Shalise stumbled forwards as the earthquake pushed, brushing her fingers against the crystal.
Two brief shocks pulsed against her finger. Nothing more intense than licking a nine-volt battery.
Her fingers broke contact as the earthquake pulled her back.
Shalise’s feet spread apart, widening her stance to help remain steady against the shaking ground.
There was a burst of confusion from Prax. The confusion gave way to laughter.
Rats
Zoe was
It was new magic–new to her, at least. Exactly the kind of magic she liked getting her hands on.
But it was all wrong.
Zoe had always been a firm proponent of the idea that magic was inherently neutral. Magic that other mages might consider ‘white’ could be used for nefarious purposes while ‘black’ magic was just as suited towards helping people as it was to hurting people.
Magic was a tool. Nothing more. What someone did with that tool was entirely up to the individual and did not reflect on the magic itself.
The project that Ylva had assigned her was slowly yet surely sending that idea down the drain.
Zoe sighed as she turned away from the dagger. The small side chamber to the library did not have enough air. Something about the dagger just made her sick.
While Ylva had managed to stop the curse afflicting Eva from progressing, she hadn’t been able to reverse the effects that had already taken hold. Eva was still unconscious. After almost a week and a half, she had shown no improvement.
Finding out why and coming up with a solution was her job. It was everything she had asked for. It was something she could do to help out. And yet…
Zoe ran her fingers through her hair, brushing back a few stray strands.
“I am out of my depth.”
In thaumaturgy, there was no spell that could accurately fit into the category of curse. There were spells that could be used to harm. They could be used in a similar fashion by enchanting objects. Lightning weaved with order and chaos on a rod could electrocute anyone who touches it.
The dagger before her was different. Even feeding pure chaos magic into something wouldn’t get anywhere as
It was made of bone. A human femur. Based on the jagged edge, it had probably been broken at some point before being filed down and sharpened. Zoe had yet to determine whether or not the dagger being made of bone affected the enchantment in any way.
The enchantment–the curse was entirely contained on the edge of the blade. She couldn’t detect any signs of magic anywhere else.
Anything that touched the edge of the dagger died on a cellular level. It didn’t even need to cut something. Just resting it on the tail of one of the rats Ylva had supplied resulted in the death of the surface cells.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the dead cells would start attacking neighboring cells and eventually kill them. The newly dead cells would continue attacking like some sort of miniature zombie infection. It would spread faster as more and more cells were converted.
The only saving grace of the curse was that it did not create zombies. A dead rat stayed dead. Even exposing a healthy rat to a cursed rat, either in whole or by mixing their fluids, did not spread the curse.
The curse knew what organism was supposed to be cursed.
Ylva stopped the memetic effect in Eva. But the dead cells were still dead. There was no healing going on, no new cells replaced the dead ones.
The curse was still there.
Arthfael’s passive healing aura kept the rest of Eva healthy, but the area around the cut was blackened and dead. The only reason she hadn’t bled out from the hole in her back was thanks to what she did with her blood magic prior to passing out.
Zoe slid her chair over to the rat cages.
A good half of the rats were completely dead. They were dead, but even the oldest hadn’t begun to rot. That small oddity was something Zoe had yet to solve. She suspected it was caused by the same thing that prevented new cell generation. Once the cells died, that was it. They just stopped. The bodies never went into the bloat state of decomposition.
Inorganic matter was another story altogether. Despite rigor mortis never setting in on the rats, Zoe’s first pair of gloves were as hard as stone. A near perfect half-sphere of dirt turned to incredibly dense stone near where Eva had been stabbed. The spot where the dagger had fallen.
Ylva hadn’t needed to stop that. It stopped on its own roughly five feet from the dagger’s tip.
After turning a desk to stone, Ylva brought in a pair of clamps to hold the dagger so that the edge never touched anything. Zoe used a strong wall of solid air around the blade to keep any accidents from happening while she wasn’t testing it.
She slid straight past the deceased and the control group to the group on which Ylva had stopped the memetic effect.
Some were unconscious, others were moving around. It depended on where they were cut and for how long the curse had to act before Ylva stopped it.
