The mage didn’t just crack Khalia’s life force and mana core, she tore them apart without a care as the merfolk screamed at the top of her lungs, writhing with so much strength that the operating table trembled despite being bolted to the ground.
The Kolgan mage kept going until everything that made Khalia a person almost disappeared. Only then did she stop, letting the energy flow from the Forbidden Sun mend the wounds that the restraints had inflicted upon the writhing merfolk during the procedure.
For the first time since she had met Lith, Solus was happy of not having a body. Or rather, she would have been if she still had the presence of mind to notice that she was screaming as hard as Khalia.
What Solus had just witnessed wasn’t a surgical procedure so much as a magical lobotomy. Khalia’s eyes were now empty like those of a doll while her mouth remained open as she mindlessly drooled.
Solus wept for the living corpse in front of her. She had hoped until the last moment that, after retrieving the Hands of Menadion, by taking control of the Forbidden Sun it would have been possible to undo the damage.
Yet what lay in front of her wasn’t a person anymore. Just a lump of flesh and mana kept together by the Forbidden Sun.
“Is it done?” A male mage asked after the arrays had been depowered and the female Kolgan had opened the doors.
“Of course. Bring her to the breeding center and bring here one of the oldest subjects for the extraction procedure. The specimen is young and healthy. She should provide Kolga with a bountiful harvest.” She said.
Solus was so shocked that she barely registered her bond with Lith being intact. She wanted to scream but she had no mouth. Her stomach hurt even though she had none. Her stone body burned with an unknown pain, yet she didn’t care.
Under any other circumstances, Solus would worry about Lith not being there to shield her life force and about the consequences that they both might suffer from the effects of the Forbidden Sun while they were apart.
Now, however, all she could think of was how the people of Kolga had abused her mother’s legacy for centuries. None of what had happened to Khalia and to many others before her would have been possible if not for Menadion’s Hands.
Solus used her shapeshifting abilities to blend in with her surroundings while she explored what happened inside the Light Torch. Being already in the surgical wing, all she had to do was to follow the screams.
A few corridors away, she found two female Kolgans sharing the same delivery room. The Forbidden Sun boosted the mothers’ metabolism, making the labor last barely a few minutes.
The two mothers stared at each other with fear and compassion until their babies came out. They begged the healers to let them hold their child at least once after the umbilical cord was cut, but the mages didn’t even bother replying.
They cleaned the babies with a water spell and enveloped them with a cloth that temporarily shielded them from the effects of the Forbidden Sun.
“There’s no time for that. If we delay even for one second, both your children will die.” The nurses said while pushing the beds out of the delivery room and bringing the mothers into two different rooms.
Just like Khalia, their limbs had been strapped to the metal frame to keep them from messing with the procedure.
Solus followed the healers as they brought the babies to another operating room filled with arrays. At the center of the chamber there was a perfectly normal cradle and what looked like a glass coffin the size of an adult filled with a translucent violet liquid.
“Odd or even?” One of the healers said after pulling a dice out of his pockets.
“Odd.”
The healer rolled a three and put the baby he was carrying in the glass coffin, where the infant started to breathe from its gills while the other healer put the remaining baby in the cradle.
Once again, the doors closed and several arrays lit up while the healers chanted their respective spell. The mage near the cradle first made the thread connecting the baby to the Forbidden Sun visible and then he manipulated it so that it would gently seep into the baby without dealing it any permanent damage.
The mage near the coffin, instead, called upon the power of the arrays and the mana geyser to safely split the darkness element from its light counterpart.
‘Good gods! Mom, what the heck were you thinking when you created something capable of conjuring Chaos magic?’ Solus thought.
Yet the healer shot the Chaos in the ground and kept the unnatural light. Solus stared in horror as the Chaos flowed through the array back inside Mogar before being pulled away with an energy signature that she knew all too well.
‘Gods, what is that thing?’ Solus had no idea that the other side of Chaos was Decay.
While Chaos magic broke all bonds, turning matter into atoms and exhausting all forms of energy, Decay magic pushed forward the clock. Used against a stone, it would turn it into sad.
Used against a muddy pond, in the presence of enough nutrients, it would boost life to the point that in a few minutes, life forms would evolve from unicellular organisms to tadpoles.
Yet there was no way to provide such an amount of nutrients so the only result would be death. Even if it was possible, Decay could generate only corrupted life forms with a metabolism so fast that their life span would last only for a few seconds.
Anything born from such magic would fade before anyone could register that it had ever existed.
Without their counterpart, all elements could solely destroy. Just like Chaos, Decay couldn’t be controlled, only unleashed after being created.
The healer dropped the spark of Decay in the glass coffin where the baby lay submerged in nutrients, making it grow and age at a speed visible to the naked eye. It took the baby a second to go from infant to adult.
An adult with a skeletal build for not having the time to properly absorb the food, with saggy muscles for never having moved a finger, with the mind of a child that had only know pain for her whole short life.
Yet none of that mattered to Forbidden Magic since her life force was perfect and ripe for the taking. The healer timed his spell to perfection, striking the moment his specimen reached its apex.
By conjuring the power of the mana geyser, he broke down the wretched woman into her light and darkness counterparts, killing her on the spot. The life force moved into the cradle, granting the other child a doubled life span, while the light element and the mana core became part of the Forbidden Sun, renewing its power.
The darkness, instead, plunged into Mogar and followed the underground path that the Chaos had earlier taken. Darkness moved much slower than Chaos, allowing Solus to confirm the presence of the familiar energy signature.
‘That’s the same kind of darkness energy that we saw coming out of the rift in Kogaluga during Lith’s tour as a Ranger. This is where the energy that fuels the undead comes from.’ Solus thought.
