>>5120915Your name is Chlotsuintha, and you are in the process of a particularly <span class="mu-i">messy</span> spot of Life-Weaving. At this stage of the spell, both the piglet – which is dying – and the smuggler – who has been dead for a day – are violently spasming. Unfortunately, at this point, all you can do is trust that your needles are deep enough to stay in place, as your hands are needed elsewhere at the moment. Your right hand is occupied with manipulating the spine as the magic courses through everything. Your left hand is gripping the shuttle, which connects you to the Loom. Beyond a dull and distant pain that throbs in time with your heartbeat, no feeling remains in it. In fact, at this point in the spell, you are probably no longer physically able to loosen your grip on the shuttle. That is one of the things that makes working alone on Life-Looms dangerous. If anything ever goes wrong once the spell is fully active, you are just as strapped in as whatever you are working on. The spell – and with it, the Strangeness – will flow down the path of least resistance, which in theory, should be either the fuel or the raw material, depending on how close the spell is to completion. In practice, the Many Mysteries are often inscrutable. Even if everything is done flawlessly, things can just … go wrong. Really wrong.
Blessedly, this is not one of those times. The spell is progressing at a comfortable rate, and when you snuck a quick look down at the cadaver a moment ago, more illuminated by the glowing light of your eyes than the olive oil lamp you have nearby, you were surprised to see that the pork you stuffed into the skull had already started to turn into something akin to brain. The color was noticeably pinker than it should have been, and the consistency was closer to muscle than the fat – discrepancies no doubt caused by your choice of raw material. You doubt that it would ever properly attach to the rest of the brain or get the look right – and you know that at your skill level, you would never be able to produce <span class="mu-i">working</span> gray matter. But you do not need to get it perfect, you just need to get it good enough so that when you drop the cadaver off of the top of the palisade tonight, the guards that find him splatted do not have any reason to think that he died a day or so ago, so they have no reason to think twice about rolling back the upgraded curfew.
Time passes. Maybe ten minutes, maybe fifteen – you are not sure. If the spell was going to fail, it would have by now. You allow yourself a shaky sigh of relief, as you glace over at the piglet. Here and there, patches of its flesh have begun to turn necrotic, caused by the backwash of the spell. Additionally, it is bleeding from all of its orifices, both of its eyes have distended and the right one, the one you stuck the needle next too have started to smolder. Despite all of this the piglet is still breathing, though you are certain it is being kept alive by the spell.
