Cheis, transfixed in more ways than one, stared down at the length of blood-flecked steel protruding from her sternum. A dry, detached part of her noted with interest that it appeared to have been driven rather expertly through the gap between her first and second ribs on the right side at a sharp upward angle, but declined to comment on the possible ramifications. The rest of her simply failed to process it, costing her the precious second which followed where the sword was roughly yanked back out. Fountaining blood, Cheis collapsed instantly.

Linduin Kayle, who had before today never seen anything more magical than an exceptionally beautiful sunrise, gaped in horror and disbelief as Tebes of Reth's headless corpse flourished the bloodstained sword mechanically and stepped over Cheis's recumbent body. His axe fell from his nerveless hands and made a shockingly loud racket as it clattered onto the tavern's bloodstained floor, and the three villagers who he had previously wounded might have seen this as an excellent opportunity to attack were they not also battling various stages of shock themselves. The villager seated at the table, on the other hand, was far too traumatized to do anything other than stare glassily and pour himself another drink.

Within the body that had once belonged to Haelid's reeve, a number of interesting chemical, electrical, and astral changes were taking place. Pathways were being repurposed, proteins recoded and refolded, and electrical signals twisted into strange new configurations that produced fractally-patterned magnetic fields and other interesting phenomena. Much of its metabolic activity, which had been in the process of ceasing entirely for various reasons, shifted gears and began doing new and more biologically improbable things. The primary external evidence of this was that Tebes' body abruptly turned purple and began to smell extremely rancid, which was even more confusing to observers. Cheis, gurgling through a trachea that was half-severed and full of blood, twitched grotesquely.

As the corpse continued to advance, Linduin found himself backing up unconsciously, a fact he became aware of only when he bumped into and knocked over one of the tavern's few splintering tables. The drinking man started slightly, mumbled something incoherent, and began to fumble around blindly for his hat.

Sparkling lights began to appear along the surface of the corpse's skin, forming multicolored traceries of lines that quickly resolved into runes and connecting structures. Suppurating pus erupted from its pores, flowing upwards in rather nonchalant defiance of gravity as its skin continued to darken into a glossy black. The various blasphemous effluvia coalesced around a wriggling lump -- half tissue, half liquid -- which seemed to be struggling up through the hole at the center of the corpse's severed neck. The corpse brought its sword up along its chest, wrapped its free arm around it as if cradling a child, and caressed a length of the blade with the stump of its neck. Linduin, who would have shat his pants if he'd had the presence of mind to do so, whimpered.

Abruptly, the sound of a pair of fingers snapping rang out clearly across the room. The corpse, weirdly, half-turned towards behind itself, despite having no head or other sensory organs with which to direct its attention in that direction.

Cheis of Veraleigh, breathing effectively if not comfortably through a mostly nonfunctional respiratory system full of blood thanks to her water-breathing enchantment, brought her hands together in a two-fisted clutching gesture as she finished her spell, then let them collapse back onto the floor. The corpse flinched, then jerked, then doubled over weirdly. The malformed and flailing tentacle which had been growing in place of a head thrashed wildly as a grotesque series of squealing and gurgling noises began to emit from the creature's midsection.

Dropping its sword to the floor, the creature quivered and squirmed, its muscles fighting amongst each other as competing directives flooded through the rapidly-replicating structures inside its body. A loud, wet gaseous emission was accompanied by several groaning and creaking noises, followed by a number of sharp reports and crunching sounds. Linduin, who had no idea what to make of any of this, quickly added another entry to his list of traumatic experiences as the corpse began to shit its own bones out of its asshole. The remaining villagers, mercifully, mostly lost consciousness at this point, except for the drinking man who stood up and excused himself with great politeness before vomiting copiously.

As Linduin watched, fascinated, the creature folded in upon itself, limbs losing their structure as the bones which supported them were broken, shattered, and ground up by internal muscular action before being deposited with great indignity out of its body. The remaining tissues, desperately attempting to maintain some manner of cohesion, alternately flowed, liquified, and flexed as the creature's form warped and twisted chaotically.

Finally, as the last of the bloody fragments of bone clattered to the floor, the dog-sized lump of flesh which had until recently been Tebes of Reth quivered, ran through several color changes from stygian blue to ebony, and then resolved into a sort of burnt gray mottled with flecks of blackness. Muscular fibers twitched, pressed against each other, and underwent a few more reconfigurations before settling on a complex and self-supporting system of hydrostats surrounded by a flowing layer of black slime. Apparently deciding it had had enough of this reception, the blob oozed rather primly out the door and disappeared.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Cheis of Veraleigh, who would have been panting if her current physiological circumstances allowed it, signaled weakly at Linduin, who took several seconds to recognize this as a gesture of social communication and not yet another in a series of incomprehensible events. Tripping and stumbling on the alternately jagged, slick, and squishy surfaces covering the floor, he managed to cross the room to her side.

"What... I... are you okay?" he asked, stupidly. Cheis managed an incredulous expression. "Sorry," he mumbled.

It took some impressive circumstances to unsettle Cheis of Veraleigh, but this was definitely meeting the requirements. Impaled, drowning, and in tremendous pain, she had just barely managed to make the gestures to trigger her water-breathing macro before losing consciousness, hoping desperately that the water content of blood was high enough that the spell would work (it had been, but not by much). She'd gotten off a casting of Grumble Guts at the... whatever that was, which seemed to have at least driven it off for now, but she had more immediate problems. Her enchantment would keep her alive for roughly nine more minutes, and her anklet would keep her from losing consciousness from the shock and blood loss, but that came at a price; its processes kept her brain and heart functional by redirecting blood from elsewhere in her body into a tighter loop between them, while depriving the rest of her, and that meant weakness and eventual paralysis in her limbs (and, she knew from past experience, more damage to her long-suffering digestive system if she survived this). It also wouldn't be great for her skin.

She fought down the rising panic and tried to think. What options did she have? She could possibly recast the water breathing one another time or two; it had had a decent amount of stored energy. But she'd start running out of blood long before she would need a second or third extension to its duration, and that wasn't something she could really ignore. Animating a skeleton, even her own, didn't seem like it would be much help here either. Her reaping macro could have reinvigorated her, but even imminent death wouldn't be enough to offset the energy influx unless it only caught one or two targets. It would also kill everyone in the village, including the kid who was desperately if ineptly trying to help her. She consigned that to "Plan X". Her other macros were definitely not going to be any help, no matter how creative she got, unless she wanted to spend her last few seconds crapping herself to death. With her full powers, she could have saved herself a dozen ways over ten times by now, but without a boot loader her emulator wasn't coming back. Time for really desperate measures, then.

She glanced around the room wistfully. Now would be a fantastic time for someone else to show up conveniently and save her life -- preferably a nice strapping blonde hospitaler with a villa and some deep-seated sexual repression issues to work through -- but the only other person who was even conscious in the room besides the kid was the dissociating villager, who had wet his pants and was currently in the process of repeatedly bumping into and apologizing to a wall. Guess it was the kid or nobody, then. She attempted to ask him to get back (she would need some room for this, and he was obliviously kneeling on some of her fingers), but merely managed to choke up some more blood -- no speech for now, it seemed. Well, shit. That meant that even hardcasting, which was stupefyingly dangerous in the best of circumstances, was going to be almost impossible. She gurgled sadly.

Linduin sat back, feeling panicked and useless. Was there anything he could do? He'd never had any sort of first-aid training, and the woman -- her name was Cheis, of something? -- was obviously mortally wounded even if he had. Was he supposed to put her out of her misery? He was pretty sure she'd just saved his life. He fumbled around, looking for his axe, but his hand came up with Tebes' sword instead. He held it up, blinking in stupefaction.

Tebes of Reth had come into possession of this weapon in less than legal circumstances; in one of the more dissolute periods of his youth, he'd been a thug with a gambling problem, and had lost rather badly at a game of sharp-set to a traveling swordsman. The fellow, whose name had been Yariel Deev, had been considered undefeatable with the blade, so Tebes had hit him with a rock from behind in an alley before even giving him a chance to draw the sword in question. As a result, he'd been rather understandably ignorant of the fact that the blade never seemed to dull (Tebes had sharpened it every day out of habit and thus never discovered this) as well as the fact that it empowered its wielder with a fearsome rage in battle (Tebes was already experiencing fearsome rage in battle for other reasons on most occasions). And most of all, he had been completely and totally unaware that the sword had the power to absorb and harvest the souls of those its wielder killed out of mercy, Tebes having never killed anyone out of mercy and being incapable of sensing his sword absorbing and harvesting a soul in the event that he had. And so it happened that when Linduin, acting entirely foolishly, brought the sword down upon the neck of a disbelieving and rather incensed Cheis of Veraleigh, the resulting complex interaction with the soul-security features of Cheis's earring was a massive surprise to everyone involved.

Outside the tavern, some distance away, the blob of black slime shuddered a bit more, and grew a tentacle with an eye on the end of it.