“Alright, I’ll trust you. We need to get started with the Itrian Severance Ritual once you’re done, though,” Zel said.

Zef briefly looked up from her scribbled notes: “Huh? Oh yeah, that. Yeah. That’ll be a good way to try these, good idea.”

Zel backed out of the room slowly and left Zefaris to her devices for the time being, deciding to come check on her once those promised twenty minutes were up. In the meanwhile, she checked on Jorfr - at least she thought to do so, but she had neglected to ask where exactly the nearest ritual site was. One of his sisters was thankfully having her breakfast in the great hall and guided Zel to the longhouse’s relatively modest courtyard, at whose farthest end stood a great obelisk, and before it Jorfr was busy carving a complex pattern of channels into a slate of ice using downright stone-age looking tools. From the obelisk, just above the ice-slate, there hung a predatory, panther-like creature with six razor-sharp tendrils sprouting along its back in two rows of three, bearing some visible injuries. It had six legs with unsettlingly elongated toes and strongly curved retractable claws, and its feline head possessed four eyes as well as two long, bristle-tipped ears folded flat to the sides.

“Where’d you get that thing? And what is it?” Zel pointed to it.

“Huh? Oh, this. I just went to one of the secondary sarcophagus chambers and picked out the most appropriate capture for this ritual. We have… A library of captured sacrificial beasts, all frozen. Every great clan does. This one’s a Pantheroid Razorflayer, a common predator comparable to a… Lynx or a mountain lion, I think. They climb trees and jump on things, and they also act as pollinators for some of the megaflora. I thought it appropriate for this rite given its propensity for severing things. You have the brass stake?”

“Of course.”

Zel went on to assist with the sacrificial preparations, using the Stake of Sacrifice for its amplifying properties. An intense, burning sensation consumed her arm when she used the stake to strike the beast dead, penetrating its cervical spine and severing one of its arteries using a diagonal stroke. The eldritch runes along its surface came alive as the beast’s purplish blood drained into the complex network of channels which Jorfr had carved into a slate of ice on the ground. Zel felt the image of the God of Sacrifice enter her mind’s eye, its skinless, plug-eyed face giving a sickly smile of approval as it reached out for her.

Jorfr gave a light nod in approval, observing the pattern fill. He warned: “Let go of the stake. The razorwire should come out any moment now…”

Before she could question, his words came true. The Razorflayer stirred, emitting a sound of pain despite its spine being severed. From the bleeding wound sprang forth seven tendrils of silver, bladed brambles, already smeared in blood and viscera as if it had grown somewhere within the creature before emerging. Up-close one could tell that it wasn’t actually modern razorwire, but it didn’t matter. The razorwire slithered across the creature’s body and wrapped it end-to-end, tightening and cutting into the beast, more and more blood pouring down from it and into the runic pattern, filling the deep recess in its center rather than spill over. One could hear joints popping out of place and bones snapping as its limbs were bent at unnatural angles. The sacrifice-god’s metal tendrils completely enveloped the animal and quite literally wrung it dry while horrific crunching and squelching echoed from within. A deluge of blood poured from the mass and seemingly vanished into Jorfr’s network of channels, as if they were able to hold an ocean of life-fluid. By the end of it, there was no animal left - just a mass of bloody razorwire with the brass stake sticking out of it, glowing with arcane power, downright seething with it.

“And now… We wait for the others. Leave the stake for now. What of Zefaris?”

“She asked for twenty minutes. It seems that looking at the Black Rod up close embedded its glyphs into her mind and she’s been writing them down to get them out of her head all morning. She said she was just about done when I checked on her.”

“You are not worried?”

“I trust her to know if something has gone wrong… But now that I think of it, I should let the both of them know where to go in the first place.”

And so, Zelsys left to do just that. Zefaris asked to borrow her White Marble Tablet, stating that she needed some of its contents to make special ink. Zel handed it over without a second thought before moving on to Victor. She found him in his room, working on another servitor. It was noticeably different in design to Midnight Wolf, being a fair bit larger and segmented in a different way - at least, that much she could discern from the one, single leg of it that was finished. He whipped around at her entrance as if startled in the middle of doing something wrong, only to calm down and return to his work.

“Right, the ritual. Just a moment… Alright, done.”

Without another word, he rose and followed her back to the ritual site.

“Making a new servitor already?” Zel asked as they walked.

“Huh? No. Well, not really. I’m redesigning Midnight Wolf. I recreated the original design in a low-output version for testing and tried to use it as mobility-enhancing armor the way you did back in Agartha, but… It just doesn’t work for me. Total nightmare to control, I had to completely focus on keeping my balance so I wouldn’t spin out and eat shit.”

“You sure you didn’t struggle to control it because you hadn’t fully recovered yet? Your performance goes through the floor if you try to push yourself while injured.”

“No, I don’t think it was that. Forming devilbone isn’t strenuous if I take my time and I used an Ignis gem as a core to start it up, so I wasn’t strained at all.”

Thinking on it for a moment, Zel theorized aloud: “I do have the Inhuman Physiomechanics trait, and there’s the Despot of Self to take into account…”

“I figure that was the case, too. You have all sorts of… For lack of a better term, control automation. Honestly I don’t understand how you haven’t automated something like Siphoning Pulse yet, just tie it to a defensive reflex and have the Primordial Self form a nerve circuit specifically for handling it, then only turn it on when you think you might be in danger.”

Zelsys furrowed her brow as she took in the suggestion and felt her Primordial Self trying to figure out if it would be possible to implement something of the sort.