[Shinyama Pavilion] A Poisonous Delivery (Duvalyon)

[Alses]

Timestamp: 32nd Day of Summer, 512 A.V. "Busy day today, Alses!" Those words, delivered with a heartlessly cheery tone from the Dusk Tower's secretary, were ones she'd come to dread. Simple and innocent when taken on their own, they now meant hours of backbreaking work carting the hated message-boxes to and fro between the Dusk Tower and absolutely every merchant, researcher, friend, acquaintance, dependent or equal that every member of House Dusk had. She'd been shuttled between the three Towers on four separate occasions that morning alone, each time with a fresh batch of cherrywood-and-gold-inlaid boxes, heavy with important correspondence. Worse, most of the important messages in Lhavit by tradition generally contained some form of small gift or other consideration packed in with them. Not a bribe, of course – if one even suggested such a thing it was met with a sharp, shocked intake of breath followed by a comprehensive education on when a gift was a gift and when it was a bribe – more an expression of mutual, cordial respect (since the reply, by custom, also contained a small gift) and thoughtfulness. Unfortunately, her Ethaefal constitution generally meant that she got saddled with the backbreaking job of carting the important messages around. There was probably also some social cachet to having an Ethaefal run messages, although no-one would dream of being so impolite as to mention it. She'd wanted to pause for a bit after the last delivery (sixteen boxes, all to the various purveyors of philtres, elixirs, potions and lotions that the Azure Market and Surya Plaza boasted – at least they tipped well, which was more than could be said of some of the Towers), perhaps experience a cup of tea at Mhakula's Tea-House, but the place, normally serene and calm, was full of other exhausted couriers shouting encouragement and critique to the sparring Dao swordsmen, and therefore decidedly not conducive to a rest. 'Resting,' she told herself sternly, to assuage the niggling pangs of guilt at how eager she'd been to take her ease for a bell or so, 'Is not the same as giving up. I'd have had my break and gone straight back to work!' This was probably a lie, but since Mhakula's was out of the question, it was a lie Alses was happy to believe of herself. 'In fact,' she considered, walking briskly back over the last of the skyglass bridges she had to traverse before arriving back at the Dusk Tower gates, 'I deserve a break, after helping the gardeners with their shipment to the lowlands, too!' And never mind that normally-immaculate Mr. Secretary (she still didn't know the dapper man's name) had come out from his frantic office and harangued her briefly for not doing her job. The barely-organized chaos inside the Tower had evidently progressed to such a point that the monocled paper-pusher was now standing outside the doors, jittery beside a wheelbarrow – a wheelbarrow – full of messages. Alses shook her head in weary and dismayed amazement – earlier on, he'd squawked about her piling them in her backpack, for ease of transport around the city, and here he was using a dirty old gardener's wheelbarrow! He was definitely coming apart at the seams. “Zintila be thanked!” he burst out, hurrying over. “We're positively haemorrhaging couriers today and this has to get to the Shinyama Pavilion quickly!” He handed her a surprisingly light box, and lowered his voice. “One of the Family is ill, and so are several of the staff; all the standard samples are in here. Leave the backpack; I'll deal with the contents.” Swiftly, Alses shrugged out of the canvas pack – Mr. Secretary's surprisingly expert touch helped the process enormously – and he shoved the one – one – box, heavily shielded and warded, into her hands, so roughly it thumped against her chest, hard enough to bruise anyone not Ethaefal. Much of the city passed in a blur; Alses knew its streets well, and avoided the clogged main thoroughfares with the consummate ease of long practice, slipping bewteen the fanciful skyglass towers, ducking into covered pathways that ran through gullies a visitor to the city would never notice, the capillaries, to switch metaphors, all the unofficial shortcuts and diversions around major arteries and organs that every courier learnt, either by initiation from an elder messenger or by a painstaking process of trial and error. For a full-figured and otherwise stately Ethaefal, Alses could move at a fair lick when she wanted to – richness of feature and the pinnacle of proportion belied the fact that perfection of form stretched further than skin-deep beauty – and her feet pounded, swift and sure, along the semi-secret byways of Lhavit. Enticing smells – that was one of the benefits of a courier's route; it took her past the vents of businesses and the secret, personal gardens of ordinary residents – filled her nostrils: freshly-baked bread, the tantalising sweetness of honey drifting from a confectioner's shop, attar of roses (although that could have been from her bath that morning) and much else. Normally surefooted, in this case haste overwhelmed even Ethaefal grace as her flashing footfalls landed suddenly, heavily, on a broad patch of taka moss, slick and wet from a bucket of sudsy water just tossed out by a worker – in an instant her loping, graceful gait degenerated into a wildly flailing tangle of limbs as her feet went out from under her and one hand – irrationally – clamped tight around the warded and reinforced cherrywood box whilst the other shot out in a doomed attempt to arrest her fall. It didn't work; chimes louder than the Temple bells rang inside her head as her intricate crown-of-horns met the hard-packed earth and cobbles of the hidden path, snapping her head forward with the jarring shock of the impact. Alses lay, quite still, for several moments, dazed, the ringing in her head chasing away all attempts at thought or locomotion. As the bells faded from full, joyful carillon to a monotonous, dull thudding, the rest of her body queued up to present the various aches and pains. Spine: needled by rock and earth. Ankles: burning from their sudden date with the sky. Left hand: convulsively cramping from gripping the box too hard. Strangely, her right hand and arm didn't seem to be sore at all – the only part of her that wasn't battered or in some way bruised by the magnificently uncaring ground. There was wetness there; as she pushed herself upright she wiped it carelessly on her crimson clothes, assuming it just to be water – burnished liquid stopped her dead in her tracks. Seven puncture marks, two of them with thin, vicious spines still embedded in them, glared back at her from her palm, weeping liquid bronze, the skin around them puffing up in angry rubies. She looked around, her sensitive nose caught a heavy, sweet scent, not exactly unpleasant but curiously penetrative...she groaned, deep in her throat, mind suddenly racing even as her eyes caught sight of the rather unassuming plant her hand had mashed as she flailed. 'Syna preserve me, I've gone and stuck myself with kuhari!' Panic welled up, clogging her throat – she was no expert on poisons, she didn't know how her body would react to toxins – and she looked around, wildly, for help. The street was deserted, a half-forgotten strip of land between the back of two rows of shops, a useful shortcut that opened directly out before the bridge leading right to the Shinyama Pavilion, towering high into a powder-blue sky a few hundred metres away. She forced herself to put one foot in front of the other, moving oddly, jerkily when compared to her sleek gait of before, feeling as though some trickster spirit had pushed its fingers into her muscles and was pulling her back with all of its might. The bridge, with its ornamental creatures and fantastical carvings, suddenly seemed far, far longer than it ever had before, sloping unaccountably even though she knew it was virtually flat. She stumbled, again, at the meeting point of skyglass and earth just before the Pavilion gates, swaying like a tree in high wind, but managed to regain her balance and walk – more carefully and with the heavy deliberation of the ill or very drunk – into the jaws of the Shinya stronghold. Inside was confusing, a welter of colour and sound, everything running together as though she'd been focusing too long on her auristics, sights merging into smells that bloomed into touches of light across her skin. “Excuse usss,” she murmured, bending into a bow to the first figure she saw, a genuflection that was only halfway-acceptable because she was focusing exclusively on it. She fumbled for her Dusk Tower crest with her bad hand – hissing through her teeth as the spines dug in deeper. “We have an urgent message for the Pavilion doctors. Request of the Dusk Tower.” Strange. Her voice sounded thick and very quiet, as though it were a great effort to speak. She proffered the box half-heartedly, with arms heavy as lead, not noticing the few drops of burnished blood falling from her hand as she proferred it to – strange, her eyesight was going, too. The fellow was tall – taller than most humans she'd met, whipcord thin, and his eyes glowed red in the light. She shook her head, still feeling rather woozy. 'A Symenenenenestra? Here? Must be the...thing. Running thing. Fall. Tumbbble. Trip! Zeltiva might be quite nice to...whatsit. Dance with. Sing about. No, visit.'

[Duvalyon Hellebore]

OOCThanks for setting this up! Mind if we make the TS pre-festival? Duvalyon is gone in summer from the 60th on and it would make any meeting in that thread simpler. The Symenestra regarded the box with slight boredom, and no sense of haste. Everything from the towers was urgent. He had learned to stop leaping into action after the last five unremarkable deliveries. Lhavitians inhabiting the towers seemed to forget that falling ill was a common occurrence, and he couldn't help them by proxy. He was a medic, not a mage and not even one of Rak'keli's favored. Oriela would be better with this sort of thing. "Dusk Tower. Very important. Duly noted," he said flatly, belying the words. The sudden sight of Alses's blood lit a brighter red facet in his eyes. Now this was interesting: a wounded Ethaefal. His eyes travelled up her arm towards the fine violet spines that had pressed into gilt flesh. He took the box, catching some of Alses's blood on his hand. Out of habit, he tasted it. Whatever it told him was either less than encouraging or useless. "Sit. Now. Keep your hurt arm below your heart." His brusque tone was clean of human feeling and assumed immediate compliance. The Symenestra gestured to a wooden table partially covered in white linen. It was half bed, half workstation. The Dusk Tower's box was set aside, as he washed his hands in a basin. While drying his hands, he called out for an acolyte from the hall. "Acolyte, quick, what plant is blue, purple and white?" "Does it have needles?" The acolyte bristled with a note of concern as Duvalyon nodded. "Kahuri, medic. Poisonous." "Do you have an antidote on hand?" "We ought to. It's a terrible but common plant." Duvalyon abandoned the conversation to return to Alses. "May I have your arm?" It was obvious he wasn't entirely accustomed to asking. Bedside manner wasn't his speciality. All his charm was rationed for endeavors like the harvest or Kalinor gatherings. Being pleasant didn't usually accomplish a damn thing for those in his charge. It typically made the healing process take longer. "I'm going to pull out the spines." As if reading her confusion over lack of tool, he raised clawed fingers.

[Alses]

OOCHope the 32nd of Summer is okay for you! The nice man's face was washing in and out of focus as Alses' eyelids grew heavier and heavier. His hands – long, thin hands, tapering spires of flesh, almost, were easier to look at. “Does our blood taste of the many in our head?” she asked. Half-addled as she was, this seemed like a perfectly reasonable line of questioning. His voice came as though from a great distance away, but what it said was sensible at least. “Sitting?” she murmured, peering blearily around. The idea suddenly seemed the most sensible thing in the world. Just sit down, relax, let everything run its course. There was a lot more white than there had been earlier; had they moved? Probably. “Sitting is...easier.” A less-graceful creature would have gone down like a sack of potatoes; Alses managed a half-dignified sprawl instead. “We can't feel our toes, medic.” She felt quite calm, really – almost detached. “Is that normal? I fell on a...a plant. And a road. Begins with a letter. C. No, no...K. The plant, that is. Shouldn't have done that. Have to hurry; urgent, they said. Nervy secretaries and busy people do not a happy Alses make. Too many heavy boxes.” A convulsive shiver rushed over her frame; in its wake, some lucidity returned, along with the panic. “Kuhari, doctor. Get it out of me. Quickly.” Even as she laid her hand flat for the brusque doctor – with such impressive claws, too; their significance would not register until some time later - Alses cast a glance to where – unerringly – she knew the sun would be, even hidden behind the walls of the Pavilion. It was nearly dusk, and the Change was looming large on the horizon – literally, as Leth prepared to rise and wipe away Syna's reign over the day. Before she could mention this, the poison coursing in her veins redoubled its assault. Her celestial form might have been putting up much stiffer resistance than was usual, but the nasty compounds kuhari made were slowly tightening their grip, spreading weakness in an expanding wave– and with it, the loss of what tenuous control Alses had over the multitude of past lives' memories in her head. “Radjud-cha djas,” she breathed, unaware of the change in language from Common to the much older, simpler tongue of Nader-canoch.

[Duvalyon Hellebore]

Alses's gibberish was met with a lifted brow and then indifference. When treating surrogates, the ability to tune out their voice was a necessity. Duvalyon was an old hand when it came to diminishing a woman's voice to a low buzzing sound. Alses's adamantly offered arm was grabbed without the delicacy of hesitation. Duavlyon pulled it taut and assumed his silent task. Black claws struggled for purchase as each spine was slid out from Syna graced skin and dropped in a bowl. Violet, a deceptively demure color for something so obviously harmful, the medic thought as he looked at the small pile of pastel spines. There was something to be learned from the plant. Alses's arm was rearranged to rest lower than her sternum. He'd let the wounds bleed for a little to push out poison. Kahuri, they had said. Duvalyon scaled the wall beside the shelves of herbs and tonics, scanning for the name. Hopefully they had something prepared. His herbalism skills were laughable. Kalinor wasn't known for its meadows and woods. There it was: "Kahuri Treatment" the label said, "To be prepared as a tea." The Symenestra frowned. Time he didn't care to spare. "Acolyte," Duvalyon called, "I need freshly boiled water." He crept further down the wall, seeking a familiar bottle. His motions wed the grotesque and the graceful as he half dropped to the floor. Two bottles were curled protectively against his chest. The antidote was set aside while the water heated, and the other bottle was uncorked and diluted in a bowl. It was an antiseptic with a bracken smell. Duvalyon began to clean the wounds with the mixture. The cloth was quickly turning incarnadine, so he paused the cleansing to apply mild pressure to the wounds. Long fingered hands were wrapped firmly around Alses's arm; a cloth the only barrier between the miraculous and monstrous. The Symenestra's implacable face altered with a slight twitch of his clenched jaw. It felt like the longest he had ever waited for a cup of tea. "Your gift," Duvalyon asked, "Can you still use it to age the wound?" He was fortunate enough to have tested the same approach on another Ethaefal. At that time, he had been guessing, but he now knew the tactic to be effective.

[Alses]

The kuhari spines fought the spidery doctor and his claws. 'Morphed?' she thought, hazily – why did the word 'spidery' keep trying to elbow its way into the melting morass her consciousness had become? Was there something she ought to remember about spiders? 'Did a spider bite me, too?' she wondered. Then: 'Do spiders even bi-OW!' She hissed through her teeth as, finally, the brusque medic who seemed to be entirely in another world, one of his own devising where she hadn't spoken a word to him, managed to gain purchase on one of the spines, slick and slippery with bronze blood, pulling hard to free her flesh of the taint. The spine didn't want to go; she could feel tiny barbs snagging and snaring, digging in, pouring more of their poison inside with every second. It abruptly tore free in a bright burst of pain that brought tears to her eyes and disrupted her wandering thoughts. The good doctor seemed to have the knack of it, now; the second came out much more quickly, leaving her hand throbbing and aflame, bleeding profusely now from a near-perfect circle of inflamed puncture marks. He manipulated her arm easily, with surprising strength in those long, long arms – stretching into infinity, almost, two spots of red in the far distance the only sign of the rest of him in her swimming vision, setting it below the curve of her breasts – a position which seemed to hold some significance, since his hands, cold against her Syna-warmed skin, held her arm there for a few moments, long enough for her to get the idea. Why he didn't just say what he wanted her to do was beyond her. She voiced this, a mildly irritated bark of: “Tusa djas canochtlas-nek dala?” 'Why will you not speak to me?' No answer; she tried again, her voice louder and more agitated – did the doctor not understand Common? He vanished once more, instead of answering – the two spots of cold he'd left on her skin burning, the only signs of his presence; she turned her head, uncoordinated – it hit something, hard enough to set the chimes off again, and she blearily saw him go skittering up the wall as though it were a floor. “Am I hallucinating?” she asked, switching language again, fighting through the ringing echoes which were only just dissipating. “We saw you dance up a wall.” 'He did,' whispered the observant, detached part of her mind. 'Put his palms and feet flat against it and scampered up quick as we please.' No immediate answer, again – had she been more compos mentis, and without the poison sapping her strength, she might have found some reserve of irritation below the thick veneer of tragic serenity that most Ethaefal tended to carry around. His hands were clamped around her arm, now, and then he addressed her properly – or perhaps she was just dreaming that. “Gift?” she murmured; perhaps he was a figment of her imagination, her brain trying to find something that would help with her current predicament. “Tanroa's Blessing?” Alses had secretly always thought that term rather pompous – the ability was useful, true, but hardly on the same level as a gnosis mark. Excellent for dealing with paper cuts and hurrying plants through two harvest cycles a year, yes, but not much more than that. Although...Alses' mind began to race. 'Simple objects are easily aged; small plants, swords, pages of notes so that I don't have to worry about drying sand or smudges. Complex objects have to be broken down into simpler ones for our power to work – as in when we age wounds. What would happen if we aged an item we were magecrafting? A ring, say? It's a simple object, we know that gnosis marks can be granted to such artifacts without repercussion, and if my ability – if the ability of an Ethaefal, rather – is of the same divine root, why then, what could we do?' The old adage: 'Time heals all wounds,' drifted in from somewhere, coupled with her – possibly-phantom – doctor's question, scattering her musings; the merest hint of true-blue light flashed around the rosette of puncture marks; in its wake, swollen and weeping wounds closed and shrank, the angry glow of insulted flesh soothing back into more normal fire-opal shades. She shook her head and closed her hand; the pain from her hand was lessening into memory with every passing second, a faint and dull ache the only sign of her accident – another day or so and the last vestiges of the marks would be healed over, her skin as unblemished as ever. Scarring just never seemed to happen; her body was much superior to a normal mortal's in most respects. 'Most' being the operative word; a heavy tiredness seemed to have settled into her bones, dragging at her thoughts and pinching with phantom fingers at every muscle and tendon, making her skin seem heavy as lead and her crown-of-horns suddenly weighty and massive. She yawned; the Dusk Rest was fast approaching, and the idea of bed had never seemed so attractive. “Your water's boiling over, you know,” she observed quietly, to Duvalyon's unblinking red eyes. They were hard and easy to meet, both at the same time; most of her wanted nothing more than to let her eyes slide shut, but another part of Alses' mind, one of the bits that did the more joined-up thinking, was shrieking at her to keep her eyes trained on him at all times.

[Duvalyon Hellebore]

Duvalyon gave a nod and made a sound of approval at the change in the Ethaefal's flesh. It was the first thing that seemed to bring him any pleasure, meager though it was. Alses finally spoke words his ear could trace. There might have been bare amusement at her first question. There was something childlike to her wondering. While Duvalyon hated being a foreign spectacle to Azo, he was moderately accustomed to children. Some ventured he was even fond of the ones in Kalinor. It made him more patient with Alses's disjointed questions. He didn't reply until reminded about the water, though. "So it is," he answered calmly. The moment she was useful to him, she began to exist. He left the Ethaefal's side to steep the medicine. A fragrance rested on the steam: balsam fir. It momentarily reminded Duvalyon of the woods outside the caverns of Kalinor. His childhood was not one spent outdoors like many young Symenestra boys. The senior Hellebore showed Duvalyon how to dress a wound before he learned how to dress a hare. Evergreen's scent was a rare treat in his youth, conjuring days he had broken loose from what it meant to be the eldest and visited the woods. Duvalyon couldn't pinpoint the day when the door to escape that responsibility had shut irrevocably. But it had, leaving him with arms full of obligations. Fifteen sometimes seemed young for a first harvest. "Scent and memory," he mumbled mysteriously to himself in the deep tones of Symenos as he shook off the thoughts. "Sit up and drink this." A bowl of light gold tea was extended towards Alses, "All of it." He smirked, proving he was not without a sense of humor as he said, "I'm assuming you don't want me to help you." Duvalyon did not seem the sort of medic who cradled heads and helped his patients sip broths and teas. "I don't know how long it will take to work", he continued to explain, "But if the Shinya herbalists are to be trusted, it will clean your blood."

[Alses]

OOCSorry for the delay; I'm revising for a medical school entry exam and that's cut down my writing time enormously. Things should be back to normal soon, however . Whatever medicine the spider doctor was cooking up smelled pleasant, at least – oddly reminiscent of the conifer forests which swathed the lower reaches of the Unforgiving, where the light was filtered and sepulchral and the air heady with the scent of pine sap. She was rather hoping, albeit fuzzily, that it was a remedy you inhaled – her experience of medicine thus far had been minimal, to say the least. Cuts and scrapes and bruises of all kinds were, in the first place, minor and somewhat difficult to acquire, and those she did manage to inflict on herself generally vanished with an application or two of directed time, which meant she'd never really had to submit to a doctor's ministrations before. There'd been horror stories from the other apprentices at various points down the years, of course - all about boiling tar and limbs being hacked off left, right and centre, and the occasional young man returning from a large evening (as her old master had rather euphemistically termed it) had sported, rather proudly, for some reason, an angry, red wound roughly stitched up by thread once the local medic had finished their work. Alses didn't have any particular objection to the sight of other people's wounds and blood, but it just didn't interest her in the way that magic did, or in the way that it evidently was supposed to, considering the amount of posturing by the young men. This, by contrast, was rather pleasant; the only thing boiling so far had been water. Things were looking up: she actually registered on his existential radar, too – he'd replied to her! However, events rather took a turn for the worse with his next words. Or rather, his next comprehensible words; he'd murmured something in a sonorous and deep tone that was completely unfamiliar to Alses' ears. 'Where is he from?' she wondered, idly, blinking slowly up at his lanky form. “Sit up and drink this.” Ah. Drinking. Less...objectionable...than eating, true, but still...Quite an impressive greenish tinge managed to flood up over Alses' face as she gingerly sat up, wincing as her head moved (her brain felt as though it were sloshing around inside her skull), and accepted the bowl. It took effort, a million tiny fingers twisting and pinching at every muscle, but she was upright, at least, and hunched over the bowl, her stomach protesting loudly in her mind. “If the herbalists are to be trusted?” she murmured, echoing Duvalyon with the bowl halfway to her lips and gorge high in her throat. If she was honest with herself, she was playing for time, trying to put off the whole messy business of drinking for as long as possible. Even if it was medicinal. “D'you trust them?”

[Duvalyon Hellebore]

OOCGood luck with the exam! Duvalyon smirked at Alses's unexpected question. "More than the poison in you." Thinking she might take this as avoidance, he added an abbreviated version. "Yes." He tapped the bottom of her bowl with a claw to make a clinking sound. "Drink." Suspecting she might try to wriggle out of taking her medicine, Duvalyon stared expectantly at the Ethaefal. He wondered if stubbornness was a racial trait for Ethaefal, or if he was just "fortunate" to meet only the most recalcitrant ones. Perhaps it was because the race had the opportunity to be stubborn. They could be set in their ways for thirty years and then begin anew without any lost time. Mortals were compelled to bend and adapt rapidly or their lives were spent. "Now." He added in his textured voice. It was pleasant to the ear despite the brusque command it shaped. In the back of his mind he wondered if an Ethaefal's body would accept an antidote the same way a human's would. He'd seen Laszlo mildly drunk, and poison was obviously swinging a mace at this one's blood. There was some element of mortality to the race, but he had never seen one ill or infirmed by years. May Viratas have mercy and let the blood be clean.

[Alses]

OOCIt went very well! Well above the average statistics, so that should give my application a bit of a fillip . No such luck; Duvalyon didn't give her the opportunity to wriggle out of it, closing down her only avenue of prevarication and tapping the bowl gently with one bone-spired finger for emphasis, making it ring in her hands. “Drink.” Two rubies glowed in space, unblinking and fixed on her when she chanced a glance up from the medicine, vision swimming. “Now,” he added, his manner brusque but not unpleasant, the sharp edges taken off by the richness of his tone. She nodded, dumbly, her movements jerky and uncoordinated – the medicinal tea slopped over one side of the bowl before she began to choke the stuff down, reluctantly letting the warm liquid seep past her lips and around her half-gritted teeth. Her throat worked furiously for several moments – rising gorge fighting against falling liquid – before she managed to swallow. It didn't really taste of much – or rather, it tasted somewhat like a pine forest smelled. In fact, the stuff was rather like some of the floral white teas she was fond of at Mhakula's, with a slightly watery component thrown in for good measure, since she was actually drinking the stuff, rather than simply experiencing it as was her normal practice. For one, glorious moment as she forced the medicine down, Alses thought she'd actually got away with it: there had been no immediate reaction, no stomach-clenching cramps and vomit reflex. Maybe all that time at the Tea-House had brought with it an unexpected benefit. 'Too soon.' That was her next thought - hot on the heels of those fleeting moments of bliss there came the response – the world was at once too hot and too bright: her eyes slid closed and a spreading wave of darkness swept over her dress from wherever it touched her skin, drinking in the sweat that was suddenly pouring from every pore until the material was sodden. A headache pounded meanly across her temples and the sprites in her muscles and bones were twisting cruelly, dug in deep and fighting the purgative effects of whatever she'd swallowed. “Good doctor,” she burbled, retching emptily into the bowl that had, up until recently, held the tea. It was trying its level best to return there, it seemed. “Good doctor-” she tried again: it was just a title, meaningless – she didn't know whoever was treating her well enough to make a judgement “-this s'posed to happen?” Alses wanted to ask what happened to the poisons that the medicine was supposed to counteract, how they were got rid of – whether, therefore, this bodily rebellion was normal - but there was precious little breath left for questions between her rebelling stomach and the tremors now racing across her form. Matters weren't helped, either, by the fading of the light outside as the sun began to dip below the horizon. The Change would soon be upon her, tearing away her celestial form, stripping skin of colour and leaving her a washed-out Konti – was that a glimmer of gold light at her feet, growing and rising with every second, or just the shifting of the tiles and her own addled sight? Another rippling flash – it was there all right, already beginning.

[Duvalyon Hellebore]

Interesting. He didn't know Ethaefal could retch. As a well-trained medic, Duvalyon knew exactly what to do when a patient asked about symptoms he was unfamiliar with in the course of treatment: lie. "I expected something like this." Well, he knew antidotes could be purgative, but he wasn't quite sure what this one would produce, especially for a poison in the blood. Ethaefal weren't his usual patients, save when Laszlo managed to turn the house into a trap for himself. And that was more throwing supplies at the Ethaefal and telling him to not hang himself. Duvalyon's eyes cast about for a larger bowl and some water, should Alses's dry heaves progress to something worse. He certainly wasn't going to clean a mess up from the floor. A wry part of him wondered if Ethaefal vomit would have motes of light. He moved calmly and deliberately in his search and discovery, as if nothing in the room was particularly troubling. The light had altered, and his vision with it. There was a kinder cast to the room, the fiendish orange and white glares dampened. "Sunset," he observed placidly, knowing what it would bring for the woman on his table. With a larger bowl in hand, he faced the trembling Ethaefal. His attention was dryly academic. Alses's transformation was similar to Laszlo's in principle but not in manifestation. There seemed something distinctly personal about the transition. It was easier to see that when exposed to variations. A Konti? Duvalyon raised a brow, his first sign of life. This one was safe from his sort in all aspects. No wonder she seemed fairly tame in his presence. Or her delirium had yet to dispel. "Here." He exchanged one bowl for another, "Just in case." He bent to find her face a moment, proving he wasn't entirely indifferent to her suffering. "If you don’t plan on using it. I want to look at your pupils."