Boros stroked his chin slowly, turning the word over in his mind the way a jeweller turns a stone under light.
"I'll have to look into the alchemy of this world," he said, almost to himself.
"You can't just shake off my question."
Yelan had moved. She was standing directly in front of him now, arms unfolded, chin lifted — close enough that most people would have felt the pressure of her presence.
Boros looked at her.
The full weight of whatever was behind those eyes landed on her without apology.
Yelan almost took a step back. Almost.
"For someone who didn't recognise what I just did," Boros said evenly, "you're being awfully persistent."
She turned her head to the side. Just enough to break the line of his gaze, to find something else in the room to look at.
"I don't plan to question you about your past," Boros continued. His tone hadn't changed. "But don't overstep your boundaries."
A beat of silence.
Yelan turned back. She lowered herself onto one knee, her robe pooling against the stone floor, head dipped.
"Yes, my lord."
Boros moved past her toward the examination table, where Stone had already secured a new subject without being asked — efficient as ever, silent as stone deserved to be. Boros looked down at the figure strapped to the surface and exhaled slowly through his nose.
*Half,* he thought. *I've burned through nearly half my mass already.*
*I can't use my other skills recklessly. Not until I've replenished.*
"Stone."
The Overseer straightened from where he stood beside the door.
"Fetch me my pills."
Stone bowed — a precise, practised motion. "Yes, Head Priest." He turned and disappeared through the secret passage without another word, the hidden door sliding shut behind him with barely a sound.
Boros turned to Yelan.
"Go and get me an update on the Fourth Seat's current location."
Yelan rose from the floor, dipped her head once, and stepped backward into her own shadow. It rose to meet her, swallowing her feet, her legs, her waist — and then she was simply gone. The shadow on the floor returned to the shape of nothing in particular.
The room was quiet. The remaining prisoners kept their eyes down.
Stone returned before long, moving through the passage with a silver tray balanced in both hands. On it sat a row of small capsules — Boros's cell pills, smooth and unremarkable in appearance, the kind of thing that looked entirely harmless until you understood what they were.
Boros took one between his fingers. He examined it briefly, then turned to the subject on the table.
The man flinched as Boros reached down and took hold of his jaw applying pressure steadily. The jaw opened. Boros placed the pill at the back of the tongue and released.
"Down the hatch."
The man swallowed reflexively.
*Good.* Boros stepped back, watching. *With this, I should be able to activate both Flesh Mutation and Cellular Manipulation simultaneously. Which will enhance my control over the shape the mutation takes rather than simply triggering the process and observing the outcome.*
The subject's breathing changed first — quickening, growing ragged, his chest rising and falling in an uneven rhythm that had nothing to do with fear. Then the colour beneath his skin shifted. Black-green veins rose to the surface like cracks forming in pale stone, threading outward from the chest, moving up the neck, down the arms, branching across the backs of his hands and over his knuckles.
The man began to writhe.
Boros closed his eyes.
He reached inward — not into himself, but outward, through the connection the pill had opened. He could feel the subject's cellular structure the way a hand feels the grain of wood — the texture of it, the direction, the points of resistance. He pressed gently. Adjusted. Guiding the mutation along his chosen path.
The writhing intensified. The screams that had been building broke free — raw, animal — and then gradually shifted into something lower as the body began to simply *process*, too deep in its own transformation to do anything else.
The veins expanded.
They thickened and darkened, spreading until they covered every surface of skin, until the man on the table was entirely black with green light pulsing in the channels beneath. Then the body itself began to respond. The silhouette changed — bulk dissolving, fat disappearing, the physique narrowing into something leaner and more severe. The muscles didn't grow larger. They compressed. Became dense, fibrous, like cable beneath rubber. The frame stretched. An inch. Two inches. Three.
Boros opened his eyes.
He stepped forward and studied the result without expression.
The figure on the table was barely recognisable as the person who'd been strapped to it. Lean. Dark. Taller by a visible margin, the ribs prominent beneath the changed skin like the hull of a stripped ship. The face had settled into something quieter.
Boros glanced at Stone.
"Release it."
Stone reached for the restraints.
Before his hands found the first buckle, the figure's left wrist bent at an angle a human wrist couldn't manage — a wet, quiet sound — and slipped free of the iron cuff on its own. The rest of the restraints followed in quick succession as it sat up, moved off the table, and stood.
It looked at Boros.
Boros looked back at it.
A slow smile crossed his face.
"Go to the wall," Boros said. "Camouflage."
The thrall turned. Walked to the nearest stone wall. And then — gradually, the way a reflection settles in still water — its surface began to change. The dark skin shifted, taking on the grey texture of the stone. The green veins faded to the pale lines of mortar in the joints. Within moments, it was simply gone. A section of wall that breathed.
Boros watched it with satisfaction for exactly two seconds.
Then his brow creased.
He pressed two fingers to his temple and stood very still.
*It consumed my mana.*
Not a large amount. But it had drawn from him — pulled on his reserves — and he hadn't directed it to. The thrall had reached for the resource on its own to power the camouflage, treating Boros's mana the way a hand treats the arm it's attached to.
*Of course it did.* He exhaled. *The thralls I create are treated as extensions of myself. By the world's logic, they are me. Their consumption is my consumption. Their actions draw on my reserves because there's no distinction made between us.*
He turned the problem over.
*Which means as long as I produce thralls this way, I'm not gaining soldiers. I'm dividing myself.*
He was quiet for a long moment.
Then — almost involuntarily — his train of thought arrived somewhere new.
*But if I were to use Creation of Life—*
He stopped.
The thought sat there, fully formed, and Boros stared at it.
A grin spread across his face. Not the faint ghost of satisfaction from before. Something wider. Something that started at the corners of his mouth and kept going, folding into a low, genuine chuckle that he caught behind his palm, pressing his hand flat over his face as his shoulders shook once.
*That's it.*
*That's why.*
He turned sharply and grabbed Stone by both shoulders, shaking him — once, twice — with the unceremonious enthusiasm of someone who had just solved a problem they'd been carrying for weeks. Stone absorbed it with the impassivity of a man who had endured considerably stranger things.
Boros let him go and began to pace.
"How could I be so foolish." It wasn't a question that needed answering. "It took me this long."
He moved back and forth across the laboratory floor, the white coat swaying slightly with each turn.
"The thralls I create are treated as extensions of myself — that's the root of it. The world sees no boundary between us. But if I apply Creation of Life the product isn't an extension. It becomes an artificial being in its own right. A distinct existence. Its consumption is its own. Its mana is its own."
He stopped pacing and looked at the section of wall that was currently a person.
"Separate entity. Separate reserves." He spread one hand open, palm up, as if holding the idea. "Simple."
Then the grin faded into something more calculating.
*But they would need to possess their own mana reserves.*
"The mana pathway transfer would be the quickest method—" He paused. Shook his head. "No. The chances of failure are too high."
He resumed pacing, slower now.
"But by merging the pathways to integrate rather than transplanting them that could work." He tilted his head. "For now, it will have to do."
He looked up, decision made, and moved back to the table.
What followed was not quick.
Stone moved prisoners to the table in succession — each one secured, each one subjected to Boros's focused, methodical attention. There was no performance to it. No cruelty performed for its own sake, no enjoyment in the suffering itself. Just the relentless forward motion of someone working through a problem with the tools available to them.
But the screams were real.
Outside the great doors, the two guards stood at their posts with their backs straight and their hands clasped and their eyes fixed on the middle distance, doing everything in their power not to listen. The sounds came through the iron regardless — rising and breaking and changing and rising again — and both men held very still in the way that people hold still when they are trying very hard not to understand what they are hearing.
Neither of them spoke about it. They both thought the same thing.
*Have mercy on us Lord. Please. Mercy.*
When the door to the secret passage moved again, it was Yelan — stepping out of the shadow beneath it, straightening her collar, crossing the floor toward the only source of sound in the now-quiet room.
She stopped.
Boros was standing with his back to her, hands clasped behind his coat, facing a row of four figures arranged along the far wall.
The first was enormous — three and a half meters of solid mass, its body far beyond what human musculature was meant to carry. Four arms hung from its frame, the lower pair sitting just below the original, each one thick and corded. Two heads sat on its shoulders, each with a face. And where there should have been a back, two more faces were visible — pressed against the surface of the skin from within, features straining outward, belonging to heads that existed inside the body but were oriented outward. Four faces. Two heads. A silhouette that had stopped asking permission from geometry.
The second and third were tall — two and a half meters each, their proportions stretched and thinned, limbs overlong in ways the eye kept trying to correct and failing. They stood like diagrams of people rather than people.
The fourth looked, at first glance, almost normal. Human height. Human build. Upright and still in the way the others were still.
Then the eye travelled to the torso, and found that where the stomach should have been, a second jaw had grown. Large. Patient. Closed, for now.
Boros turned at the sound of Yelan's footsteps.
"Oh," he said. "You're back."
Yelan's gaze moved across the four figures and returned to him.
"Yes, my lord," she said. Carefully. "I have returned."
"And the Fourth Seat?"
"She will be arriving shortly."
Boros looked back at his work. He was quiet for a moment, studying the four of them with the calm eye of a craftsman assessing a finished piece — noting the places where the result matched the intention, noting the places where it didn't, filing both away.
Then he turned to Stone.
"Prepare robes for our four friends."
Stone bowed without a word and moved to carry out the instruction.
Boros straightened his tie. Adjusted the stethoscope at his collar. Glanced once more at the row of thralls, then toward the door.
"It's time we welcomed her ladyship."