Wednesday Snippets - She’d owed them a lot of blood

Happy Hump Day, friends! Hopefully the week is treating you well so far. I'm making steady progress on Chaos Songs, having fun deciding what horrible things to do to Tristesse and Lola. I've got new characters to introduce, old ones to revisit, and weird stuff to unfold, and it's awesome! So, here's a quick look at what I've been up to so far. Last week we visited Tris, so let's visit Lola this week. Enjoy!

Why not just use chaos magic to create something?

The thought came with a physical nudge that had her wobbling on the ladder. It creaked alarmingly, and she dropped Thorn’s notebook to grab onto the bookshelf with both hands, heart flipping. The book hit the floor with a soft thud and she stared down at it, breathing too hard to swear, but feeling very sweary all the same. Climbing the ladder had been hard work. Going back down, retrieving the book, coming back up, and still having to collect the ingredients…

She couldn’t even finish the thought. It was too tiring.

“Tea break,” she said aloud. Tea always helped. Or at least, tea wasn’t going to make anything worse.

She picked her way carefully down the ladder, exhaling in relief when her feet were back on solid ground. Her laboured breathing evened out as she set the kettle over the fire and added a handful of herbs to the water. Thorn had no real tea, of course. She’d cheerfully murder for a pot of Lady Grey, but the bag of heathery-minty smelling herbs she’d found near his hearth were better than nothing.

Huddling close to the low fire, she rubbed her cold hands and contemplated that little, insidious thought she’d had. Using chaos magic to make a homunculus would certainly be quicker than using Thorn’s alchemical spell. She was used to instant gratification when it came to magic, and the idea of wasting a day labouring over potions and invocations made her head ache. She thought of Mara, baroness of Bitter Waters, and her infinite army of constructed ravens. How many days and nights had Mara spent on them? And how much easier would it be for Lola to simply call on her patrons and shape herself a winged pony out of raw, abyssal magic?

Her wrists itched and she turned her hands over to examine the bloody bandages wrapped around them. She’d owed them a lot of blood for the gift of the demon tongue. She’d barely recovered from repaying them for the trip here from the City, and they took far more blood than she ever used in her own spells. Giving them more so soon was dangerous, she knew that. And whilst she could delay the repayment for a while, the longer she waited, the more she’d owe. They were sorcerous loan-sharks, her patrons, and they’d wring her dry if she gave them the chance.

She sighed, running her hands through her greasy hair. Once, back when she first started using blood magic and was still learning her limits, she’d made herself anaemic. Here and now, she was sharply aware of the returning symptoms. She was always tired and short of breath. Her skin crawled and she had dizzy spells on waking, although she’d managed to hide that from Tristesse. That alone should be enough to override the temptation of borrowing from the patrons. Unlike back home, she couldn’t pop an iron supplement and up her kale and steak intake.

She knew that. She understood that every day she stayed in Gehenna, her health suffered. That every time she borrowed from the patrons, she put herself further into jeopardy. Tristesse didn’t have to lay out the dangers for her when she knew with every heart palpitation that she slipped closer and closer to the edge.

And yet the patrons still whispered and she was still tempted.