Seiren pushed open the cover of the body container. The test rune was completed. The only way to know if it did anything to the wounds on a dead body was by trial and error. The hinge was rusty and opened with a squeak.
Madeleine lay there, her eyes shut, her cheeks sunk in, and her skin pale and bloodless. Her hands were clasped across her abdomen and she was in the white night dress she wore the night she was killed. Seiren lifted the sheet with her newly-created rune and placed it across Madeleine's chest. It glowed with a green-violet hue. Seiren snapped her fingers, activating it. The rune sank into Madeleine and, on cue, she started to mutate. Her eyes snapped open, the eyeballs rolling independently in the sockets. Her mouth opened and shut like a fish. Her arms and legs snapped around at odd angles, each crunch resonating deep into Seiren's head. A guttural sound emanated from Madeleine's throat.
Seiren stepped back, horror closing its hand around her throat. She waded through syrup-thick air. The monster that was Madeleine twitched its head, reaching for her. Seiren tried to scream. No sound came out. The air suffocated her, smothering her.
Seiren sat up in bed with a scream.
Cold sweat covered her from head to toe. The bed sheets stuck to her legs and abdomen. She peeled them off with a shudder, the remnants of the nightmare still heavy on her shoulders. A headache throbbed at her temple. Nausea swirled in her throat. The tight sensation of being strangled lingered; she could taste bile in her throat.
Her breath came in erratic gasps. She swung her legs out of bed, slapping her cheeks in hopes to wake herself up further. The persisting images were becoming less real and more fuzzy.
Reality came back. Her cheeks burned, partly from the slapping and partly from embarrassment knowing Loren would now have had one live performance of Seiren's daily nightmares. Something else she could gossip to Rowan about.
The flat was silent; the only sounds came from the hustle and bustle out on the streets. She'd half-expected Loren to come sprinting and kicking down her door seeing as she'd just screamed the place down, but even as the minutes ticked by, no glamorous blonde came rushing in. What kind of a doctor was she?
Seiren got dressed and took yesterday's clothes to the bathroom to wash. On the table was a scribbled note, in cursive as curly as the writer's hair.
Hi Seiren. Have to rush to work today, sorry! Meet me for dinner tonight, yeah? L.
She scrunched up the note and sighed. There was no getting away from her.
A photo sitting in a frame on a bookshelf caught her eye as she readied to leave Loren's flat. She paused. Three boys and a girl huddled together. A spindly boy, about sixteen years old, stared at the camera with serious eyes. A girl not much younger than him looked equally grave, blue eyes piercing in the picture. They both sported jet black hair, the same as the youngest boy, who looked about eight or ten. His grin stretched across his fat cheeks, a chunky arm wrapped around the last boy with spiky blond hair and chubby cheeks. The blond boy's sparkling grey eyes rolled up to his friend, the epitome of happiness and a stark contrast to the glum faces of the two older siblings.
She put the picture back, frowning. Maybe the young blond boy was Loren's brother. The three black-haired siblings looked somewhat familiar, but she couldn't place what. Perhaps they were family friends.
I miss the Feblands, thought Madeleine at the mention of family friends.
Seiren hadn't thought about that name in a long time. Mr. and Mrs. Febland and their children Kasia and Tala were childhood friends. Kasia would be eighteen now, and Tala in his mid-twenties. Since Seiren moved into King's not long after her family died, she had never gone back to Finberry. There were too many bad memories.
She shook her head, clearing her mind. There was research to be done and many runes to sketch. She had no time to lose.
Seiren slaved over the runes for the rest of the day. Every mage knew the basics of creating a rune and most people develop their own styles within three or four years of runing. Many styles were employed over the hundreds of years rune magic had been used, with the most prominent focus initially on red runes of energy and orange runes of fire and heat. Yellow runes of light had always been the simplest to learn. The least understanding lay with the indigo runes of mind manipulation and violet runes of physical manipulation, due to their theoretically unlimited potential, and the green runes of healing, as experimentation potential was limited due to the need to practise on live subjects and high risk of adverse outcomes â at least, until King Pollin came into power. There had been a few breakthroughs in magic affecting the living being, such as the focused green runes Loren spoke about and re-growing skin for burn victims.
A few of the runes seemed promising, but their actual effects couldn't be assessed until she tried it on living tissue. Her eyes kept darting to the body within the sealed box at the far end, the violet runes glowing on the outside to maintain optimum conditions within and prevent the body from decaying.
The sun set without her realising. It was only the muffled shouts and screams of children that broke her attention and she found herself in an almost pitch darkness, squinting at her experimental runes, her neck aching and back throbbing. Her stomach grumbled and there was an uncomfortable fullness in her lower abdomen. She turned her head. The far window overlooked a garden where children rushed about, flailing their arms and shrieking with laughter.
Just what I need. A ruckus to make my research even harder to do.
Something bright caught Seiren's eye. She got up and moved to the window, frowning. The children tore about, but some of them were in wheelchairs, cheering on the chase. Some of the running kids had casts or bandages on with green runes glowing. Others had limbs entirely immersed in a bright, white light.
Is that what chaos magic looks like?
I don't know. It's not anything I've ever seen.
There was nobody nearby except for the children. Nobody was activating the white light magic. The green runes can be modified with circle locks to prolong their duration of action, but the other magic was too bright to be rune and too persisting to be burst.
Seiren picked up her cloak and threw it around her. She slid the laboratory doors open. On cue, the soldiers outside snapped to attention.
"I'm leaving for the day," she said over her shoulder. They nodded and locked up. She rushed out of the institute and headed to the enclosed garden she'd seen from her room. The sound of laughter sounded closer. The hedges stood tall as the white marble walls of the institute ended. She glanced around. No doors. Not surprising, considering that area was probably part of the hospital and couldn't be accessed from the outside â not by normal means, anyway.
She picked out a piece of paper and chalk and sketched a violet rune. Snapping her fingers after sticking it against the hedge, the leaves thrilled, turning into a passable wall. She stepped through. Short mowed grass flattened beneath her leather boots. A small garden opened before her. Children screamed, running, waving. At the far end, the double doors stood open into the hospital, a sprawling building with shiny windows and an air of dignity and cleanliness. Figures moved behind the glass. The air felt saturated with magic at work.
Two children spotted her and stood with their mouths agape, staring over her shoulder.
"Is that magic?" one of them said in wonder, pointing at probably the remnants of Seiren's violet rune. The tiny boy had spindly limbs and one of the arms was wrapped in the white magic she'd seen from her window.
"That's my rune, yes." Seiren crouched and frowned. She pointed at his arm. "Is that magic, too?"
"Yes, that's the doctor's magic," he said with pride, puffing out his chest. "She said I was a really good boy for being so brave, because that magic sometimes hurts but it didn't hurt at all. I even got some sweeties from having that put on."
"You cried a little," the girl next to him reminded him. He stuck out his tongue.
"Did not."
"Did, too."
"Which doctor is that?"
"Oooh I forgot her name. But she was pretty. So pretty. Like a princess."
"Tall, blonde, very long hair?" Seiren's stomach knotted.
"Yes! She was so nice to everyone." His attention switched back to Seiren. "But you're a mage too, right? Can you show me some magic?"
She blinked at him, surprised. Nobody had ever asked her for a show before. Sure, everyone was impressed by the fact that she was a mage, but the respect came with a distance.
"Mama once took me to see a magic show. The big man made lots of sparks with his hands and they danced in the sky," said the girl, eyes shining.
Burst magic.
Ah, your forte.
"Ah. I can't do that, but I can something that's just as cool. If this man here will let me see his arm afterwards."
"Sure!" He nodded with enthusiasm, his eyes also shining. Before Seiren even extracted her chalk and paper, she had a small crowd of excited children before her, filled with expectation. She froze. She'd never had a crowd this big before, nor interacted with children. What did they like? What if they didn't like what she'd shown them? Did they speak the proper tongue? Even as her brain churned, they fidgeted and her heart thudded with panic. They were already losing interest.
Just show them something fun and moving. Kids are happy with very little.
"Okay. So... you, tell me your favourite animal," she said, pointing to a random boy. He flushed, grinning from ear to ear.
"A horse!"
A horse. She could work with a horse. For a moment, she'd been anxious he'd say something difficult like a dragon or bird. She spread a piece of paper on the ground, chewing her lip and brain whirring. Two circles and a centre point. She attached an outlet to allow the product to move. Within the circle locks, she drew the sigil to prolong its effect, knowing how fragile this untested rune would be. It would last perhaps five seconds. She overlapped four triangles, three of them pointing at their own locking circle. She'd last seen something similar in a mage attempting â and failing â to reanimate a dead body in one of her textbooks. This was a simplified version and minus the gradients of a green rune. She then added three separate straight lines from the centre that didn't join at the other end, turning the violet rune of overlapping shapes into an amalgamation with red, to generate energy. She kept it at three, not wanting her product to charge off.
The kids held their breath. Seiren tucked her chalk away and ran a hand through her hair, leaving it in spiky clumps. Symmetrical except for the outlet at the top. She waved at the kids; they dutifully scooted out of the way, leaving a path for her rune. She held her breath, too, and snapped her fingers.
The rune glowed a mix of violet and red. The soil beneath bubbled. A blob surfaced with four stumpy legs and a hint of a head. It reared its nub of a head, stood on its two tiny back legs, and cantered forward. The children shrieked, scuttling back. The blob horse made about five metres down the field before dissolving into dirt, vanishing amidst the blades of grass.
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