The Beauty
Evening of the River Serpent Attack, 77 Spring 218
A failure. A failure. A failure.
The thought pounds in her head, burns behind her eyes in the tears she refuses to shed, flames in the shame that flushes her cheeks and bites her words short whenever she must speak.
The simplest task, and she’d been too much of an idiot to do it. And all of her attempts to right it had been just as much of a failure.
Too much of an idiot to open the vial when she was in the perfect position to do it. Too blind to find the vial. Too stupid and overconfident to get away from the serpent before closing it up in the bubble. Too much of a rolling ball of failure to save them. Too much of an idiot to realize, beforehand, that trying to save them before all of the grubs were dead was an effort in futility. Her idiocy had wasted so much effort. So much time. So much of a dead weight. Would have been just plain dead, had others not had to struggle to bear her up, to rescue her carcass.
The one thing she’d done right, perhaps, had been to eventually retrieve the unused vial. It was still good, could maybe still be used. Maybe once whatever the source of the grubs was eliminated, or all of them hunted down, or —
But that was a task of unknown proportions. Maybe gargantuan. Maybe impossible.
Unless…
The memory returns, suddenly, of the fanged interior of the serpent’s stomach, the burning of its internal fluids all around her, eating into the clothes that hang sad and vent-tattered even now, peeling great patches of her skin and burning off portions of her hair. Not enough to kill her instantaneously, but enough to potentially kill her, and make her exit as soon as possible.
Nothing they’d experimented with had been deadly enough to kill the grubs without also harming a person. But could she alter a person’s bloodstream or flesh just slightly, enough to make it inhospitable? Or render its hairlike mouth-tendrils ineffective? A coating, perhaps, like her slippy-spell, but for the insides? Could both be done?
Her eyes, red from exhaustion and exertion, widen. She dives into her bag, retrieved from Astarael after the battle, pulling out her notebooks—stuffed with torn-out and rearranged pages, rebound in different configurations. She pulls another small square sheaf of paper and lays sheets and notebooks alike out on the deck, pinning them down with daggers and shears and anything she has to hand as she crawls between them, making frantic notes. There, the formulas for the paralytic poison, but if she took only the thinroot portion of it and combined it with the ground soapstone of her slippy spell—maybe on top of a pattern that partakes of the base principle of Change and Growth inherent to her alteration spells—
It would take days to create and test, probably. Not time they have, unless she can do it in the evenings, when they rest. But she’s going to need more equipment than her own alchemy kit.
Throwing her notebooks back into her bag, she grabs the most relevant notes and barges into wherever Ethan is, heedless of whatever he might be doing, brandishing the papers. “I need your help. I’ve figured out a way to keep the things from takin’ us over.”
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