Going silent, the bird looked sideways, staring at Krahe with one eye. As she ate, the passing thought of invoking Chernobog’s Mystic Wisdom came to her; the Snare-sign of Blackest Pitch did, after all, carry the Outer God’s Touch tag. That thought alone, it seemed, was enough to set it off. A black pinhole appeared amidst the redness of Barzai’s eye, and soon encompassed it wholly. Flashes of knowledge flooded in, confirming one out of several theories that she had come up with for this conundrum.
Barzai couldn’t solidify his new form unless it was invoked in the situation for which it had been conceived. She had no choice but to trust that it would work as expected and use it in real combat for the first time.
She finished her meal and took to calligraphy. The ink, now stable, was not yet ready to be used. Beginning with water and an ink stick, she had blended it with the Unguent of Nug-soth, and now it was time to add the final component, a liquid ink that also acted at once as binder and thinner to determine the final viscosity. Finally, after a few minutes of stirring, it was liquid.
Hours passed.
In a meditative state, Krahe repeatedly drew forth her vitriolic hate and wrath, reveling in it, bathing in it, spitting it forth onto the talisman paper like a cobra does upon its prey.
It was hate not for individuals, not in truth.
Krahe had never been given the easy comfort of names and faces to foist her hate upon.
It was the idea of evil, of subversion, of insidious decay. Wandrei Faust sought its prey based not on simple single minded malice, but on a greater malice born from outrage and derision towards those who would stand in Krahe’s sacred path.
Wandrei Faust was a fist not for slaying random thugs or for killing those who merely wronged her. It was wrought for smashing apart those who would forestall her from her ultimate goal.
Within her hand burned an anger altogether greater than that which could be felt by those content in the midst of their own lives. It was anger worthy of the heavens, the sort of anger that would drive one to consider burning a tyrant’s city and killing millions as a failure because it didn’t annihilate the very ideology for which the tyrant stood.
The hate within her had sprouted silently, and even now, it bubbled, coiled like a serpent, looking out for its rightful prey to strike out. It was the hatred of the righteous, ready and waiting for those who would undermine what is good. Unlike the Saxonian Wars of the early 2200s, there would be no generations-long buildup of vitriol, no century-long reawakening of long-forgotten tendencies spurred on by the malice of corporate interest. No, no such thing. Clutching it closely, never once had the flame of righteous hatred within Krahe gone out or sputtered. Never once since that day. She had caught the flare of the bomb, and with plutonium’s caustic glow she had lit a profound hate that not even a lifetime of peace could put out.
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Were she to live out her new life searching for an ephemeral, greater evil, never finding it, Krahe would die content, but deep inside, she knew it would not come to pass. A human life could be long, and ever more so if technology’s wise hand forestalled the withering march of age… And she had a knack for looking in the wrong, or perhaps right, places. An inborn skill for noticing patterns that the exact kinds of people she hated didn’t want her notice. That was, after all, what made her an investigator; a nose that tended to stick itself into the vilest, most wretched cracks in society’s facade.
Stroke after stroke, the image of the wrathful, grasping hand was put to paper, time and again.
Barzai, ever curious, watched on.
The raven watched on, enraptured. A maelstrom of dark smoke swirled about the woman, vast quantities of Thauma burnt and Entropy purged, time and again. Her soul, her astral body, blazed alight, invisible to all but the eyes of the Raven of Ruinous Eyes.
One by one, Krahe prepared talismans.
She stopped not when she ran out of ink, but when she was simply too exhausted to continue, when her arm physically gave out, trembling even under the miniscule weight of her brush, when the muscle no longer had even the energy to scream, but instead simply failed.
Hours had passed, and she hadn’t even realized it, so engrossed had she been with her task.
A pile of finished talismans sat off to the left side. Another, larger pile of bad talismans sat off to the right. A forty percent success rate.
With a sigh, she used her left arm alone, alongside a few tar-tendrils, to stow everything away and set up the erasing solution to recycle the lemons’ paper.
Two more days passed.
Somewhat disappointingly, Sorayah made no attempt to move against her, at least not in the open. Nothing Krahe could use as an excuse for violent and wildly disproportionate retaliation for her own satisfaction.
Day by day, she spent her time. Finally, as she sat in her basement-range, frying slices of a kind of fish from the River Machine, she felt the Tarnished Jade Flower mark giving her a message. A simple thrum, and the concept of “outside”. Right outside the door of the building, beneath the night’s pale moonlight, she found herself glancing left and right, looking out for a person or a talisman. She realized that the thrumming of her mark sped up or slowed down depending on her location. Hot and cold. A stupid game of hot and cold. It led her some distance away to a secluded spot in the back alleys, where she was met by a floating talisman just like those Zachariah had used to collect the votes. It simply appeared in mid-air when she reached the spot where the mark’s thrumming became a continuous one. At that moment it ceased, and the talisman appeared with a shimmer entirely too similar to the one produced by disengagement of active optic camouflage.