Everyone and anything else she'd carve through on her way to get what she wanted. No thought given, and no quarter. "I'm sorry." She murmured to both mother and Mitsuo. Then she rolled over. Once the Dragon had his quicksilver, she'd tearfully apologize to Mitsuo and he probably wouldn't forgive her. A glimmer caught her eye. In her haste to the bed, he satchel's contents had been spilled across the floor. She had the quicksilver in her hand. It still its struggles and Yaki felt it quiver.
Ka-clink, Ka-clink, Ka-clink. Her heart sounded as if it was chomping on a metal bit. Yaki closed her eyes and extended her awareness inward. Her body resisted, her mind slipped off her skin. She was Yaki. A single being, a single spirit. Yet that wasn't true. She'd felt the branch against her heart and the tentacles of Yaz'noth forge invade her. The awareness of everything inside her of the organs he had forced to function while they cried for death on the cellular level. Yaki put her hand to her chest and forced herself to remember the feeling of her heart, the awareness of its assurance pulse. In her chest she felt it, a void of life within her. A mechanical thing laboring to move her blood, the crystals studding its surface were dead. Yet above that dead space and woven through it sat something that pulsed with heat and life. It stretched tendrils down through the machinery of the hearth and into one of her lungs. The lung had twisted as if to get away, no longer a single oval lobe but a coiled mass intermixed with scar tissue. A battlefield that the healing of the medical crystal had wrought.
Now though. As she tipped the vial to her lips and the hapless drop of living silver fell down her throat. The tendrils of the thing in her co-mingled with the passageways of her lung, becoming the inseparable. The quicksilver struggled as it fell down her throat and as the hot thing in her chest snatched it from her esophagus and pulled it inside.
What did I just do? The question had barely trudged across the plane of her mind as the heat flared with the force of an explosion. The bottle broke against her palm she barely caught herself from striking the floor with her face. She breathed out a mass of smoke in a silent scream. More. The thought pounded out through her body and she scrambled to obey. Yet there was no more. No more quicksilver. But there was gold. Gold would do. She grabbed her Torii pendent, bent it in half and swallowed it. More. Mitsuo had a golden chain, Yaki slurped it like a noodle. More. One of her Gem in her bag was a small gold nugget, down the gullet it went.
The heat increased. Sweat steamed off her skin as coughed up blackened bits of flesh. The ka-Clank ka-clank ka-clank of her heart thundered everywhere. Her fingers pulsed with its rhythm. The veins in her arms darkened to black, as they strained to contain her blood.
Ka-clank Ka-
It stopped. She toppled over, mouth opening and closing like a stranded fish. A red glow throbbed from inside her chest, so bright that her ribs cast shadows on the wall. In her molten core something flowed, like egg cracking open within her.
In the brightness her vision began to dim, darkness eating away at the corners of her world. Too much heat. Far too much heat. In the corner of the room stood a soaking tub with a faucet. Her strange black veined arms pulled her to it. She turned on the water and gulped it down.
Her insides hissed and fizzed as steam pour back up her throat. The blackness claimed more of reality as drank more. This time the water beat the heat. A blessed chill spread through her as she vomited the water back into the tub. And miraculously breathed in. Not deeply, the cool air filling a quarter of her chest. It was enough. She breathed and as she did so she found a new sound echoing through her strangely hollow feeling chest.
Thrum thrum. Thrum thrum.
A distinct, two note beat. Strong, inhuman, but organic.
Thrum thrum. Thrum thrum.
An improvement? Yaki didn't know. Clinging to the edge of the tub she watched the veins in her arm fade from black, to gold and back to a normal, barely visible as darkened lines beneath her tanned skin.
A thought occurred, a memory rose that she had heard a heartbeat like this once before. Slower, thunderous but there, all around her while she had been remade.
It had been the sound of Yaz'noth's heart.
Dragon's Cage Page 20
