A Jaded Life

Lia and I were sitting in front of the last currently occupied cell, going over our plans one more time. The Shattered within was restless, still trying to bash its way through the solid walls, and I was planning to put it to sleep soon.

“Can you shackle the thing instead of putting it out? I believe that their mental state right before the transformation, the desire to, well, live even as their blood is taken from them plays a large part in the success of the ritual,” Lia asked, making me grimace even as I nodded. This experiment was largely her show, I was just helping and gathering information for my own purposes, if she felt that a conscious test subject was needed, I’d have to get creative.

“Best to put it out for a bit, shackle it while unconscious and just wait for it to wake back up,” I allowed, as I had no interest in trying to wrap shackles around a struggling Shattered, that sounded like a massive annoyance. Now, it was Lia’s turn to nod in acceptance and moments later, after a concentrated burst of Mind Magic, the Shattered was out like a light and I stepped into the cell, quickly forming the required bindings around the thing’s body.

“It’s quite interesting,” I mused, placing a hand on the Shattered’s leg so I could use my Blood Magic to get a better idea of its body’s composition. “Outside their overall body shape, they have little linking them to humanity any longer. Their brains, for one, but even that has changed, not quite shrivelled up but something similar,” I sighed, before focusing on the rest of its body, trying to understand what I was detecting.

“The rest of its body is just weird,” I shook my head, remembering different Shattered I had studied ever since the Change had happened. There was a clear progression in their forms and internal structure, from the original Shattered, nothing but humans with burning eyes and slowly emerging monstrous features, to what I was seeing now. Internally, these things had nothing that remained from their former humanity, their organs were completely and utterly foreign to me, forcing me to guess at their functions. There might be an analogue to a human heart, but their circulatory system was strange, to say nothing about a few dense, bony structures I could only feel thanks to the blood moving around them. The respiratory system was greatly reduced, too, while the remains of their reproductive systems were just weird, to the point that I could only guess at the thing’s original sex by the width of their hips, though they, too, had changed.

“Makes me wonder what would happen if we actually manage to turn a Shattered back into a human,” I mused, glancing at Lia who was watching me with interest.

“You mean, would they cope as I did or just kill themself?” my daughter asked, gesturing towards her own body, reminding me that her internal structures were just as inhuman as the ones of a Shattered. Granted, she retained a lot more of a human’s outward appearance and, amusingly, remained fairly attractive by human standards, despite the uselessness of these outward features. After all, there was no way that Lia would ever nurse a babe, and yet, she had more than I did in that regard. Not a lot more, we were both fairly disadvantaged in that regard, but more nonetheless.

“Something like that, yes,” I nodded, despite knowing that Lia hadn’t so much coped with the transformation she had undergone but had discarded her entire existence before the change, relegated it to knowledge with no emotional attachment to it. Thus, the new name she had asked for, the willingness, or maybe even wish, to leave her original family and travel with me and her wholehearted embrace of her role as my daughter. Would a repaired Shattered do the same, discard their entire existence or would they try clinging to it, only to be forced to accept that that existence had been, well, shattered by the Change, just like they had been?

To say nothing of the body horror any human would experience when realising their bodies had turned into something that could only be described as monstrous, especially while trying to regain their already damaged humanity.

The kindest thing to do, if we managed to repair a Shattered’s Soul and return their mind to a human state, might be to send them into a deep sleep and let them pass away peacefully, without ever waking up and experiencing the horror they had become. But would I want to have that happen to me, or would I want to have the minuscule chance to overcome the trauma and damage? I would have to meditate on that question because I didn’t think there was an easy answer, especially not one we could actually accomplish with our limited resources.

“Let’s do this;” Lia pulled me from my thoughts when the bound Shattered started to stir, quickly returning to the waking world. Now, it was time to see if we could make the Shattered into a Vampire, as I had done with Lia, all those months ago. We had tried something similar before but didn’t have any success with it, despite our successes with actual people. Something about the Shattered, most likely their broken souls, made it difficult.

This time, our idea was that I would pull the Soul into a roughly spherical shape, not trying to put it back together, while Lia would drain the Shattered’s blood in an attempt to turn it into a Vampire. Hopefully, the transformation would pull the shattered pieces of its Soul back together, turning them vampiric but also stabilising them in the process.

For the third time, I started to puzzle a Soul back together, though for once, I wasn’t trying to make it fit or anything like that. No, I was just trying to get a roughly spherical construct of soul shards, something for the vampiric transformation to latch onto.

At the same time, Lia was sinking her teeth into the leathery skin of the Shattered, making me wonder if we should try to find a way that’d let her trigger the transformation without a bite, just like she was able to drain Blood and Astral Power using her Blood Magic. Sure, it would likely take longer but I doubted Lia wanted to have a mouth full of dirty, leathery skin.

Despite the shackles, the Shattered tried to struggle, twisting and wriggling as much as it could but there was nothing it could actually do to dislodge Lia from its neck. She just kept drinking and I could see the fire in the Shattered’s eyes start to die down, while I could feel the Soul shudder within my magical grasp as if the pieces were about to disperse.

Finally, Lia was done drinking and the vibrations of the Shattered’s Soul were starting to give me trouble, even after I activated Overflow to bring more of my power to bear. A single moment of carelessness, and the Soul would immediately disperse, though I hoped it wouldn’t cause the same kind of damage as a repaired Soul did, I had no interest in getting covered in mangled flesh. Maybe it was a good thing Lia had already drained the thing’s blood, at least we wouldn’t be coated in that if things went wrong.

Even without looking, I could feel the moment Lia put the first drop of her Blood into the Shattered’s mouth. Suddenly, the shaking and vibrating of the Soul changed, no longer was it trying to fly apart, but it was drawing together, drawing inwards, and taking all the power I had invested in keeping it together with the various pieces. The sudden drain was even trying to take the power within me, forcing me to violently rip away from the sensation, causing me to stagger back and endure a spike of pain ripping into my brain.

“Shit,” I couldn’t help but curse, leaning against the wall to stabilise myself so I wouldn’t keel over. Taking deep breaths, I started to regain my equilibrium while watching the Shattered transform. Outwardly, there was fairly little change. Its skin retained the leathery quality, its claws were still there, maybe even a little sharper than they had been, and the teeth in its maw had grown, turning slightly jagged but visibly sharp in the process. Additionally, the empty holes that once held its flames were rapidly filling with a solid, almost gemlike substance, just like Lia’s eyes had. Only for this Vampire, the substance wasn’t the deep, carnelian red of Lia’s eyes, it was a lot darker, to the point that it looked more black than red. Carefully glancing beneath the surface, trying not to agitate my headache even further, I could see that the transformation of the thing’s soul had been a success and I was looking at the familiar shape of a vampiric soul.

Now, we only had to figure out how much of the Mind remained, whether it was that of a Shattered or that of the original human.