Sedemir fell to the ground clutching his chest. Correction: What was left of his chest. An sizable portion of it had been rather unceremoniously removed from him; rather, it had removed itself. His various cytoplasmic grafts had torn themselves off his body. He heaved, breathing was difficult. He was missing a lung and one of his hearts. It was only by the marvels of Simic biomancy that he had survived the ravages of Simic biomancy.
His sight was failing him, not because of his missing eye, but rather the blood loss and the not insignificant part of his brain that had left him. But he faintly heard some great and terrible beast rampaging in the distance. ‘The Eksperiment must have been successful’ he thought to himself ‘he looked down at the pool of fluids leaking from his mutilated form ‘not quite how I might have imagined it…’ The rest of his senses began to fail him. He rolled over on his back. He could not feel three of his arms and either of his legs below the knee, when he tried to breathe out of his gills he choked and blood spat out instead. This was Master Vig’s greatest work evidentially; birthing a guild of butchered cripples.
Despair and rage began to overwhelm the usually stoic vedalken mage. ‘How could he do this. To me? To all of us?’ he thought, speech was beyond question at the present. ‘How is this, any of this, what you promised?’ He choked on rage and blood ‘The years of service and dedication. The trials and experiments and surgeries. Crafting my body into a more appropriate form for your grand plans, and this is what I receive for my tribute?!’ Sedemir’s blood pressure was inching him ever closer to death. He gurgled a curse through his agony “YOU’VE RUINED ME!”
Sedemir’s sight gave out. As did his hearing, his touch, his taste and smell, and his other 37 senses. They gave way to madness. Colors swirled around him into smells that tasted unlike anything he had ever heard. Everything. Nothing. Nowhere. Anywhere. Too much. All at once. Sensory overload. And then nothing. Sedemir fell hard on his back. “What in the hell?!” Sedemir turned to see who had suddenly joined him. A human man, in simple leather tatters, a look of shock plastered across his face. With what he had left, Sedemir cast the strongest stasis spell he could manage upon the man, and lept upon his frozen form as it fell backwards, stiff as a statue.
He cast a similar, though less dramatic spell upon himself, and held his remaining arm up to his remaining eye. He concentrated as hard as he could, channeling mana with all his might. His fingers elongated into blades. Transpecies organ transplants were tricky, especially without a proper lab, but Sedemir would not allow himself to be a victim of Momir’s deception. He got to work, removing organs from his patient and suturing them into place upon himself best he could. Doing this upon himself, in his condition, was beyond excruciating; but nothing he couldn’t handle.
After some amount of effort, Sedemir had himself a full body of organs again. He had managed to replace two of his missing arms and both of his legs. As luck would have it, his patient was of a similar build. The ham-looking flesh stood in stark contrast to his own turquoise hide, but pride meant nothing before his own survival. He fixed everything but his brain, he didn’t dare mix that with someone else. He would simply have to culture new tissue and program the missing data with what he had written in his logs.
He stood, tenderly upon his new legs. Human flesh was so unappealing looking. It resembled ham. Sedemir was not fond of ham. He wiggled his hammy toes and twisted his face in disgust. He looked at the grass between his toes and. Grass? It just dawned on him that he was most certainly not in the Simic science hall he had been in when his organs had revolted against him. He looked around. Very few buildings anywhere around, lots of rolling sandy hills, with tufts of grass growing upon rocks, simple stone huts with red banners flapping in the breeze. Sedemir did not get out of the lab as much as perhaps should have, but he was no fool. This was not Ravnica. It was simply not possible to stand anywhere on Ravnica and not see a skyscraper piercing the horizon in some direction. What had happened to him? How had he come here? Who was the man who had saved his life?
He looked down at the man who had saved his life. Correction: The remains of the man who had saved his life. He was still under the lingering effects of Sedemir’s stasis spell, but it was beginning to fade. Blood ever-so-slowly oozed from his body like tree sap. If at all possible, Sedemir would have attempted to save his life in return, he did not enjoy being indebted to another, but it did not seem possible. Without his lab or proper materials he did not have that which would be necessary to replace what he had taken, and he needed it more. A noble sacrifice. Sedemir applied an enzyme to the corpse. Nothing would be left in an hour but fillings and belt buckles.
Sedemir gazed upon the puddle that used to be the man who had saved his life. ‘What now?’ he thought to himself ‘What does a man do when everything he has ever built has become torn down? Pick up the pieces? Start over?’ What was the point, so much had been lost.’ He clenched his fists. ‘No.’ He had worked too hard to be an annotation on Momir’s journal. He would carry on. No longer a parasite to someone else’s vision, but the progenitor to his own. And it would be glorious.
