88 - Reliquary Pt. 4 [Cherno]

Firminus paced as he spoke, eventually settling down on one of the benches.

“Collating this with other information that I rightly should not possess, I would wager that the Molted Vestige has extraordinary sensory filtering properties while likely also dampening cognitive strain and substantially enhancing the user’s ability to parse sensory information. If you see any nodules near where it would connect to the brainstem, they are more than likely auxiliary motoric brains, as Aspasius was the first to obtain a willingly-given Inax motoric brain and turn it into a graft. They are quite rare even nowadays, hard to come by…”

“And the Liminal Coil?”

“Right, right. I am not… Sure. Its maker and original owner was a hermetic drasaurian grafter named Vehrab Ibn Ghazi Barzai, of the Zkauba tribe. He conceived and used it alongside several other experimental grafts during the Great Plague of fifty-one seventy-two. As far as I know he retained the entirety of his Great Plague Regalia with the sole exception of the Liminal Coil, placing it personally within this very vault and refusing to speak of it ever again. Records of the Great Plague are spotty at best, but Barzai’s powers were and still are so eclectic and varied that I can only guess at what effects the Liminal Coil might have. Barzai’s most famous deed during the Great Plague was, by some means, momentarily crippling a great beast that had fought the fullgraft Galeas to a standstill; not only did he seem to stun it, he tore down the beast’s Barrier as well. He is recorded as having repeated this act several times with only seconds in between, allowing Galeas the openings he needed to wound the beast and then strike it down with his own supreme offensive Thaumaturgy, the Ultra Shine. Whether this ability was one connected to the Liminal Coil or no, he hasn’t been seen using it again since the Great Plague… But the same is the case with half a dozen other strange abilities, and Barzai himself has only been sighted a handful of times each decade since then. For the past fifty years, the only incidents in which he was involved, he single handedly resolved using an artifact scimitar that spewed cyan-blue fire, presumably operating on Arcane principles.”

“The Coil, Firminus. Any more intel on the Liminal Coil? Perhaps another ability Barzai only used during the Great Plague? Anything? Help me here man, I’m burning way too much Thauma to stay upright.”

“Well… No, I fear I cannot help you any further. You shall have to discern whether one of the two Sacred Relics is right for you on your own.”

Sighing, Krahe hobbled ahead, counting down until she reached the thirteenth alcove to the left. Floating in a containment tank laden with what seemed to be centuries of seals, Molted Vestige was a strange, self-contained spine wrought of translucent chitin with pale-blue nerve fibers showing through. Despite not having even glanced at the documentation she felt an unsettling pull at the back of her mind, like an unchecked back door that might have been left open. Turning around, Krahe hobbled back out of the alcove and made her way right down the way to the Liminal Coil. Lacking the Molted Vestige’s many layers of seals and extensive documentation, the Liminal Coil had a comparatively small handful of scrolls and memslates to show for its history. Floating in a tank of translucent solution, it wasn’t just a spine, but included a full rib cage. Moreover, rather than being plastered in seals at all, an incense burner engraved with eye-pulling sigils sat right in front of the containment tank and similarly eldritch sigils had been scraped into the tank’s thick glass. The Liminal Coil’s unsettling form was made from a bronze-like metal that glistened in slightly wrong ways, as if it were reflecting light from a nonexistent flame. Spurs protruded out of its vertebrae, and its entire structure gave off the appearance of an occult torture implement more than a prosthetic. Its ribs were divorced from human anatomy, twisting at odd angles that, seemingly by coincidence, just so happened to form a rib cage.

Vaguely baneworm-like, reddish tendrils extended out from the spine and around its ribs in a shape that suggested they were somehow meant to function alongside the host’s own thoracic nervous system, or to perhaps replace its functionality altogether.

None of these design elements did much to dissuade her from taking interest in the prosthetic; the only concern was that the ribs might be slightly off in terms of shape, but she was sure they could be adjusted. Reassuringly, the substantial design flaw of floating ribs was absent, the lowermost pair connected to the main rib cage. There was also little space between each rib; assuming this metal had good durability, the rib cage would be able to act as more effective internal armor. Hair-like filaments of seemingly the same metal as the rest of the prosthetic extended from the points where it would connect to the rest of her skeleton; anchors and reinforcers both, she wagered.

Closing the distance, Krahe took in hand one of the memslates and, after some awkward fiddling, got it to slot into her eyebox. Rather than text, a video recording of a vaguely crocodilian saurian popped up. He began to speak, but Krahe couldn’t understand a word of it. The only words she recognized were his full name at the very start. With further effort she unfurled a scroll, then another, and another still, finding them to be barely legible at all, written by someone clearly mentally unwell and, by the handwriting, not proficient in using a normal writing implement. What little she managed to decipher from the third scroll spoke of diving into dark waters, of grasping tendrils and whispering voices in the deep, of a maddening between-place from which one could look on the world as one looked into a murky lake from the beach. Then, there was pleading to not use the relic unless one can gaze upon a particular sigil without flinching, and even then, Barzai still warned the reader to not dive too deep.

The sigil was absent, cut out, the missing chunk filled in by blank paper and a message directing to a drawing of a scroll that looked, to Krahe’s eyes, nearly identical to the many similar scroll cases on the table. Each scroll was just a different iteration of the same thing, each written by the same hand, growing only marginally more sensical one after the next.