The book struck the wall spine foremost and exploded in a shower of yellowing pages as the binding gave way. Orchid scowled at the ruin of it from behind her stacks of reading.

“As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of gigantic stature.” She sneered at the pages rustling to the ground as she mocked the words in a sing-song voice. “Tell me, Mary dear, where did you find corpses ‘eight feet in height, and proportionably large’ to get the pieces from? You’d need half the damned NBA.” She sighed, scrubbing her eyes with the balls of her palms. It was past dawn, the sunlight was making her eyes ache, and Mary Shelley was getting seriously on her nerves. She’d dig her up and kick her if she knew where she was buried. She stretched, flexed her fingers, then pushed a tray of surgical implements and a dead frog irritably aside and took up the books again.

All right, Mary Shelley was a blind alley. She’d known she would be, but even something that unpromising was a break from the Kabala. It was only with immense pains and tedious effort that she’d managed to track the material down in translation, and several long nights had eventually had to be spent in the regrettably difficult persuasion of an aged Hebrew scholar. His mind was supple, elusive, and remarkably penetrating, and she still wasn’t convinced that he hadn’t slipped in some deliberate misreading before his eventual (and to be fair, quite painless) demise. Old man blood. She grimaced. Nasty.

Not like the other one. She closed her eyes, let the memory rise up for a moment. It was terrible and enthralling. She could taste the hot blood coursing down her throat, feel the heat of it on her bare skin as the luscious little innocent lay twitching before her. She’d been good. Better even than meta the blood of the innocent. Daxrathas wasn’t letting her forget it either. It felt good, deep down in the pit of her stomach. Good to have taken her away from him. Good to have destroyed her. Good to have cleansed the world of one more mincing, simpering affront to all that she had had to live through.

She shuddered. Too good. She had the sensation of walking on the very edge of a fathomless void, feeling the sharp break of the precipice with the soles of her feet. Flying, not Falling,whispered the Voice from within. Don’t you want to feel alive again? She gripped the book before her until her nails clawed through the cover, but made no answer.

In Prague, in 1686, the shtetl was leveled by a fire begun when a drunken reveler threw a firebrand over the wall separating the Jewish ghetto from the nearby docks. The captain of the guard, in sworn testimony, claimed that a gigantic figure had been seen carrying Jews from their burning homes and striving to subdue the flames. His testimony was supported by numerous statements by his own men and by other witnesses. In the following pogrom, no evidence of such a figure was ever discovered, despite the thorough search and looting of the homes and temple. It was surmised that the captain and his men had been confused by the smoke and chaos, or possibly that they had been deluded by “foul Jewish sorceries.”

They might have thought differently if they’d been educated men, Orchid mused. She shuffled through the handwritten notes of her now deceased Hebraic scholar, the excellent and learned Rabbi Ibrahim. 1573 -– a prayer for the sanctification of the crucible. 1436, from a truly ancient manuscript -– a remarkably accurate anatomical diagram describing the inscriptions to be placed at the joinings of the limbs. And here in translation, as late as 1972, a detailed list of the materials used in compounding the vitae animus. Scattered throughout the ages, like a current deep below the surface, ran the history of the golem.

The most difficult part of applying the knowledge was the conversion. As tedious as it had been to transcribe the spidery characters of the Kabalistic inscriptions, it was work done in vain if the characters could not then be inverted. Nothing so simple as mere reversal of the written form, of course, but a complete repolarization of the sacred to the profane. Each sigil had a depth of meaning -- symbolic, numeric, pictorial. She’d given up in despair every morning, only to be drawn back to it each night, fascinated by the power that lay locked in the tortuous black swastikas. The scholar had been of no help in this part of the endeavor. He’d laughed at her. His mind was like trying to grip a fish; however she clawed at it, he wriggled from her grasp, taking the best of his secrets to the grave. She could make him recite, but she couldn’t make him think, and she was left to unravel the mystery on her own. Daxrathas knew how, but his price was high. Lambs and doves didn’t get her far; they whet his appetite and gave her a few maddening hints, but no more. In the end, she’d needed something more high powered.

She hadn’t known the woman very well. She’d met her a few times, but they’d never really connected. They were passing acquaintances. She did this sort of thing all of the time. She had no choice but to make humans her cattle, and one cow from the herd was little different from any other. Daxrathas had set a price that had to be paid; there were others that could have been harder. This sunken hag, dragged from the cells of the local penitentiary, was nothing to her. She hadn’t called her mother since she was four.

We’re not going to think about this right now. We’re not going to think about this right now.

But she saw it all again -- how baffled she’d been, how she’d shaken off the grogginess of sleep early enough to know real terror, how she’d pleaded for her life. Please please, I’ve got a little girl. Did she really care, just then, or was it just desperate cunning? Something inside of her, weak and soft and hurting, crawled toward that faint hope and had to be crushed down ruthlessly. Too late for all of that. Too late now. She would have put her to sleep, but Daxrathas insisted. He wanted her alive in every sense of the word. She would have left the room, once the pentacle was laid and the summoning complete, but Daxrathas insisted on that as well. She was to stay, and with her eyes open.

A kind of clinical detachment had come over her, a cool steely wall behind which the painful scrabbling of her soul was almost stifled. She’d kept up her end. She’d watched it through, perfectly motionless, every minute of the long hour while the woman begged to be released from what was left of her mortal body. Daxrathas had reveled, mauling his prey and crushing her spirit with inhuman pleasure. He’d drawn out her torment moment upon moment, holding out false hopes, toying with her terror and abasement, coaxing her to grovel, plead, cower, fawn, and betray before he finally killed her. In the end, he’d forced Orchid to one last sacrifice.

“Tell her who you are, little pupil.” Daxrathas’s voice was a purr. His great clawed hands tipped the woman’s chin up, digging lightly into her throat. She was kneeling before him, blood splashing to the floor from her torn and naked body. She licked pathetically at his great clawed feet, lost in a haze of pain and abject fear. Orchid could barely watch her. “Speak,” rumbled Daxrathas. “Or we shall see how much longer she can be kept alive. Speak now, and I will spare her further torment.”

Orchid nodded, feeling her stomach turning violently. He was capable of more -- much more. She stepped forward and crouched down on a level with the woman. Gently, she touched her chin with her fingers and raised her eyes to her own. The cool, detached part of her mind, the part that wasn’t hurtling in a whirlwind, noticed how her hand trembled.

“Mom?” The word felt strange on her lips. The woman’s eyes were vacant, but a faint light sparked in them. “It’s Janey.”

Recognition dawned on her features. Daxrathas roared with pleasure. His claws shot home.

He remained. He was needed in the flesh. The pentacle reeked of her blood as she stepped into it with the texts.

“Here.” His clawed finger stabbed down at the diagram of the golem, coming to rest on the inscription on the center of the chest. “The inscription is ‘mother’ in the old Hebrew tongue. No doubt your scholar told you that much.” His lip curled in contempt, and his breath was hot and reeked of the charnel-house as his lips brushed against her ear. “Now how did you secure his cooperation, hmm?” He dragged one clawed finger across her cheek as she struggled to concentrate on the paper in front of her. “There are simpler ways to bring a son into existence, Janey. Much simpler ways.” His hand slid flat over her stomach and rested there.

She pushed back a wave of nausea, trying not to betray her fear. “We’ll do it my way.”

The demon chuckled, leaning over her until his cheek brushed her own. His voice was an insinuating rumble.

“That frigid virginity of yours will get lonely, Janey. I’ll be here when you tire of it.”

Her frozen silence was met only with a rumble of amused contempt. Then the curved claw of his forefinger struck down on the text.

“Mother. But more than this. What else?”

She peered at the unfamiliar characters, her mind still racing from the demon’s sneering taunt. “What else? Umm it’s”

“Numbers. The Hebraic alphabet is used to record numbers. Aleph, the first letter, with a value of one -- the nikkudim below it do not signify. Mem Stumah, thirteenth letter of the alphabet, gives you the number--”

“Thirteen?”

“No.” Daxrathas growled irritably. “Why do you dabble in what you do not understand? Yud,
the tenth letter, marks the turning point between single digits and the tens place, you would call it. Yud is ten, Chof Kefufa is twenty, and so Mem Stumah is fifty. The word has the value of fifty one. Now, the shape. What does it tell you?”

She stared at the page, trying assimilate the barrage of information. “The shape? It’s a box. And then an X shape, with dots underneath it--”

“Backwards! You’re reading it backwards, stupid child,” Daxrathas snarled in frustration. “You’re moving in dangerous circles, Janey. Perhaps you’d better stick with what you know.” A cold hand closed over her thigh, gripping it with claws that could rend it in an instant. Daxrathas’s voice sunk to an insinuating purr. “Or learn what you don’t.”

“Right to left. I understand.” She gritted her teeth, trying to ignore the frigid pressure of his grip. “So there is a shape, a little like an X.”

“Look at the shapes within it. What do you see?”

“I see two opposite facing shapes coming out of a central plane like reflections in water. That is Aleph.” She knit her brows, concentrating intently. “And it is written in the Sifrei Torah, Tefillin, and Mezuzos”

“Which means?”

“That it is a sacred text, written in the style reserved for the Torah and for scriptures.”

“Correct. And the other letter?”

“Mem Stumah, written in the same style... a shape like a box with a piece jutting off to the top left. It’s a little like a house.”

“Yes. We have then the next level of meaning. First, balanced opposition growing out of a static state. Then from that we move to a solid shape, a house -- stability and safety. Together we have a meaning--”

“Mother. The opposition could be mother and child. Or husband and wife. Or--”

“Yes. It has many levels. Now look at the Aleph again. What else?”

She groaned. This was unbelievably hard. They were on the first letter of the first word and already the lines were swimming in front of her eyes.

Daxrathas drew his claw along the shape. “Yud. Yud. Vov. The line from upper left to lower right is the character Vov. The two arms reaching up and down are Yuds. What do you learn from this?”

Orchid’s lips moved slowly. “It’s the number twenty-six?”

Daxrathas nodded. “You begin to learn. What else?”

She forced her mind to grip the problem, pushing away the feeling of Daxrathas’s clawed hand moving sinuously on her thigh. “Ten, ten, and six. We learn that the opposing forces are stronger than the static. We learn that opposition is more powerful than stability.” She paused, something teasing the back of her mind. “In that character! In that character, opposing forces are more powerful than static stability but it is followed by Mem Stumah, a sign of stability with a much higher number. In the word ‘mother,’ the opposing forces in Aleph contribute only one, and the stability of Mem Stumah contributes fifty. So mother is the stabilization of opposing forces.”

Daxrathas nodded, eyes glowing.

“Now. Invert that. All of it.”

With a tired sigh, she picked up the quill. It was going to be a long night.

It was a long several weeks. The Gematria was hardly a field of study to be picked up lightly, and the invention of an entire new system of symbolic writing was a strain that nearly undid her. Daxrathas’s presence was hardly conducive to progress. She needed his knowledge, but his constant insinuation of himself into her consciousness was a strain on her nerves. His appetite was demanding; it was becoming harder to find careless victims who could be carried back alive. After that first, heavy price, he had taken whatever she’d brought, but the last one had been difficult. Damned cheerleaders were always in better shape than she remembered, and this one had nearly wriggled loose from her before she could force her eyes up and grip her mind. In the end she’d had to backhand her hard enough to knock her unconscious, and she’d broken her cheekbone in the process. It hadn’t felt as good as she would have thought. The rush she used to get from that sort of thing was fading to a dull tedium as she scurried about fulfilling Daxrathas’s appetites.

Tonight was a night off. She’d left Daxrathas gloating delightedly over the cheerleader and stopped in to check on Hack. She’d hardly seen him in the past week; she’d been closeted with Daxrathas until the reek of blood from the pentacle sunk into her clothing and hair. Hack seemed all right, although it was hard to tell. Last night he’d come home battered and torn, but she hadn’t been able to get any information out of him. Whatever he’d tussled with had been tough enough to leave a new network of scars over him. It wasn’t Omega; Hack or the television would have told her about that. She’d pushed that issue aside and dealt with patching him up, driving the stitches through as he sat in stolid silence. She didn’t want to know who it was. They had enough enemies already.

She sighed, blowing her hair away from her eyes. And here came more. Those frigging crows were back again. She paced restlessly, watching them wheeling over the asylum. Damn Black Priest and his prying little lackeys. Those crows belonged to Macha; there was no doubt in her mind of that. All right, you swaggering cow, she thought. Let’s see what you’re made of, because I’m more than a little sick of skulking around underground. She shot a glance out of the corner of her eye, then flung up her hand and threw a bolt of black energy hurtling into the center of the flock of crows.

It was a bad shot. The crows scattered, cawing taunts after them as they wheeled and reassembled. But she had other things on her mind now. One crow, swooping down low, touched the ground and became woman.

“Can’t think of anything better to do?” Orchid eyed the woman, trying not to feel intimidated by the fact that she had to look up to do it.

“You presume too much,” replied Macha. She spoke with an air of serene and unruffled calm, as someone far above the minor concerns of the moment. “You would be most unwise to
attempt to harm my creatures.”

Orchid felt her hackles rising at the smug, unperturbed response from her opponent. “I’ll
presume to make Kentucky Fried Crow out of them the next time I see them. Back off, Macha.
Run back to your master while you’ve got legs to take you.”

Macha’s cool smile diminished slightly as she unsheathed her swords with calm deliberation.
“Very well, girl. I shall take my exercise for the day and instruct you in respect for your
superiors.”

Orchid shrugged. “All right. Ten paces back, turn and fight?”

Macha nodded, turning to pace off the distance. “That is acceptable.”

“Really? How about this?” Orchid smirked, shot a hand forward, and slammed a bolt of dark
energy into Macha’s side and back. The force of it threw her hurtling back toward the ruined fountain that stood in the overgrown remains of the ornamental gardens.

Macha picked herself up from the ground with rather less deliberation, but with an easy movement that made Orchid’s stomach sink. She was tough. No one she’d hit with that kind of power had ever stood up before.

“As you are without honor, I shall dispense with the formalities.” Macha swung both swords up, dropping to slight crouch. “Try your best, girl. It would be disappointing to kill you too quickly.”

Orchid paused. This was a tougher adversary than she’d faced since her transformation. It wasn’t what she was used to, and she could feel herself floundering mentally. Watching Macha shift her position, gliding around to her right, she decided to buy some time. Keeping her eye on the warrior-woman (who was moving damned fast), she concentrated and drew the light up and into herself, dodging to the side as absolute darkness fell like a cloak on them.

“You’ll need to do better than that.” The voice was frighteningly near. Orchid instinctively ducked and rolled as light glimmered up and around the form of her opponent. Her almost lazy swing of the sword would have bisected her if she hadn’t dodged. As it was, she was coming on fast, not even breaking her stride to easily outdistance Orchid. Frightened now, Orchid wriggled backwards on the ground, trying to get to her feet. An instant later, her throat was pinned between the edges of two swords, their blades crossed and their points sunk lightly in the earth on either side of her white neck.

“Don’t you want to run along and look after your little Cuchulain?” Orchid panted, choking out the words. Damn, this was uncomfortable. Another minute and she was going to phase out. She hated to do it; she didn’t want her old friend the Priest to know about that little trump card. But this was fast looking like a lethal position to be in.

Macha eased her swords back from her supine opponent’s neck. "How old are you, child? And what could you possibly know of Cuchulain?"

Orchid bit back her first angry answer. Tempting as it was to point out that a woman of twenty years was hardly a child, information was the new gold. She wasn’t giving Black Priest anything for free.

“I know what anyone can read. His reputation has continued. And I know that Omega meets of his criteria.”

”Omega cannot hold a candle to Cuchulain.  And you would be wise to bite your tongue before making such comparisons.”

With that, the towering figure moved out of the starlight. Macha stepped away from Orchid, allowing her to stand. She got to her feet, rubbing her neck. Damn, she hated the smug little smile on that woman’s face. She felt a violent urge to puncture her calm by whatever means necessary.

“The parallels are there without me pointing them out for you. I’m surprised you don’t see them yourself. He’s preternaturally gifted, very young, and if I’ve got  his history right Omega was struck by lightning and received his powers in his 17th year -- the same year Cuchulain received his arms from Conchubar Mac Nessa and held the ford against the invading army of Connacht. Plus of course lightning being traditionally viewed as the joining of powers from sun and cloud, then what we have is something that looks a lot like Cuchulain’s symbolic roots in the sun and water gods coming back to ground themselves in a new young champion.” She paused and took a deep breath. Damn, that had just spewed out right from her reading to her mouth. Macha was starting to glower and fidget with her swords, so she cut it short.

“But screw that. I don’t care what you think about Omega. What I want you to do is fuck off and stop spying on me with your damned crows.”

Macha laughed. “What?  Just like you refrain from skulking in the shadows and spying on that jester named Pantomime?  I thought you were a smart child, but I guess I was wrong.”

Orchid felt her anger boiling over. Damn this woman! Those snide “child” comments were really getting on her nerves, and now she was throwing this Pantomime crap in her face. Like she gave a damn. Like he mattered anything to her.

“All right, Macha. Let me explain why you should call your little pets away.” She looked up and grabbed the mind of the nearest crow. It was a fair distance, but crows as a rule don’t have much in the way of willpower. She yanked a few strings and brought it flying to her hand.

“This is why.” She grabbed the crow and wrung its neck, throwing its body at her feet.

Macha stared at her, absolutely silent for a moment. Without so much as looking back, she drew her sword, swung back, and slammed the blade straight through the trunk of the oak tree three feet behind her. The trunk gave with a splintering crack, and the entire tree crashed to the ground.

“You should not have done that,” said Macha, her voice firm, low, and deadly. “I will ruin you for this.”

Nodding quietly, the woman turned on her heel. An instant later she was gone and a crow lifted quickly from the ground.

“Fucking birds,” snarled Orchid. She glared around at them, then walked back inside, slamming the door behind her.

The break hadn’t done much for her concentration, but she forced her mind back to her work. She’d slowly managed to assemble what she needed -- alchemical compounds for the vitaeanimus, blessed parchments stolen from a nearby temple and ritualistically profaned in a complicated ceremony, and a special ink compounded from shellfish hulls, extracts of belladonna and mandrake root, and the blood of swine. Tonight, as she moved into the final preparations, she’d brought in the freshly killed body of an unrepentant murderer.

Neil Hamilton had died hours before in Graterford Correctional Facility, strapped to a gurney with a quietly impersonal machine administering the lethal injection.  Thirty-six years old and with a measurable intelligence quotient of one hundred and sixty-eight, Hamilton had pursued jointly his two great passions in life: medicine and murder. His convictions for the drugging, rape, murder, and dismemberment of six University of Pennsylvania nurses, student doctors, and staff workers were sufficient to place him on death row, but investigating officials were all too aware that this only scratched the surface of Dr. Hamilton’s “hobby.” Once he was captured, his interest in his own existence seemed to flag; he’d waived every appeal due to him and ordered his lawyer to expedite his appearance in the death chamber by all means possible. Fascinated throughout his life by the suffering and deaths of others, he appeared unperturbed and even enthralled by the prospect of his own demise. In his own way, he would have appreciated the final use to which his remains would be put.

Hamilton’s body formed the main framework of the creation. His torso and internal organs were entirely intact. After some consideration, Orchid had included his hands as well. Where else would she find a murderer with the hands of surgeon? To that she’d added a grotesque butcher’s shop worth of other parts, each carefully selected for its utility. The arms -- both pairs -- and the other pair of hands were garnered from the cream of the illegal boxing circuit. Loins and legs were taken from a professional football player wanted for the rape of his stepdaughter; the police and newspapers were still marveling at his sudden dissapearance after the issue of the warrant. She’d tried to keep them in good condition, but the smell was powerful. And the head

She leaned against the wall, her face hidden in the shadow as she watched Dr. Everett’s progress. It was remarkable what a pediatrician relatively untrained as a surgeon and supplied only with a staple gun and fishing line could do. Naturally, there was no need for the usual tedious connection of blood vessels, ligaments, and muscle fibers. The inscriptions would do all of that. But the docile, trembling way in which he devoted himself to his work was rather touching. It was good to see a man who really put himself into his work.

As he tied off the last knot in the putrescent wreck before him, he lifted his beaten, watery eyes to her. She was rather disappointed to see the knowledge in his eyes. She’d left Hamilton’s head on until the last, but he’d evidently worked out the last element of the plot. As she pushed off the wall and approached him in a gentle stalk, he laid down his tool and held his hands open. His eyes drifted briefly to Hack’s form, leaning silently against the far wall. He paled and swallowed, then forced his eyes back to Orchid. His lips moved weakly, and his voice was faint and supplicating.

“Please. Make it quick.”

Daxrathas chuckled from the shadows, but she nodded. She’d spent the last two weeks enduring his jibes and taunts about her lingering humanity, and she was sick of catering to his depravity. Everett wasn’t a bad sort at heart, and he’d served them well. Well, and perhaps a little too long. His cringing was instinctive and automatic now, and his entire body was a mass of tics and trembling. It was time to put him down.

Stepping forward lightly, she took him by the arm and drew him into her. He slumped against her, his face buried against her chest as she brushed the hair from his neck. Carrow. She pushed away the thought, took his head in her hands and drew it back to expose the white skin. His soft whimper as her teeth broke the skin was childlike, and his hands clutched at her for comfort. She drew him in gently, letting the light and the pain fade together until he hung limp in her arms.

Then, from the corner of the room, Punishment snarled eagerly, and she dropped him on the slab. Enough with patience. There was work to do.

Hack stepped forward and severed Everett’s head from his body with a practiced stroke. The taut lines of his mammoth frame were drawn harder with excitement and fulfillment. The sweat on his body was a fine sheen, and the spasm of pleasure that rippled through him was terrible to see. His hatred for the doctors who had condemned Melvin to a living death was unbounded, and in this consummation it was unbridled and awful to behold. Orchid shrunk back against the far wall, her eyes wide. Moments like this terrified her. She hoped -- she even prayed, with a certain bitter irony -- that Melvin was still somewhere inside of the monstrous frame and the cold, shadowed eyes. But tonight she could see nothing of Melvin in Hack.

Hurridly, she took up the head as Hack severed Hamilton’s neck. She set Doctor Everett’s head in place and quickly secured it with the crude materials on the table. The face looked calm, almost peaceful; she turned away from it to focus on the rough stitchwork as she joined the neck to the body. Daxrathas, for once, was silent, brooding over the foot of the table like an unquiet spirit haunting the room. As Hack took up his place at the head of the table, Orchid kept her head down and tried not to think of her own position, trapped between the two of them. Looking down on Everett’s quiet face, she bit back a sudden insurrection from within, a scream from the part of her that remembered tears. And has it come to this? She narrowed her focus to the individual stitches, counting them over and over in her mind in order to push away the images that rose there. Permafrost, wasted and ruined in the Black Priest’s gaol. Pantomime, his eyes wide and frozen as she stepped towards him. Her mother. She drove the stitches home with desperate concentration and an unconscious whimper of torment that did not go unnoticed by her lowering mentor.

At last the gruesome handiwork was done. Now began the lengthiest part of the ritual, the painstaking process of inscribing the sigils that would unite and animate the body. Under Daxrathas’s tutilege, she had translated, transcribed, quantified, symbolically analyzed, thoroughly inverted and re-invented over a hundred Hebraic inscriptions from manuscript sources relating to the construction of golems. The oversized chart she’d created hung on the wall, showing each joint and the corresponding symbols to be inked tortuously onto the skin on either side. It was a tedious, lengthy task. She dared not rush, as each sigil must be draw entire and perfect, without error or correction. There were ten separate laws governing the shape, size, and symmetry of the aleph alone, and the new character set they had created was no less complex. The placement of the symbols was similarly precise and unforgiving of error: at the precise center of the body as measured from outstretched hands to the soles of the feet; along the femoral artery to the inner loins; directly over the center of the heart. Daxrathas, mercifully, was silent; Hack was immobile, preternaturally still. Like the evil geniuses of her work, they stood at the head and foot of the table overseeing her every move.

At last it was done. Her back and neck ached from the cramped position, and even her supernatural endurance was showing the strain. She straightened, pushed back her hair, and looked up and down the body. It was covered in spidery, flowing characters, some widely separated, some densely clustered in spirals, pentacles, and swastikas. Swaying slightly on her feet, she took up with trembling hands the final inscription. It was carefully inked on a sliver of the finest parchment, torn from the pages of a defiled Torah and cured in incense from the burning bones of a pig. Upon it were the Great Words, the most powerful and difficult of inscriptions. They had cost her long hours of tormented reasoning to unlock and re-create. Folding the paper upon itself, she pressed one finger to the lips of the corpse. Prying them carefully open, she slid the paper between the clammy grey pads of the lips and under the corpse’s tongue.

“It is well done, pupil. I would not have guessed that you would have such a talent for it.”

Daxrathas stepped closer, to the very edge of his pentacle. He surveyed her handiwork.

“It is time. Prepare the vitae animus.”

Swallowing nervously, she nodded and then glanced anxiously up at Hack. She’d discussed what was about to happen well, she’d told him what was about to happen. He’d nodded, the barest movement of his mask, and nothing more. He stood now as immovable and inscrutable as a stone lith, a pillar of terror at the head of the table. Taking up the crucible and the ceremonially profaned knife, she walked toward him, her steps growing slower and more tentative as she approached.

God, he was big. Looking up the tower of flesh to the expressionless mask and the sunken dark eyes, she felt her stomach sink. He was immense. It wasn’t just his physical size, although that was terrifying enough. There was something radiating from him like a physical force that crushed you down and ground you under. The dark hollows of the hockey mask bore down on her.

“Melvin?” She whispered it, the barest of breaths as she raised the crucible and the knife to one bulging bicep. She shot a glance back over her shoulder at Daxrathas. He was watching them intently, but she didn’t think he had heard her. “I really need you to come out.” The hollow eyes of the mask were unchanging; the immense form remained motionless. “Melvin. Please. It’s Janey.”

A spark. The tiniest movement in the head -- the slightest bending of the mask. She glanced back again at Daxrathas, nervous. He was sure to notice any hesitation. She bit her lip and prayed that that spark had been there. Then she slid the knife over the mounded muscle of his bicep.

The blood hit the crucible steaming, pouring in a rivulet down the curves of rigid muscle. It hissed as it struck the compounded vitae animus, joined with it and transmuted it. She looked up worriedly, lifting the knife as the blood flowed into the brazen hollow. The eyes of the mask were fixed on her and he was watching her intently. She looked into the eyes, seeking a connection. There was no certainty. She just prayed that she was right.

She turned away, the crucible cupped in her hands. The contents smoked and reeked, burning away into the pure vitae animus. She moved to the table, opened the mouth of the golem. Slowly and carefully, intoning the Great Words, she poured the fluid. As she finished, she could see it filling his mouth like a pool of quicksilver. Putting down the crucible, she carefully performed the final task. With wire of drawn gold, she sewed shut the lips of the golem.

Daxrathas nodded, his inhuman eyes glowing in the darkness. Hack stepped forward and surveyed the creation. As he leaned toward it, Orchid backed slowly away. There was no telling what his intent might be.

He placed one mammoth hand upon the chest of the silent golem. An instant later, the chest rose in the creature’s first ragged breath.

In the starless night, a frigid breeze stirred the leaves.

Home       Gaming Guidelines        PC Roster        NPC Roster