LIGHTNOVELONLINE 169 – I’ve Eaten Worse
"What do you plan to do with him?" she gestured to the prisoner.
"I'll turn the body into the church, it should get back to any relatives he might have. The wormy fuck didn't even bother to change the face, and kept the original contractor ID. As for the worm... I'll debeak and swallow him whole. You've got an acid bath to look forward to, my friend."
The fear gripping the baneworm-host seemed to get to be too much, as his tendrils began writhing wildly. The body's eyes rolled into the back of its head, with tendrils bursting out of their sockets. The worm exploded out of the host's mouth, trying to jump for Krahe. Before it could reach her, Barzai erupted out of her chest, catching the worm in his beak as he darted across the room. The eidolon proceeded to tear into the worm, seemingly killing it instantly, and continued eating it from there on, piece by piece.
"Sorry. Looks like my pet eldritch monstrosity stole your dinner," Krahe said, genuinely unsure whether Garvesh would be angry. The old saurian finally finished repairing the one ward-scale, and erupted with guttural laughter.
"You didn't really think I'd eat that nasty fuck, did you?" he cackled, slapping his thigh. It sounded nearly like a gunshot.
"I've eaten worse," she shrugged. "Was that a total lie, or some niche delicacy?"
"It's a niche delicacy even among saurians," Garvesh nodded. "Baneworm meat's nasty and stringy, and you must be very careful to remove the venom glands without rupturing them. We used to do it as a ritual execution for any baneworms we caught."
The hatred dripping from each of his words made it abundantly clear how much he reviled baneworms as a whole, not just this particular individual. He shook his head as if to clear his thoughts, sighed, and glanced down at his chest, running his hand over it. The ward-scales revealed themselves beneath his fingers in a truly draconic suit of armour, though many of its scales were chipped or even broken.
"Fuckin'... They're getting more brittle by the year. Unless you've got more to tell me, you should go. I'll be here for a while."
Krahe glanced at Barzai, then replied: "I figure I'll be stuck here for at least fifteen minutes. Got any crab juice?"
Garvesh's face lit up, and nodding, he gestured vaguely towards his kitchen.
"Yeah, in the fridge, pour yourself a glass... And bring me the whole jar after that."
Ignoring Garvesh's incident and the resulting tragic death of Imraal's food cart, things were going quite well. While she was still there, she showed him both Eutropia's souldregs and her broken voidkey, hoping he might be able to appraise it where her glasses failed. When she had attempted to appraise the key, it did give a reading, but the reading in question was garbled and illegible.
Unfortunately, appraising the original effects of a broken key was apparently far more complex than a functioning one. Garvesh, audibly pleased with himself, explained it thus: "Think about it. Think a rando on the street could look at the pile of scrap out front and tell that it used to be a food cart, let alone the specific kind of burners it had or what kinda food it used to make? It's... Alright, it's not actually like that with broken artifacts, but the analogy still works. Takes specialized knowledge or equipment to make sense of it. If you want..."
"No, you don't need to find someone who can appraise it for me. I'll let you know if I run out of my own options. You just... Fix yourself. You'll be useless to me if you get whittled down and killed."
She spoke as if her motivations were entirely selfish, but in truth, she had grown at least enough of an attachment to Garvesh to not want him to die simply because she liked him. Krahe, of course, was not fully aware of this fact, or even willing to admit it to herself, let alone to someone else.
Returning to the safehouse, she found it empty, and spent further time studying Yao's scroll in the absence of anything urgent to do. Having jumped ahead a few times, she found that the later sections were exceptionally dense and frequently referred back to earlier parts of the text, so she stuck to going through it from the start for now. The parts she had managed to digest so far mostly covered small tips and optimizations for the basic act of drawing a talisman. Rather than cosmic secrets, the scroll's early parts contained the wisdom of countless hours spent doing a repetitious, yet also precision-demanding task. Krahe couldn't draw a Wandrei Faust with the new brush yet, but she found it to be far more pleasant and better-balanced in the hand. It would only take time and practice to get used to it.
The reason she went straight to Yao's scroll was simply the fact that Yao was on her mind as she left Garvesh to his work. The Talisman Mistress was, after all, the first person who came to mind when it came to appraising the broken key.
Once she had built up a pile of wastepaper, her grip on the brush was noticeably unsteady, and she saw occult symbols when she closed her eyes, Krahe decided it was enough for now. She spent the rest of the day resting and casually reading, occasionally making mostly-futile attempts to pierce deeper into the dense mass of Yao's scroll.
The next day, she visited the shrine on Gashward Road as a stop along her way to her house on that street. A young, nervous-looking woman manned the shrine. She couldn't be more than sixteen, yet Krahe felt a tangible degree of strength from her, both physical and magical. Despite being visibly nervous at the sight of Krahe, clearly knowing who she was, the shrine maiden moved with trained grace and her arms had well-defined muscles from what was visible of them.
"Would you happen to be Lady Blackhand?" the girl asked, as if guessing.
"That would be me, yes. I suspect I'll be visiting your shrine in the future."
"Ah, my name is Eliana. There are packages here for you, if you could come with me."
One of these aforementioned packages was heavy and the size of a small suitcase, while the other was about the size of a letter and half a centimeter thick. Both were wrapped in narrow reams of paper, with a central, stamped-on sigil with lines of smaller ones spreading out across the package in a chain-like pattern.
"A pulse of your thauma, please," Eliana prompted, and Krahe did as asked. The central seals pulsed with golden light, and the sigil-chains gradually disappeared as if it was burning them away. With all the sigils gone, the packages looked a bit strange, but not particularly church-y, so she just carried them to house No. 94 the normal way.
