Bazzalth leaned in close, watching with rapt attention as the crawler writhed, the blood that filled the vat slowly consuming the crawler’s temporarily reanimated flesh. He could not be sure if the thing suffered in agony, or if the spasms were merely the last acts of decayed nerves and muscles firing haphazardly as the transcendent liquid dissolved them into nothingness, though the state of its soul suggested the latter. The ethereal sphere hovering above the body had taken on only a momentary hint of blue, the vast majority of it still the grey of death. Then, the last dots of blue vanished and the soul returned to its fully-grey state, marking the moment this experiment became a failure. Soon, the soul faded from existence as all evidence of the crawler ever being in the vat vanished, leaving nothing left inside but Bazzalth’s own specially-processed blood.
Pushing away the initial frustration, Bazzalth reminded himself that there was no such thing as failure in the hunt for Knowledge. Every test, no matter the outcome, provided more data, and data was the most precious of all things. Yes, the results were suboptimal, but he had only spent the last fifteen years studying the mystery of his people’s blood. The field was still in its infancy! He would figure it out given time, as he had with everything else. Time was something he had in abundance, after all.
For several thousand years, Bazzalth had endeavored to fill his hoard with all manners of Knowledge. At first his efforts had been scattershot, his attention jumping from subject to subject, but after several hundred years, he’d come to realize the benefits of concentrating on a specific area of study. With a more focused approach, he could build a broad understanding of the subject and then use that initial knowledge to identify the most intriguing mysteries and build the path to solving said mysteries. By the time he had exhausted every question, he found he had achieved a true understanding of the field as a whole.
Bazzalth’s latest subject of academic interest was bioscience. After over five hundred and twelve years of diligent study, he’d decided fifteen years ago that he was proficient enough in the field to begin investigating perhaps the greatest mystery of bioscience: the blood inside him and his brethren. The multi-hued liquid was so unlike the blood of crawlers and other animals that Bazzalth hesitated to even use the same nomenclature for the two.
In his eyes, a person’s blood could be considered the ultimate miracle substance, one capable of disproving the very laws of reality that he’d spent so many decades uncovering. For example, a person’s blood completely invalidated the Laws of Persistent Matter:
One, matter cannot be created or destroyed except through Observation.
Two, matter created through Observation will persist after creation indefinitely. Once its full existence has been established, it is no different than any other matter and will persist indefinitely even after the Observation ends. This did not apply, of course, to reaction-based Observations such as fire, which needed either available fuel or continued soulforce to maintain their existence.
A person’s blood, however, invalidated these laws. Matter that came into contact with unprocessed blood would be slowly destroyed over the course of hours until it literally ceased to exist. The matter did not corrode, it did not become dissolved into the blood, and it did not turn into a gas and float away. It simply ceased to be.
How such a phenomenon could even be possible was just one of the many questions about the blood that he still had to solve. Like the rest of the questions in this case, Bazzalth had a theory but lacked the evidence to come to a hard conclusion. His current belief was that it was related to the astounding level of lifeforce found in each drop of blood, which was somehow able to overwhelm reality itself to such a degree that absolute destruction of matter without Observation became possible. That belief was little more than an educated guess at this point, however, as he didn’t have the data to support such a claim; that would change soon, as his experiments continued.
The destructive power of a person’s blood was so great that only one thing was able to contain it: a person’s flesh. The question as to how the flesh of people resisted the blood, when all else succumbed to it, remained half-answered at best. His working assumption, which went hand in hand with the previous one, was that blood’s huge lifeforce was balanced by the equally strong power found in each and every cell in a person’s body. One day, he would deduce the definitive truth to both these mysteries. Until then, he utilized what he already knew to his advantage, leveraging his centuries of expertise in biology and his people’s unparalleled regenerative ability to grow vats and other equipment from his own cells to contain and study the incredible liquid.
Much to his delight, his study had branched in multiple directions since he first began his experiments. It had all started with the discovery that his blood had different properties when altered in certain ways. While raw blood destroyed matter, processed blood often behaved completely differently depending on how it was altered.
He’d already devoted several years to the exploration of several varieties and found numerous applications. One variety could be turned into a sort of glue that bonded with anything solid on a molecular level with a seemingly unbreakable strength, another became a gas which converted organic matter into stone, but none showed the stunning potency of the variant “Phase-shift 4” which he had dubbed “Ichor of Life”.
A thick, translucent blue sludge, Ichor of Life reanimated the dead tissue of crawlers and other animals, perhaps by imbuing the flesh with some of its abundant lifeforce. There were a few catches, however. The bodies would lose their life the moment they were removed from the liquid. Yet, leaving them in the vats was also unfeasible. Given that the blood was merely phase-shifted, it still retained potent matter-eating properties. The reanimated flesh would be broken down almost as quickly as it returned to life, rendering this miracle rather meaningless. But Bazzalth was not perturbed. He knew that, with enough study, data, and experimentation, he would find a way around these problems.
Right now, he was still in the early data-gathering phase, which meant a lot of dunking dead animals in vats filled with Ichor to see what happened. He would alter the formula slightly every so often to see if it produced different results. So far, while minute details might be different, the end result remained the same.
Turning to the side to fetch more samples, he realized, to his dismay, that he only had enough for one more round of tests. He needed more corpses but had no way to get them. Drat!
Well, that wasn’t technically true. He was quite capable, physically at least, of leaving his peoples’ territory and heading south to the place where thousands of crawlers congregated. There, he would have his pick of experimental material. The problem lay in the Accord.
Given that people were beings of immense power, they naturally chafed at the idea of submitting to a higher authority. What higher authority could there be but themselves? As such, mandating a code of behavior or instituting such things as “laws” was nearly essentially impossible. People did what they wanted, living their lives as they chose while endeavoring to amass their hoard to greater and greater heights. Getting the entire populace to engage in some sort of mass action would only be possible through one thing: overwhelming force, enough that all those opposed combined would not be able to overcome your collected might. Even if two-thirds of all people wanted something, there was nothing that could be done if the third opposed was stronger. When the ensuing violence ended, they would emerge victorious and their word would be final.
Might made right. This simple truth was the way of the world and always had been.
With myriad conflicting opinions and dispositions among the community, there was no topic that everybody agreed upon... except one. It was known as the Accord and it boiled down to the following: “No person shall do anything that would reveal the community’s existence to the crawlers. To break this rule is punishable by death.”
Like the rest of the people alive today, Bazzalth was too young to know life before the Great Cataclysm. Only four people had even hatched before that terrible day. That was why, when they had all grown enough to begin exploring the world outside their sanctuary, the people had decided as a whole to ensure that their existence remained a secret to the crawlers. Being seen by a crawler was forbidden, which meant that nobody dared live or fly anywhere near the southern area of the mountains. Nobody but him, that is.
A azure bonfire of power winked into existence at the edge of Bazzalth’s soulsight. Though still more than two mountains away, he recognized the soul immediately, letting out of huff of amusement. What fortuitous timing.
Bazzalth put away his observation equipment and headed into the tunnel leading to the outside as his visitor swiftly approached. Just as he finished squeezing his way through, she landed nearby, her massive dark blue body sending tremors through the earth.
“Clear skies, Bazzalth-brother,” Bazzalth’s sister greeted him.
“Calm skies, Tavreth-sister,” he replied, regarding her with no small amount of envy. At over one and a half times Bazzalth’s size, Tavreth was one of the largest people and also perhaps the most powerful. Not like him, the smallest and weakest person there was.
“Crawlers once more have crossed line. Bazzalth-brother knows what to do,” she informed him.
“Where?”
“Crawlers return to Yrim’s Summit.”
Ah, yes. Bazzalth remembered that one. To think that the crawlers would return to that place after how he’d cleansed it about a year ago. Did they not know what would happen? Was one extermination not enough? Were they truly that stupid?
“Bazzalth will remove crawlers, as always,” he told her. “Does Tavreth-sister require anything else?”
His sister paused for a breath to consider the question, making him immediately regret asking it. It was apparent that she had no other business with him at this time, but because he’d asked, now she felt like she needed to come up with something.
“Bazzalth-brother’s tunnel is too skinny,” she finally answered. “Tunnel has not been widened in millennia. Tavreth misses days when Tavreth could enter to see Bazzalth-brother’s home. Bazzalth will widen tunnel.”
“Bazzalth likes small tunnel. Small tunnel controls airflow,” he argued back. Of course, he was too smart to say the real reason he kept the tunnel so thin that even he, the smallest person, had trouble getting through it. Bazzalth did not want his elder sister in his home. Bazzalth did not want any other person in his home. Given the way others treated him, he saw no reason to make access to him any easier. All that ever happened when others saw the results of his hoard was that they began to treat him as even more of a pariah than usual. He hated it. It wasn’t like he could change his hoard any more than they could change theirs, but that didn’t stop them.
“Bazzalth-brother, Tavreth was not suggesting,” his sister growled. A heavy pressure slammed into his mind, causing him to reel back in shock. Then, the pressure vanished as quickly as it came, a warning of what she could do to him if he ever dared oppose her. “Tavreth will return in half-year. Tavreth looks forward to seeing how Bazzalth-brother’s hoard has grown these last centuries.”
With that said, Bazzalth’s imposing sister turned away and took flight, heading north towards her cave and the caves of the others. Now alone again, Bazzalth headed back into his abode to get ready. Proper pest extermination required certain special preparations. Yes, fortuitous timing indeed. Now he would be able to stock up on experimental materials just as he was running out.
Not long after, Bazzalth soared south, ready to do his task, a task he was uniquely suited for. Bazzalth lived to the south of the others for several reasons. One was, admittedly, his desire to be left alone. But the other, arguably more important reason was that he was the guardian of the southern border.
Every person could be largely defined by three things: their hoard, their flame augment, and their unique talent. Bazzalth’s talent let him see the souls of other sapients through solid objects and at a great distance. With such an ability, he could make sure that no crawler, no matter how well they hid, lived to tell the tale of the people hidden to the north.
Every day, he swept through the entire southern mountains, keeping low and using his soulsight to see through the mountains themselves and find crawlers who had made their way too far north to be allowed to live. His talent meant that nobody had to worry about a crawler getting away to spread word of their existence. It was something that no other person could boast, which, for all his weakness, made him invaluable.
People couldn’t go all the way to the southernmost mountains of the mountain range, as they would be visible to crawlers on the hills past the range. Yet, everybody’s homes were still far, far to the north, at least five days of travel for a physically-gifted crawler. This meant that Bazzalth could allow crawlers to explore a decent amount of the southern part of the range and only strike when he knew that nobody would be able to spot him.
However, that was only for small groups of crawlers exploring the mountains. His people’s tolerance for organized crawler operations like mines was far lower than that for a few crawlers on their own. Mines meant development, and development meant crawler civilization slowly but inevitably encroaching upon his people’s sanctuary like a slowly rising tide. This could never be allowed to happen, so any mine that sprang up more than a few mountains deep into the range had to be wiped from the mountainside with extreme prejudice. This was when Bazzalth’s talent went from “extremely useful” to “absolutely vital”. Only he could exterminate every crawler while ensuring that none lived to tell the tale, not even a crawler a mountain away. No chances could be taken with something this crucial.
The mine at Yrim’s Summit was a mine he had already cleared out once before, massacring hundreds of the tiny crawlers with ease, and yet they had already returned after just a year. Bazzalth wondered what could drive them to their death so readily. Was it hunger? Greed? Or were these crawlers simply considered expendable? Perhaps those sent to these mines were valued less than the ore they dug out.
As he neared Yrim’s Summit, he swooped down until he flew just above the rocky ground, keeping out of view from watching eyes. Landing on the north side of the mountain, he gazed through the rock with his soulsight to find what appeared to be some sort of mild chaos happening on the mountain’s south side near the mine. Had they spotted him somehow? After observing for several breaths, he decided that they had not. Well, their chaos was about to increase a thousandfold.
Placing down his material bag and pair of acid bombs for later, he leaped back into the sky and soared around the mighty peak, coming in upon the crawlers from the east. Several of them noticed his approach and let out a cry of warning, but it was too late. It had been too late long, long ago, back when they had been born crawlers. This was just the natural conclusion.
A number of tipped-over crawler transportation devices lay near the southern end of the crawlers’ camp, their cargo of ore spilled all across the mountainside. The largest number of crawlers congregated around them, feverishly working to right the transports and dig beneath the spilled ore towards something—more crawlers, his soulsight revealed to him. He silently thanked the crawlers for making his task easier.
Breathing in, he roared out a large cone of white-hot flame, the fire incinerating the crawlers and their transports. Having arrived with authority, he reveled in the sight of the remaining crawlers scattering like the vermin they were. Using his soulsight, he surveyed the area to find all the crawlers on the periphery first. Those near him could wait for a breath or two; they wouldn’t be able to get far.
The mountainside around him was littered with the grey souls of the departed, remnants of the first cleansing a year prior which would not fully disappear for another seventy years or so. Bazzalth ignored those. Instead, he searched for the bright blue spheres of live crawlers and spotted only two, a pair on the north face of the mountain to the south of the mine. They were standing on the single path that led away from the mine, their mouths open in shock and their eyes wide with fear. One of them saw him looking at them and turned to run, the other quickly following.
No matter.
Taking another deep breath, Bazzalth concentrated on the flames building inside him, infusing them with his incredible power, willing them to change as he always had. Once he felt the power reach peak capacity, he opened his jaw wide and unleashed it all in a single blast. A concentrated, focused beam of light lanced forth from his throat, covering the distance between him and the two fleeing crawlers with a speed that only light possessed. The beam tore through the pair’s bodies, slicing away their torsos and leaving just burning heads and legs to tumble down the mountainside.
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Bazzalth’s light augment was widely mocked by the others for its low power, its blast unable to leave more than a large welt on another person’s hide. He couldn’t deny that it paled in comparison to some others, such as his sister’s mighty lightning augment, but he liked his. It was different, and it came in handy for solving long-distance issues like the one just now.
Turning to the rest of the crawlers, Bazzalth began to mercilessly slaughter them one by one, using his superior size, speed, and strength to keep them contained as he carefully created more materials for his experiments. It was a lot more work than just roasting the lot of them—he had to use his claws and tail while being careful not to crush their bodies too severely—but such was the life of one seeking knowledge.
Some of the crawlers were silly enough to try to attack him, sending arrows, fireballs, and other such projectiles his way, or doing their desperate best to stab and slice him with various bladed weapons. He ignored them, as the vast majority of their attacks were too weak to even take notice of. Only one of the crawlers seemed strong enough to even cause him pain, and that pain was little more than a slight itch. He flicked that particular crawler into a nearby boulder.
Soon enough, dead crawlers littered the ground around the camp. No crawler within the camp still breathed, the entire mountainside covered in newly created grey spheres. There were, however, a large number of crawlers who had decided from the beginning to hide inside the mine. Their thin tunnels were far too constricting even for him, the smallest person, to fit inside.
This would not be a problem.
First, Bazzalth flew back around to the north side of the mountain and collected his prepared supplies. Then, after returning to the crawler camp, he placed his twin bombs on the ground and proceeded to collect his materials, loading them into the large sack for transport back to his home. Finally, he pried open the entrance to the mine, activated the bomb, and rolled it inside.
These bombs were filled with a special acid. The product of another person known as Maylanth and her flame augment, this strange acid rendered most organic substances into pools of sludge and gas while having no effect on non-organic matter. He would trade for a vat-full of it from her every decade or so. The acid did not decay if kept in a sealed container and had no effect on something as strong as a person’s flesh, so he could keep it stored away and use it to make bombs such as these for just these sorts of occasions.
The bomb burst open inside the tunnel, the vaporized acid spreading throughout the mine. Bazzalth watched with his soulsight as the acid reached the huddling crawlers and began to do its work. The gas would eat away at a crawler’s entire body, even the bone, until there was nothing left that could be recognized as a crawler’s remains. Slowly, the colors of the souls began to change, each going from the bright blue of life to the muted grey of death.
Death did not mean the extinguishing of the soul. The soul lingered for a long time, clinging to the matter that was once its vessel for many years. Previous experiments had shown that only the complete annihilation of the matter itself through a person’s blood was capable of erasing a soul before its time.
Once the last of the crawlers inside the mine had perished, Bazzalth set the other bomb to release its contents in another twenty breaths, picked up his bag of experiment components, and took flight. Soon, the acid would wash over the mountainside and its adjacent mountainsides, wiping clean the last traces of the crawlers that had once been here, and he couldn’t allow it to touch his precious materials.
Easy, as always. Too easy, even. Though he was the weakest of all the people, he was still a person. He was one who soared high above those pathetic, insignificant ground-bound animals. Not even a thousand crawlers could pose a threat to him. This was not a challenge, it was merely a chore.
Just a wing-beat later, however, he noticed two grey souls lying in the snow some distance from the now-destroyed mine camp. These weren’t the only grey souls out on the mountains, of course; the mountain was littered with the dead souls of those who had died both today and in his last purge. He had just ignored all the grey before because the bright blue of the living was the only thing he needed to care about when cleansing this place.
These two, however stood out among the rest because of two things. The first was that they were clinging to fresh bodies collapsed in snow dyed crimson with crawler blood. The second was that their souls were noticably dimmer than the rest—so dim, in fact, that he’d almost missed them entirely. This could only mean that these were crawlers that had yet to reach adulthood. The soulforce of an infant crawler was negligible even by crawler standards and would slowly grow in power as the crawler matured until reaching its peak at the crawler became an adult.
The first body, however, turned out to be unusable. The head had been nearly completely severed from the body, rendering it useless for his needs. It was a shame, really. This body seemed quite unique. Bazzalth devoted very little of his memory to the appearance of crawlers; he preferred to focus on things that mattered. Still, this sort of crawler was rare, so he took notice. He had probably only seen four or five crawlers with fur-covered tails and triangular ears protruding from the tops of their skulls in the last thousand years. He had never before seen one with such golden hair. A shame, really. He would have liked to see what difference, if any, there would be with the Ichor, but the body was just too damaged.
The other body turned out to be nearly as unique. The dark coloration of the skin, hair, ears, and tail was rare as well, though he was sure that he’d seen another with the same features recently. Yes, now he remembered. An adult male, the crawler had been a member of an exploration team that he’d encountered two seasons ago. The dark one with the tail and triangular ears had vanished into the Ichor just as unremarkably as the rest.
This one looked much the same, only a fifth of the size. Even smaller than the one before, it only had a single long arrow poking through its chest. As a bonus, both children had died just a few breaths before his arrival judging by the state of the bodies and blood, meaning this child was as good as the materials he’d just gathered himself. Most excellent. He gently picked up the body, being careful not to accidentally crush the tiny bones. Though the integrity of the body was excellent due to the timing and nature of its death, the body itself was not in great shape. He could see its bones poking out against its skin all over its form, from its face to its ribs to its arms and legs. Hopefully that would not impact the results.
A fog of acid was quickly making its way down the slope towards him, so, collection complete, Bazzalth took to the skies. One more check for sapient life turned up nothing within his large range, so he proceeded north, towards his home and towards Knowledge. All that remained at the mine was a wasteland of death, one barren of clues for any future crawlers who would come to investigate the sudden lack of contact. Hopefully, they would learn from this what they had not learned the last time: that to mine this far north was to die a mysterious, terrible death.
Sometime later, after squeezing himself into his home, Bazzalth prepared the next round of experiments. He refreshed the Ichor in the vat, replacing the somewhat depleted liquid with a freshly processed batch, prepared his note-taking equipment, and removed the gathered materials from his sack. Opening the vat’s lid, he picked up a body from the pile. This body belonged to one of the better fed crawlers, a female one who had been foolish enough to attack him. Bazzalth appreciated such foolishness because it had allowed him to grab the female and snap her neck without damaging all her fragile organs.
Gently dropping the corpse into the Ichor, he watched the action begin. The body immediately convulsed, its limbs thrashing as the Ichor not only made contact with its skin but rushed into its mouth and nose. The woman’s garments started to disintegrate almost immediately, dispersing about the vat as a sort of brown cloud that soon vanished entirely, eaten by the blue slime.
Bazzalth watched with his soulsight as well, observing how the grey soul began to change, speckles of blue appearing across the dull sphere, slowly growing larger and larger and... fading away into nothingness. Bazzalth held back a sigh as he reminded himself that this was still valuable data. He watched as the Ichor devoured the crawler’s skin and then her muscles from the outside and from within at the same time, taking note of the time the decomposition started as well as its speed and other details.
This body had lasted only half as long as average, only sixteen-and-a-quarter breaths. Why? Was it the age? The gender? The time since death? What it had last eaten for breakfast? Even with all the data he had already accumulated, he could not find a correlation. He needed more data.
Taking a second body, he repeated the process. This one, unlike the previous body, didn’t decompose for a good fifty breaths. Was it because this one was a male?
Two more corpses, and then he would have to replace the Ichor. He dropped the next body in, noting that it was the small child he’d found when leaving the mine.
The child’s ragged clothes broke down immediately, their integrity far weaker than that of the previous two subjects. As the tiny being wildly spasmed about, he kept an eye on the soul, watching the familiar blue speckles grow on the spectral grey sphere like bacteria on a dish and waiting to record the moment the growth faltered and fell apart. But it didn’t.
Bazzalth’s heart pounded in his chest, his body tensing up so hard that his toe-claws dug trenches into the stone beneath him as he watched the azure speckles grow and grow. His breathing quickened as the blue continued its conquest of the grey sphere, the color spreading faster and faster and faster until...
A living soul glowed weakly within his soulsight, floating above a tiny body suspended in Ichor. The body’s chest weakly rose and fell, autonomically breathing the translucent liquid in and out. Alive.
Flinging his head back, Bazzalth unleashed a powerful roar of triumph. Success! Finally, success!
For a long while, Bazzalth did nothing but observe, taking down every last detail of the creature in the vat. He recorded everything from its breathing patterns to the way it held its body to how its eyes remained forever closed but he could see subtle flutters in its eyelids. Was it blinking? Perhaps dreaming?
Eventually, however, it was time for more invasive measures. Removing the lid, Bazzalth set down his “delicate instrument” assembly beside the vat. One of his more useful creations, he’d grown the tool to allow him to better operate with detailed precision on his subjects, given how crawlers and other animals were often smaller than a single finger on his hand. The assembly came in two parts: the main setup which displayed a variety of tools, and a control panel that connected to the main assembly through a cable of nerves. By manipulating the controls, he would send instructions through the nerves that told the muscles in each tool what to do.
Taking great care to avoid damage to the subject, he took control of the assembly’s smallest syringe arm and had it dip down into the vat needle first. Like most every tool and container he used now, this tool had been grown from his own flesh, allowing it to shrug off the corrosive nature of the Ichor with ease. The tiny needle, crafted from his bone, poked into the diminutive child’s flesh and began to draw its blood.
Bazzalth reeled back slightly in surprise as a multi-hued phosphorescence blossomed before his eyes. What was this? Something inside the vat was emitting a bright, shining light along every spectrum of the rainbow. Pulling the syringe tool out of the Ichor, he lifted it up in the palm of his left hand and inspected it closely. As he suspected, the light came from the blood he’d drawn from the child.
After getting a closer look, Bazzalth realized why it appeared so strangely familiar. This looked almost like the blood of a person! It shared the same multicolored appearance, though a person’s blood did not glow robustly as this did. But what was this doing inside the crawler child? It made no-
With an audible hiss, the syringe split open without warning, dropping its contents onto his finger. Bazzalth let loose a loud growl as the blood lit up even brighter upon contact with his flesh. What was this terrible pain? Why did it hurt!?
Overriding through sheer will his instinct to move his hand and wipe away the pain, Bazzalth kept his hand still and inspected the area that hurt with a critical eye. To his utter shock, he found that the crawler’s blood that had somehow spilled free from its container was eating away at his hand! The sight baffled him utterly, but it could not be denied. This iridescent liquid was destroying the flesh of his hand, a feat not even a person’s blood could accomplish! Spellbound despite the pain, Bazzalth watched the mesmerizing light show of shining rainbow sparkles the blood emitted, each one of the hundreds cast off every moment floating up into the air for just a breath before winking out of existence.
The blood ate deeper and deeper into his hand until eventually it broke through to the bottom and fell to the stone floor below, whereupon it continued its rampage by sinking into the rock itself. Upon inspecting his wound, Bazzalth found no sign of acidic burns or chemical reactions. The flesh had simply been destroyed.
Impossible! Ludicrous! And yet... utterly undeniable.
How fascinating!
Not even bothering to treat his wound, Bazzalth threw himself into his work. His regenerative abilities would close the gap quickly enough without him needing to waste time treating it, not when he could be using that time to crack open this mystery! He studied the child in the vat throughout the night, the next day, and the next night without rest. By the end of the second night, he had concluded, as definitively as he could, that the child somehow carried the blood of a person within her. It carried all the same hallmarks as his own blood did, or the blood of his sister.
There was, however, one critical difference: this child’s blood was far more potent than any person’s blood Bazzalth had ever studied. Thousands of times more concentrated and powerful, in fact, far more than every other living person combined. So saturated with lifeforce and destructive power was this substance that it could even accomplish what a person’s blood could not and destroy a person’s flesh! How did it not eat through her own body? He had no answer... yet.
That was just one of the many questions this discovery had raised, questions he craved answers to. Where had the blood come from? Had the Ichor reacted with her body somehow, changing it as it reanimated her so it produced this new ultra-potent blood? Was that how she resisted the destruction of the Ichor?
For that matter, what even was she now? Was this child still a mere crawler? Though other people would disagree, Bazzalth believed two criteria separated people from crawlers: blood and flight. Crawler blood was just like the blood of any other animal. It lacked the transcendent qualities of a person’s blood. The other criterion was rather self-explanatory. People ruled the skies, while crawlers could only, well, crawl pitifully along the ground. Bazzalth saw no wings protruding from this tiny creature, but her impossible blood was so remarkable that he couldn’t help but feel that she was halfway to being a person. A half-person? A crawler-person hybrid? He would need to come up with a new taxonomy for this, oh yes! This was so exciting!
As the day went on, Bazzalth kept studying the creature with a single-minded focus. By the end of the day, he had come to understand the sheer magnitude of the being he’d created, and he could not help but be in awe of its absurdity. The lifeforce contained within this tiny form outclassed the combined lifeforce of every known person in the world combined! And it was being generated by the child herself, not simply absorbed or borrowed from the surrounding Ichor. There was no way the Ichor could manage such things, anyway; while the lifeforce found within it was indeed formidable, it was little more than a drop compared to the ocean of energy this child possessed. The impossible blood that flowed within her veins was also something her body manufactured, not something converted from the Ichor.
For the longest time, Bazzalth had believed it possible—maybe even likely—that the temporarily reanimated bodies he submerged in the Ichor were not even momentarily alive once more, but rather in some form of “undeath”. The thought was that it was simply the lifeforce of the Ichor providing an external fuel that drove the flesh to move once more, an empty vessel that could not sustain itself or generate its own lifeforce. The way the corpses were erased had always prevented him from determining the truth of this theory with certainty.
Now, he knew that this possibility was not the case, at least in this instance. The child suspended within the vat was alive in every sense of the word. He had taken her deceased form and transformed her into something new. This crawler was no longer a crawler, but rather something new. Something greater. Something amazing.
Bazzalth rejoiced. He had done it! He had returned the dead to the land of the living! No, he had created life itself! He had accomplished something that nobody, not even his great ancestors in their shining palaces, had been able to accomplish!
After two full days of studying the body in the tank, Bazzalth decided he had discovered all that he could discover with the current arrangement. If he wanted more answers, he would need to remove the child from the tank. He glanced at the floating body as he lifted the lid. The girl’s flesh had filled out over the last two days, changing her form into what he imagined a healthy crawler child would look like. No longer could he see bones pushing against skin. As a strange side effect, the child’s hair had grown at a rapid pace. Now over seven times the length of her body, her long strands of hair filled much of the large vat.
Grabbing that hair with his left hand, Bazzalth used it to pull the child up to the top of the vat and scooped up her body with his right hand, letting it lie in his wide palm. For a few breaths, the body lay still, unmoving. Then, just as Bazzalth felt his worries come to a crescendo, the tiny body spasmed violently and began to cough, spewing blue slime onto his hand.
He raised his palm up to just beside his right eye to better take in the details as the crawler child’s coughing fit finally abated, the last remnants of the Ichor removed from its lungs. He wanted to observe how the crawler would react. Would it scream, or scramble back, or even try to run like all crawlers did when confronted by a being of such overwhelming power as himself?
Slowly pushing herself into an unsteady sitting position, the child opened her eyes sluggishly, almost lethargically, and looked up at him. Her gaze unfocused, she took in everything before her but seemed to process little to none of it.
“Ahh?” her tiny, high-pitched voice squeaked out as she ponderously slid her hands across the smooth scales of Bazzalth’s hand.
“Ahh...” she said again as she reached out to touch the side of Bazzalth’s face, her palms and fingers slowly caressing the sleek hide just below his eye. “Mmmm... warm...”
Then, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, the child leaned her upper body against his cheek, nuzzled it with her face, and went to sleep.
Bazzalth blinked in utter befuddlement, finding himself at a complete loss. Whatever he’d expected, that had not been it. The thought tickled him. In truth, nothing about this child had gone according to his expectations. What a perplexing little thing she was! What a treasure trove of data!
His ears picked up a tiny rumble as the child began to release a series of small vibrations with each inward and outward breath, the minute tremors barely detectable against his skin. How odd, and strangely pleasant. What was the purpose of such a noise? Just another question to add to the list!
Yes, he would keep this one and study it with great interest in the years to come. There was so much to do! He needed to prepare a living space and new equipment that could withstand her impossible blood and food! What was he going to do about food? People only needed to eat a few times each season, but this creature would probably need a much more steady supply of... of what? He didn’t even know what she ate! There were so many questions to consider!
It was at this point that Bazzalth realized that he couldn’t move his hand without waking the child and possibly dropping her onto the hard stone floor below, meaning he would have to carry out his preparations with only his other hand. He sighed as he slowly returned the unused bodies to his sack with his free hand and carried the sack to his storage area in the back of the cave. The things he did for Knowledge...