Chapter 16

CHAPTER 16: Recovery

A few days later, Kresha woke up feeling somewhat back to normal. The first thing she noticed was the sounds of tools lightly banging against glass beakers. She opened her eyes and peered around her master bedroom, seeing all of the damage she caused from losing control.

The claw marks in the walls and the broken furniture fragments reminded her that she hadn't made new blood bloaters in time to keep the hunger at bay.

'Fuck! I probably destroyed at least half the Keep trying to feed on everything. Oh gods, I probably ate all the livestock. The last thing I can do right now is find a nearby village to repopulate the herds.'

Kresha tried to suddenly sit up in a rush to at least finish mutating the bloaters in the lab, but her body felt too heavy to follow her commands.

When turning her head in the partially thrashed bed pillow, noticing that Arkyn was moving about the room. He was the one clinking the lab equipment together in a rush.

She saw he made some makeshift blood infusers from some lab supplies to administer mutated bloater blood he must've made himself.

Sitting on the corner was a fresh bloater just a little smaller than his torso, spigoted to produce the blood substitute she always drank and pumping into a needle sitting in her arm.

He had her personal research book open on a popout table and was still mixing a few other ingredients to the compound. She pieced together that they must have been sedatives to keep her from rampaging while waiting for the long growth process to finish.

'Thank the gods he searched for the procedural notes, even if he kept drugging me, eventually my feral form would have built a tolerance and just destroyed everything once again.'

Kresha mumbled at him at first, feeling how parched her throat had become after laying there for so long. Once she cleared her throat and found her voice, she demanded he help her sit upright to drink what had already been prepared.

She acted irritated more than anything about him being in the room, and waited a few minutes before guiltily asking how bad the damage was to the Keep.

"Well you fought a bull and won messily, a few mining golems needed re-oiled, and the worst is probably some cracks throughout the Harvest Cavern that'll need plaster repair sometime this week."

Her eyes grew wide after realising he already finished listing the damages and seeing that was all. She half expected to have wrecked dozens of golems at the smell of their gears, torn up nearly every corridor in the keep, and devoured at least half the livestock to satiate the hunger. Arkyn was ready with a more detailed explanation.

"Once I discovered you had locked yourself in here to contain your transformation, I figured the empty storage room and your rather ambitious taste for blood were connected." He said after handing her a glass of water as well.

"You chased me around for a bit but got distracted long enough for me to come up with a plan." He pulled out the inkpen she gave him for recording notes. "After syphoning and storing a bit of blood from the cows with this, I lured you away from all of the livestock and back into the hallways. Then let you capture me inside the botanical cavern. Not before I had a chance to mix in a lot of these."

He showed her the dark-green leaves of a Driftweed Sapling; used as a sleeping agent by apothecaries and sometimes a coma inducer to keep patients more stable during weeks of painful healing.

While hiding inside the plants, trees, and bushes; Arkyn was chewing as much of the extract as he could out of the leaves and soaked the cow blood with it. Once he was pinned by Kresha, he moved the liquid bubble to where she bit into his artificial skin.

The drugs couldn't do him any harm since he controlled what actually flowed in and out of his brain by suppressing his senses. The results were nearly instant and it gave him the time to search the master bedroom for notes on how to make more Fangbell.

"Yes, well I am sorry about that. I should have been thinking more clearly; Odbrane is experiencing a rather long winter and I didn't think to prepare more in advance. By the time I could even get down the mountain, it would've already been too late."

She didn't say much afterward. Kresha only commented every once in a while on how he should be growing the bloater, but nothing else beyond that. She watched him walk in and out of the room all day, occasionally hearing him come in while she slept, still working his tasks and helping her with no need to physically stop.

Trying to manage both maintenance and the still ongoing experiments left him no free time to read or talk much with Kresha outside of her recovery. She felt a knot of stress growing in her stomach, wondering if she felt guilty for relying on Arkyn.

After three long days of staying in bed, Kresha felt herself get antsy. Part of her did not like sitting still for so long, and another wanted to get both herself and especially Arkyn out of that bedroom.

While on the last day of recuperating, she finally said something not involving the growth project still ongoing at the side of her bed. She caught him by the hand when he was walking past for the twentieth time. She debated herself in silence one last time before finally muttering something to herself.

Even with his magically-sharp auditory senses, Arkyn could hardly understand what she was trying to say to him.

After another moment, she finally spoke up clearly. "I swear I never meant to make your life an even crueller existence. None of this was supposed to happen."

Arkyn was confused at such a random apology to him, but he was still ready with an immediate response. "I hardly find what you did cruel, you had simply lost control because of unforeseen variables. I have been here for at least twenty years, plus the forty you took to convert my mind in this body. You cannot live that long and not make a single mistake, it would be unfair to expect that kind of standard.

"That's not what I meant, Arkyn."

She sat back up, this time pulling the sheets back to stand. She felt wobbly at first, but steadied her arms on Arkyn's. She turned them both to face one of the several stone panels on the wall behind the bed. With the metal wand, she tapped on a dozen hidden runes in a certain order, making sure nothing was missed.

After a few seconds, the wall hissed as the airtight seal was released. A plume of dust shot from its edges, carried by the small wind.

Once it was fully open, Kresha pulled out a hidden drawer in the wall compartment. Inside were three items; a small wood carving, a rolled up painting, and what appeared to be a necklace with an obsidian looking crystal the size of a fingernail tied to a chain of silver. The necklace was used to tie the large large scroll closed.

"It's time I tell you about who I am."