Chapter 60 : Dissection
"You're desecrating its body. You're going to cut it apart. Doesn't that disgust you? It disgusts me."
Small Ling had been unhappy since the runic transcription began. Its nature was light and nobility and the instinctive rejection of everything Evan was doing, which was the nature of its kind.
"If it disgusts you," Evan said, "you can go outside. You can leave entirely. What I do is my own business."
The unicorn made a sound, turned around, and went outside.
Evan watched it go for a moment. Extraordinary creatures, he thought — so pure in their orientation that they couldn't tolerate the ambiguity that most living things required to survive. Perhaps that was why they were legendary rather than common. He felt no guilt. He picked up the blade.
The smell when he opened the abdomen was intense. He had a sensitive nose and registered it and set it aside. He worked methodically: organs removed and catalogued, green blood collected into a glass vial — a dark-element alchemical material, useful for treating oakwood into staff-making material of the appropriate type. He noted the structure and moved inward.
At the throat he found the arrays he had half-expected after studying the membrane wings. Two of them, natural formations in the tissue: the first converted normal vibration into high-frequency sound waves carrying significant compressed energy. The second took him longer to parse — it resembled a refinement array from human alchemical practice, but more fluid, more organic. When he finally worked out its function, he understood it was a conversion circuit: energy input became yin-fire output. He recorded both.
The spinal column held a black magic core connected directly to the vertebrae, a secondary energy system running parallel to whatever elemental process the creature used normally. He had not expected this.
The bones throughout the body were covered in arrays. Evan sat back and looked at them for a long time before he understood what he was seeing: the prototype of an anti-gravity circuit. The theoretical basis for the floating-object arrays that appeared in high-level magical engineering, made by nature in a creature that used its wings to fly.
He worked until the night was mostly gone, then cleaned and stored the relevant materials and sat down to rest with his eyes closed.
Outside, Small Ling was having a difficult time with its own convictions. It knew Evan was not evil in any way it could clearly articulate. He had saved its life. The unicorn clan's principles on gratitude were unambiguous. It stayed outside and did not look through the cave entrance.
……
Howling in the distance, then closer. Then Small Ling's answering cry.
Evan came out.
Three dire wolves stood beyond the edge of his illusion array, each one the size of a large donkey, red light moving across their coats in slow pulses, eyes burning green in the dark. One of them looked at Evan, shifted its attention from the unicorn, and launched.
He had seen its haunches compress. He moved at the same moment the wolf did, not away from it but reorganizing his position, and the sword came up through the motion the way it had come up against the Shadow Moth — not decided, just arrived. The wolf's claws swept through the space where his shoulders had been and found a different space instead. The sword-aura drove into the wolf's chest before it landed.
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The second wolf spat a fireball. Evan read the intake and had three syllables out before the fire arrived — the bracers responding to the incantation, a water orb forming at his left hand that met the fireball at arm's length. Steam. Both dissipating.
Small Ling deflected the third wolf's fireball with lightning. The shockwave pushed them both several steps back.
The two of them stood in the clearing and listened to the howling multiply in the distance. More wolves, many more, converging from different directions. Small Ling's wings spread with the involuntary tension of a creature that is calculating whether it can survive the next few minutes.
It glanced at Evan.
Evan said: "Undead Calamity."
"No —" Small Ling started.
The black fog was already spreading.
It came from him and expanded outward in all directions, and from it came the skeletal soldiers and the bats and the bone dragon, the full mass of the high-level death spell reduced from its battlefield scale to what a single Arcanist-rank death mage could sustain — not hundreds of thousands, but enough for a valley in the middle of the night. The wolves that had already arrived met the leading edge of it and found skeletons on all sides. The wolves that were still approaching reached the boundary and stopped.
Small Ling stood in an unaffected circle around itself, white light blazing. It watched what was happening to the wolves and turned to Evan.
"Stop this. We could have run. You're using dark magic to massacre them for no reason —"
"You could always intervene," Evan said, looking at it with genuine interest. "In fact, you'd make excellent research material."
The unicorn looked at his expression, spread its wings, and left.
Evan watched it go, amused at himself for feeling something about that. He didn't pursue it. The Undead Calamity had been necessary rather than convenient — he had felt the sheer number of wolves converging and had done the math. Two hundred dire wolves in the dark against one Arcanist and one injured unicorn was not a fight that ended well without something to change the equation.
The outer wolves saw the skeletons advancing through the fog. Some held ground and tried to fight, their fireballs dispersing formations that reformed immediately. Others began to back away. Then a few turned and ran, and once a few ran the outer groups decided together, and the sound of the retreat rose and then fell away.
Evan recalled the constructs and let the fog clear.
Forty or fifty wolves dead, their bodies already dried husks, the Calamity's passive drain having done its work. He took nothing from them. Only the first wolf, the one he had killed with the sword before casting anything, retained its original body.
He carried it inside, applied Core-seal without much hope — the wolf had been dead long enough that the magical energy had probably dispersed — and dissected it. The core was gone, as expected. He noted for future reference: Core-seal had to be applied immediately, while the body was still warm, to catch the energy before it dissipated. A living magical beast had no fixed core; the core only formed and solidified in the act of death, and it formed fast and lost cohesion faster.
The bones were covered in arrays. He spent time on them that he hadn't expected to spend, recording what he found, and finished the dissection with a cleaner sense of what magical beasts were actually doing structurally versus what the theoretical literature claimed.
He washed his hands, adjusted the magic lamp's core position to extinguish it, and sat in the dark.
His mind went to the arrays. In normal magical practice, a mage visualized the appropriate array, concentrated until the visualization was precise, and activated it — the array was the form, the elemental energy was the substance, and the mage's attribute determined which arrays could be activated. The system assumed a fixed correspondence between attribute and array type.
But the arrays in these two bodies tonight didn't follow that taxonomy cleanly. The Shadow Moth's yin-fire conversion ran through what should have been a dark-element circuit but pulled from what felt like a more fundamental layer. The dire wolf's arrays were fire-element in output but structured differently than any fire-element array in the human tradition.
A thought arrived in his mind that made him sit up straighter.