Chapter Five: The Extraction

From

The Dossier of Dr. Brink, Volume One, Part One

At first there was nothingness, then I was suddenly engulfed in a wild cacophony of crashing waves and primal screaming, then mere seconds after I had fallen unconscious—at least that it how long it felt to me—I opened my eyes, heart racing, and the sounds abruptly stopped. I reoriented myself as my pulse normalized.

I was outside, still in the dead forest, but I had been elevated and placed on my back, no longer on my stomach amongst the dirt and flesh. I was lying on a pallet of straw with some piece of cloth folded beneath my head. The sun had declined to a position indicating late afternoon. Before I had located my own limbs, or accounted for the various aches now competing for my attention, I thought of Koss.

I looked around to locate them, or anything at all, and my eyes found a multifaceted scene that I had to process in sequence. Immediately adjacent to my location, an array of assorted small objects, seemingly organized with care along a rectilinear grid, lay upon the ground. I was a few dozen meters away from the building, but it was no longer a building, rather a smoldering ruin—a blackened shell containing the alchemical processing equipment now reduced to a heap of heat-twisted scrap. Finally, I saw the Sauropsians. Scur and Tetch were standing over a table upon which my mattress had been placed. They were looking down at Koss, who lay atop it, their chest rising and falling with regular rhythm. I was immediately awash in profound relief.

“Koss,” I called, my voice stronger than I had honestly expected, but Koss did not stir, did not respond. Scur and Tetch perked up at the sound, and Tetch galloped over to my side. They hopped around and yipped vigorously—immediately obvious to me as signals of positive valance—and I smiled wide and offered my hand to them. They grasped it and helped me to my feet, which I found this time with reassuring ease, and I grabbed my pack from its position beside the table, slung it over my shoulder with a professional confidence, and made my way over to Koss.

What I found there sobered me considerably. The wounds on Koss’s face and neck had closed—closed entirely, knit shut by whatever I had done to them in the last moments before my own collapse—but closed imperfectly, sealed around several small, dark shapes still lodged beneath the new skin. I realized that this must have been glass, fragments of the shattered window, healed over as though nobody had the presence of mind to remove them first, and I suppose that was exactly the case. Acutely aware of the possibility of infection, I recognized that my work as a healer was not yet complete.

For the first time since arriving in this land, I turned to the familiar practice of surgery. ​I retrieved the fine-pointed tweezers—an instrument intended for manipulating clockwork rather than flesh, though the principle of extracting a foreign object without damaging the surrounding material struck me as reassuringly identical—from the tinkering kit in my pack, then equipped my scalpel with a steady hand. I sanitized both with alcohol from my dwindling supplies and promptly set to task.

Koss stirred under the first touch, eyes opening to slits, and for a moment I thought I had caused pain rather than relieved it. Then their gaze found my face, and held it, and one clawed hand rose, slow and deliberate, and closed around my wrist. It was the same grip Scur had offered me over the map in their hut, and I understood it the same way. I clasped their wrist in turn, said nothing—there was nothing in either of our languages that would have improved on the gesture—and returned to my work.

Scur, meanwhile, had produced a small clay jar from their satchel of powders and pastes, and applied its contents—something cool, possibly numbing, and beneath that, a sharper smell I associated with antiseptics—to each wound as I opened and evacuated it. Between the two of us we cleared at least thirty fragments of glass from Koss’s face, neck, and shoulder before there were no more visible to us. Tetch, who had been watching us intently, purred, then Scur joined and politely waved me off, satisfied. I put away my equipment, lowered myself to a squat beside the table, and allowed myself, for the first time since waking, to feel something other than clinical focus. My hands, I noticed, were shaking rather badly, and I let them.

⁂

In the sudden peace, both my mind and my eyes began to wander. I first noticed a set of tally marks gouged into the underside of the table—a count of sixty-six—that intrigued me and prompted me to investigate the various items that were laid out on the ground a few meters away. The immediate object of interest was a large leather bag, which I opened it to find two glass bottles filled with silver liquid. I initially assumed it to be mercury, but soon realized that its physical properties did not match this assumption—the density was far too low. I carefully placed the bottles back in the bag for later investigation.

Then I moved to the smaller objects. The first was a small, beautifully carved wooden bird, its wings outstretched in mid-flight. I held it in my palm for a long moment, appreciating the fine work that must have been necessary for its creation. Second, wrapped in stained cloth, was some sort of pendant. It was a heavy disc of tarnished metal, stamped with the unnerving image of a gauntleted hand squeezing a crystal, a small drop of liquid falling from its tip. When I held it up for closer inspection, I heard Scur behind me make a low, guttural growl of alarm, a particular sound I had not heard from them before. I raised it to Scur in an attempt to learn more, but they just covered their eyes and turned away. I did not press the issue further at that time.

The remaining objects were pieces of paper, and I cannot hope to express here the complicated emotions that washed over me upon realizing that the text upon them was Opentongue. There were three pages: two larger sheets with handwriting, and one smaller one that appeared to be torn from a book. I read through them, mouth agape.

The smaller page was from some sort of encyclopedia of alchemy and artifice, with specific references to fabric manipulation and various applications: mechanical companions, weapon enhancement, creation of extradimensional spaces, all under an entry on “Rarefied Field Essence” which had been circled and underlined in several places. Most of it went over my head—in my homeland, this was considered extremely advanced study that I had barely pursued—but I resolved to read closer later, and placed the page in my pack.

The larger pages told the story of the building itself—enough of it for me to understand what had happened here—and they disturbed me a great deal as I read. They were journal entries that interspersed both technical notes and personal reflections. The refinery had been operated by an alchemist working under the direction of an individual known as Foreman Fox, and the equipment in the building had been a complex machine for extracting a particular type of alchemical essence from a variety of mineral ores, producing enormous quantities of toxic waste as a byproduct.

I suddenly realized what I had seen—something that I had heard about only once before in my life, from the shared, rambling story of two traumatized soldiers I was treating, a story that had fascinated me at the time. The individual strapped to the chair had been used as a living catalytic reactor—a biological component in the alchemical circuit, forced to process reactants within their own body’s metabolism to produce the desired substance and filter out the rest. They had almost certainly been experiencing overwhelming agony, perhaps to the point of a paradoxical numbness, and the state of their mind at the time of our encounter had likely been that of confused rage.

My continued reading confirmed this. The yield was too low, the original process inefficient, and in desperation, the alchemist had turned to capturing a Sauropsian and integrating them into the machine. He justified it, in his own words, as “a simple creature for a simple task.” This seemed to work, for a time, as he noted that the Sauropsian’s physiology had proven surprisingly resilient, the yield having increased, and the shrieks having subsided into a “manageable gurgle.” At the bottom of the page, almost appearing as a footnote, had been scrawled a strikingly personal detail: “FINALLY, I will have enough to get my Flower out of that PUTRID hovel. She always loved the birds in the market. SO! I will buy her ten, a hundred, a thousand, a million!!!”

The second page revealed that everything went wrong. Rather than merely being filtered, the toxins began to integrate into the Sauropsian’s physiology. Their flesh was warping, bones restructuring, and they had nearly broken the restraints. The alchemist could not disconnect them without dying, he could not cease the work without Fox finding out, and he was rapidly losing a coherent sense of self. He was trapped in a workshop with a victim who had become a component who had become a monster of the his own creation, and that monster watched him while he slept. At the bottom was the very last thing written, all lowercase, scribbled to the point of being difficult to read: “the done bird is done. flower bird flower bird flower where is my flower”

Scur and Tetch had been watching me read, and when I finally looked up, their expressions told me they suspected the weight of what I was holding, and I confirmed it. I pointed to the word “Sauropsian” on the page, then at the residual sludge of the tormented being we had fought, then at the two of them. They went very still. Then Tetch made a soft, low sound of grief that needed no translation at all. I had to stifle my intense compulsion to laugh. Didn’t you already know, comrade? But then Scur lowered to the ground beside me, and I wrapped my arms around them.

⁂

After some time in silence, I was filled with a physician’s delight to see Koss rise of their own accord. They sat up, then stood, then exchanged lively dialogue with Scur and Tetch, who seemed to be equally delighted. Scur then pointed at the sinking sun, followed by downriver, in the direction of the village. I agreed that it was time to return to the cove, so I moved to gather my scattered belongings in preparation. I retrieved my crossbow from where it lay, still near the now-ruined refinery—at this point I assumed the Sauropsians had somehow set it ablaze—and took a minute to peer inside, finding nothing of note. I still do not know the ultimate fate of the alchemist; there were no signs of a body in the burnt remains of the building.

After I rolled up my mattress, reequipped the harness, and took a very long swig from a waterskin, we set off. Evening was arriving, and the sun at our backs bathed the forest in a pleasant golden light. The journey home was, thankfully, even more uneventful than the journey upriver. Koss once again took point, marching with a confident steadiness that both greatly surprised and reassured me.

I took the duration to reflect. At first, I tried to make sense of what I had done to the refinery victim and what I had done for Koss, finding little success at the time. Then, I contemplated the quite astounding revelation that people in this land—at least a portion of them, some in poverty, others in industry—communicate in Opentongue. Finally, my thoughts found their way to the alchemist himself, his ability to rationalize, and what may have happened to him. I held the carved wooden bird in my hands for most of the walk, running my fingers over the grooves, finding it impossible not to admire the delicate craftsmanship.

We arrived at the cove after nightfall and were received by the villagers with great warmth. While my companions presumably explained the events of the day and the necessity of gathering alkaline stone, I retired directly to Scur’s hut to rest. Atop my unfurled mattress, I looked over the belongings we had recovered from the refinery, particularly the encyclopedia page.

It quickly became clear to me that the silver liquid was Rarefied Field Essence. My excitement over its many potential applications—all laid out with instructive clarity on the page—arrived simultaneously with the uncomfortable realization that it was the direct product of the captured Sauropsian. I sat with this discomfort for some time, mulling over my course of action.

Eventually, I resolved the uncertainty. In my solitude, I uncorked one of the bottles, uncorked an empty vial from my supplies, and poured out a small amount for my own personal utility. I then set the two bottles aside for the people of the village to do with as they pleased. Shortly after, Scur entered the hut, bringing me a meal of cooked fish, and the smell immediately brought to my attention an intense hunger that had been quietly accumulating since that morning.

While I ate with notably less grace than I had previously shown around my Sauropsian hosts, Scur pointed to the cliffs on their map. I nodded, acknowledging our imminent task, and for the short remainder of our time awake that evening, we brainstormed and discussed—through drawing and gesture—possible methods of hauling the immense quantity of mineral required to clean the river. We worked until I could no longer keep my eyes open.

I dozed off while turning the carved bird over in my hands, and I slept through the night without dreaming, or without remembering that I had.

(Vol. One Part I to be continued in Chapter Six: The Cliffs)