Quoted By:
On the cobblestones underneath you, the Glyphed Gull is either shivering and twitching or attempting to flap its wings. Your eyes are beginning to strain from all of the focus, and you allow yourself to blink, breaking your focus, and temporarily allowing your Strange-Staining Glyph to reinitialize. You can take some small relief in the fact that your bungled breaking of the Glyphs has not somehow managed to release any additional Strangeness … but at the end of the day, that is a fig-leaf, through and through. Recovering this Glyph in a condition where you could safely study it was never going to be easy. Now, because you cannot stop fraying everything up to save your miserable, besotted life, it is going to be harder – and worse, more dangerous.
For a moment, you seriously consider dropping everything, rushing back to the Belfry, and trying to Reverse your Glyph breaking on the Life-Loom … though you ultimately decide against it. If you had another seabird to work with, maybe, but even then, the Glyphed Gull is simply too Strange to work on the Life-Loom at the moment. You would have to Remediate, then Reverse, then break the Glyph <span class="mu-i">again</span> … and only then would you be back right where you are right now. To be sure, you might be in a slightly better position with the condition of the Glyph. Emphasis on ‘might’. Each of those three processes could go terribly wrong – or you could do everything right and the bird just up and dies on you anyway.
You focus on the bird again, and soon the constantly shifting white-gray-black Stains disappear. You get some more salt, and then you look over the legs of the Glyphed Gull very, very carefully, to make sure that there are no Glyphs anywhere on them. Once you are satisfied that you are not going to be destroying anything you would want to study later, you peel off your gloves, rub the salt thoroughly on your palms, then you gather up both of the bird’s legs in your hands. As if it could sense your intent, doomed Gull starts to shake and tremble all the more violently, no doubt trying to get away from you, but your grip is firm and sure. You press the bird’s back into the bed of salt you have thrown on the ground, and after you take one last steadying breath, there is nothing left to but to initialize the cast and pray for the best.
Unfortunately, the cast is not the best. Even though the only kickback to the spell you experience is getting the air knocked out of your lungs right at the start, you can see that the magical reaction is figuratively tearing through the bird – physically tearing as well at your point of contact with the target of the spell. Skin is spontaneously separating itself from cartilage, cartilage is spreading from muscle, muscle is separating from bone. As you watch the pair of legs in your hand flense themselves to the point that the only thing keeping them together is your grip, you contemplate aborting the cast and trying again.
