Unsleeping Patron - Harvesting the Tail-Eye

Dry reeds pulled through iron teeth—that was what the wind sounded like through the Northern Crags. pulled through teeth.Silas crouched in the shadow of a basalt shelf, his toes wedged into a narrow crack to keep the gale from catching his canvas tunic. Twenty feet below, the gully opened into a bowl of black gravel, littered with the splintered ribs of mountain goats and the rusted plates of old iron shields.The thing stepped into the bowl from a narrow crevice on the eastern wall.It walked like a horse, but its spine was a ridge of bare, interlocking vertebrae that protruded through grey, hairless hide. Where shoulders should have been, two fan-like wings of yellowed bone scraped against the canyon rocks with the dry, hollow noise of wooden shingles sliding over slate. But its most dangerous feature dragged behind it in the dust a six-foot tail of braided sinew terminating in a single, wet, bowling-ball-sized eye that rolled constantly in its socket, scanning the crags above.A Sken-Demon.Silas didn’t reach for his mantis-scythe dagger. He closed his right hand into a fist, letting his golden inner light pool in his forearm until his knuckles throbbed with a steady thirty-six-beat pulse.He didn’t aim for the beast’s head.He flicked his wrist, driving a needle-thin bolt of Mind-Light straight at the wet orb on the tail.The light struck true. The decoy tail-eye burst in a spray of clear fluid, its black pupil tearing apart like a punctured bladder.The Sken-Demon let out a brassy, screeching blare. The loss of its tail-eye blinded its rear defense instantly. In its panic, the creature wheeled around in a tight, clumsy circle, its bone-wings slamming against the basalt walls as its horse-like snout snapped toward its own tail.Silas leaped from the shelf.He didn’t drop like a stone. He summoned two Mind-Light hands from his shoulder blades to catch the cliff face, anchoring his weight for a fraction of a second before hurling himself downward into the gully.As he fell, he fused his right arm’s golden light into a three-foot drill-spear. The translucent tip didn’t just point it spun, a vortex of solid amber light whirring with a high-pitched, saw-like whine that cut through the wind.He landed square on the creature’s back.The drill-spear plunged straight into the soft, unarmored skin of the beast’s underbelly. Grey fat and hot, sulfurous grease erupted from the wound, spraying across Silas’s chest as the spinning light bored through five inches of muscle and gristle.The Sken-Demon screamed, its front legs buckling into the black gravel.Before Silas could wrench the spear free to strike again, the beast’s long, skeletal neck whipped backward with terrifying speed. Its massive, horse-like jaws fitted with two rows of flat, grinding iron teeth snapped shut over Silas’s left forearm.CRACK.It wasn’t a clean slice. The bone in his forearm shattered into a dozen sharp splinters before the teeth tore through muscle, skin, and tendon, severing the limb four inches below the elbow.Silas was thrown off the thrashing beast, his back slamming hard into the basalt wall. His severed arm dropped into the gravel five feet away, its pale fingers still twitched in the grey dust.Blood didn’t gush from his stump.The moment the meat separated, the Eldritch Physique inside his marrow took over. A swarm of thick, pitch-black tentacles no thicker than iron wire erupted from the jagged stump on his elbow. They didn’t bleed; they squirted out like writhing, hungry worms, reaching across the gravel toward the severed forearm.Equally black threads burst from the wrist of the detached arm.The two clusters of tendrils hooked into each other in mid-air. With a wet, snapping sound, the severed forearm was yanked back across the dust, slamming against Silas’s elbow. The black threads pulled taut, weaving through the shattered bone fragments, stitching muscle to muscle and skin to skin with a series of heavy, wet clicks.The sensation was agonizing like having a hundred white-hot needles dragged through his marrow but within three seconds, Silas’s fingers twitched. The skin over the wound was stitched together with a dark, raised seam, fully functional once more.The Sken-Demon was staggering to its feet, its belly leaking black, oily fluid onto the gravel as it raised its bone-wings to crush him.Silas didn’t retreat. He stepped forward on his reattached arm, raised his right hand, and drove a fresh Mind-Light spear through the beast’s ruptured belly, thrusting all the way up into its spinal column.The Sken-Demon shivered once. Its bone-wings clattered against the basalt, its horse-like legs collapsed beneath its weight, and it hit the gravel with a heavy, final thud.Silas knelt beside the carcass, his chest heaving, his mouth filled with the bitter taste of cold iron.He plunged his reattached left hand deep into the beast’s torn stomach, digging past the warm, slippery intestines until his fingers closed around something hard, smooth, and cold.He pulled it free.It was the Skardini Core a sphere of dense, grey stone the size of an orange, its surface engraved with natural, vein-like grooves that hummed with a low, spiritual frequency.Silas wiped the grey grease from the stone onto his canvas trousers, tucked the core deep into his inner pack beside the horn powder, and turned his bloodshot eyes back toward the towering crags of the north.