“Not now, Morrígan!” snapped Yarlaith, his foul mood returning. “We have a lot of work to do, and a very sick patient who requires our undivided attention.”

Morrígan turned to leave. Scowling, she walked through the cavern, past disembodied limbs and torn-up corpses, severed with surgical precision. Several alchemy stations were set up along the length of the cavern, as not to have ingredients from different blood potions contaminating each other.

Of all the bloodied and broken cadavers, only her mother’s body remained intact inside her coffin, still fresh and beautiful from the funeral ceremony.

This is what it’s all for. Morrígan approached the coffin. This is why we’re defying the Church and defiling these bodies. Grave-robbing, illegal blood potions. When we wake you, it’ll all be worth it.

From behind the coffin, a large black rat emerged, trotting along the ground with its nose held up in the air.

“Stupid rodent,” she muttered as she reached for a glass bottle from a wooden shelf overhead. She had seen that same rat many times before; once it had even climbed into her mother’s coffin before she chased it away. Morrígan slowly raised her hand, readying the bottle, when it stopped and looked up at her. Morrígan hurled the glass bottle across the room, but the rat darted out of the way into the safety of the darkness. With a crash, the glass smashed against the foot of the coffin.

“Gods, Morrígan!” said Yarlaith, scowling. “At this rate, I’ll barely have a lab left by the time we’re done. Go, do as I asked. Now!”

Morrígan cursed the rat as she left the workshop. She took a short tunnel down to a trap door with a ladder dangling from the ceiling. She emerged headfirst into her uncle’s study, but it had been a long time since he had studied in it. Most of the books had been removed from their shelves for ease of access in the workshop, and even his favourite chair had been brought down into the caves.

The clinic itself was dark, and Mrs. Mhurichú was asleep across the way. A special leather mask covered her face, as to prevent the spread of infection. She looked like a great bird, lying there in the darkness, the respirator hooked like a beak. Yarlaith had stored all sorts of herbs and spices in there to keep the consumption in, but they did nothing to keep Mrs. Mhurichú’s snores out.

Morrígan crossed the clinic towards a small alchemy lab built into the wall and went to work in silence.

Alchemy wasn’t necessarily magic, but it was often referred to as an “augment” to healing. Potions and solutions did little to heal a wound or cure an ailment on their own, but there were some forms of sicknesses that even the most skilled healer couldn’t cure with their hands. As a result, most white mages were well versed in both.

If blood potions were legal, then most healers would be out of their job, Morrígan realised, carefully weighing out six ounces of willow bark. She added these to a solution, along with a measure of spores from a strange fungus, and the solution simmered softly as she added heat. She sang under her breath as she added seeds to the scales.

Willow for the fever,

Poppy for the pain,

The healers keep on healin’,

But we still all die the same.

She preferred making blood potions to proper ones. There was a certain magic in Human blood that came alive when mixed with the right ingredients: magic that would always be stronger than normal alchemy. She often wondered if there was a simple blood potion that could cure the consumption that even Yarlaith didn’t know about. Recipes for illegal potions were hard to come by, and it was likely that there was more out there than those listed in his notes.

Morrígan double-checked all the ingredients. The fungi spores were the only components of the potion that were supposed to cure Mrs. Mhurichú, while the others eased her suffering. The woman was still sick, though, and sometimes it seemed as if all their hard work was just keeping her barely alive.

It would be a kindness to let her die. Morrígan stole a glance at her patient, who coughed and groaned under the mask. Like Morrígan, Mrs. Mhurichú hadn’t seen daylight for weeks. What kind of life have we left to give her?

Morrígan reached for a pen and inkwell and labelled the bottles in big, clear letters.

And besides, we’d put her body to good use.

And besides, we’d put her body to good use.

I was away, at Mount Selyth’s peak

When the tower pierced the sky.

From there we watched, but none dared speak,

‘Til Lord Himself did cry:

“The hubris of man does not compare,

To the scale of Simian pride.

But dare they add to this Sin’s height,

And see their Lord defied?”

So Seletoth went to the City of Steam

And beheld the Simians in sight.

But in silence we stayed at Mount Selyth’s peak,

Dwarfed by the Tower’s height.

Yes, the Tower stood taller than Mount Selyth’s peak,

Before it was felled from within.

And for one short breath, Lord Seletoth’s might

Was eclipsed by the Shadow of Sin.

Excerpt from The Fall, AC 157

Chapter 9:

The Chimera

‘Accounts of Necromantic practises date back as far as one-hundred years after Móráin’s Conquest of Alabach.’

Morrígan read by the light of a sinking candle, while shadows of twisted limbs danced across the cavern walls.

‘The earliest known Necromancers were healers of the Mage’s Academy of Dromán, although they were ignorant of their heresy at the time. Cadavers were used for white magic, in training and in practise, up until AC 145. Under today’s legislation, all healers and alchemists from those days were as guilty of Necromancy as Earl Roth himself.’