Chapter 15: Transformation And Alliances
The contract said Tuesday evenings, but desperation kept its own calendar.
Orin descended into Marrow's basement three days after the equipment shed incident, carrying vials he'd stolen and questions he couldn't swallow. The butcher's shop closed at dusk and became something else after. A laboratory dressed in hanging hooks and preservation jars, science conducted in the vocabulary of meat and measured suffering.
The stairs creaked their commentary on his weight, on choices that added mass in ways scales couldn't measure. Below, lamplight carved the darkness into anatomical segments, illuminating workbenches crowded with instruments that had opinions about flesh.
Marrow looked up from whatever he'd been dissecting. His hands were bloody to the wrists, casual intimacy with interior geography. "You're early. Contract specified weekly examinations. This is day three."
"Schedule changed. Need analysis before questions become investigations."
"The equipment shed." Not a question. Marrow wiped his hands on an apron that had witnessed sufficient atrocity to qualify as historical document. "Whole district's whispering about it. Five green-stones, two drained, three traumatized. Instructors are interviewing witnesses, cataloging inconsistencies, building cases against unknown variables."
"How fast is the investigation moving?"
"Fast enough that being seen leaving my establishment might add your name to lists you'd prefer to avoid." The butcher gestured toward an examination table that had probably hosted previous subjects and remembered their conclusions. "But you're here anyway, which suggests either courage or the particular stupidity that accompanies people who've stopped distinguishing survival from suicide."
Orin climbed onto the table, cold metal against his back like judgment rendered in advance. The basement smelled like preservation fluids and old blood, scent memory of everything that had died here learning lessons about biology.
Marrow approached with instruments, his expression shifting into clinical focus. "Show me the birthstone."
Orin unwrapped his hand. The void stone caught lamplight, silver specks moving beneath surface like schools of luminescent fish navigating oceanic darkness. Marrow studied it with the intensity scholars reserved for texts in dead languages.
"It's changing faster than predicted. The silver specks are multiplying, spreading." He pulled out a magnification lens, squinted through it. "Almost looks like fractal patterns. Self-similar structures repeating at different scales. That's not birthstone physiology. That's something else entirely, probably non-biological."
"It absorbs human essence now. Not just monsters."
The confession landed like autopsy findings confirming suspicious deaths. Marrow's hand stilled, lens lowering slowly. "You drained cultivators. Living people."
"Three contractors who were hunting me. A green-stone who cornered me looking for entertainment." Orin kept his voice level, clinical matching clinical. "The void stone doesn't distinguish between monster essence and human cultivation. It consumes anything that flows."
"And you let it." No judgment in Marrow's tone, just observation. "Because starving felt worse than feeding."
"Because they were going to hurt me and I discovered I could hurt them, more than they could hurt me."
"Honest. Disturbing, but honest." Marrow returned to examination, producing devices Orin didn't recognize. Glass tubes connected to rubber bulbs, metal calipers that looked designed for measuring things that preferred not being measured. "This changes the research significantly. Human essence is more complex than monster extracts. Cultivators shape their essence through years of technique refinement, embed personality fragments into their circulation patterns. You're not just absorbing power, you're consuming portions of identity."
The observation arrived like diagnosis confirming terminal conditions. Orin thought about the techniques embedded in his nervous system, combat patterns he'd never trained but could execute perfectly. Vera's knife work, Marcus's grappling, Richard's aim discipline. Pieces of people living in his muscles, ghosts haunting his reflexes.
"Can you separate absorbed essence from original personality?" The question tasted like hope dressed in pragmatic clothing.
"Theoretically? Maybe. Practically? I'm a butcher with above-average education and dangerous curiosity, not an essence theorist with decades of research funding." Marrow pressed a device against Orin's chest, listened to something through connected tubes. "But I can document the integration process. Map how your birthstone distributes absorbed essence, whether it's storing personality fragments or stripping them during absorption."
He worked in silence for several minutes, taking measurements, drawing blood samples that filled vials with liquid. His hands were steady, professional, betraying no reaction to whatever he was discovering.
"Your circulation patterns are becoming non-standard. Normal birthstones channel essence through predictable pathways, established routes that follow nervous system architecture." He traced a finger along Orin's forearm, following invisible channels. "Yours are evolving. Creating new pathways, optimizing flow in ways that shouldn't be possible without surgical intervention."
"What does that mean?"
"It means your body is rewriting itself to accommodate the void stone's appetite. You're not just getting stronger, you're becoming fundamentally different at the structural level." Marrow released his arm, made notes in a leather journal. "Give it another month at this rate, you'll be biologically distinct from baseline humans. Might not even register as the same species under detailed examination."
The words sat in Orin's chest like swallowed ice, cold spreading through regions warmth couldn't reach. He'd known the void stone was changing him, felt it in the way his body moved, the precision his fingers achieved, the strength that felt borrowed from someone else's skeleton. But hearing it confirmed through medical terminology made the transformation concrete, irreversible.
"Can it be stopped?"
"You mean can you stop feeding the void stone, halt the transformation, remain whatever you were before moonlight decided to make you interesting?" Marrow's expression suggested he already knew the answer and found it darkly amusing. "Theoretically, yes. Stop absorbing essence, let your current integrations stabilize, accept your plateau. Practically? You're being hunted by guards, investigated by instructors, targeted by green-stones who've decided you're prey that forgot its position. Stopping means dying through insufficient power to survive the accumulated threats."
"So I keep feeding it."
"You keep feeding it and hope the transformation completes before you forget what you were transforming from." Marrow set down his instruments, poured two glasses of something amber. Offered one to Orin. "To survival through consumption. May we recognize ourselves when the hunger finally stops."
They drank. The liquid burned, stripped his throat tissue, arrived in the stomach like philosophical assault. Orin coughed, before the warming felt pleasant.
"The green-stones you drained. They'll recover?"
"Physically, probably. Their birthstones will regenerate capacity over months or years, assuming the void stone didn't damage the fundamental structure." Marrow refilled his glass, contemplated it like a scrying mirror. "Psychologically? You broke something in them. The certainty that hierarchy is absolute, that their position is guaranteed through genetics and social architecture. They'll spend the rest of their lives knowing something defective devoured their cultivation, reduced them to baseline, proved that apex predators are just prey that hasn't met the right teeth yet."
The description should have satisfied something in Orin, revenge against people who'd spent their lives benefiting from his oppression. Instead, it just felt hollow, another weight added to a collection that was becoming too heavy to carry.
"You regret it." Marrow observed him with butcher's precision, reading carcass for useful information. "Not because you think it was wrong, but because it was easy. Because the void stone made consumption feel natural, justified, almost pleasurable."
"Is that what happened to the essence vampires during the Unification Wars? They drained enough people that it stopped feeling like murder and started feeling like eating?"
"According to historical accounts, yes. They became so efficient at consuming that they forgot consumption required justification. Just fed when hungry, drained whoever was available, until armies had to coordinate specifically to eliminate them." Marrow swirled his drink, watching amber patterns form and dissolve. "But those were cultivators who chose vampirism, developed techniques specifically for essence theft. You're just a boy with a broken birthstone trying to survive in a system designed to crush him. The moral distinction matters, even if the practical outcomes look similar."
"Does it? Matter?"
"Ask me again in five years, if you survive that long." Marrow stood, moved to a cabinet, returned with a wooden box. Inside, six vials of preserved essence, grade four judging by the luminescence. "Ironback vertebrae, rendered and refined. Grade-four durability enhancement. Enough to push you past veteran levels if the void stone processes it efficiently."
Orin stared at the vials like they were execution warrants written in biological materials. "Why are you giving me these?"
"Because I'm invested in your survival and interested in how high you can climb before the transformation completes or collapses." The butcher's smile was brief, bitter. "Also because watching someone from the absolute bottom challenge the entire hierarchy is the most thrilling entertainment I've had since my son died. Call it vicarious rebellion through proxy violence."
"I'm not rebelling. I'm just trying not to die."
"That's what all rebellions claim initially. Then they accumulate power, develop momentum, discover that survival requires overthrowing whatever's trying to kill them." Marrow closed the box, pushed it toward Orin. "Take them. Feed the void. Get strong enough that investigations become inconvenient rather than lethal. We'll continue examinations, document the transformation, hope we're cataloging evolution rather than just elaborate suicide."
Orin pocketed the vials, feeling them like promises written in compressed violence. Six more... six more transformations, six more steps away from whatever he'd been toward whatever he was becoming.
"The instructors investigating the equipment shed. They'll eventually connect it to me."
"Probably. Question is whether they conclude you're dangerous or an asset they want to control." Marrow walked him toward the stairs, lamplight carving shadows from their passage. "I'd suggest cultivating allies, people who'd find your elimination more inconvenient than your continued existence. Nobody survives alone in hierarchical systems. You need witnesses, advocates, people whose interests align with keeping you breathing."
"Who'd ally with a blackstone? Surely it's social suicide."
"Other people the hierarchy has crushed or threatened. Fellow anomalies, enlightened self-interest wearing friendship's mask, anyone who sees your survival as precedent for their own possibility." He opened the door to street-level darkness, gestured Orin through. "The academy is full of people who secretly resent the birthstone hierarchy but lack power to challenge it. Be visible enough to inspire them, subtle enough to avoid elimination. Thread that needle and you might survive long enough to discover what you're transforming into."
Orin climbed into the night, carrying stolen essence and observations that felt like prophecy written in butcher's shorthand. The slums wrapped around him like a violent blanket, known quantities in a world becoming increasingly strange.
His birthstone pulsed a steady rhythm, the heartbeat of something that had stopped being entirely human but hadn't finished becoming whatever came next. The silver specks swirled faster, fractal patterns multiplying like infection or evolution, hard to distinguish which.
*Six more vials. Push durability past fifty. Become something that's genuinely difficult to kill.*
The logic was circular, survival justifying consumption justifying survival. But circles were just lines that gave up pretending they were going anywhere.
He walked toward the academy through streets that treated him as a victim, past alleys where he'd bled learning that weakness invited violence. The geography was unchanged, but his relationship to it had transformed. Now predators tracked him, studied him, whispered about the blackstone who'd developed teeth, uneasy, now apprehensive about approaching him.
*Dangerous to be noticed. More dangerous to remain weak.*
The contradiction wrapped around him like theorem proving its own impossibility. Every choice seemed to accelerate toward outcomes he couldn't navigate, paths narrowing until the only direction was forward dealing with consequences along the way.
A figure detached from the shadows ahead, blocking his route. Orin's hand went to his knife, forty-seven speed preparing for violence that was becoming his default response.
"Relax, Fox. I'm not here for a confrontation."
The voice belonged to Caius Vermillion, purple-stone aristocrat who'd been studying him since entrance exams. He emerged into streetlight, dressed for slumming in expensive clothes that apologized for nothing. His birthstone caught ambient glow, violet depths suggesting power Orin couldn't measure.
"Little late for tourist visits to the poor districts Caius..."
"Late's the only time worth visiting, less... Well less everything really." Caius approached with casual confidence, purple-stone enhancement making him genuinely dangerous in ways Orin's stolen strength might not overcome. "Heard about the equipment shed. Five against one, two drained, investigation ongoing. Impressive debut performance for your academy career."
"It wasn't a performance. If anything it was self-defence.. survival."
"Survival that demonstrated capabilities no blackstone should possess. Essence drainage, combat proficiency, attributes that let you dominate green-stones in close quarters." Caius studied him like a puzzle with missing pieces. "You're not hiding anymore, Fox. Or you're hiding poorly, which amounts to the same outcome. People are asking questions. Soon they'll want answers extracted through methods that don't prioritize your continued breathing."
"Why do you care? Surely what happens to a mere peasant is below the notice of a fucking purple stone.."
"Because anomalies interest me. Because the birthstone hierarchy is stagnant, corrupt, overdue for variables that disrupt its comfortable cruelty." Purple light pulsed from his birthstone, essence circulating through patterns that looked practiced to unconscious perfection. "Also because I offered sponsorship and you declined... Now I'm curious as to whether it's pride or stupidity that motivated your decision."
"Let be honest here Caius, it was probably both."
That got a laugh, genuine amusement cutting through aristocratic performance. "Your honesty is quite refreshing." He gestured toward the academy's silhouette against the night sky. "My family's hosting a gathering next week. It's a private event, select students, an opportunity for networking among future military leadership. Attendance is effectively mandatory for any green-stone with ambition. Blackstones aren't usually invited, but Id like to arrange an exception."
"Why would I want to attend gathering full of pompus dick heads who think I'm defective?"
"Ha.. Because visibility in correct contexts is armor against elimination. If instructors see you socializing with nobility, integrated into proper hierarchies, they'll hesitate before categorizing you as threat requiring removal." Caius's expression suggested he was enjoying explaining tactics to someone who'd rather be anywhere else. "Also because you need allies, and gatherings are where alliances form through mutual recognition of useful capabilities."
The offer tasted poisonous even if logical, benefits hidden beneath obligations he couldn't calculate. But Marrow's advice echoed: cultivate allies, become more valuable alive than dead, survive through strategic visibility.
"I'll consider it.."
"Don't consider too long. Opportunities like this have an expiration date." Caius turned to leave, paused. "One more thing: the investigation into the equipment shed is being conducted by Instructor Kael. She's thorough, politically connected, personally invested in maintaining hierarchical order. If she concludes you're a destabilizing variable, she won't hesitate to eliminate you through channels that don't require public justification. Watch yourself around her. She's not Varen. She doesn't find anomalies interesting."
He disappeared into shadow, leaving Orin standing with warnings accumulating like bad weather.
*Kael investigating. Caius offering a questionable alliances. Marrow documenting my transformation. Void stone pulling to devour more. It's just shit on shit lately*
The variables were multiplying faster than he could track, situation complexity growing toward a critical mass. And he was still just fifteen, still just a boy from the slums who'd wanted to climb out of the gutter and discovered that the altitude came with atmospheric changes that made breathing increasingly difficult.
The academy waited ahead, looming in the darkness. The memorial garden patient as winter, ready to plant whoever failed.
Orin walked toward it.
Would he recognize the thing staring back from mirrors when he finally reached whatever altitude the hunger was climbing toward?
The questions dissolved into darkness as he descended toward his basement cell and sleep.