The alchemist was first to shout, hands on his face as he ran into the room and to the machine, switching it back off, but Amma couldn’t look away from the shock on Damien’s face and how it shifted into ire so swiftly. Even without his armor and cloak, he was an imposing figure, and when he strode over, she thought he might kill her right there, but instead he only wrenched her off the floor.
“Get away from there,” he growled, pulling her back from the expanding ooze. She stumbled, his hand still tight on her upper arm as he assessed the situation. “What did you do?”
Amma stammered, blinking up at him. “I didn’t mean…the table…and the box.” She pointed, and the imp quickly chucked the glass container across the room, clasping his claws behind his back.
Mudryth caught the box with her elongated reach before it landed in the pond of melting gold at their feet, growing at an abnormal rate, much more goo now than could have been originally inside the container. Mudryth’s form went dark as shadows crawled up her limbs from the floor, and her eyes brightened until they glowed white.
Damien gave Amma a shove backward, telling her to stay out of the way. The ooze had covered the things that fell beneath it, and they bobbed up to the surface, a set of bottles each containing some strange liquid, the shattered pieces of another, chunks of human, the trinket of liathau wood, and then they were sucked into the goo, disappearing as the blob continued to grow until it hit the edge of the shadows Mudryth had called up from the ground, containing it.
Anomalous scurried up to the edge of Mudryth’s shadow, peering over and into the pool. “I never knew this could expand its mass in such a way.”
“Where did you get this?” Damien carefully circled the barrier, and the ooze began to climb up the foggy walls the hag had built.
“I can’t exactly remember!” Anomalous sounded as if he were delivering absolutely positive news to the room, throwing his hands up with a broad smile. “I fell through this hole in the quag a few moons back and got it from one of those underground fellas, you know? They’re strikingly handsome butweird. They called it something…something strange.”
“It didn’t happen to be luxerna, did it?” Damien’s brow was dark and heavy with concern.
“No, no, it was…I think…god goo! Right, yes, the goo of the gods, he said it was. The gods aren’t real, of course, so I just assumed I’d have to play with it to figure out what it really is, but I did sort of forget I even had it. This is absolutely fascinating!”
Damien rolled his eyes, and began to mutter in his sibilant language. The expanding puddle quivered and shrank back in on itself. “It’s got a will,” he said with a sort of disgusted look on his face. “Something in there is alive. Has it always been like that?”
“I don’t know!” Anomalous was positively beaming. “It’s much too big for the box now. Muddie, you think you can shift it over to one of the cells?”
The hag said nothing, eyes glowing a brilliant white, but the shadows moved like a fog over the laboratory floor, and the viscous, golden puddle inside sloshed over itself as it went. Anomalous swung open the door to a transparent tube, and the goo was ushered inside and dumped off. The hag breathed in with a horrible, rasping sound, and the shadows collected themselves in one, long rope that she sucked into her mouth and snapped her teeth shut on the very last bit of, eyes losing their glow as the door swung shut with a pop.
Even larger than Anomalous, the cylinder filled with the bright ooze, rising up to nearly its top before settling, and the alchemist smooshed his nose up against the glass. “Simply riveting!” Beside him, Mudryth came back into herself, gathering up a roll of parchment that she handed over to Anomalous and he immediately began to scribble on. The two stood under the glow the strange goop was now giving off, trading excited theories about what might come of all this.
Damien, however, turned back to Amma, quiet fury on his clenched jaw. She shook her head, backing up from him and bumping into the case she’d saved previously, managing to only shift it a bit. Then Damien’s eyes flicked across the room to where the imp was huddled in a corner. Kaz’s tiny hand shot out, pointing at Amma, and she gasped in betrayed disgust back at him.
“Anomalous,” said Damien, rubbing his face, “I must apologize, this is—”
“Amazing!” The alchemist threw his arms up, the parchment he’d been writing on unraveling. “I’ve been too busy to experiment with that box, but clearly I should have. If you look closely, that broken lumbar joint is mending itself!” Floating past where he pointed, a small shadow was indeed knitting together in the darkness of the goo.
Damien turned instead to Mudryth. “Truly, we’ve made a mess.”
“Oh, please, sweetie, we’ve had livelier inventory days around here.” She patted at her frizzed-out hair and wiped off a last bit of shadow from her shoulder.
Damien’s gaze fell back on Amma. He was out of his armor, the skin of his face and hands clean if his black tunic and pants were still stained. His look had dissolved from the rage he’d been wearing, but she still straightened when he strode over to her. “You,” he said, “don’t touch anything else.”
Amma was prepared to protest that she hadn’t actually touched anything to begin with, but Anomalous whirled back on them, voice booming, “You must spend the night! I’ve so much to do before we can possibly begin our grand experiment.”
Damien grunted, Amma looking from one man to the other, and then the blood mage gave in, an exhausted slump to his shoulders.
A short while later, Amma was led along a raised walkway off the back of the tower and into cozier, if sideways, living chambers. Damien ushered her up a narrow staircase to a private room, closing the door behind him and then standing there, glowering at her.
She swallowed, unsure where to start, because the truth of it was, shedidspill the table of body parts, and she evensort ofturned on that whirring machine, but the rest of it, the start of it, was all that terrible, little imp, and it had been on purpose too. Yet Damien seemed determined to be angry withher, and gods did she hate to upset anyone, especially a blood mage who had threatened to kill her while they were in the perfect place to dispose of a body. Amma lifted her arms and opened her mouth.
“Sanguinisui, do not hurt yourself, do not hurt anyone else, and do not leave this room.”
Amma snapped her mouth back shut despite that he hadn’t ordered her quiet, the familiar, awful crawl of the spell working its way through her. His voice had been fairly flat, yet he still stood there, glaring, instead of sweeping out of the room and leaving her alone.
She glared back. “Is there anything else?” she asked, surprised by the cut of her own voice, but suddenly overwhelmed with anger herself. “Something you want me to do for you?”
“What? No,” he spat back at her.
“Really? You’re not even going to force me to tell you the truth about what happened? You’re just going to assume it was all my fault, and—”
“I know that wasn’t your doing.” He cut her off, and she straightened, the shock of both his words and sudden shift in demeanor chasing away her own anger. Damien sighed, settling into his usual irritation. “Kaz clearly has it out for you, but I didn’t expect him to be so hostile. Risky when he’s of so little use to me. I’m thinking of killing him off again.”
