A day after Apexus’ arrival, it had looked at almost everything in the illusionary space that was outside the house. The pond never lost water, no matter the amount of water the man filled into buckets and took back into his den or the slime drank. What was planted in the herb beds grew in a matter of hours. The metal fence was pretty odd, patterns covered the three levels of railing that ran horizontally from pole to pole. Wherever a strut and stanchion intersected, there was a thorn of metal that pointed towards the inner centre of the illusionary bubble.
One week after Apexus’ arrival, it trusted the man enough to enter his den. It only had a single room. In the far-left corner stood a bed, if it even deserved that title. Frame with enough cloth between the body and the wood to invoke the appearance but none of the comfort of the bed would have been completely accurate, but that was too long a title. There were three desks. One that stood lonely in a corner of the room, two of the three chairs dusty and clearly never used. A second that was right next to the bed and had paper, ink and writing utensils orderly stowed away.
The third, and largest, was more of a desk construction than a single table. On cupboards and shelves nailed to the ceiling and walls stood flasks of many colours and with many coloured liquids inside. Little sacks of seeds were orderly stored away in labelled boxes.
After two weeks Apexus asked what those weird shapes on the labels were supposed to be. Asking being it staring and prodding its head at them until Gizmo figured out what it wanted. From there on out, the old man started teaching it words and letters. Although the former was a side-effect of the latter.
After three weeks, this little scene took place.
“Apple,” Gizmo stated, pointing at the red fruit in his hand. Apexus stared at the fruit for a few moments and then reared its head. Grabbing a large brush with its mouth it dragged four oversized letters on a piece of paper. After the brush returned back to the small casket, where the black paint wouldn’t drop on the wool carpet, the slime presented its work to the old man.
“No, no, no,” he laughed warmly but with a necessary amount of scolding in his tone, “Ap-ple, not Ap-le. This word has a double p… I would ask you to form the syllables with your own mouth, but if you could form a human one, you would have done so already… can you?”
Apexus shook its snake head.
“Can you explain to me why not?” Gizmo wanted to know.
After thinking about it for a moment, the slime nodded and wrote down a couple of words. “Have not killed you,” the old man read out loud and raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean? Do you need to kill someone specific in order to replicate parts of their species?”
Apexus shook its head and thought about how to make it clearer in the words of the man. It just didn’t know the order of letters yet that expressed what it wanted to say. Unable to find an answer, it reached out to the apple acted like it took a bite.
“You need eat a specific individual?” Gizmo asked, his ability to translate words into meaning proved as vital as ever. In this leaf of existence, he was one of the few people who could properly communicate with and teach the slime. Reverberating Meaning was a magic few learned and even fewer could use passively in every word they spoke.,
The slime nodded and shook its head in that order. “Mhm… Ah, you need to kill and eat a member of a species kind?” A nod. “So, you have to kill them yourself?” Another nod. Gizmo’s lively eyes seemed to grow as dark and old as the rest of him for just a moment. “I see,” he mumbled in a depressed tone, “I see how this tale ends.”
Apexus was confused. Remembering a gesture Aclysia had often used, which, in retrospect, probably was born from the same feeling, the slime tilted the posture of its head. “Not important. For future reference: Kind.” Gizmo wrote it down, “Have not killed your kind, that’s the proper sentence for what you meant. ‘Killed and ate your kind’ would have been even better.”
Why did the ‘you’ suddenly gain an ‘r’? Human communication was so complicated.
A month after the slime’s arrival, it finally decided that it was time to trust Gizmo. It wasn’t something it just suddenly came to. The night prior, the old man had woken up long before his usual time. Not of his own volition, but because a heavy coughing fit shook his body. It lasted from that point until the sunrise and even when it had finally passed Gizmo was bound to his bed for that whole day, pale as pastry and quivering underneath his blanket as if he was freezing.
That was the first day Apexus properly realized that this man was old and that old people would die, sooner rather than later. Not trusting him for even longer might extinguish the first and only lead the slime had on healing Aclysia.
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So, it one day placed the metal fairy’s body on the alchemic worktable as Gizmo was watching a potion brew over an ever-burning candle. To signal it was serious, the slime then backed off until it was out of striking range. That range was considerably longer now, while it may have forgotten just about everything from back in the cave and the Growths from its adventures on the mountainside were slowly fading as well (It was afraid it wouldn’t be able to regrow its snake-vulture-deer combination if it ever let it fade at this point), Apexus had grown considerably.
Gorging itself on the many, many different kinds of herbs Gizmo planted in his garden combined with Apexus’ natural affinity to grow more upon plant consumption, had caused the slime to now be as large as a guard dog. Gizmo had measured it to be 68 centimetres across.
Smiling, the old man reached out, his glasses already sat on his face, as they always did when he worked on his potions. In those moments, when he wasn’t interacting with the slime, the old man always looked the most vulnerable.
Apexus had to hold back to not flutter his wings and attack the man like an angry pigeon, the moment Gizmo picked up the cracked body. However, it managed to keep its reaction to a nervous quivering, which slowly subsided as he watched the delicacy with which Gizmo handled her.
“Yes, it seems my initial prognosis was correct,” he confirmed to himself after putting her down on a piece of cloth. He slowly ascended up a two-step stool. He was now face to face with a part of the shelves that was hidden behind a lock. “The good news is that it is easy to treat, as long as one has the necessary ingredients,” he announced, fishing a key out of his stained robes. The slime perked up. “The bad news is that this old man lost the means to enact the proper rituals.”
Apexus sank together until he was a thin, small-winged puddle on the table, exuding the smell of misery through his pheromone ducts. “Don’t be saddened, I have some of the necessary stuff in storage. We can use that to start the process. We will just have to improvise on the rest,” Gizmo said and pulled out three flasks.
They looked different than all the other bottles around, who were just basic cylindrical containers with a bottleneck and sealed with a piece of cork. These were elegantly curved and covered in golden lines that looked like they had dried yesterday. A piece of perfectly fitting glass, with a pointy extension to pull at, kept the liquids inside from spilling out of the thin neck. One contained a black, the other a white liquid but both contained swirls of gold. The third was a vile green.
“Essence of Natural Depth…,” Gizmo said, putting the black flask down on the left side of Aclysia’s head. “…and Essence of the Ordered Omni-Verse,” the white one followed at the right. “Mixed with Essence of Divinity, the three basic ingredients to create an immortality potion… or to restore the connection of a diving being to this world.” He placed the third vial at the side after looking at it for a moment. He mentioned it with no further word.
Apexus almost became a square at how shocked it was. This man would give up immortality just to help it? Gizmo was as quick as always and picked up on this with a saddened smile.
“I have lived a long, long time, Apexus,” he said in a tired tone, “and that life doesn’t deserve to be eternal. In no small part because of why I happen to possess these things.” He carefully, aware of his own jittery hands, opened the flasks. “That aside, as I said these are the basic ingredients. There are more things outside of the leaf that I would require to concoct a proper one. Better to use these essences in the service of a good for the oddball that keeps me company.”
Gizmo giggled at the pun that his magic failed to translate into proper meaning. Despite that explanation, Apexus felt the deepest gratitude at witnessing this man’s sacrifice. After taking a second piece of fine cloth and covering Aclysia’s body with it, the old alchemist simply emptied the contents of the bottle onto her, The black and white soaked into the grey fabric.
The essences dominated the original colour and turned the fabric into a display of white and black swirling around each other, never mixing. Superfluous amounts began to run over the table, Apexus was unsure if such a waste of the probably priceless materials was wise, but Gizmo didn’t move.
It soon became apparent why. The golden swirls in both liquids connected to each other and formed the outline of Aclysia’s body under the cloth. From her toes, over the wings, to her ears and even her sprawled out hair, a perfect silhouette formed. Letters of providence appeared on the inner rim, forming sentences whose meaning refused to stay within the slime’s nucleus no matter how often it read them. A light rose from the cloth as the superfluous liquids changed their course, flowing backwards and being absorbed.
“Ah, divinity,” Gizmo mumbled and took a relieved breath, as if he had just been delivered from a sin. “it is so beautiful, but deserves to rest not in the hand of the greedy.” Shadows fell back over the wrinkles in his face, there were none the fewer. “If there is one thing you remember from your time here, Apexus, even if you change your name or your entire nature, do promise me you will remember that.”
The slime slowly nodded, unsure what to make of this scene.
The cloth underwent a transformation in the meanwhile. From two simple squares, laying above and below the metal fairy, they folded and warped until they gripped the outline of Aclysia tightly. She looked like a mummy, albeit a black, white and golden one. The outline of an eye appeared on her chest, between the soft rising of her breasts and where her naval would be.
“Now,” Gizmo cleared his throat, “this is theoretically enough to repair a divine vessel, but we also have to call back her soul once the process is done. For that, I will need you to gather a couple of ingredients.”