The Restored: Chapter Six

Content Warning for Body Horror!

Also, the keen eyed among you, or the ones who follow my discord server, will note that I messed up the name of the book. It's not 'The Remembered', it's 'The Restored'.

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Hadiya hunched over the vat of crystal solution, watching it build slow layers around the clockwork heart, and let out a slow sigh, before standing and turning to her new assistant, Hamza. 

Having one of those had been a novel experience. While there was always a delineation of senior researchers, junior researchers, project leads, and other methods of power, she’d never had someone who was fully and directly there to keep her focused and working, as well as who she could offload the paperwork to. 

Hamza checked the clipboard he held, and then glanced at one of the researchers assisting her with this project. 

“It’s holding steady at roughly five units per hour higher production than standardized models of the same size. We’ve got about a seventy percent integration with the arrays you were using based on the tattoo designs, and the initial ignition didn’t form a noticeable detraction from the mages. The experimental arrays seem to be holding. But it’s impossible to say.” 

Hadiya nodded and looked at one of her fellow researchers, the druid who used her magic to integrate aura aspects that didn’t drain from local ambient aura in order to generate power. 

“Integrate the sample.” 

Hadiya was nothing if not intelligent. Nexus had tasked her with improving aura generators, four main goals in particular. 

Her first goal, increasing the aura density that the crystals could create, had been the easiest. Aura crystals were, after all, crystals. Mostly quartz, but sometimes they could form from other substances. The spells to grow crystals into specific patterns were well known, and by integrating spells that grew the crystals into runic induction and capacitance formations within the patterns of the crystal that were in turn activated by the aura running through it, she had been able to increase the generation rate considerably. 

Honestly, Hadiya personally thought that once someone developed a microscope powerful enough to fully examine the arrays, they would find that the reason quartz bathed in high levels of ambient aura gained the ability to store aura was because it was using similar spellcraft on a microscopic level, activated through some mechanism of magic that wasn’t present on the macro scale, but that was just a pet theory of hers, and one that would either be supported or disproved with time. 

That was, of course, only her first idea to improve on the crystals. She had dozens of others, some of which involved the brass spellcraft bands that interacted with the heart of the crystal, but they would need their own experimentation. 

The second project she’d been tasked with was the models based off of Aura Tree seeds. They held incredibly strange magic that seemed almost like a blend of angelic and djinn systems of power, and she’d been able to throw herself into the research with vigor.

She’d stripped it down to the bone, then rebuilt it using help from the blood magic, aura-extraction, and soul magic research she had done with the tattoos. They were using somewhat similar principles, after all, but the problem had been immediately apparent. At least, it was to her. She was arguably the most experienced mage in cross-planar aura generation on the planet, though, so she couldn’t blame the previous researchers for their failure to realize why the arrays were stealing magic from the person who activated them, only to burn out. 

The crystal didn’t have life running through it. The lifeline was a mysterious part of magic, present both in a human’s body and soul, but not present in a demon at all, while being the entirely of what seemed to make up an angelic soul, or at least, the aura generation layers of the soul that she could research, though extraplanar magic was so twisty that she wasn’t sure soul applied to anything she’d researched: not demons, not ghouls, not fae, not dream spirits, not elementals, and certainly not angels.

The solution hadn’t been simple, exactly. When she’d made her tattoos, they’d been able to harness calories from the body that were turned into shed lifeline power, but the crystal didn’t have those. Creating a self-sustaining form of life was impossible as far as she knew, so she didn’t even try. 

She just cut them out, and replaced them with new array portions from demonic magic that were compatible. Now, the crystals didn’t permanently steal aura from someone to activate without a lifeline, a simple sacrifice of some excess soulstuff from animals was enough to begin the process. 

The third problem that she had been asked to address was the integration of the growth array and grand spell. 

The growth array, stolen from the cloak of a rebel leader in the north, continually refined something. It didn’t add power, but it did allow the pathways of the magic to become more efficient over time, as they adapted to their job. The cloak had used it with a series of abjuration magic arrays to perfectly format imperfect spellcraft into spell storage systems, until it reached a point it could break apart spells with only a tiny fraction of the aura it cost to cast the spell. An annoyingly warlike use of the power, but barbarians did love their battle. 

Integrating it into the clockwork heart had been a challenge. The heart needed to continue moving at all times, and only did so through absorbing planar friction and converting it to kinetic energy, which was in turn converted into aura through the use of a particularly strange sample of aura recharge. Fitting it in had required her to speak to a few of her ligature contracts, and she still wasn’t sure it worked perfectly, but time would tell. It should gradually improve the gears ability to harness the friction of the planes and the movement of the stars, and increase aura output over time.

The grand spell of Ulacto was… strange. It seemed to operate on very old and outdated magical principles, and she was fairly confident it was the entire reason their country was an empire. It demanded the near constant expansion of something’s physical mass in order to improve it. If the item stopped expanding, then the spell would slow, and eventually began to drain power from the spell it was integrated into. Requiring a continual absorption and expansion of physical mass was strange, and the language it was cast in was so lost that it was near impossible to understand, let alone modify.

Normally, it made it just about worthless, but she was experimenting with temporary measures to allow it to improve the crystal while it was in the growing process, then break the array. Her hope had been to tie the array to the growth of the aura it produced, to create a positive feedback loop. It had worked, but only until the aura flowing through the item had exceeded what the physical runes could hold, at which point the crystal had exploded. Violently.

The other strange thing about the spell was that it seemed to fundamentally shift ambient aura, and that was in line with the fourth project: building a generator that could create ambient aura.

The substance that she’d been given proved it was possible, the golden ichor that created ambient aura from nothing at all, which she’d taken to calling the miracle drop.

But mimicking the magic of something from a plane she’d never heard of without completely sacrificing it was ambitious. Sacrifice was a principle of magic as old as time itself, and one common across human magic and every plane she’d ever heard of. She wasn’t going to sacrifice it, though, only expose it to the array.

If she was being honest, the entire project  was ambitious, one that could fundamentally alter the way that magic was used in the modern world.

And if Hadiya was anything other than intelligent, it was ambitious. 

This experiment used her new miniature-etched crystal designs with a soulstuff-kickstarted aura seed engine, gears were laced with the growth spell of Paerús, and the grand spell of Ulacto, exposed to the miracle drop. The idea was to create a generator surpassing all others, one that could generate ambient aura, and would generate more until it was at its very limit, at which point it would be held in stasis as the grand spell broke. 

“Expose the sample,” Hadiya said. She placed her hand on the runes in front of her and began to chant, investing them with aura to activate their magic. She wasn’t going to ask these researchers to do anything she wouldn’t, after all. 

Bloody eyes, the white haired old blood mage from the Undercity, let out a hacking cough, then spat phlegm into the trash can. 

“It isn’t going to work,” he said, his voice raspy and cold. “I can feel it in my bones.” 

She glared at him, but didn’t stop her chanting, as one of her fellow researchers began undoing the lead box that contained the miracle drop.

The golden droplet in its rune encrusted vial was placed into the circle on the opposite end of the room from Hadiya, and the researcher began to chant his own part of the spell.

Hadiya saw power practically explode off the runes as they began to glow bright enough to hurt her eyes. She thought that she could see lines in the air, an almost complete circle, and hear a chanting of a voice that wasn’t her own. She felt something rushing in, something she couldn’t describe. 

Aura flashed in the air, and runes began to squeal as they shattered. The crystal began to tremble, the clockwork heart spinning faster and faster, and she stood and glanced at the aura measurement device, which examined the ambient aura levels in the room. 

It was working. The ambient aura was rising by the second, and–

Crystal exploded out of the vat where the generator was growing. Spears of long, thin, faintly green-colored quartz shot through the room, and her defensive artifacts flared. The one around Bloody Eyes did as well, as did the protective equipment around the other researchers in the room. 

Hadiya felt the band of metal she’d etched her wards on glowing hot. The runes were getting stronger by the second. But more spears were coming, and it was getting hotter and hotter. H

The one near the vial reached down to activate the emergency runes on the miracle drop’s vial, when his protections broke and the crystal lanced inside of him. 

Hadiya started sprinting, hoping she could make it before her own fell apart, and watching the man. She expected to see life leave his eyes.

But he didn’t die. 

Instead, he began to grow. 

Great bulging tumors rippled out from his stomach, where the crystal touched. His bones began to slip from his flesh as they grew bone spurs, each one as large as Hadiya’s entire hand. Sickening, cancerous growths covered his eyes, his nose, his mouth. His body began to ripple, and organs began spilling out of him. A heart, a liver, a kidney, a second heart, a third heart, four pairs of lungs, each and every one of them throbbing with vast cysts spewing blood and fluid into the air. 

Hadiya’s protections had been made to defend against anyone and anything, including a mage overcharging them, but they exploded, and metal began to grow, great rivets of steel and brass and copper. More scientists, friends and colleagues, rivals and strangers alike, were transforming into vast blobs of flesh, and even one of the metal desks had deformed into monoliths of metal. Where flesh touched metal, they seamlessly merged, ignoring every natural law Hadiya knew, and breaking several laws of magic she had thought she knew. 

As her second layer of defenses started to grow hot, she reached the vial, slapped her hand on it, and ran a spark of aura into the runes etched onto the glass. The spell activated, and her second layer failed. The crystals and tumors and metals were pressing on her third and final layer of wards when she finally finished, and the vial was pulled into the Wandering Path. 

Something fell over the room as reality seemed to reassert itself, and Hadiya looked up to see that she and Bloody Eyes were the only ones left alive in the entire room. 

No, that wasn’t right. The tumorous mass next to her was breathing, rasping for breath. But no longer under the power of the miracle drop and the empowered generator, his breathing grew more and more labored. 

And within moments, he died.