The Exorcist Doctor

Chapter 109 - The Gloam // The Light

The room below the surgical chamber and behind the statue of the crooked Saintess was no sanctified chamber of medicine. The forge had grown over the last year in something less like a workshop and more like… a deranged carnival of industry.

Large machines squatted in the corners like sleeping titans, their arms and vents catching lanternlight in rusted gleams. Fans kept the air flowing; lanterns swung from crooked hooks; scattered tools and piping connected things no sane engineer would try to connect. He certainly tried to make it all make sense, but, well… he didn’t get any instruction manuals when he bought most of them from Juno. Didn’t stop him from trying to arrange them around this small room.

“Welcome, beloved assistant,” he mumbled, flourishing his cane as they stepped into the forge and he turned on the lights.

Maeve stepped inside with the cautious dignity of one stepping into a madhouse. The walls were still streaked with lurid splatters of dried red, green, and silver paint, and that made her scrunch her brows. “I can’t believe the stains from the prototype elixir bomb haven’t come off,” she muttered, brushing her fingers across one streak.

“It’ll wash out eventually.”

“Or so you say.”

“Paint is but enthusiasm in liquid form. Besides, a forge without color’s like a prison of iron.”

She sighed, shifting her umbrella against her shoulder as she followed him to the far end of the forge. A cabinet wall loomed there, full of drawers of uneven sizes, each labeled in handwriting that could only be read by someone already insane.

Gael yanked open drawer after drawer. Inside lay the spoils of their work for the past year and a half: dried chitin plates, cracked mandibles, soft sacs of Myrmur organs still faintly glowing, membranes in jars, legs bundled like sticks. The air was thick with their preserved musk. Maeve didn’t like being in here, but he liked it. Strong smells were the only smells that got to his nose.

“... What, exactly, are you making this time?” Maeve asked.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he dug through the cabinet until he found it: a pulsating, half-chitin, half-flesh organ about the size of his palm. It glowed faintly golden-green like a biological lantern, so he lifted it like a priest holding up a relic, grinning.

“The headlight organ of Lorcawn’s Myrmur,” he crowed theatrically. “And now, I shall make it sing again.”

He tossed it onto the central workbench where it pulsed faintly, illuminating the scattered chisels and clamps. Then he rummaged in a side cabinet until he pulled out an empty lantern frame: silver, hexagonal, and bare of glass.

This’ll do nicely.

While he tossed the lantern frame onto the workbench and threw himself on there as well, Maeve sat herself down in a distant chair, flipping open her horror chronicle. “Well, you enjoy that until you need me. I’ll enjoy this in the meanwhile.”

Soon, the forge filled with two rhythms: the scratch of Gael’s chisel against the headlight organ, and the soft rustles of pages turning. He carved bioarcanic glyphs around the organ, one after another, and every once in a while he paused to glance at Maeve’s face, catching the flickers of her reactions as she read: her lips tightening, her brows lifting, her breaths catching.

It was entertainment in and of itself stealing peeks at her.

“Don’t spoil it,” he said absentmindedly. “Not a word.”

She smirked behind the book. “Then get your own copy.”

“I’ll borrow yours.”

“It’s mine.”

“I bought that for you.”

“And you gave it to me.”

He grumbled, stabbing a little harder into the organ than necessary. Glyph after glyph built across its surface until ninety-nine percent of it was complete. The last one percent he saved for the lantern itself. He picked up the hexagonal frame, carved a single intricate line onto its inner lever, then stabbed the organ into the place where a candlewick would go.

The lantern shimmered faintly, its new heart glowing.

Satisfied, he wiped his hands on his coat and turned to a machine hulking against the far wall. It resembled a pipe organ if pipe organs were designed by a fever dream: dozens of tubes feeding up along the walls into a glass jar on the ceiling, with a central metal pedestal in the middle under the glass jar. Levers, chains, and cogwheels tied the whole machine together, though they were only visible because he’d removed their metal plate coverings trying to figure out how the whole thing worked a month ago.

Maeve looked up from her book for a moment, sighing. “I still have no idea what that thing does.”

Gael spread his arms. “It’s an infusing machine. A marvel. A migraine. You put something on the pedestal, feed your ingredients into the tubes around the pedestal, twist that crank, pull that lever—”

“—just ignore me—”

“ —and you’ll eventually infuse whatever’s on the pedestal with whatever mixture you’ve got up in that glass jar.”

Maeve tilted her head. “You need help with this part?”

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“Not yet. Keep reading. What’s happening in your book?”

She smiled slyly. “Miss Kristen just admitted to—”

“Nope.” He clapped his hands over his ears dramatically, then returned to business.

One by one, he poured ingredients into the five glass tubes rising around the pedestal. Into the first tube, he poured a vial of vitriol ashes, a powder the color of smoked glass that hissed when it touched metal. Into the second, he tipped a flask of marrow solvent, pale as bone-dust dissolved in vinegar, and into the third, he crumbled a cluster of sable resin, a sticky pitch harvested from the corpses of hollow Myrmurs that still smelled faintly of incense and rot.

The fourth tube he reserved for something more volatile. He uncorked a vial of his symbiote elixir and watched its iridescent contents slither and shimmer into the glass. It clung to the top at first, reluctant to leave, before a few more taps and pokes from him finally made it surrender and ooze down the tube in a prismatic ribbon.

And for the fifth… he grinned. His boots clanged across the floor as he strode to a separate bench, where the little glass case waited like a present for him. Inside, the pale silver petals glowed with their own cold fire. The moonflower—the rare bloom Maeve had given him just last night.

Lovely little thing. Too pure for Bharncair by half. He let himself smile, and Maeve, catching the smile, softened in return.

Then he got practical and smashed the glass case, yanking out the moonflower before crushing it in his fist.

“Oi!” Maeve’s smile evaporated into honest horror. “What are you—”

“Scientific progress.” He popped open the fifth tube’s lid and stuffed the crushed moonflower down the throat with two brisk jabs of his thumb. “Been hunting this plant a full year so I could try out this building. Thank you kindly.” He winked at her through his lenses.

Maeve’s cheeks colored, and she ducked back behind her book with an injured huff. “You’re… welcome. It better work, though. That flower took six bribes, three middlemen, and one very unpleasant customs officer who kept calling me ‘flower-wife.’ to get.”

“It’ll sing,” he promised, slapping the tube shut. “Now get over here. I need your help.”

Maeve set her book down and stood. While she crossed, he stacked six rectangular panes of raw glass onto the pedestal under the giant jar—clean and cut to his hex lantern’s dimensions, edges biting his gloves—and then pointed at the waist-high iron crank bolted to the machine’s side.

“We’re going to persuade these five ingredients to get very well acquainted with each other,” he said. “When we turn the crank together, everything gets sucked up, swirled, and kneaded in the super-compressor up there, then dripped down as a single mixture onto the glass panes. Infusion by force and romance.”

Maeve arched a brow. “Romance?”

“Between reagents, yes. Not us. We already eloped.”

She planted both hands on the crank. “Ready.”

He did the same, taking the other end of the crank. “Three, two—”

They heaved.

The machine woke like a cathedral organ remembering a wicked hymn. Valves clacked. Pistons muttered. Somewhere inside the pipe forest, a chain crawled into motion with a rattle, and the five glass tubes trembled as pressure rose, their contents surging upwards: vitriol ashes in a smoky swirl; marrow solvent sluicing pale and thin; sable resin crawling like liquefied incense; the symbiote elixir writhing in prismatic reluctance until pressure bullied it along; and last, the moonflower pulp unfurling into pure silver essence, defying gravity as all five ingredients were drawn into the glass jar overhead.

“Harder,” Gael said through his teeth, delighted. “Turn it—turn it!”

The crank fought them, then surrendered an inch, then another. The lanterns along the rafters flickered in sympathetic panic. The whole forge shuddered. Loose plates on the other machines leapt free and clanged to the floor like applause. A wrench skittered by their boots and disappeared under a workbench with a guilty clink.

Then every single gas lantern in the clinic went out at the same time, plunging the forge into near complete darkness.

“Gael! Keep it down!” Cara screamed from the surgical chamber upstairs. “If the clinic collapses, I’m repurposing your bones as coat hooks!”

Gael cackled. “Consider it a structural test!”

Maeve grunted once, twice, breath fogging her lenses.

“It… would help… if you labeled your levers—”

“I… did,” he wheezed, beaming. “With my… heart.”

Above them, the central glass vat frothed. Streams from the five tubes jetted inward and collided, colors rolling over each other—smoke-gray, marrow-pale, funeral-black, oil-slick iridescence, and moon-silver—until the whole jar boiled with a storm of luminous slate. The compressor’s collar cinched with a metallic groan. A hairline crack zipped across the glass and stopped, the internal pressure they were creating by turning the crank a little too much to bear.

“Almost,” Gael panted. “Almost… there!”

And they drove the crank the last quarter-turn like two executioners finishing a job. A lever somewhere tripped with a triumphant click, and at last, pressure shoved the mixture of five liquified ingredients down the narrow tube at the bottom of the glass jar.

A single bead of the mixture fell.

Plop.

The first drop struck the top pane, sank into it with capillary hunger, and bloomed. The glass blushed from transparent to opal, and as drop after drop followed—a steady rain, each drop staining every layer with iridescence—they let the crank spin free and let out long, exhausted breaths.

The lanterns around the clinic steadied, returning light to the forge.

“... What, exactly, did you just do?” Maeve asked, chest rising and falling.

Gael walked to the pedestal. The stack of panes shone, each one a captive aurora—no longer clear, but not opaque either, patterned by thin veins of silver-white threading through the glass.

He picked up the top pane. It weighed the same as before, but it felt… different in his hand. It certainly looked different as well.

Then he picked up the entire stack, slotted each glass pane into the hexagonal lantern’s six faces, and held the completed lantern up for Maeve to see.

“Tada. Complete.”

He thumbed the small dial on its side, and the inner lever tapped the carved organ nestled at its core. The forge lit at once with a clean, impossible glow: white, pure as bone under moonlight. White light was a rarity in Bharncair, a city that knew only green haze, jaundiced lamps, and the perpetual dim of poisoned fog.

“I’ll call it… the Gloam Lantern,” he declared. “It’ll never run out of fuel, because its heart drinks from bioarcanic essence itself, endlessly regenerating.”

Maeve stared at it, lips parted, and then arched a skeptical brow. “That’s impressive, but… that has nothing to do with the moonflower.” She crossed her arms, narrowing her eyes. “So evasive. What does this lantern actually do?”

“That,” he said, dimming the light with a flick of the dial and hanging the lantern from his belt, “we’ll only find out once it’s baptized in the field. It might work, or it might explode. Only one way to know.”