Blood From a Stone

Petra had only been aware of the existence of the Crypto Chthonic Cuniculi for a few months, and yet she navigated it better than those who had wandered its meandering passageways for centuries. The instant she perceived any threat coming upon her, she would use her newfound kinship to the Darkness Beyond, a primeval god from another reality, to become one with the surrounding shadows and let it pass her by unnoticed. 
While she lacked any real conscious understanding of the fractally brachiating tunnels that dipped down into the highest echelons of the Underworld to spread throughout the various planes of Creation, the Darkness Beyond that had given her new life and new abilities also afforded her an intuitive sense of extra-dimensional directions. The Cuniculi still contained many thousands of miles worth of passageways for her to get lost in, and many thousands – perhaps even millions – of doorways. One wrong step could lead her somewhere well out of her depth. 
And while she had yet to entirely rid herself of the fear that she might not be able to find her way back to Emrys again amidst such seething madness, she never failed to recognize the door home when she saw it. It was a mere oval in the dirt, outlined with old roots, without an actual physical door to guard it. To anyone who didn’t know any better, it looked long abandoned, and likely a lair for one of the many cryptoids that called the Cuniculi home. 
Petra, of course, did know better, and dashed through the cavern entrance without hesitation. Once she was engulfed by the dark, she switched to her shadow form to pass through it, coming out the other side to the world of Dorshadah, the world she now knew as home. 
She looked up to a sky packed with literally a million times as many stars as the one on Earth, the sky of a rogue planet adrift near the center of the galaxy, anchored to no sun of its own and lit only in a twilight of starlight. It was not a habitable planet, strictly speaking, which meant it was a good place for gods who didn’t want to be disturbed by pesky mortals. There was an atmosphere, if an unbreathable one, but that no longer mattered to Petra. The air was enough to carry the strange siren song of the wind screeching across the alien geography, one of shiny and stygian blue regolith shaped into beautiful and bizarre formations by forces Petra couldn’t begin to fathom. 
That Emrys had even known of the existence of such a world, let alone had been able to reach it, was proof enough to Petra that he was a god. She was now his fully dedicated disciple, intent on freeing him from the chains the Ophion Occult Order had placed upon him and restoring him to his full power.
Her latest mission complete, she eagerly made her way up the spiral stair of carved stone to the mammoth, gothic cathedral of a sanctum that Emrys had made for himself. As she had expected, she found him meditating, likely unmoved from when she had last seen him. He levitated roughly three feet above a large Zen Garden he had made from the planet’s native regolith, continuously generating eddies and vortices of air to shape it into an everchanging mosaic of mandalas.  
While Petra was herself physically capable of meditating indefinitely just as well as her master was, psychologically she could only manage a few hours at a time. She was loathed to disturb him, and hesitated to announce her return.   
Fortunately, she didn’t need to. Emrys opened his miasma-filled eyes and gave her a small, serene smile in greeting. 
“You were successful,” he said. Though it had been a statement, not a question, Petra nodded in the affirmative. 
“With both objectives,” she added, pulling out a ring of numerous skeleton keys. “I contaminated the Sigil Sand, and got Ivy’s keys. I had plenty of time to copy down the Spell Circle they were working on before I replaced it with my own, and you were right! They’re trying to set a trap for you down there!” 
She reached into her robes and handed him her Book Of Shadows, already opened to the page she had copied the Spell Circle onto. He gently received it and spent a moment studying the design before raising an eyebrow in uncertainty.
“What is it?” Petra asked. 
“Perhaps nothing, but in order to work, this Spell Circle would require an extremely powerful vassal of Ophion, most likely the Grand Adderman himself,” he remarked. “That would put him in an extremely vulnerable position, and within only a few precise yet subtle changes to the design, the spell would be reversed. I can’t help but wonder if that’s a result of incompetence or treachery. Something to keep an eye on, at the very least. Let me see those keys now please, Petra.”
Petra obediently handed him the keyring as he passed the book back to her. The keyring itself was a brass Ouroboros, while the bow of each key was made from three interlocking Ouroboroses. 
“You’re certain these are Ivy Noir’s keys?” he asked. 
“She matched the description, the woman she was with called her Ivy, and I took those right off her belt,” Petra assured him. 
“Good. If we can steal the master keys of a Head Adderman, then the Order will know that their Cuniculi Doors aren’t enough to keep me at bay,” he smiled as he examined the keys one by one.
“Can you tell where they lead too?” Petra asked. 
“Not precisely, no, but I can get a general sense of the nature of what they guard,” he explained, his fingers settling on one key in particular. “And this one, I think, might lead me to another powerful Egregore to feed upon.”
“Powerful enough to break your chains?” she asked. 
“Almost certainly not, Petra, but little by little my power grows, and one day these chains will no longer be able to hold me down,” he promised her. He noted that she seemed ill at ease, her expression dour and her eyes cast downward in anxious thought. “What troubles you?” 
“I met with our contact at Pascal’s while I was out,” she informed him. “They were attacked by the Darling Twins, and they were looking for you.” 
“They can’t find us here, Petra,” he assured her. 
“But what if they find me while I’m out on a mission? What if they try to capture me, either as a way to get to you or just because they can’t stand to have a survivor roaming free against their will? I… don’t think I’m strong enough to fight them yet,” she confessed shamefully. “I want to stop them, and I want revenge, but if I’m forced to fight them now, if they drag me back into that playroom of theirs, I…”
She trailed off, the horrible thoughts running through her mind being too awful to put to words. Emrys inhaled to speak, but then glanced down at the key he was holding in his hand. 
“You raise a valid point. You’re at risk to both the Darlings and the Ophionic Order at large, and that simply won’t do,” he said, unfolding his legs and setting his feet back down upon the ground. “Come with me. This Egregore is for you.”
“Wait, what?” she sputtered in bewilderment. 
"I'll show you how to absorb its essence, as I did with the Darlings' pet," he replied casually. 
“No! Emrys, you need it!” she objected. 
“What I need is my acolyte to be strong, safe, and fearless,” he insisted. “You need to be able to defend yourself from anything you might encounter while out on your own, including the Darlings. I need more strength to break my chains, yes, but this is more pressing. Come with me, and we’ll see what the Ooo is hiding, and what use we might be able to make of it.” 
***
“So, I’m going to eat an Egregore?” Petra asked in disbelief as the two of them made their way back through the passages of the Cuniculi, sticking as close to the shadows as they could in case they needed to hide in a hurry.  
“Figuratively – mostly, at least,” Emrys answered. “You’re going to be absorbing its psionic essence into yourself. You remember that while you were deceased, the Darling’s pet Egregore, the Voggathaust, was going to eat you? It had no interest in you while you were alive because your consciousness was still mainly embodied in your physical brain, but upon death, it transfers fully over to the astral body, the soul. A soul with a conscious mind fully embedded in it is heavily laden with psionic potential, and a freshly deceased mortal soul is typically too naïve in this power’s use to fend off an attack from a predatory thoughtform, making them an easy meal. In its case, however, it became my prey. You must do as I did; penetrate the Egregore’s form with your miasma, then carefully attune it so that its essence flows into you. It will resist this with all its might, it may even try to reverse the process and feed upon you, but so long as I am there to guide you, I believe you can do it.” 
The two of them instantly shifted to their shadow forms and faded into the surrounding darkness upon sensing the presence of something heading their way. 
“Now will you admit that none of the cryptoids that are running around in here are a good fit for the Menagerie?” they heard a raven-haired, violet-eyed Clown woman say to another Clown who was trying to get blobs of sickly yellow-green mucus out of her auburn hair. 
“I thought Chthonic lifeforms were supposed to be placid, to conserve energy! These things are insanely territorial!” she complained. “Orville said the monsters living here were Lovecraftian! They’re just ugly, and gross, and unsanitary! Humping Heffalumps, are they unsanitary! Arghhh! Fine, you win! Maybe these things are a little itsy-bitsy-spider too dangerous to keep at the Circus, but they’ve got to be breeding though, right? What if we find some babies and bring them back?”
“And then what do we do when they get too big?” 
“Flush them down the toilet! The proverbial toilet, I mean. They’d clog a real toilet, and I need our toilet kept in tip-top shape. I don’t care how much you say you love me, you do not want to deal with the biohazards that come out of my rear end. Keeping strict Clown Kosher does not make for pretty poop.”
“We can’t just kill show animals when they stop being profitable; think of the publicity!” 
“Nobody cares about animal welfare when the animals are ugly, and these things are uggggggg-ly! Oh, we could market them as ugly ducklings, and tell people they’re just the larval stage of some beautiful, cosmic butterflies! That way we can dispose of them without it looking suspicious. Just toss them down into a sewer and let them fend for themselves. What’s the worst that could happen?” 
Emrys and Petra resumed their physical forms when the Clowns had passed them by enough that their conversation was no longer intelligible – or audible, rather, since their conversation hadn’t been all that intelligible even when they had been in clear earshot. 
“Weird,” Petra muttered. “So, what if this Egregore is too powerful for me to try to consume? Shouldn’t I start with something smaller? And safer?”       
“Smaller and safer isn’t worth the risk, Petra. You want to be able to handle yourself against the Darlings, don’t you?” Emrys asked rhetorically. “Besides, the Order will be sure to change the locks as quickly as they can now that they know we have the keys. We can’t allow such an opportunity to go to waste.”
He took a single step before pausing again to take his bearings. 
“We’re getting close. We’re not too far off from Pendragon Hill, relatively speaking. Whatever they’re hiding here, it was probably Chamberlin’s, or at the very least he was holding it for Crowley or one of the Crows. They always have such nice things.” 
The two of them went a bit further down into the Cuniculi, taking on their shadow forms once more to avoid a hobbling hobgoblin on his way back home to the Cellar Suites in Chamberlin’s luxury apartment complex, before finally coming to a heavily fortified spellwork door. It was thick and heavy wrought iron, inlaid with complex spell circles, with each silver rivet engraved with a unique sigil. Emrys raised his hand to try knocking, but thought better of it. 
“Aside from an extremely powerful Egregore, we have no idea what's on the other side of that door, right?" Petra asked nervously. "There could be Addermen in there, couldn't there? Other occult defences, other monsters, innocent civilians? The Darlings didn't have any problem with letting their pet Egregore lay on the couch, so to speak." 
“All true. I’m not saying there is no risk in this, only that it is a risk worth taking,” he replied. He inserted the key into the door, but turned to speak with Petra before opening it. “What we face in here may well be something more terrifying than anything you’ve encountered before, which is why I’m going to need you to trust me more than your own instinct and experience. Do as I ask, and do not fall back unless I explicitly say to do so. Can you promise to do that for me, Petra?” 
“I… I promise, Emrys,” she vowed, with only a small vestige of reluctance in her voice.  Emrys nodded reassuringly, and cautiously pushed the door open. 
On the other side was a large, barren, brick-lined room. Every footstep they took echoed across its daunting volume. Some motion-activated emergency lights that sparsely lined the perimeter flicked on when they detected their presence, providing just enough illumination for them to see that there was very little for them to see. 
“It’s so quiet,” Petra whispered. “Are we still underground? The air seems… sterile, but there’s no ventilation in here.” 
“That’s because the creature we’ve come for kills every living thing in its presence, including microbes,” Emrys said calmly. “We’re alone with it, as no one else would ever risk being in its presence without a vital purpose, or survive for long if they did.”
“Emrys, where is it?” Petra asked impatiently, her head and eyes rapidly darting around the empty room for any sign of the Egregore that she could sense but not see. 
Emrys directed her gaze upwards, towards the center of the room. Hanging from the ceiling, suspended between three golden serpents, was a crystal orb two-to-three meters in diameter. Petra had already seen it, of course. It would have been impossible to miss such an ostentatious ornament in a room so otherwise bereft of furnishings, but she had naturally assumed it was merely a gaudy light fixture. 
Now though, she could see the orb was filled with a dark crimson fluid, a fluid which was not still but rather swirled around and around as if a shark was impatiently circling its prey inside of it. 
“Is that blood?” she asked. 
“Not quite. It’s sanguine humour, or rather it’s an embodiment of the alchemical concept,” Emrys replied. “That’s the sort of power that wouldn’t be of much use in breaking my chains, at least not directly, but would be incredibly potent in your hands.”
Petra jumped as the sanguine humour in the orb suddenly became turbulent, vague outlines of limbs and faces forming within it and viciously lashing out against the crystal. 
“It… wants to feed on me, like the Voggathaust did,” she said with a nervous gulp.
“Yes, only this one prefers live prey. Souls and psionic energy have no appeal to it,” Emrys nodded. “It technically doesn’t even need to touch you to do it; that’s why there’s nothing alive in here. It would just speed up the process.” 
“Does that mean I can feed on it through the crystal?” she asked hopefully.
“Conceivably, but I don’t think we have that kind of time, and the process would likely shatter the orb anyway,” he replied as he produced an obsidian throwing star from his robes and held it at the ready to shatter the crystal orb. “When I break it, it will go for you first. It thinks you’ll be easy prey, just like the Darlings did. Predators are cowards like that. Prove it wrong, and one day soon you’ll be able to show the Darlings that they were wrong too. Are you ready?” 
Petra took a few cautious steps back from the orb, but nodded in the affirmative. Emrys nodded in reply, throwing the star and then disappearing into his shadow form. 
The crystal broke with a thunderous, cacophonic shattering. The shards clattered to the floor, and Petra had expected the sanguine humour to splatter along with it. Instead, the fluid rapidly expanded into a gaseous cloud of airborne droplets. Numerous crimson talons began reaching for her, and she immediately reverted to her shadow form and slinked into the darkness. 
This didn’t seem to confound the Egregore all that much, however, and it began casting long, sweeping tendrils into the shadows to try to find her. Knowing she couldn’t hide forever, Petra readied a miasmic tentacle of her own in each hand. Leaping back into the light, she fired them into the cloud. To her frustration, the droplets rapidly retreated, causing her to hit nothing but air. The cloud’s snaking appendages morphed into hanging human torsos that began clawing and gnashing at her as it moved closer. 
“Shit,” she cursed as she immediately retreated and tried firing again. “Emrys, this thing doesn’t have a solid form! How am I supposed to hit it?” 
“Of course it doesn’t have a solid form. It’s an Egregore; it’s composed of thought,” Emrys’ voice whispered from all around her. “Don’t aim for the cloud, aim at what it represents.” 
Good advice in theory, but focusing on the Egregore’s noncorporeal form was a bit tricky when its corporeal form was in the process of actively trying to exsanguinate her. Shifting in and out of shadows, Petra evaded the creature as well as she could, but it was starting to spread itself wider and wider with the goal of casting a bigger net. The room was now thick in a fog of blood droplets, crudely arranged into shambling, semi-humanoid forms desperate for their next meal. 
Knowing that she had no time left to waste, Petra positioned herself in what she deemed to be the optimal location and reverted out of her shadow form. The creatures didn't so much walk as glide towards her, their arms reaching out for her as they closed the distance. Ignoring them as best as could, Petra focused her new sense of clairvoyance on locating the focal points of the Egregore’s psionic form. 
Once she found a relatively still one, she fired a blade of miasmic darkness right through its heart. 
The humanoid forms immediately dissipated back into mist as the Egregore shuddered and howled in pain. Before it could reconstitute itself, Petra impaled several more focal points with her miasma, firmly ensnaring the beast in her grasp. For an instant, she dared to smile in triumph before wincing in pain as she felt the monster begin gnawing into her miasmic appendages. Its humours began to coalesce around its psychic wounds as it now tried to suck out Petra’s essence through her own black blades. 
“Reel it in now. You’ve got this,” Emrys’s voice encouraged her. Nodding and gritting her teeth, Petra now focused on properly attuning her miasma. With each twist, the Egregore twisted back, but she could still feel whether she was getting closer or further away from her goal. Soon enough she hit the sweet spot, and the Egregore wailed like a deflating balloon as its power rushed out of it and into her. 
The sensation of it was almost overwhelming for her. She dropped to her knees and let out a cry of determined anguish, like one might let out during childbirth. Though the pain and exertion pushed her to her very limits, her resolution to see the act through to the end imbued her with a resounding fortitude she previously hadn’t known she possessed. 
And while her labour did exhaust her, quickly sapping her strength, she sapped the strength of her prey far quicker and it soon lost both the capability and the will to resist. By the time she was finished with it, it was reduced to a withered husk of tissue no bigger than a tea towel, splayed out upon the floor as it struggled to breathe. 
“Well done,” Emrys praised her, at last emerging from the shadows and waltzing over to the remains of the Egregore. “These are quite useful for making portals, but with the Cuniculi being so close at hand, I think we’ll save it for another time.” 
He picked up the bloodied and beaten pulp of a thing and tossed it casually in a satchel slung around his waist.
“Petra? Petra, how do you feel?” he asked.
Panting heavily, she looked at him with a dazed expression, as if she wasn’t even quite sure where she was or what had just happened. 
“I… I….,” she stammered. She extended her hand towards the sticky red patch on the floor where the Egregore had fallen. With minimal effort, she re-evaporated the coagulated residue into a mist of blood droplets, one that swirled around her arm in a helix that overlapped with the miasma of the Darkness Beyond. “I can control blood!” 
“Strictly speaking, you can control sanguineous humours – that is, anything which falls under the metaphysical concept of ‘blood’, regardless of any technical or scientific definitions,” he clarified. “As I said, nothing that will help me in breaking my chains, but next time you face the Darlings, you can be confident in knowing that any wound they give you will only provide you with more ammunition.” 
“Emrys… thank you! Thank you for this!” she gasped, hot tears of exaltation flowing down her cheeks as the Egregore’s power coursing through her soul made her feel more empowered than she could ever remember. 
“I did nothing but offer a few critical pieces of information and some gentle encouragement,” Emrys insisted. “You slayed and consumed the heart of the Egregore all on your own. We’ll have a proper celebration later, but now we must be off. As much as I’d love to stick around to see Seneca’s face when he comes to change the lock and realizes he’s too late, we’d still be best to avoid direct confrontation with the Order for now.” 
“But there’s still more keys on that ring,” Petra reminded him as she rose to her feet. “Is there anything else worth going after while we have the chance?” 
“They might seem a bit disappointing in comparison to the Egregore, but yes,” he replied. “If you’re up for it, we can try a couple more raids.” 
Petra nodded eagerly, clutching her sanguine blade in her fist like it was a new toy. Giggling, she sprinted back into the Cuniculi and waited for her master to follow her. Emrys lingered a moment, reaching into his satchel to retrieve a purple rose, the same one Seneca had used in the ritual that had summoned him. Feeling especially emboldened by the success of his disciple, he chose to leave it behind as a calling card beneath the shattered orb, so that the Ophion Occult Order would be left with absolutely no doubt as to what had happened. 
Category:Gods
Category:The Vesper's Bell