fragments, and torn canvas shreds resting in a shallow, wet heap.An hour passed. The Miasma drifted down from the rim of the depression, wrapping the red stain in a thin layer of ash-grey grease.Deep within the pitch-black void behind Silas’s severed consciousness, a single spark struck flint.It wasn’t the golden light of the Mind-Light. It was a cold, tar-black ember that flared from the base of his spine or where his spine had been sixty minutes before.The dark fluid on the stone floor twitched.First came the filaments. Fine, hair-like black threads, wriggling like earthworms in rain, sprouted from the edges of the blood pool. They didn’t spread outward; they reached inward, hooking their barbed tips into the white splinters of crushed bone.Click. Crack.A sound like dry twigs snapping echoed through the empty plaza. Three inches of shattered thighbone rolled backward across the smooth marble, dragged by two black tendrils. It struck a second bone fragment, and with a wet, sickening pop, the two pieces locked together, the fracture line instantly stitched over by a weave of dark, gelatinous fibers.The pool began to pull itself back into a mound.Curdled, black-red blood flowed backward against the slope of the stone floor, drawn into the center where his lungs had exploded. Ribs knitted themselves out of white dust, snapping into arc-shaped cages around a heart that reformed from a cluster of writhing, dark vessels. Flesh sloughed over the bone frame in rapid, shuddering waves, skin stretching tight over the ribs like wet parchment pulled across a drum.Silas gasped.His mouth opened, his new larynx tearing open with a dry, screaming whistle as cold air rushed back into his lungs. His eyelids snapped back, the sclera completely black two abyssal pits swallowing the twilight before the dark ink receded into his retinas, leaving his eyes bloodshot and raw.He rolled onto his stomach, his knees dragging across the smooth marble floor. He vomited a bucket of thick, tar-like fluid onto the compressed stone, his entire body convulsing as his newly stitched stomach locked in violent cramps.In his skull, the yellow hide of the Parchment shivered. Beside it, the dark, obsidian quill of his Eldritch Physique gouged out dripping crimson letters against his dark consciousness.Vessel Reconstructed. Core Origin Energy Drained: 12%. Anchor Status: Stable.Notice of the Eldritch Physique: So long as Lifespan remains unexhausted, the soul cannot be severed from the shell. Physical destruction triggers reconstitution at the anchor point. Death drains the core Origin Energy. When Origin reaches zero, the vessel dissolves into permanent void.Silas lay in the dirt for ten long minutes, his forehead pressed against his own black vomit.He lifted his right hand. It was pale, complete, five fingers working without a tremor. The skin over his knuckles was smooth as a infant’s, completely free of the scars he had earned climbing the Ash Hills or fighting the obsidian mantises.He was alive. The Synod officer had crushed his body into a bowl of bloody meal, stepped over his remains, and walked away, leaving him for dead.Silas slowly sat up, pulling his knees to his chest. His canvas tunic was ruined, shredded into bloody rags that hung off his bare waist, but his canvas pack lay ten paces away on the stone floor, uncrushed. The officer hadn’t bothered to destroy his gear. To a man who could step through spatial rifts, a bag of dried herbs and stone bowls was less than dust.Silas crawled over to the pack, his bare skin shivering as the damp Miasma draft hit his naked shoulders. He unrolled the canvas. The two silk-bound packages the Asharto horn powder and the Thread-Fish ash were intact. Beside them lay the Blood-Lantern, its bone-and-iron frame cold and unblemished.He reached into his chest with his mind, checking the amber core of his Mind-Light.The golden seed was still there, pulsing at thirty-six beats a minute beneath his ribs, but deep within his marrow, a hollow, empty ache lingered. Twelve percent of his core Origin Energy was gone, burned away in the sixty minutes his body had spent stitching its own meat back together.He didn’t have infinite lives. He was nearly immortal, anchored by his remaining lifespan, but every time his meat was ground to dust, his foundation eroded. Eight deaths like that, and there would be nothing left to hold the soul.Silas pulled a spare canvas cloth from his pack, wrapped it tightly around his waist, and picked up his mantis-scythe dagger.He looked toward the silver seam where the rift had closed, then down at the small blue tail-hair the Fox-kin girl had left behind on the stone floor. He didn’t pick it up. He stepped over the black stain of his own vomited blood, turned his eyes back toward the northern trail, and took his first step across the flat, crushed faces of the citadel.