“This is what you consider cosy?!”
“It’s not that bad,” Lysyra defended, as she folded her thin mattress up against the wall to make more space. Not that it helped much.
“This is worse than even my worst expectations.” Nyxala was crouching with her head low, and yet the short spikes along the back of her neck still scraped the ceiling. “It’s filthy. Why do you have so much trash piled in the corner?”
“I have to put it somewhere. Every so often I draw a ritual that’ll accept it as sacrifice.”
“But there’s so much!” Nyxala put her hand over her nose. “How do you handle the smell?” Even without the support of air to keep the scent aloft, it was horrible.
“What smell?” Lysyra asked. For a moment, Nyxala thought the girl was messing with her, but her wide, dumb eyes told of her honesty.
“You are kidding.” Nyxala shook her head and made her way back to the false wall with a dozen sliding bolts locking it in place.
“What are you doing?”
Nyxala ignored her. She unlatched the door, and opened it as wide as its hinges would allow. Stepping through, she laid her hands on the broken altar, and using her tail as leverage, shoved the massive stone block out of the way.
“Stop!” Lysyra’s voice was panicked, but she was clearly trying not to be too loud. Nyxala wondered why she even bothered. The girl had clearly gone out of her way to set up this little hovel in one of the most remote public ritual chambers you could find. Nobody was going to hear. “No. Put it back! Close the door.”
Lysyra tried to shut the wall to what had once been a tiny storage room for the ritual chamber, but Nyxala left her tail to block her. The door didn’t budge. Nyxala’s tail barely felt the force Lysyra tried to exert. The girl really could do with a name to strengthen herself.
“I’m not moving until you’ve gotten rid of it all,” Nyxala said. “When we’re working together in the future, I don’t want to have to think of how you’re sitting in your own filth.”
“I don’t sit in it,” she tried to defend, but as Nyxala held her stare, the girl soured to a sulk. “But anyone who sees it will be suspicious. Maybe someone has a name to follow it back to me.”
“Well then, you better take it where it won’t be suspicious.”
“Do you even know how far that is?”
“I don’t,” Nyxala said with a flat tone that told how little she cared. Regardless of her reasons, Lysyra had sent her into that suppression field that for all she could have known, could have affected her mutations as well. It might have been her death. A little cleaning was nothing the girl should be complaining about.
“Fine,” Lysyra grumbled, getting to work.
The girl’s real body crawled across the ritual that covered most of the available space. She wasn’t exactly agile, but her hands and feet avoided the chalk lines with practised ease. Lysyra’s hovel didn’t even reach the size of a ward room. The former storage room had already been small, and the alterations Lysyra had made shrunk the ‘living space’ even further.
She’d added in a second floor. Above where she slept, ate and performed rituals all day was a makeshift platform that held all sorts of materials and supplies. By the number of water canteens and provisions, Nyxala expected that Lysyra could last in here, sealed away, for months at a time.
“Are you going to help?” the snide comment came as Lysyra passed a bag from her hovel to one of her replicas.
Nyxala blinked. “No. It’s your mess.”
Lysyra grumbled again.
“This whole set-up you’ve got is very reminiscent of the Refuge.” Nyxala would have overlooked the old, cracked ritual chamber entirely if Lysyra hadn’t lead her to the dim corner below a broken LED strip. “Did they make it for you?”
“No. I did this all myself. I didn’t want anyone to know,” Lysyra said. “But they did teach me how.”
“You said they took you in after Tarchon cast you out?”
Lysyra took a moment to gather her thoughts before speaking. “Not soon enough. By the time they found me — caught me stealing — my sister was already dead and I’d gained my first additive. I was good at hiding. But that doesn’t mean much when they catch your arm. I was terrified at first.” She chuckled under her breath. “But they took me in, gave me food, and for the first time in a year, I wasn’t terrified of sleep. They’re the only one’s on Coral I wouldn’t consider monstrous.”
“But you left?”
“I did.” Lysyra paused to scoop up loose scraps not bagged with the rest of the trash. “I love Judge, and many of the people that helped me are kind, but I could never stay. The Cultless; their ideas on the way some things must be are… disagreeable. I learned early on that if I was to stay I would lose all control over my life. Well, it’s a little silly now, but I was a kid at the time. When Ila made me promise to hide, I took that promise seriously. To stay in the safety of the Refuge, I would have had to give up my ability to hide. I’d make the same choice today, but for very different reasons.”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
If there were any more people like Prong amongst the Cultless, Nyxala could guess at what those ideas might be.
“Done!” Lysyra passed off the last bag to one of her replicas. “Now put the altar back in place and close the door.”
Nyxala wasn’t all that inclined to lock herself in a tiny space with no escapes. It felt too much like a cell. Still, she could tell Lysyra was ten times more antsy than her about not being in her cell, so she did as asked.
“It’s only us in here. There’s no need to keep those mutations hidden. You can let them out.” Now that the door was locked, Lysyra was no longer fidgeting nervously. Even so, she was obviously not used to speaking in person, and her arrogance was slow to return.
Nyxala didn’t move.
“Come on,” Lysyra whined. “Some of the guards got to see.”
“And I came very close to killing them for it,” Nyxala growled. “Should I follow through with you?”
“Ah, Sorry.” The girl’s back stiffened, realising Nyxala wasn’t in a joking mood. “So the man went Mad. That’s unfortunate. Did you get what you wanted out of him, at least?”
“Not as much as I’d have liked, but it wasn’t a waste.”
“And you?” Lysyra gestured wildly at her. “I think it’s about time you give me an explanation. What was all that back in the Tributary. The bloody blob that can write. Euphoria! You summoned a god without any countermeasure in place! Don’t you know how stupidly dangerous that is?!”
“It worked didn’t it? You got your needle and scroll, and I got my sceptre back.” Nyxala tapped the glowing staff on the ground. “Besides, what does it matter that I gift the chance to wreak havoc on the Machine God Worshippers to a god that’s helped me before? I probably would have gotten caught without him.”
“You’ve summoned it before?”
“Yeah, by accident.”
“How do you summon a god by accident?!”
“With a couple of toes.” Nyxala finally cracked a smile at Lysyra’s look of disbelief. “You know these mutations make me a very valuable sacrifice, right.” She waited for her nod. “Well, turns out, if you offer a sacrifice far beyond the worth of the ritual or summon it was used for, gods can simply… steal it. Euphoria helped me kill off a bunch of Fleshsmiths in the Dark Star for the fun of it, so I’m not too worried about setting him off so long as it’s to cause chaos.”
“…if you’re sure?”
“I’m not.” Nyxala admitted freely. “But when I’m offered odds that are more likely to harm the cults than myself, I’ll take them.”
“Uh, huh. And the blood?” Lysyra eyed the necklace around Nyxala’s neck.
“My current theory is that it’s a small part of some much greater being that was able to interfere with my evolution.” As if recognising the gaze on it, the hardened blood reverted into a flowing blob that hugged her neck. This small, it was almost cute.
“Another god?”
“Possibly.”
Lysyra took a breath. “Honestly, I shouldn’t be surprised from one tasked by the Eidolons. If one of those touched you, forget your mutations, that alone would be worth sacrificing.”
Was that possible? That their touch alone would make her all that much more of the ‘perfect sacrifice’? Nyxala doubted an Eidolon would care much for the value of their own touch, but then again, they spanned galaxies; did her sacrifice ever really interest those beings?
Nyxala was broken from her musings by a crack in her name. Her mutation was finally coming through. This was meant to be something that would hopefully allow her to traverse Coral’s shadows. Now to see if it really offered anything helpful. She ripped open the last of the crack.
The sensation that overcame her was… entirely unfamiliar. Nyxala felt nothing grow. Instead, it was as if she connected to a limb she didn’t know she had. She could feel it, but no matter how she checked herself, nothing appeared different. Even as she felt around with this new limb, she couldn’t tell what it was she was touching. It remained far too foreign. She could feel the tug of her Talent guiding the new senses, but it didn’t help her recognise what it was.
Nyxala was about to deactivate the concealer and check again, when Lysyra’s wary tone reached her ears. “N̪ỷx̱̽ala… what is going on with your shadow?”
Her eyes snapped to the floor, where the fuzzy shadow she cast now spread across the room in a dozen long tendrils. They mimicked her tentacles. One poked at the shadow of a candle, before pushing through it and to the edge of the wall. Her shadow found no difficulty in climbing where nothing blocked the light.
“A new mutation.” Nyxala glanced up. “And going by how you saw it so soon, it’s another one that is completely unaffected by the concealer.”
Lysyra visibly relaxed at the news, likely having envisioned some monster infesting her shadow rather than Nyxala herself controlling it.
The shadows pulled back at her command. She had it shift its form, devolving her humanoid shape until it was only tentacles spreading through Lysyra’s room. They touched the walls. They touched Lysyra. Nyxala could feel it all, even if matching exactly what she felt was going to take some time. Calling them back, she attempted to make shapes with the non-physical extension of her form. This is where she found her control flounder.
Her shadow refused to take a shape her body couldn’t cast.
Slipping outside, it didn’t take much experimenting to also discover she couldn’t separate the shadow from herself, which made jumping very strange. The moment she was in the air, her shadow shrivelled away. Nyxala would need to watch that; it wouldn’t be very good if she was discovered because her shadow disappeared because she jumped or fell too long.
Nyxala let her shadow fall into its natural state, like how fingers curl or lungs breathe, and found that she would need to keep her shadow in mind at all times now. Its resting state showed the resting state of all her mutations; not the forms they were currently in. Her tail was straight and long, while her tentacles swayed freely.
She slid back into Lysyra’s hovel and, even more annoyingly, the shadow lagged behind. Like a tentacle swaying with her inertia, rather than something resulted by blocked light.
“This better have a use greater than simply feeling the ground,” Nyxala grouched.
“I don’t know about your shadow, but I just overheard something interesting. You’re still looking for opportunities to take down the Fleshsmiths, right?”
“Them and all the other cults.” Nyxala nodded.
“Well there’s a bunch of them that just got the call to gather on their Island.” Lysyra grinned, knowing she had Nyxala hooked. “All those thousands of Fleshsmiths, isolated on a disposable Island. Doesn’t that just sound enticing?”