“Ahh! Get away from me!”

  Kaelis kicked herself along the floor, frenziedly fleeing from the mutant jar as it lurched towards her. The thing bellowed and raised its viscid arms, flailing them in the air like cracking whips. Daring to turn her back to the monster, Kaelis flipped herself over and scrambled to her feet. She stumbled across the laboratory in a mad dash, doing her best to keep from tripping over the scattered machinery littering the floor.

  Jira sprinted over and threw herself between Kaelis and the creature, her revolver at the ready. Kaelis took the briefest breath to bury her shock before whipping back around, raising her gun as well. Together the two took aim at the twisted monstrosity, staring at it in terror.

  “What the hell is that thing?!” shouted Kaelis.

  Jira had no response. She signaled toward the lab’s exit. Moving cautiously, she and Kaelis backed up towards it, keeping their eyes fixed on the jar-creature all the while. The thing didn’t seem interested in pursuing them. Instead it stayed put, waving its arms around in exaggerated arcs. There was something strangely natural about the way it carried itself, the way it moved—something almost human.

  “Yeesss, fleeee!” the thing wailed, raising its arms up higher. “Begooone!”

  “Ah, Captain! It’s got words!”

  At once, Jira halted her retreat. She cocked her head, her eyes narrowing, and let out a pensive, “Hmm.” Keeping her gun raised and ready, she slowly began to advance on the mutant jar.

  “Captain, what are you doing? Let’s get outta here!”

  The creature jittered as Jira approached. It scuttled away from her. “Ah, don’t come closer! I’m scary!” it threatened, raising itself on its trio of spindled legs and widening its arms, making itself appear as large as it could.

  Jira planted her feet. She took her finger off the trigger. “Who are you?” she asked.

  Very gradually, the living vial loosened its aggressive stance, lowering its arms to the floor. It stood there for a few seconds and tersely twitched, as if analyzing the two women’s faces and postures.

  Jira raised her hand in a show of peace. Moving gingerly, she holstered her gun before lowering her guard completely.

  “Captain, wha—?” started Kaelis, only to be silenced by a firm hand gesture.

  Jira took another step forward, her palms up, her face relaxed. “It’s okay. We won’t hurt you,” she said to the creature.

  The thing wound down, matching Jira’s calm. It let her come closer.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “I…” it muttered, as if trying to remember the answer for itself. “I am… I am Duke Diogo Sarul, steward of the Valley.”

  Kaelis nearly dropped her rifle. She stared at the glowing green jar with its goopy tentacle legs, utterly flabbergasted. “The last duke…” she whispered. With morbid fascination briefly beating back her horror, she scooted in for a closer look at the creature.

  “Are you… pillagers?” asked the Duke.

  Jira shook her head. “No,” she said. “We’re here for answers.”

  “…I see.” The Duke turned his cylinder to face the large machine occupying the center of the room. “Yes, I am certain you have a great many questions. Nevertheless, I must humbly apologize, as I cannot afford to have my work disrupted any further. Now, if you do not intend on interfering, then I must insist that you show yourself out. If you would excuse me.” He performed a bow as best he could before scuttling off towards the back of the lab like a spider. “Where was I?…” he muttered to himself. “Ah, yes—conductor coil. Must find a replacement…”

  Kaelis watched as the thing began to peruse his shelves of storage, unsettlingly slithering his slender feelers around mounds of mixed machine parts. She couldn’t help but shudder.

  “Duke,” said Jira loudly.

  “Hm?” The Duke turned, his attention reseized. “Please, leave me. I do not want any more trouble—”

  “The animals, those men—What happened?”

  “Men? Whose men?”

  Jira pointed towards the pair of bodies crushed underneath the lab equipment.

  “…Ah,” said the Duke, his disembodied voice shifting to a somber tone. His gooey limbs slowed and slumped. “Ahhh… It was… a regrettable incident. Yes, yes, most regrettable. They broke into my lab, you see, attacked me unprovoked with these frightful constructs—same as that which you carry.” He pointed towards Kaelis’s rifle with a gelatinous digit. “I was frightened and I… I did not yet know this vessel’s strength…”

  Jira frowned. “And the animals?”

  “—Ahah, here it is!” declared the Duke, wrapping a tendril around a tightly-wound metal coil. “Yes, the animals… I deeply lament having to resort to such petty thievery, but my designs necessitate living tissue. I will gladly compensate the peasants for the loss of their livestock once I am made whole again.”

  “I’m sorry?” asked Kaelis, her bewilderment now firmly etched onto her face. “Whole again?”

  The Duke scurried over to the helix machine, and the meaty, corpsey construct laying on the slab beside it. “Behold!” he proudly exclaimed, gesturing to his mummified head atop the body. “Homunculi Mark 4. I had been going about it all wrong. All wrong. I’ve been like a child! Oh yes. My body is the crux. Yes, yes, the crux. My skull, my flesh—with them as a base, the procedure will take. I can at last rebuild myself anew.”

  Kaelis clenched her eyes, trying to make sense of the ever-growing madness. The Duke of Saruleah—who was now some kind of spectral slush—was planning on rebirthing himself into a rotting patchwork meat-corpse of a body, which he’d made himself by fusing together flesh carved from several stolen animals? …Honestly, putting it all into words only served to disturb her even more.

  “Duke,” said Jira, burying her revulsion. “Why do all this? What happened to you? And how are you still alive?”

  The Duke slid over to the machine and delicately removed a panel. He reached his myriad limbs inside and began to install the coil. “In my corporeal days I was a researcher of the Unbound, you see,” he began to explain while working busily. “To understand them is to understand the Angels—why they had left us, when they would return. They were sure to return, it was a certainty. Yes, yes, a certainty. The Angels would save us from these dark times, and then finally they would bestow upon my family our long promised reward.”

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  Jira arched a brow. “A reward?”

  “Is our story not a part of your histories?” the Duke said with a bite of frustration. He gestured his tendril toward racks of ancient armor proudly displayed between the lab’s library of texts. “House Sarul is a dynasty stretching back to the golden days of Ama-Lasria. For generations we guarded the Archmother—a mighty household. My ancestors sided with the Angels against the God King in the final days of the war, you see. And for our service we would be greatly rewarded upon their return… And done!”

  With the coil installed, the Duke resealed the panel and moved to the opposite side of the machine. He fiddled with a complex arrangement of knobs and dials tacked onto the base, continuing his story as he worked.

  “But how would they find us if we fled?” he said. “My family, they…” The Duke suddenly seemed to hesitate. He hovered his feelers over the machine, as if consumed by painful memory.

  Pushing aside whatever thought he’d had, he resumed his work just as quickly as he’d paused. “My family insisted that we outpace the Unbound, make for the Southland colonies. But I could not abandon my ancestral home. The Angels—I so wanted… to see them… And the numbers foretold their coming. Yes, it was a certainty—five hundred years after the Sundering, they would return at last. But that was far too long to wait, and I would not let death stand in my way.”

  “So you did this to yourself?” asked Kaelis in utter disbelief. “To stay alive?”

  “Correct.”

  Jira folded her arms. “Okay… How?”

  “The device…” answered the Duke, gently caressing the large machine’s intricate metalwork. “My great-grandfather found it near the old battlegrounds of the distant north, reduced to scraps and forgotten. It is called a Transfuser—crafted by the Angels, you see, used for the art of soulcraft.”

  Kaelis kicked herself for not realizing it sooner. The impossibly interlaced helix of pure golds and silvers was unlike anything made by man. Of course it was Angelic in origin.

  “I studied the device for years,” said the Duke. “Put it back together piece by piece, augmented it with a few of my own components. And I devised for my family a… a temporary solution. Merely temporary.” He gestured to the fluid inside of his vial. “I created this compound, farmed from the Unbound—a perfect conduit for life, you see. And with the machine I bound into the compound my soul and sealed it in this vessel, so that it would not dissipate into the cosmos. And once our lords returned I would be given a new, perfect body, and me and my family… we would take our rightful place beside them.”

  “What happened to your family?” asked Jira delicately.

  The Duke moved from the mass of knobs and scampered over to the slab. “It has been so long now,” he muttered, outright ignoring Jira’s question. He examined a large control panel laying on the ground, connected to the Angelic machine by a dense snarl of rubber cables. “Yes, yes, much too long. I cannot wait for the Angels, I must be made whole again. I must!” With that, he slipped back into a working frenzy, sorting through the cabling with rigid focus, muttering to himself all the while.

  Kaelis lifted her helmet’s visor and rubbed her eyes, still barely able to believe them—of all the things she’d thought she’d see today, this was very low on the list. She looked over to clock Jira’s reaction to all this. The Captain was standing fixed in place, watching the Duke work with a look of intense intrigue on her face. Softly, Kaelis sidled up to her.

  “Uh, hey, Captain,” she whispered. She flicked her head to a spot near the lab’s stairway. “Can we talk, just for a sec?”

  After a beat, Jira grunted in agreement. She followed Kaelis until they were just out of earshot.

  Kaelis promptly commenced her huddle. “Okay, so all of this is, like, completely insane, right?” she heatedly whispered.

  Jira paused to consider it before finally nodding. “…It’s different.”

  “Right. So, what do we do?”

  “Hmm…” Jira threw a long look towards the Duke, watching him as he shuffled about with a desperate intensity.

  “We should get back to Lange,” Kaelis urged. “Report this in, maybe rope in some backup. Then we come back here and put a stop to this ‘experiment’ before things get even more out of hand. What do you think?”

  Jira kept her head turned, her gaze still glued on the living jar. Very subtly, her brows began to tent, and her face compressed with the slightest sting of some wrenching pain—not of horror, but of pity.

  “Captain, did you hear me?”

  “…Mm,” Jira barely acknowledged. At once, her eyes hardened. “No, we’re not done here,” she decided, her mind apparently made up. Without another word, she broke from the huddle and marched back towards the Duke.

  “Wait—what?” Kaelis sputtered, staying put. “Captain, no, come on!”

  Crossing the lab, Jira planted herself a short distance from the Duke and his machine. “Duke,” she said, placing her fists on her hips.

  “Just a moment,” the Duke replied, his focus still fixed on unknotting the tangle of wiring.

  “Stop working.”

  “Please, if you would give me one—”

  “No. Come here.”

  The Duke twitched at Jira’s gruffness. He promptly ceased his task and, moving somewhat sheepishly, slunk over to Jira. Kaelis watched on from afar, keeping her hand gripped around her rifle, just in case.

  “You’ve caused this village a lot of pain,” said Jira. “Too many lives have been lost. This ends today.”

  Reeling, the Duke took a panicked step back. “No, please, you must allow me to finish!” he begged. “I am ashamed of what I have done, truly I am, but you cannot intervene! Not now, not when I am so close—!”

  Jira raised a firm hand, swiftly silencing him. “But—” she continued, “if you swear to make amends, we’ll let you complete your task.”

  The Duke hovered there for a moment, softly quivering with confusion. “…You will?” he asked.

  “How long for you to fix your machine?”

  At once, the Duke’s verve returned, and then some. “Not—not long,” he answered. “Only hours now. Mere hours!”

  “Okay,” said Jira. She stood tall. “You have until nightfall.”

  The Duke shivered with rapture. “Oh, Angels bless you!” he hailed. “Bless you! I shall be ready by dusk. Yes, yes, by dusk, you have my word!” He dove back into his work, moving with a renewed sense of haste. “I am very nearly finished now. Yes, I need only run the final calibrations and then I shall be ready to commence!”

  “Hm,” grunted Jira, taking a step out of his way. She moved to return to Kaelis. “And just know, if anything starts to get out of hand, me and Vintra here are gonna put a stop to it. Understand?”

  “You’ve nothing to fear,” proclaimed the Duke, waving a quick tendril. “Nothing at all. The village is in no danger, and I require no more living tissue. Once I have returned to physical form I will submit to any authority, pay any recompense the villagers ask of me. Yes, I—I will give everything that I am back to the people. Everything that I am, and more! But I need to be whole again, I—I need to live! Something good must come out of what I’ve done, it must!”

  Flailing faster with every second, the Duke scuttled around his machine in circles, prodding at it in a frenzy of feverish fiddling. With a free limb, he latched onto a thick cable and jammed it into an open socket. The device let loose a threatening hiss, a spurt of sparks firing from its base.

  Kaelis twitched, recoiling at the machine’s simmering power. She took a long step back, keeping a watchful eye on the Duke all the while.

  “…Uh, Captain Sirroza, you sure about this?” she asked as Jira sidled up beside her.

  Jira returned a curt shrug. “…I want to see what happens.”

  “Yeah, okay, but—” Kaelis grimaced, shooting the Captain an anxious glance. “But soulcraft, it’s… Well, I’ve only read a bit about it, and it’s super weird and even more dangerous.”

  Jira grunted. “I know.”

  “Right, so what if that machine can’t handle the energy and it blows up? Or just as bad, what if the transference actually takes? Are we just gonna let some… shriveled up meat-man wander into town? I can tell you now, that’s not gonna go over well.”

  Jira thought about it for a moment. “…Just stay alert,” she said.

  Kaelis pursed her lips—looks like there was no changing the Captain’s mind. “Alright, fine,” she muttered, yielding to her leader. “But if that thing goes haywire and we end up swapping bodies or something, I am not gonna be happy.” Stepping away, she threw her back against the wall beside he exit, feeling it best to give the pickled mutant Duke and his patched-together soul-sucking machine as much space as was humanly possible.