I have a disease. My blood is wrong. My bones are sick. I'll die. But perhaps I can preserve myself, long enough, with the holy blood of our Delight.
A couple of days had passed since Eddy had performed the Rite of the Burgeoning Risen, and he still had not entirely calmed down. Being a Beyonder was wondrous, there was no argument about that. He had gained unnatural stealth and dexterity, he could see in the dark, hide his weapons and money easily, and smell the weather itself. All of this would have been unthinkable before that night in Orthos Wood. But, despite all of this, his introduction to mysticism and ritual magic had awoken a passion in him. It was all so interesting, so arcane and exotic. When he had drawn ancient symbols in bone-chalk and planted apple seeds in the eye-sockets of a corpse, he had truly felt like a part of the supernatural world. It was… thrilling. He knew that all of this was a childish response, but he didn't particularly care. Ritual magic was wonderful. It made him grateful for Mr Voice's help. Neville Atherton had clearly been very gifted, but his work was flawed. Some of his symbols were misattributed or slightly warped, and his draining sanity had affected his analysis heavily (especially in the rambling latter half of the book). Mr Voice's knowledge allowed him to correct these mistakes and sort the metaphorical wheat from the chaff. He had such an advantage over other dabblers in the mystical arts.
Since Wednesday, he had performed the simple protective rite twice more - once that very morning. Both times had been successful and he had grown more used to the ritual. He still heard distant whispers and saw disturbing sights in the periphery of his vision, but repeated exposure had made the manifestations less frightening to him. However, he still hoped that he could start properly digesting his yet unnamed Sequence 8 potion soon so as to rid himself of the anomalies.
When it came to his new Sequence, the days had not given Eddy much aid. He had spent most of his time wandering the streets of East Borough, hoping that something might happen to give him a clue into his new powers. He had even worked up the courage to interrogate Mr Voice, but the entity had not been much help. Despite his increasing ease of communication, Mr Voice often had to fall back on bursts of images and feelings whenever he 'spoke' in order to portray more complex concepts. He had not been able to come up with a name for the latest form of his Path. Instead of a name, Eddy had received a taste of salt on his tongue and mud on his skin, the feeling of curling up in the dark, the allure of something hidden. It was helpful in a way, Eddy could feel the connection, but working out a name and a set of principles from that was easier said than done.
In order to pass the time, Eddy had tested out his improved dexterity, pickpocketing his way through the Borough. Of course, he had avoided Parliament Street Gang territory as well as Zmanger turf. The former was just good sense, the latter was because he hadn't heard from Meursault since that night and didn't want to remind the man of his existence. There was no doubt that the dangerous man was simply biding his time, but Eddy took solace in the self-deception that there was a minuscule chance that maybe the Zmangers had just forgotten about him. Blind hope is a wonderful thing.
His flexible fingers had liberated the contents of enough wallets and coin pouches to pay his rent and food easily. In all honesty, he could have stolen more, but he was mainly interested in testing his limits than making a load of cash. He had targeted the most alert-looking men - the kind who almost always kept a hand over their wallets or the ones who had hidden them well. Eddy took great pride in robbing them regardless. His stealth and unnaturally nimble fingers made short work of such folk.
Initially, he'd wanted to try pickpocketing the pickpockets, but that goal was complicated by two problems. The first was that they were alert and sharp-eyed enough to see through his 'veil' (as he had begun to put it). Their perception, naturally trained by their method of sourcing income, and distrust of rivals combined to make them some of the only people that could perceive his presence when he was fully veiled. It would be a different matter at night of course, but then they wouldn't be out on the streets. A man could not always work in ideal conditions, after all. The second problem was that they were poor. Despite the epidemic of pickpockets, most of them had to give the lion's share of their winnings to the gangs that controlled them. Often, there were left with barely enough to eat and had to shelter in the rafters of warehouses and abandoned homes. Stealing from them felt wrong. Eddy had compromised on his morality greatly, but robbing malnourished children for the sake of honing his skills seemed too callous. Therefore, he had not persisted in his efforts for long.
The afternoon found Eddy strolling along the charmingly titled Spoon Lane. Despite the quaint name, the actual place was probably one of the worst areas in East Borough. Perched just below the top of a low ridge near the Tussock River, Spoon Lane was perfectly placed to catch both the foul breeze from the polluted river and industrial fumes from a collection of paint factories adjacent to the docks. The unfortunate olfactory situation was not helped by a burst sewage pipe that spilled human waste onto the surface of the street. There were always rumours that the 'Spoon Lane Pipe' was about to be fixed by local authorities, but somehow the work was always interrupted by poor weather, problems elsewhere in the Borough, or lack of funding. This had caused Spoon Lane to become a general health hazard. Here, cholera, scarlet fever, typhus, typhoid, and tuberculosis still reigned over the lives of the denizens with an iron grip. The sound of wet coughing was always heard. It was the place where the poorest gathered, the most downtrodden. The cobbles were slick with filth and Goddess knows what else. Needless to say, Eddy was not wearing his best pair of shoes.
He would not have come along Spoon Lane, but part of the docks had been closed off over some kind of police investigation over a massacre on a passenger liner from the Southern Continent and Spoon Lane was the next fastest route through to his next location. If not for that turn of events, he would never have braved the Lane.
As Eddy walked along Spoon Lane, he was ignored by the residents. At the best of times, they had lifeless eyes that stared out from their crumbling hovels. In other poor neighbourhoods, people were hungry and fought for every scrap, but those who came to Spoon Lane were already too far gone and had lost hope. So, normally Eddy would be ignored by them, but with his Veil in effect, he was totally unnoticeable to them. Invisible. It was quite unnerving, he thought. Normally he could spot someone's eyes glazing over as they looked past him, but these people couldn't even get that far. He might as well not exist to them. There was something awful in that realisation that he couldn't articulate. If the breeze blew a little stronger, would he fade away into the air like drifting smoke? What was the difference between him and a ghost? His melancholy emotions started to affect his spirituality and immaterial whispers began invading his ears. He hurried his steps in an attempt to leave the Lane. It was a mistake to have come here.
Suddenly, Eddy's sharp eyes noticed something that caused him to start. In a shadowed gap between two hovels, a man was staring out at Eddy. It was a scrawny fellow, clothes tattered and loose on a thin frame - spine bowed and skin stretched over a gaunt face. He was pale and anemic, sweating slightly as if standing upright was a great burden. He was holding tightly onto a package of bread wrapped in paper, thin arms clutching possessively at it. His dark and bushy brows were drawn closely over brown eyes that nonetheless seemed to pierce Eddy's veil. There was a sneer on his face that turned Eddy's stomach; something cruel and full of hatred like the man had seen in him his nemesis, his greatest enemy. The watching man noticed that Eddy was looking at him and withdrew sharply into the shadows - panic on his face. With his night vision, Eddy saw him scuttle into the depths of the Lane, often looking back over his shoulder as if fearful of being followed.
Eddy could not help but feel a little shocked. He had theorised that only the most perceptive people or low-Sequence Beyonders with sensory powers could hope to spot him. Even if the man was in the former category and not the latter, his perceptive power was frightening. Such a thing was worth investigating. He decided to follow the man. Immediately, Mr Voice began listing the names of Beyonders with such powers.
Criminals, Marauders, Students of Ratiocination, Hunters, Assassins, and Beast Tamers among the low Sequences. You will not be hidden from any of the more powerful Beyonders.
Eddy grimaced slightly. That was a more sizeable list than he had expected. It seemed as if powers of perception were high among many Beyonders. He'd have to be careful. He doubted that the man was anything more than a low Sequence Beyonder (especially given his apparent material circumstances), but if the gaunt man were a Beyonder, then several of the names listed by Mr Voice were enough to instill a level of caution in him. Criminal. Assassin. Hunter (his thoughts jumped to Meursault). Such names showed clearly their danger. Eddy moved to the side of the street and pushed his Veil to its limit. Time to hunt.
Leveraging his now more healthy body, Eddy pulled himself up on top of a low hovel and crouched there. Peering into the shadows of the alleyways off Spoon Lane, his eyes followed the gaunt man's path deeper into the warren of slum dwellings. Eddy followed his twisting path from above, hopping between rooftops. He was aided by the illegal construction of the slum. Here, where there was no legal building, proper street widths were not abided by, causing houses to crowd together and the alleyways to sometimes become barely passable. Therefore, it was no great ordeal to pass over the top of the slum - sometimes he only had to step over alleyways (such was their narrowness).
The rag-clothed man was still looking over his shoulder but clearly did not have the sense to attempt looking upwards. Eddy was reminded of his route into Wharf Five. The whole means by which he entered that heavily guarded place was predicated on the theory that guards would not think to look downwards. He had been correct in that assumption, so too was he concealed by his target's narrow mind.
Eddy watched for several minutes as the man walked around in varying circles - as if attempting to lose a tail. Sometimes he would stop and press himself against a corner, peering back along his path as if waiting to see if he could catch Eddy following him. Eddy found great amusement in observing this from almost directly above the man. He was coming to the conclusion that either his target was an absolute genius Beyonder luring him in with a false sense of security, or he was a normal man with a sense of paranoia so exaggerated that he was able to pierce Eddy's Veil without any sort of supernatural aid. The former seemed unlikely, but the latter was interesting enough that Eddy still felt it worthwhile to follow the man. What kind of life, what kind of experience, could create a mind twisted to ignore the most foundational aspect of Eddy's set of powers? He had to find out, if not for the sake of his curiosity, then for the sake of research. Understanding the limits of his powers could never be a bad thing.
Eventually, the gaunt man appeared to be satisfied that he was no longer being followed and swiftly made his way to a nondescript shack in the heart of the slums off Spoon Lane. As he followed the labyrinthine route from above, Eddy reflected that he might well have lost the man if he had simply headed straight home rather than engaging in such needless looping. He shrugged mentally - nobody ever said that paranoia equated to common sense. The man brought out a key from under his rags and twisted it in the lock of the shack's door before entering the structure. From the decrepit look of the place, Eddy doubted that a key was necessary. It looked as if a light kick would knock the rickety wooden door off its hinges.
Stealthily, Eddy used his arms to let himself down from the top of the roof on which he was perched and dropped down to the ground. He made sure to make his landing as quiet as possible, so as not to alert his paranoid target. The shutters across the windows of the hovel were cracked and loose - perfect for a certain sneaky person to peek inside.
Through the slats of the window shutters, Eddy could see the situation inside. There was little furniture - only a table and chair as well as a small pile of dirty blankets in one corner that no doubt served as a bed. The majority of the floor space was taken up by what could only be described as an altar.
A large table had been draped with a grey cloth that spilled down onto the floor. The table was festooned with objects, plates of fruit, meat, and bread. Closer to the middle of the table were candles that Eddy recognised from the Embankment market - wax imprinted with spiritual herbs like fingered citron and night vanilla. Eddy spotted chamomile incense and bound sprigs of gold-leaf mint. It was no wonder that the man was forced to live off Spoon Lane; he had clearly spent all his earnings on this eclectic altar. At the centre of the altar was a circle of slate tablets on which chalk symbols had been drawn. Eddy frowned. They were misshapen and ugly. He recognised a few of them from Arcane Symbology, but they were poorly drawn and from different sections of the book. Some of the other symbols were clearly made up. The whole ensemble screamed of ignorance in the field of mysticism.
However, the most unusual object on the altar stood at the centre of the circle of slates. Upon a wooden stand stood a doll. It was ragged and worn - diminutive and cheap-looking. It was seemingly made out of stuffed cloth. Its face was featureless except for two black beads for eyes. They seemed to shine with a dark and forbidding light. Atop its head was a mess of sparse hair that looked far too real for a doll. It was greasy in the light of the candles and hints of sunlight that came in from outside the hovel. Its strangest feature, however, was a pair of highly detailed and leathery wings that sprung from its back like those of a bat. The whole combination made the doll seem incredibly ominous and disgusting to a normal person's sensibilities.
The gaunt man, however, was by no means a normal person. Holding his package of bread out in supplication, the man approached the altar and placed the food on a waiting plate before kneeling in supplication. Then, as Eddy watched from his hiding place, the man began chanting. Eddy recognised some sounds of Hermes and Ancient Feysac, but they were appearing together - occasionally interspersed with words in Loenese and bits of dialect. It was a butchery of a normal ritual. Eddy frowned. On top of building the least effective altar he had ever seen, had this man also created an utterly useless linguistic pidgin for rituals?
Despite his disdain, though, Eddy's eyes widened as he saw the man suddenly pull out a knife and - still chanting - slice across his palm savagely. Eddy winced as blood spattered across the altar and covered the food. An especially large drop landed straight onto the doll's body. However, it was at this point that the strangest thing occurred. The droplets of blood soaking into the altar cloth and the items on it suddenly seemed to shudder and were drawn towards the centre of the altar - the red stains moving along the weave of cloth like blood in veins. The blood reached the doll and abruptly sank into it. There was an awful wailing noise that came from the doll which persisted for several seconds until all the blood disappeared. There was a silence for a span of time, and then a blast of energy rippled out and pitched the kneeling man onto the floor of his hovel.
Eddy stood still. How had this chimeric imitation of a ritual actually succeeded in doing anything? He was still a novice in ritual matters, but even he understood that what he had witnessed was the furthest thing from orthodox - the mystic equivalent of a blind man's fumblings. His thoughts raced until he settled on an answer. It must have been the doll! Clearly, the ritual was useless - made up by the insane owner of the doll - but the doll itself must be a Beyonder artifact. A Beyonder artifact keyed to blood. The man, still lying on the floor, had started to laugh madly. It was a wet and bubbling cackle that spoke of lung diseases and infirmity, but Eddy only had eyes for the doll. He needed to get his hands on that artifact.
AN: Eddy is having some adventures - featuring crippling pseudo-Victorian poverty and an item from CultSim (not our first and not our last). In the game, the Winged Doll is just a tool that gives you a tiny boost in Rites. I have expanded it a little here to fit the rules of LotM. We will see the details of that next chapter.