Chapter 471: Practical Methods

"Young Hauke’s future is in your hands."

Aspakos’s words weighed on Erkembalt like an anvil strapped around his tail, dragging him down to the ground and forcing him to look at the captive Frost Walker like a person rather than a puzzle to be solved. The aging artificer would have preferred to treat Hauke’s condition as nothing more than a challenge to his skills, one that he could succeed or fail at without real consequence. After all, Lady Nyrielle had only asked that they try, she had never demanded results.

But now, his old friend had not only reminded him that this was a painfully young man, younger even than Erkembalt’s own children, but he was a young man who could be incredibly useful in the days to come.

It didn’t take a prophet to understand that Lady Nyrielle and Lady Ashlynn likely hoped to use the Frost Walkers to blunt the fire sorcerers, the so called priests of the invading human army. One look at the Holy Flame Blade had been enough to show both men the sort of enemy they were up against and a sorcerer like Hauke formed a natural counter to those sorcerers.

But beyond that, he was a young man... one who was suffering a curse that was far too cruel for someone who seemed to have blundered into the schemes of ancient spiritual revenants.

"You take the joy from my life with words like those, old friend," Erkembalt said, collecting the tools he’d dropped and returning them to their place on the table. "Be a second pair of eyes for me while I work," he said gruffly as he brought a cone of incense and a burner to Hauke’s feet. "Tell me if you notice anything that I don’t."

Pulling a small mechanical striker from one of his vest’s many bulging pockets, the artificer quickly lit the incense before lowering a set of colored lenses over his ordinary spectacles, blocking out the light cast by torches and focusing only on the flow of faintly visible energy as it circulated thorough Hauke’s body.

Within his icy prison, Hauke watched carefully as the sorcerers performed their work. He didn’t know what the strange feathered sorcerer had seen in his vision but the feeling of great power pulling aside a vast curtain reached Hauke even in the prison of his own mind. The brief brush with power gave him a feeling of an immense world of possibilities and at the same time, the heavy feeling of dozens of hopes and dreams dying all at once.

Sorcery like that was far beyond anything that Hauke had ever experienced but since it seemed to have convinced the man called Aspakos that he should spare the young Frost Walker lord, Hauke was inclined to at least respect the power of the sorcery even if he didn’t know what kind of revelation it had provided.

Right now, however, he was watching Erkembalt work as the artificer carefully fanned incense until a cloud of haze enveloped the Hauke from the tip of his horn to the ends of his toes.

"Look here," Erkembalt said, pointing at a swirling pattern in the smoke above Hauke’s head. "It’s like his energy has been broken into two distinct flows. His mind and his body are nearly completely separated from each other."

"Not completely," Aspakos said, hovering far enough away that he wouldn’t disturb his friend’s delicate work but close enough that he could see things from a different perspective. "Look closer. There are three flows. One for his body, another for his head, and a third, a paper thin shell surrounding the two and holding everything together. But his horn has pierced into the shell."

"Mmm, and it’s doing more than that," Erkembalt agreed, watching the flow of the smoke. "If I didn’t know better, I’d say this was a vampire’s curse. His horn is drawing energy away from his body to fuel the curse keeping his mind sealed away..."

"That’s not how vampire curses work at all," Aspakos snorted. "This is Frost Walker sorcery, very old Frost Walker sorcery. It’s like it’s using cold wind to steal the heat from his body and giving that heat to the curse that binds him," he muttered before walking over to the table and peering through Erkembalt’s tools. "Do you have Silver Leaf Purity Powder? Or have you prepared any Thief’s Revealing Mist?"

"Do I have any Silver Leaf Purity Powder," Erkembalt muttered with a disgruntled -humpf- sound as he padded back across the prison cell to his tools. "Wouldn’t be much of a curse breaker if I couldn’t look for corruption beneath the surface would I? It’s in the canister labled ’dirt samples.’"

"Dirt samples?" the dark feathered sorcerer said in surprise. "Why do you keep your purity powder with dirt samples?"

"I don’t," Erkembalt said, opening a wooden canister to reveal several neatly stored vials, each one containing a different unique, glittering powder. "You think I’ve never had burglers rifle through my things? The outside world isn’t like things were back in the Forsaken Lands. Even children will try to snatch things that look like they’re valuable if they think they can get away with it. A starving man will snatch anything labled ’silver’ even if it’s just ground up plants that are worthless outside of the trade, but no one snatches ’dirt samples.’"

"Now look," Erkembalt said, his tail standing up straight in anticipation as he carefull withdrew a pinch of the silvery powder and sprinkled it over Hauke’s iridescent horn. As soon as he did, the bright silvery powder turned dark, settling on the horn in patches that slowly grew larger as the artificer added more powder until a pattern began to emerge.

"Chains," Aspakos said, clicking his tongue in disgust. "His horn is the anchor of the curse that binds him. This is intricate," he added as he examined the chains, noticing patterns in the chains that almost resembled glyphs from an older form of Eldritch. "This would never work on someone who wasn’t a Frost Walker... and maybe it would only work on another Frost Walker with an iridescent horn like his."

"That makes it fairly simple though," Erkembalt said, walking across the prison cell to retrieve a saw that would cut through the limbs of a person just as easily as it would cut through the limbs of a tree. "All we have to do is remove his horn and the curse should completely unravel..."