Quoted By:
Ah, damn it all! Not the time to get weepy, you Moon-eyed Idiot! Even if you weren't taking real risks at this very moment. You resume wafting with vigor, no longer trying to usher the smoke up the chimney - simply clearing it away will be enough for you.
This new stratagem works well enough that progress is immediate and obvious; and finally, from underneath the pall of the smoke looms -a terrible, many-eyed animalistic head! For a shade of a second, <span class="mu-i">Orge</span> races through your head ... but then the smoke clears a little more, and you can now see that it was naught but a boar, repurposed into part of this Construct. Still, you will not fault yourself over your immediate impression - the head is far removed from Mundanity, to the point that even a farmer or Slaughterer probably wouldn't immediately recognize it. For a start, the eye sockets of the head have been hollowed clean, so that Conduit may run to all of the sighted Components that cover the head - and there are a lot of them ... more than a dozen, perhaps as many as sixteen. Unnervingly, they are pinned in place straight through the middle of each lens. All of them, blank and dim, staring listlessly ahead, in the opposite direction of their transfixing needle - a good three inches of metal remaining outside of the eye, and only the Patternmaker and father knows how deep they have been sunk. Unsettled, you very deliberately look elsewhere. There is not much to see from your current position though - save for the jaw. It appears if the jawbone was removed - specifically, just the jawbone. The jowls, and the rest of the skin that once covered the absent bone remains, as well as the lolling black mass of the tongue - and now that you look, you can see that there are these white, fleshy tendrils that sprout from the tongue and overhang the jowls and missing jaw to splay themselves on the polished stone below like many little fingers.
What you do not see is any wooden blocks that have Glyphs Scrivened onto them - or any Glyphs at all, for that matter. Have the Glyphs activated already, reached completion and burnt themselves? Is that why you cannot see any of them? Is that what you are smelling? You waft a little more - and have to stop yourself from gasping, lest you end up taking in more of this increasingly noxious smoke. There is quite a bit more to the Construct. The head of what was once a boar is sitting on the polished stone floor of the hearth in a fleshy puddle of its own jowls ... but the spine is still attached to the back of the head. At a nearly perpendicular angle, it rises up into the chimney, passing underneath the lintel. And the entire length of it is one great bulging bundle of Conduit and what are clearly repurposed brains. One thing is clear - you are standing in front of the Logic Organ, arguably the single most important part of the entire Assembly - and had things gone even worse with your cast, you might have ended up killing all of it, instead of just part of it.
