By the time Eva felt well enough to actually move, her body was sticky and somewhat unpleasant smelling.
But it had worked.
It had worked.
Her blood was flowing rapidly through her body, all according to her direction. Much like when the hunter had stabbed her in the chest. She didn’t need a heart. She had blood magic. And maybe a little demonic constitution helping out as well. A normal human might have a bit more trouble recovering from that pain or even standing up again.
She repeated the action with both of her legs, pouring blood from her stumps.
Which almost had her passing out again. Eva quickly sucked the blood back into her body as she considered a second, albeit smaller problem.
Unlike before, she wasn’t mass producing an endless supply of blood. That had been some demonic power. Maybe she would learn to harness it fully one day. For now, she only had the blood in her body.
Trying again, this time Eva did not make solid arms and legs. Her hands were thin and bone-like. As if the bones of her arm were the only things that extended out, no meat and no muscles. Her legs were the same. She only had narrow bones of liquid blood stretching out from the stubs at her hips.
She still felt a little anemic, but it was better than nothing. So long as her body continued to produce blood cells, she could fill out her thighs and hands to their proper shape. For now, skeleton Eva it was.
And she stood, shaky at first. Whether the shakes came from how narrow her legs were, the dull thumps of pain still pounding in her chest, or simply because she wasn’t quite used to walking around just yet—using the blood as legs before had felt a whole lot more natural—she couldn’t say. But she did stand.
Standing was an improvement worthy of praise in and of itself.
Technically, she didn’t need to stand. Neither did she need long legs. Floating around on platforms of blood should be possible. It was basically what she was doing anyway—unless she hardened the bones of blood, they were fairly poor supports for her body. And she could harden them, and probably would later, but only once she had enough blood to spare for proper legs.
However, half her reason for not wanting to crawl around was appearances. Specifically not wanting to appear weak in front of other demons. Floating around on a platform of blood might be convenient, but didn’t
Similarly, she didn’t really need hands. She could form her blood into tentacles or just leave it all within her body until she needed to manipulate something. Even in that case, she wouldn’t need to move her arms. Floating blood was a trick she had learned a long time ago.
Maybe some day, she wouldn’t feel the need to maintain appearances. For now, she walked out of the room on two feet made of blood with two skeletal hands.
And, as she left the room, she found herself in the common room of the alternate women’s ward.
In the real world, and the last time she had seen the alternate version, the common room merely held a table and a few stolen couches. It normally sat between all the cells of the prison and led out into the main walled off courtyard.
However, as she walked into the common room, Eva found herself face to face with an obsidian column. Sandstone bricks from the roof and floor of her domain littered the floor around the common room as if it had risen from under the ground.
Eva found herself staring into her own glowing red eyes in the reflection of the smooth obsidian wall. “Huh,” she said, slowly walking around the construct. “I don’t remember creating that.”
Press Conference
After ensuring that she was indeed alone within her domain—she hadn’t found any enigmas, humans, or demons wandering around, nor had she sensed the presence of any—Eva returned to the common room to further inspect the column sticking through the roof.
As it turns out, it wasn’t a column. All four sides angled inwards ever so slightly up until high above the roof where the angle bent sharply towards a central point. She had searched every inch that she could see and found nothing. No markings or inscriptions of any kind. Whoever had built it hadn’t even had the decency to slap on a sticky note telling why they built it.
