This choice: Use Miranda for the experiment • Go Back...Chapter #7The Keyserling Legacy by: imaj   Miranda is smaller than you, but it is still difficult to lift her onto one of the slab like tables. As Chelsea you have a well toned and athletic body from all that cheerleading, but she isn’t exactly strong. You could switch to another, more powerful, body stored in your mask, but you already ruined one dress last night and this top you’re wearing is too darling to wreck. You manage to roll Miranda into place and lock her arms and legs into position, snapping the metal restraints closed round them.
Then you clamber up the ladder that leads to the metal gantry suspended above the experimental benches. The desks here are messy, some are covered in reagents and ingredients, others paperwork. You catch sight of one of the diaries of Cornelius Keyserling and your eyes linger there for a second.
The real secret of the library isn’t this laboratory, although it’s certainly useful. The real secret of the library, the entire college and possibly all of Saratoga Falls itself is these diaries. Written at first by Cornelius Keyserling, founder of this college and latter by his son Augustus and grandson Julius, they are a record of magical experimentation and development.
Unfortunately, they are also in code. It is fiendishly difficult and relates to the same sigils used to access the laboratory. So far you have only decoded a handful of the journals, enough to learn that the Keyserlings were embroiled in a bitter feud with a rival family of practitioners by the name of Shabbleman. You permit yourself a little smile whilst thinking about that – back when you were Will Prescott you had cousins with that name. As well as that information, there is a good bit about the gwarcheidwad in the journals, which has enabled you to gain a level of control over it that Blackwell could only have dreamed of. That and the experiments, which you hope to repeat at some point.
You can get back to those later though, because you have the Libra to work on today. It sits on another desk, surrounded by your notes and the various materials you’ll need to carry out what you are planning. A couple of blank and polished masks sit beside it.
The golem limit is the problem. You are limited to a handful of the things at most since each one requires a little bit of your essentia to control it. So you had thought, but reading through Cornelius Keyserling’s journals made you realise it was a little more complex than that – another essential part is the purification of the material. By adding a little clipping of your own hair, a part of your own essentia, you can cleanse the graveyard earth that makes golems of the things that dwell in it.
They are called revenants and Cornelius Keyserling wrote at length about how dangerous they are. There’s not much that scares you now, but these things do.
The theory is long and complicated, but the upshot is clear. Removing revenants from the graveyard earth that makes up golems puts a hard limit on the number you can have.
Then you discovered a string of seemingly useless spells in the Libra: One that removes the mind from a living body, one that turns such a mindless husk into a golem and one that implants the appearance and personality of someone, their imago, directly into a golem so it cannot be removed again. They’re useless because a golem created in such a way is under no ones control but its own. You’d tried it out on a football player you brought back to Blackwell’s house a year ago, before forgetting about it disgusted at how little use it was. To this day he still doesn’t know he’s a fake.
You grab a blank mask and the Libra and climb back down to the main area of the lab. The first step is to make a copy of Miranda, so you set the book to one side and place the blank mask on her unresisting face. It sinks underneath her skin – the process is as unnerving as the first time you saw it two years ago. While you are waiting for it to reappear you turn the Libra to the correct page, laying it under Miranda’s head so that the sigil touches her.
Your resolve falters as the mask bubbles up from under her skin. Miranda is about the closest thing you have to a friend. She is also vain, obnoxious and shallow, you remind yourself and the qualms subside. You grab the mask and set it to the side. No backing out now, you speak the pseudo Latin words of the spell.
Lightning arcs out from Miranda’s body. It plays over the other experimental tables, searching for something to ground itself in. You stand still, knowing that it won’t touch you. Although spelled out explicitly in the Libra, to complete this spell correctly requires an additional golem to carry away the ripped imago of the victim. That’s what the lightning is – the tattered remnants of Miranda’s imago. You have no spare golem to act as a lightning rod though, you have something entirely more effective.
The shadows in the library lengthen as the gwarcheidwad stretches its metaphysical limbs. The lightning arcs about the lab with more urgency now, but not for long. It fades away as the shadows lengthen. For a moment the lab seems entirely shrouded in darkness then the shadows retreat. You catch the sound of an unearthly contented purr briefly, but it too fades away.
The gwarcheidwad eats revenants, but it will happily take a ghost in a pinch – and what are ghosts but disembodied imago.
Stripped of her imago, Miranda is only a golem. You grab the book and climb back up to the gantry. There’s no avoiding it now – you’ll have to take your mask off. As Will Prescott is too big for your clothes, you strip down. You grab a thick old dressing gown and slip it on to protect yourself from the chill air of the laboratory. Speaking the magic words, you pull at the mask on your face.
When the dizziness passes you find yourself looking at the world through different eyes. Taller ones for a start. Ugh. It’s been a long time since you’ve been yourself and the feeling of having something hanging between your legs again is very alien to you.
You examine the mask you just removed. The name Chelsea Courtney Cooper is visible hovering just over the surface of the inside, as is the image of the face you’ve been accustomed to wearing. You wave your hand over the mask and something else appears: A sigil of control. It has your true name hidden within it, visible only to those who understand sigils.
The next set of spells in the Libra seemed to be little more than curios when you first looked at them. The first created a sigil of control on the inside of a mask. It was useless by itself, almost worse than useless since it drew on the same pool of essentia that is used to control golems. The second described the creation of a putty-like material that could be painted on the inside if a mask. The treated mask could then be placed on a golem. By wearing the mask with the control sigil on it you could take direct control of the golem. You’d experimented with the whole setup using one the golems you still allow Blackwell to have. It worked perfectly on the golem, but only on the golem and not a real person. Interesting, but not very useful.
Unless you were clever.
Unless you realised there was a way to create golems that didn’t draw on your essentia. Unless you realised that such golems would still be subject to the effects of the sigil of control. Unless you understood sigils on such an intuitive level as to be able to etch a sigil of your own design on such golems that would link it to the control sigil. Unless you were you, in other words.
After all that, suspending the control sigil on one of the chameleon layers of your Chelsea mask was child’s play. Still, it does mean you have to remove the mask to make the putty. You turn the Libra to the correct page and set a small ceramic bowl on top of it. Then you pile a set of ingredients inside. You set the contents ablaze and place the mask with the control symbol atop the bowl.
The fire goes out after a minute or so and you lift your mask off the bowl. Inside is a runny, putty-like material. You’ll have need of it in a minute or so, but first you want to get back to what you think of as normal. You wave your hand across the mask and mutter a couple of syllables. The control sigil vanishes and the name Chelsea Courtney Cooper reappears. You smile as you lift the mask to your face, welcoming the dizziness that marks your return to the form you are more comfortable in. You pull your clothes back in before climbing back down to the laboratory floor with the bowl.  You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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