Shadows of Elysium: The Laughing King

Chapter 6: Library

Three days earlier

A strange woman read books by lantern light in the darkness of the abandoned library. The rain had always been soothing to her, even the acid rain. So the storm raging outside made it easy to relax, but the corpse draped over the railing of the second floor did not. The body was still bleeding.

That didn't mean that it was fresh though; the puddle of blood building on the floor was disproportionate to the amount of blood a human being contains. As the woman was well aware, and plenty bothered by. Trivial questions like, "why is that thing bleeding?", couldn't distract her; there was research to be done.

She had began by scanning the titles to find anything related to her studies and piling them on the desk overlooking the sea. The resulting stack consisted mostly of tales on beasts, notes on ancient animals and biology of the mutant genes. The Wurm Wars of Gorbog, How to not be Eaten in the Wastelands, Bioresearch and Mutation Treatment.

After reading the last book far more thoroughly than she had ever read a textbook, Crow stood to stretch her back. She pulled out a long cigarette that she rolled herself and lit the end with one touch of her finger.

Gardening out Mutations.

That one was oddly related to her predicament, but the tribe wasn't plagued by mutation. It was Elysium that filled the ground and the people with arcane disease. She pocketed that one for later anyway, maybe the methodology was similar. She still needed to find the opposite of the drug, something that could pull the intoxicant out like the elders had been planning. The cure so to speak.

Bestiary of the Western Swamps.

The blood continued to drip. The acid rain began to pour loud with an audible hiss coming off of the mostly resistant wood coating. Her cigarette cherry burned slowly down in the dim light. She picked another book and turned through the pages. This continued through the night.

Dark Arts of a Medicine Woman.

The dripping blood.

Savage Critter Origins.

The patter and sizzle of acid rain.

The Decrepit Slime.

The long ash scattering across the ground like shattered glass.

Glow of the Heart: Esoteric Study of Spirits.

"Why did I pick this one up?"

The blood stopped dripping. Crow froze in the middle of turning a page and cocked her head at the puddle. It was rippling from more than just a drop. The surface didn't shimmer red when she moved, but remained a deep ink black. One foot closer and stars began to dance within the pool.

Entire nebula filled the mind's vision as she stared. Stars aged into black holes before her eyes, planets grew from barren wastes into high tech civilizations and back again, the scenes zoomed out to show spectral leviathans moving the cosmos in a slow dance. The giants became germs and the germs became people and the people became....

Crow averted her gaze just in time. A slimy arm slides out of the cosmic pool and pulls with it a still forming head and torso. Before long a fully formed humanoid stood from the mess. Its face shifted from nothing into a sideways mouth full of shark teeth from chin to forehead.

Crow grabbed her staff from beside the desk and unleashed the Elysium trapped within the crystal on the end. A blade of blue flame exploded out and slashed the creature in half at the waist. The torso crawled a little further and Crow slashed down at its neck.

Crow unwrapped the bandage stained black on the inside. Two black strings of runic text hovered over the soft inside of her forearm. They made teardrop rings around her fingers at one end and entered her skin at the shoulder. A third string of text was beginning to hover over her arm and ring finger. It burned heavily like a knife cutting from the inside.

The blood began to drip.