There is a lot about me you don't know -Tales of Arcadia ENG

15-Xiāngsheng

'Can books and scrolls even possess people?... It's strange to think that. But if Morgana's Skathe-Hrün allowed her to possess me, then... '

"Have you read about the Keeper yet?" She found herself asking, chasing away the previous thought and trying to ignore the discomfort that instantly caused under her skin. A dirty feeling, almost, that had hovered inside her in the first weeks after she had been practically exorcized. A dirty feeling that had made her feel as if she had been the intruder in her own body, not the Mother of Monsters. She felt it less often at times like this, but it was there nonetheless.

"Yes, but he was only mentioned a couple of times. No representation of him drawn in the volume yet." Blinky ran his hand over the pages of the tome. "So far it has talked about the historical situation, about Xia's Lair, which was called the Crucible... About condemnations, perhaps unjust, perhaps not, suffered by a group of witches who practiced black magic, since signs of Alchemical Transmutation of humans or animals had been found."

Claire blinked in confusion. "... Sorry, I didn't understand the last one."

"Alchemical Transmutation," repeated the Troll. "I have no idea how it works, but it was a type of Necromancy in which they used the component materials of the body, studying the doses, to bring corpses back to life."

"So basically they were taking human flesh, bones and...?"Claire shivered, feeling a knot forming in both her throat and the pit of her stomach, accompanied by nausea. She tried to -and struggled to- digress, hoping to chase it all away, but failed miserably. They seemed to have taken root.

"Not really. They were chemical elements, Fair Claire. Iron, fluorine, silicon, and others..." he stared, blinked, stared more, and chuckled. "Several others." Blinky went back through the book, turning back several pages. "Only Xia herself had tried to make an exchange between a living being and a dead one, it seems. And from there, well, came those creatures Mr. Casperan mentioned, the Jiangshis." A particularly long pause. "They are complicated and dangerous spells, with unpredictable results to say the least."

Yes, it was pretty blatant as a thing. Unless Xia had been completely out of her mind -that was still a possibility to consider, especially for the simple fact that she had allowed them to kill entire city populations! And that was not the attitude of sane people- she did not think the woman would expect one of the very creatures she had created to turn on her and then devour her.

Claire nodded a little, leaving Blinky to continue his reading, ending up looking out like Aaarrrgh for several moments before then returning to cast a glance at the rune on her hand and then at the woman's drawing once more.

'I wonder if it is really out of power or possession that she decided to do such a thing,' she found herself thinking, a grimace painting itself on her face, leading her to frown. 'Hopefully, no one else will have a good idea of creating new ones, anyway.'

She really, really hoped not. It would have been unpleasant. More than unpleasant. Gruesome, for sure... and with unimaginable proportions of disaster to say the least. Just like an apocalyptic movie. Or precisely like zombie TV shows.

She had never seen it, but Toby's explanation and scrolling through the Internet pages a bit -when they still had been in America- had been enough for her to get a pretty good idea of what it would be like to find herself in such a situation. There had been various fantasies about how to protect herself and what kind of buildings would be the safest.

Just saying it had been almost fun, a way of chatting and letting one's mind go into disparate hypotheses, the concepts of which seemed light years away, really. But... not in reality. Putting it into practice would not have been at all. Oh, no, definitely not.