>>5234128Lord Yosef’s coughing fit resumes, even worsening. He hacks up blood and bile upon his floor, falling from his chair to his hands and knees. Tears well in his eyes from the pain of his damaged lungs and stomach lining, though the defiance and triumph never leaves his expression. Or, well, not until…
“Not sso fasst, Grandpa,” you say, falling to your knees beside him and placing a hand upon his back.
“Huh-HAAAK-huh…” Lord Yosef groans and wheezes, not quite able to form words. “Huh-hwhat?”
You shush him, narrowing your eyes and focusing upon him. He tries to bat your hands away, but his self-inflicted poisoning ironically renders him too weak to fight off your efforts to stabilize him. The charmed amulet upon his chest is a more serious impediment, with its demon-repellant components and warding runes, but his retching leaves it dangling from his neck; a swift slash of your frost-dagger removes that obstacle and sends it flying across the room.
“You heard me,” you say, forcing a smile. “You assked my Reptilian name, yess? Well, it’ss unpronounccceable to your pitiful mammalian maw… But my mother onccce told me what my father intended to name me—or, well, hisss firsst child, if it wass female.”
You meet his confused expression.
“Shira,” you tell him. “Shira Yosssef.”
“…No.”
>15Your command of biological manipulation is hardly up to the standards which presumably helped create the Tower’s distinctive and potent healing potions—you’ll have to study with Henzler further, some day, to make your own equivalent. Still, it is enough to help slow and neutralize the organic poisons in old Lord Yosef’s system, and to mend the worst of the damage. Your human grandfather will not be going on any mind-control murder-missions against masterful mages anytime soon—at least, not with any chance of success—but he will live.
“You’re… You’re lying,” he wheezes. “You’re a filthy, lying, degenerate sack of—”
“’Degenerate’ isss correct, at leasst,” you say. “It’ss the term that my people—my MOTHER’SS people—use for my cassste… The hybridss of her race and yoursss.”
Lord Yosef looks at you in horror, the pieces coming together. You can see it in his eyes: the understanding now of why you reminded him so much of his late wife. He is speechless in horror, in anguish. His son is dead, gone, killed by an ancient menace beyond human understanding in service to abomination… And his sole legacy, his son’s ‘rightful’ heir, is also heir to that darkness which consumed him.
The tears start flowing, and they don’t stop until you place your hands upon the poor, sorrowing old man’s wet, wrinkled face and reach into his mind to wipe the pain away. When you kiss him, it is no lustful and sadistic affair, but a chaste and familial gesture, almost a mercy. You search his mind while the ectoplasm is delivered…
>20…And you find EVERYTHING.