The dagger before her was different. Even feeding pure chaos magic into something wouldn’t get anywhere as hostile as the dagger was.
It was made of bone. A human femur. Based on the jagged edge, it had probably been broken at some point before being filed down and sharpened. Zoe had yet to determine whether or not the dagger being made of bone affected the enchantment in any way.
The enchantment–the curse was entirely contained on the edge of the blade. She couldn’t detect any signs of magic anywhere else.
Anything that touched the edge of the dagger died on a cellular level. It didn’t even need to cut something. Just resting it on the tail of one of the rats Ylva had supplied resulted in the death of the surface cells.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the dead cells would start attacking neighboring cells and eventually kill them. The newly dead cells would continue attacking like some sort of miniature zombie infection. It would spread faster as more and more cells were converted.
The only saving grace of the curse was that it did not create zombies. A dead rat stayed dead. Even exposing a healthy rat to a cursed rat, either in whole or by mixing their fluids, did not spread the curse.
The curse knew what organism was supposed to be cursed.
Ylva stopped the memetic effect in Eva. But the dead cells were still dead. There was no healing going on, no new cells replaced the dead ones.
The curse was still there.
Arthfael’s passive healing aura kept the rest of Eva healthy, but the area around the cut was blackened and dead. The only reason she hadn’t bled out from the hole in her back was thanks to what she did with her blood magic prior to passing out.
Zoe slid her chair over to the rat cages.
A good half of the rats were completely dead. They were dead, but even the oldest hadn’t begun to rot. That small oddity was something Zoe had yet to solve. She suspected it was caused by the same thing that prevented new cell generation. Once the cells died, that was it. They just stopped. The bodies never went into the bloat state of decomposition.
Inorganic matter was another story altogether. Despite rigor mortis never setting in on the rats, Zoe’s first pair of gloves were as hard as stone. A near perfect half-sphere of dirt turned to incredibly dense stone near where Eva had been stabbed. The spot where the dagger had fallen.
Ylva hadn’t needed to stop that. It stopped on its own roughly five feet from the dagger’s tip.
After turning a desk to stone, Ylva brought in a pair of clamps to hold the dagger so that the edge never touched anything. Zoe used a strong wall of solid air around the blade to keep any accidents from happening while she wasn’t testing it.
She slid straight past the deceased and the control group to the group on which Ylva had stopped the memetic effect.
Some were unconscious, others were moving around. It depended on where they were cut and for how long the curse had to act before Ylva stopped it.
“Hello, Charlie,” Zoe said with a sad smile. “How are you doing today?”
The rat squeaked once before running towards the little cave in his container.
Zoe immobilized it before it could hide by enveloping it in solid air. She left a little hole for it to breathe through.
Naming them had been a terrible idea in retrospect. After killing Gin, Ron, and Freddie, the rest had all been numbered. Charlie was one of those from when she still named them.
Zoe spent a moment of time building up the magic for a measurement spell.
“Fifteen point nine-seven centimeters,” Zoe said as she marked down the numbers on a chart attached to his cage. The same number as the last six entries.
Before cutting his tail, it had been eighteen point three-one centimeters. Using the cursed dagger, she had made a paper-thin cut at sixteen centimeters. Ylva had stopped the curse’s memetic effect less than a second later.
With a non-magical knife, Zoe had severed the tail at fourteen centimeters. Charlie’s tail had been regrown using purely potions.
Or rather, Charlie regrew one point nine-seven centimeters of his tail. It hadn’t changed in two days despite his continued potion treatment.
The stupid curse knew where it had left off.
Arthur underwent a similar experiment with the exception of Ylva’s intervention. He had lived just fine for a day or two while he underwent healing. As soon as his tail grew back to where the curse had spread, the curse took hold again and continued attacking the rat.
So far, Zoe had a decent idea of the effects and limitations of the curse. Yet she felt no closer to a cure than before she started.
One by one, Zoe checked over the other experiments. None of them were showing any real progress. Overpowering the curse with any kind of healing magic had so far been met with nothing but failure. They’d need to find a way to remove the curse.
The pressure in the room changed as someone opened the door. Zoe leaned back in her chair, rubbing her eyes as the footsteps approached.
“How long has it been since you last took a break?”
“An hour,” Zoe said as she spun her chair around to face the newcomer. “Maybe two.”
“Uh huh,” Carlos said. “I haven’t seen you since this morning.”
This morning? Zoe shook her head. “What time is it?”
“Eight. In the evening.”
“Ah. Maybe more than two hours then.”
“When did you last eat?”
Zoe put on a shallow smile. “An hour ago. Maybe two.”
Carlos adjusted his glasses with a single finger to the rim. “You’re as bad as Genoa.”
“Can’t have that,” Zoe said as she stood and stretched. There was a kink in her neck that wouldn’t quite go away. Twelve hours of sitting hunched over notes and experiments would do that. “How is Genoa? She hasn’t found any more alcohol, has she?”
“Not so far. She spent the day fighting Arachne.”
“That’s better than a few days ago.” Zoe raised an eyebrow. “She actually managed to coax Arachne out of Eva’s room?”
“I think they both needed to work out their frustrations,” he said with a nod. “It can’t be easy for Arachne with how Eva is, even though she is physically here…” He trailed off with a glance to the side.
“How are you doing, Carlos?”
Zoe regretted opening her mouth the moment she finished speaking.
He pulled off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, scrunching his eyes shut. After resetting them on his face, he turned to face Zoe and smiled. “I don’t know how to answer that without either lying or being depressive.”
“I–I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“No,” he waved his hand as if dismissing her comment. “It shows you care. Let’s go eat.”
“A break might be good. I’ve been meaning to find Devon and share some of my research. Given his background, he might be able to do more with it than I.”
Carlos played the proper gentleman and held open the door. “I saw him walking out of Ylva’s eye-stalk room not long ago. Well, not so much walking as stalking out while muttering under his breath.”
“I hope he hasn’t gone far.”
Zoe grabbed her cane from its spot against the door on her way out. More out of habit than any real need. Some mages that actually needed the things turned their canes into foci, either for backup or for their primary focus. Zoe had considered and dismissed the idea.
A cane was far too large and unwieldy compared to a dagger or wand. If she was going to do that, a full staff would serve far better. As an air mage, she did not need the extra magic storage capacity. Most of her spells had a low enough cost that most of a staff would end up as dead weight.
The spells that did need more, well…
She’d need far more than a staff to perform the large-scale weather manipulation that Ylva had so casually used to hide the sun.