The outpost ritual room had seen some attention from a skilled draurcraftyst.

There'd already been a basic circle pre-painted on the floor in platinum suspension when Jarv entered the room, sealed with resin except for a few bare contact points, and it had only taken him a few minutes to sketch the rest of the tokenization diagram out in platinum chalk.

Really, the perfect circle it needed was the only seriously faffy part, and somebody, presumably Eind, had taken care of that for him. At least, he hoped the circle was perfect.

There wasn't much in the way of stabilization structures on the walls or ceiling, and Jarv was having to handle that manually.

He paused halfway across the room, eyes closed, hands out. He could feel a curl in the energy of the room, a place where the field peaked and looped, nagging at him like a thorn burr stuck in clothing.

He stepped forward and ran his hand through the space, massaging the field with the energy of his own body, feeling the curl unknotting and slipping loose. The peak relaxed and fell, the patch evening out.

This was the difference between an amateur and skilled draurcraftyst. Anyone with a few months training could throw together a ritual and start pulling tokens out of a creature's soul, but if the energy field supporting it was peaky or uneven, adulterated, or turbulent, or if the diagram was badly adapted to the environment, they'd get weak versions of surface tokens and nothing else.

Jarv took a step to the left. It felt like there was only one irregularity left, a wheel-shaped depression where the field was weaker in one corner. He pushed his hand into it and felt into his soul, bringing the claw of Nix-nix-chittalias-desth into the forefront.

Just holding a powerful soul token ready would radiate energy into the environment, and by concentrating on the claw Jarv was able to emit trace amounts. He waved his hand through the depression like a painter, letting energy mist out of him until the bowl was full, the field in the room now completely smooth. Eventually whatever background force was causing the depression would push out what he'd dripped in, but he had a few minutes.

The sound of a latch from behind him signaled the opening of the door. Eind poked his head through the gap.

"I have the supplies you asked for."

Untamed energy washed in through the open door, disturbing the tranquil energy of the room with rowdy currents and eddies. New tangles twisted into existence. Within seconds the room had returned to a chaotic mess.

Jarv scratched at his head and turned to the door.

Eind was standing there holding a white bag in his hand, looking into the room with naked curiosity. There was nothing particularly interesting about the room. Just the diagram on the floor and the dead body in the center of it.

"Thanks," Jarv said stepping to the door and putting his hand against it. "Just, leave them outside. And don't come in for half an hour."

He tried to push the door closed, but Eind caught it at the last second, putting his face to the crack.

"Are you tokenizing a human in there?"

"I would never do something so heinous or illegal," Jarv said, putting pressure back on the door.

"Can I watch?"

Jarv paused and pulled the door open.

"Promise not to tell anyone?"

"I promise."

"Come in," Jarv said, letting Eind enter then closing the door behind him. "Help me look for peaks."

Eind didn't understand at first, but Jarv was able to coach him through feeling out the knots of energy in the room, if not on how to smooth them out. Together they equalized the space in half the time it had taken Jarv alone.

When the room was tranquil again, Jarv crouched by the corpse of Paumi and lined the cleanly decapitated head up with the body.

The empty eyes of the head stared up at him accusingly.

"I can't believe you killed him," Eind said, looking down at the corpse. "We weren't friends, but..."

Jarv reached down and moved the head's jaw, speaking in a high pitched voice.

"I had it coming. I was a plant." Jarv rolled the head to face Eind. "Don't cry for me. Someone would have done it sooner or later."

"Please don't do that," Eind said, looking away awkwardly.

"You're the one who wanted to watch a human tokenization, you grisly fuck."

Jarv straightened the head and held his hand over the body, feeling for the thread of energy that would be flapping around perpendicular to the ritual circle.

The tokenization diagram worked by creating a regimented flow of energy from the circle upwards. The current would pass through an object –in this case, a body– and carry its soul out in purified, comprehensible packets, all sorted and ready for use.

Jarv caught the invisible thread and let himself become a destination for the trickle of energy, feeling it begin to flow.

Eind leaned forward, staring down at the spot on the man's chest where the fragments would emerge.

The first soul token was unremarkable, a flat rectangle like a card, about one finger long and two thirds that wide, light gray, with an elaborate border.

The image on its face was a painting of a narrow shortsword of a type that was called a dancing blade in Drek'thelamagne, mostly used in the performative, acrobatic duelling style that was taught and practiced in imperial institutions. The image showed a hand grasping the sword's hilt, so Jarv tended to think it represented Paumi's fencing ability rather than anything as exotic as a bound blade or transplanted sharpness.

He plucked the token out of the air and laid it down in front of him on the ground, before feeling for the thread again.

The second token to emerge was dusty gray, the image on its face showing ropes and wires, straight or knotted, some barbed, endlessly overlapping, covering the entire painted area.

Jarv took it and held it up to show Eind.

"Any idea what this could be?"

"Uh," Eind said, thinking. He chewed his lip before answering. "I couldn't hazard a guess."

Jarv laid the token on the ground without comment, placing it to the side away from the first. The soul only developed attributes that were integral to a person's life. If something appeared during tokenization, it had either been transplanted in at some point, or it was essential to their being.

Paumi's body yielded five tokens in total. The sword, the ropes, a token displaying the image of a golden statue in Paumi's exact likeness which Jarv took to be his pride or maybe dignity, the life token, and the self token.

The last two were always the hardest to extract, particularly from a corpse. A novice or middling draurcraftyst might have been able to tease out the two or three fragments closest to the surface –in this case sword and ropes– but they would have been weak and muddled. Jarv got all five, each one almost as pure and intact as was technically possible in the basic ritual room.

Paumi's life token had come out damaged, too dog-eared and torn to animate a human body, but that was unavoidable following a beheading.

He was about to start wiping the diagram down –the self token was always the last thing available in a body– but he felt a flicker in the thread of energy floating up from the ritual. It was the kind of turbulence that would indicate there was still something in the vessel.

He placed his hand back into the thread and let the connection form, waiting.

It took a minute before one last thing washed loose from Paumi's soul, a hexagonal token, vivid red, with an image showing an indistinct snarling creature mostly hidden by darkness.

Jarv pulled it out of the air and showed it to Eind.

"And this. What's this?"

Eind looked at it then at Jarv, worrying his lip.

"I don't know. It looks like a creature fragment."

Jarv held the token in his hands, looking down.

"I think this is a void wolf," he said, indicating the partially obscured animal in the image. "I read it as sudden violence. A void wolf's lunge maybe?"

"How would he have something from a void wolf?" Eind asked, then, "Why was it so deep?"

Jarv gathered the dancing sword, wolf lunge, and golden statue tokens into one stack and slipped them into his pocket. The life and self tokens went into their own pile, set aside.

He picked the ropes token up and held it to the side, then looked into his own soul, seeking out the dustbull breath he held there. He brought it to the forefront, and a light gust of dust blew from his fingers.

The ropes token turned dusty gray and crumbled. Jarv broke it between his fingers, letting the ashes fall to the floor.

"Let's get the body into the hallway and grab the bag from outside," Jarv said, grabbing Paumi's feet.

Energy washed back into the room as they opened the door, and they folded Paumi's body to squeeze it through the doorway and into the area of dead space at the end of the corridor.

Back in the room, Jarv started unpacking the white bag. It was made of some kind of extremely light substance, waxy, but flexible and fragile. Eind explained it was a tar product that got used for a huge number of things here. Jarv hated it.

Jarv sat at the edge of the ritual room and pulled a brown paper bag from the larger plastic one. It smelled of food, and the bottom was soaked with grease. This at least was something familiar to Jarv.

He finished unwrapping the sandwich and bit into it, chewing mechanically as he identified the components.

"What is this?" he asked.

"Roast beef combo," Eind said.

Jarv shrugged. "It's fine."

"Yeah. The food here is fine."

Jarv pointed around at the circle on the floor.

"Clean this up and draw a surgery ring."

Eind's mouth fell open.

"Who are we doing surgery on? Not me?"

"Not you," Jarv confirmed.

Eind started wiping up the existing diagram with a wet cloth, then pulled out a metallic chalk and began the process of sketching a complicated diagram along and inside the pre-painted ring.

Jarv finished his sandwich and reached back into the bag. He rooted around, pulling out a gray steel lockbox with a padlock fitted to the front.

This will do.

Draurcraftyc tokens were fragments of a soul, parceled out into pieces that were easy to handle and relatively easy to understand. They stayed in that form so long as they were protected by a body, or were being held together by a ritual. Outside those bounds, the tokens were unstable. They could collapse for any reason, either dispersing, or activating, or sometimes taking on an existence of their own, separate from any body. Storing them for long periods was difficult, needing special preparations.

Jarv picked up his platinum chalk and made a series of scratches on the box, drawing miniature symbols, a simplified version of a ritual circle. When it was complete he slipped the sword, statue, and void wolf tokens into it, before closing the padlock and pocketing the key.

Eind was finishing the diagram on the floor when Jarv dove back into the bag and came out holding a stuffed rabbit toy.

"I asked for a doll," Jarv said, eyeing the rabbit. It was gray, about a foot tall, with glass beads for eyes and a fluffy tassle for a tail.

"Many of the dolls here are in that style," Eind said, standing back and looking down at the diagram. He looked satisfied with it. "I think the people here prefer animals to people. In this nation at least."

"I can see it," Jarv said.

He stood, placing the rabbit at the center of the circle. They closed the door and started massaging the energy field of the room back into something homogenous, this time Eind finding the irregularities on his own, and Jarv unpicking them. They were done in minutes.

Afterwards they both sat on either side of the diagram, their legs crossed under them. Jarv reached out and drew a line, completing the final step of the diagram.

All of the energy vanished from the room in an instant. Jarv felt it as a spiritual wind, brushing his skin, whirling around as it was drawn into the toy at the center. A moment later the toy's tokens appeared.

Two tokens, irregularly shaped squares, both frayed and faded. The toy wasn't seasoned enough to have anything of value in its soul, and what was there was almost too weak to extract.

One of the fragments showed a depiction of the toy's fabric skin, which Jarv interpreted as its softness. The other was white and cloud-like, which he didn't recognize, but could only be something related to its malleability.

Unlike the tokenization ritual, which set up a flow to parcel and remove a subject's soul forever, the surgery circle pushed a huge amount of energy into a body at once, forcing the soul out. It used more power, and the displacement was only temporary, but because of that it could be used to alter the constituents of an object or person.

Jarv reached out and plucked the cloud token from the air, quickly swapping it for the self token he'd taken from Paumi.

"Oh no," Eind said quietly, speaking almost to himself. "What are you doing."

Jarv performed the same motion again, swapping the rabbit's softness for Paumi's damaged life token.

He slipped the toy's original fragments into the lockbox, then sat back and watched as the two new tokens slowly sank back into the stuffed doll.

The rabbit sat up and turned its beady eyes on Jarv.

"For a second, I actually thought you'd do it. You couldn't even–" Paumi's voice trailed off. The rabbit's head turned, looking around at the ritual room. "Where am I?"

Eind's hands were clasped over his mouth as he quietly whispered, "Oh no" repeatedly, stretching the words out.

The rabbit caught sight of the circle below it, then looked down at its paws.

"What have you done?"

"Hello, Paumi," Jarv said. "I'm gonna need to ask you some questions."

Paumi looked further down, examining his body, then looked up at Jarv, hate shining in his glass eyes.

"You madman! I'll kill you!"

The rabbit launched itself at Jarv, wrapping its paws around his throat and squeezing. Jarv grabbed the back of its neck and pulled it away, depositing it back onto the ground.

"Bring me back!" Paumi shouted. "Where's my body? Put me back."

"Your head's gone, Paumi," Jarv said. "Snip snip, remember."

Paumi held his arms up, clenching his paws, and let out an inarticulate scream of rage.

The sound of a latch came from the wall behind them, and the door inched open. Indrie poked her head through.

"Everything alright in here? I heard shouting."

The rabbit spun on her, raising an accusing paw.

"You! Traitor!"

"Okay then," Indrie said, pulling back and closing the door behind her.

"Listen, Paumi. I'm not messing around," Jarv said. He pulled the void wolf token from the lockbox, holding it up for the rabbit to see. "Tell me about this."

Paumi folded his arms and looked to the side. Guilt was written all over the little rabbit's face.