Chapter 17: 17 – Shriveled Heart

She stretched out on the hard mattress, her feet hanging out of the bunk, head resting on her hands. All it took was a couple deep breaths, and she slipped into the realm of sleep.

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A mixture of smells and sounds assaulted the senses. Zelsys instinctively grabbed to the right, grabbing the cleaver before she even opened her eyes. The pale morning sun shone through the doorway. The smell that filled her nostrils was a pungent mixture of Viriditas and Nigredo, the former countering the latter and creating a smell that could only be described as aggressively fungal, a smell that one would follow if they wanted to find mushrooms after rain. The other smells were sweat, and menthol, and vanilla, noticeably wafting in from nearby. 

“Morning already?” she thought, looking around. The bunk across was empty, but there she was - Zefaris stood over the sink, brushing her teeth. She placed a cup underneath the faucet and turned the valve, the crystal on the wall glowing a faint blue as crystal-clear water poured into the waiting cup. She poured the water down the drain, then opened the faucet again and washed her hands, then her face.

Shaking her head, Zelsys sluggishly rolled out of the bunk into a sitting position, stretching and rolling her shoulders, blinking and yawning as she shook off the cobwebs of sleep. “Talk about a deep sleeper. Hey Snow White, catch,” said the blonde, throwing something thin and wooden into Zelsys’s waiting hand. It was a flat piece of wood with bristles on one end - a mass-produced toothbrush, the type that one would find in a ration pack’s accessory tin. It was pristine, and smelled strongly of menthol.

“We got mis-assigned a shitload of accessory tins instead of regular rations. Had to start hunting early on, but at least we got all the toothbrushes and Aqua crystals we could need,” Zefaris answered both of the questions she was going to ask, walking out onto the clearing soon after.

Zelsys stood up, walked to the sink, wetted the toothbrush, and just… Brushed her teeth, unable to shake the strange feeling. A toothbrush and running water. Such mundane, basic amenities felt out of place in a place like this. Her mouth filled with foam and bitter menthol, washed away by the water to who knew where. An arcane reservoir like Makhus’s Rubedo bottle? An alchemic recycler that would condense the pure Aqua into a new crystal? A regular old tank somewhere in the transport’s guts? Who knew. 

She rinsed her mouth, splashed some water on her face, put on her boots and strapped the cleaver in its holster to her back. Next came the arm harness, and in her hand, the Tablet. The rays of the morning sun fell upon her face as she stepped out of the transport, and there they were, the three so-called war criminals. 

Zefaris and Sigmund were around the now-dead fire-pit, busy packing things into three huge backpacks and a variety of smaller pouches, while Makhus was crouched at the still, sticking seals to one bottle with his right hand and holding another to the outlet with his left. The rot-bear’s heart had shriveled to less than the size of a fist, and still it beat inside the flask, pumping black Fog into the apparatus even with the burners off. 

As Zelsys approached them, she felt Makhus’s eye upon the Tablet, and she almost palpably felt the realization dawning on him before he asked what she thought he would. “Hey, this might be a lil’ much to ask,” he began, but Zelsys cut him off before he could finish by simply walking up and sitting down on one of the logs, placing the Tablet on the ground and activating the PUT INTO STORAGE function.

She sat there, legs crossed and hands on her knees, staring at him as the Fog vortex formed. “It won’t stay open for long, and the moment it closes that’s it,” she smugged at him. “Hurry up soldier boy.”

A hearty laugh issued forth from her when she saw his eyes go wide as he reached for one of the larger seal-bottles with lightning speed, cautiously placing it onto the vortex, which was too small for the bottle to fit. It expanded to swallow the bottle, and an expression of visible relief settled into Makhus’s face as he reached for the next one, dropping it into the vortex with far less caution.

She knew that the vortex would stay open for as long as they kept adding things, but they didn’t, and the resulting momentary panic manifested itself as a mindblowing feat of sheer coordination. In less than five minutes, the three soldiers managed to store most of the seal-bottles and the vast majority of the heaviest goods they would be carrying, even including their chest-plates and weapons, with the exception of Makhus’s sword and Zefaris’s rifle.

“Last one,” the blonde said as she rushed toward the vortex. In her hands, there was a small flask bearing seals in blue ink, half-filled with ash and coals, a fist-sized gemstone the colour of dying embers sitting atop them. The vortex swallowed it the same way it did everything else, and the three soldiers breathed a collective sigh of relief. Zelsys gave them all a look, grinning ear to ear. She could tell by the rising annoyance on Zefaris’s face that she had already realized what she was about to say.

“Y’know, I would’ve let you store your shit even if you let the vortex close,” she admitted, “but watching you go was entertaining.”

---

They departed perhaps half an hour later, leaving behind most of the camp - Zelsys couldn’t clearly tell how much the sun had moved through the tree canopy, and more importantly, she couldn’t read its movements that accurately. Makhus didn’t bother even attempting to dismantle the alchemic still, instead just smashing it up with a rock before they left. 

A harmless prank aside, the three soldiers were thankful for not having to carry the bulkiest of their possessions. Their backpacks were still heavy enough to slow them down, which was only compounded by the density of the forest.

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