The Exorcist Doctor

Chapter 135 - Myrmurs // Whispers

The Breeder hummed a Vharnveil tune as he worked his scalpels. His hands didn’t match his song. The unconscious woman strapped to the surgical table in the center of the room looked small beneath the bright lamps—small and pale and horribly normal, though that was about to change really soon.

Once he opened up her stomach, he leaned in close, peering into the glistening hollow he’d made. His humming softened into a pleased little murmur. It was just about the right size for a cylindrical bomb, so he picked it up from the surgical tray next to him and slid it inside her, tucking it into a small pocket of flesh.

A delicate push. A slight rotation. A satisfied pause as it settled. His gloved fingers pressed around it gently, checking its placement until he was sure it wouldn’t move around.

“There,” he whispered. “Now you won’t spill the beans, will you?”

The woman didn’t answer. He shifted to his surgical cart fully this time. There were scalpels of different sizes, bone hooks, clamps, fine needles, and threads that’d been braided for more intricate surgeries on the tray, but beside all of those sat a cold mechanical chest, its lid slick with misty frost.

He opened it carefully and reached inside, pulling out a small jar, and within the jar—a living heart.

Not a human heart, of course. Not even close. He’d grown bored of playing with those decades ago. The Myrmur heart, in comparison, was smaller than it had any right to be for the trouble it could cause, and it looked wrong in every way a living heart could look wrong. It pulsed with a wet, hateful, uneven rhythm. Veins of swirling pinkish-purple energy threaded through it like wires. Black ichor shimmered between its folds. If there was a malevolent god in this world, this would be their creation: disease forged into jewelry.

The heart spasmed the moment he lifted the jar, and a tiny scream scraped against the glass. The parasite inside tried to manifest, tried to push itself outward, tried to claw at the boundary and become more than a heart. Like all living beings, it didn’t want to stay contained, so he brought the jar closer to his mask and cooed at it.

“No, no,” he whispered. “You can’t do that. Not in there. Not in my little jar.” He tapped the glass with a fingernail. The sound rang bright in the sterile hush. “This glass is infused with toxic blood from that man, so you can huff and shriek and dream of crawling out into the world all you want, but you won’t escape. Not even if you’re Blight-Class, darling.”

The heart beat harder as if it understood and was insulted. His humming returned, threaded with laughter, and he turned back to the woman.

He opened the jar.

Even though he’d gotten completely used to the procedure by now, working with a Myrmur heart was still as exciting as ever. He slid it out with a careful tool, guiding it down into the woman’s stomach, and then he watched with glee as it latched onto the inner stomach wall. Tendrils—thin, ugly little threads—reached out and found flesh, anchoring the heart and deepening its rhythm.

“Oh, look at you.” He sighed. “Such a greedy little bug. Such a hungry little god.”

His hands went back to the woman’s wound, and he stitched her up with the same care he would’ve used on a noble’s daughter in a proper clinic. Needle in, thread through, pull, knot, repeat. When he was finally done, he wiped his tools and pushed the table to the side. It glided along the rails that ran across his floor, and when it reached the tunnel mouth at the far end of his lab, it began rolling down a slope, swallowed by a dark archway.

The woman would find herself in the lower floors soon enough, where his assistants would take over the rest of the process. They’d take her measurements, weigh her body, and then toss her out somewhere random across Bharncair. Somewhere inconvenient. With any luck, the drugs he gave her would make it so she wouldn’t even remember being strapped to a table for the past two months.

… And that’s the quota for this week.

He let out a long, heavy sigh and sank back into his rotating chair, letting it cradle his spine like an old lover. At his age, it was even more comfortable than lying in his bed. With a lazy shove of his heel, he rolled across the polished floor towards the round window set into the other side of the lab’s gilded walls. The glass was fogged nearly opaque, and a milky film of condensation turned the world outside into a smeared painting.

He wiped it clean with the back of his glove.

Bleakhearth glittered outside, bright, gilded, and still drowned in rain in the middle of the night. Street lamps burned in long strings over rooftops and balconies, golden light spearing up into the night and cutting through the Vile like stage spotlights. Somewhere, a flare bloomed and faded, and somewhere else, faint music pulsed with a melodic rhythm that made even his old body want to sway. There was always a party somewhere in Bleakhearth. Always a performance. That was why he’d chosen the western ward of masks to be his base of research.

He watched the lights outside with a small, satisfied smile—and then a shadow dropped in from the glass dome overhead.

His chair creaked as he whirled, a mild spike of worry pricking the back of his neck before he realized who it was.

Stolen from NovelBin, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“... Still don’t like front doors, huh?” he muttered, scowling at the Myrmur Doctor. The Raven in question—with umbilical cord-like straps trailing from his sleeves and coat hems, dragging along the floor as his signature accessory—only patted down his shoulders and shook rain out of his top hat, looking completely nonplussed.

“I want my report,” the Myrmur Doctor said calmly, putting his top hat back on. “How have this month’s Myrmurs been performing?”

The Breeder’s grin returned in full. He scooted his chair sideways with a quick push, rolling to the nearest table where his stacks of notes lay in perfect disorder, and rummaged through them like a pianist searching for the right chord.

“Oh, you’re going to like this month’s report,” he murmured, finally plucking out a bundled report. “They’re performing better than expected.”

He tossed the report across the lab, and the Myrmur Doctor snatched it out of the air.

“Ignoring the few Wretch-Class Myrmur Hosts I made to see if I couldn’t improve the implantation process even better, most of our Blight-Class Myrmurs managed to wreak a fair amount of havoc in their respective wards before they were cleaned up,” he said, as the Myrmur Doctor quickly scanned through the papers. “The Symbiote Exorcists dealt with most of them here in Bleakhearth and Umbracross. The Fishermen took care of the ones in Wraithpier. Ironwych’s on full damage mitigation using our stabilizers, and Blightmarch… well, let’s not talk about Blightmarch. It’s hard to even let a Wretch-Class Myrmur slip into Blightmarch these days with those Saint’s Hands running around.”

The Myrmur Doctor didn’t reply as he kept reading. He didn’t hum. He didn’t react. He simply absorbed the information the way a grave absorbed rain, and the silence stretched long enough that Breeder felt it start to itch beneath his skin.

He smiled anyway. It was a nervous curl at the edge of his mouth before it widened into something brighter and more… theatrical.

“Well,” he said lightly, rocking his chair back a fraction, “it’s fun and all getting to mess around with implanting Myrmurs, but that’s not our real objective, is it? I’ve been itching to check on the big one up there. Is it still developing smoothly?”

“Yes,” the Myrmur Doctor murmured, eyes never leaving the page. “All thanks to your artificially created Hosts.”

That answer sent a quiet thrill through Breeder’s spine. He clasped his hands together, pleased. “So Cassian is happy with our results?”

“Very. He and his cohort have increased our funding for how well our Myrmurs have been doing, weakening the gangs of Bharncair, so the big one has been getting more nutrients and biomass accordingly.”

“But, of course, most of that biomass isn’t actually going to the big one either.”

The Myrmur Doctor didn’t deny it. Breeder laughed under his breath.

“Duplicity upon duplicity upon duplicity,” he said, tasting the words. “Truly, this is an exciting plan.”

But the pages merely kept turning, and that, more than anything, unsettled him.

Breeder’s laughter faded. He sat there for a moment, watching the raven mask dip and rise with the rhythm of reading, the trailing cloth strips barely moving as if they, too, were fully absorbed within the report.

“... You know my nature, Benedict,” he eventually said. “You know my curiosity. You know my desire to understand the Nightspawn and their bioarcanic power more than anyone else, but… this plan of yours. Do you really think it’ll work? Even I… well, even I find it hard to believe it could be possible.”

For a while, the Myrmur Doctor said nothing yet again.

But then the report rustled once more before stopping.

“When the Nightspawn first descended from the dark stars,” the Myrmur Doctor said at last, “Bharncair collapsed into even more chaos than it had already been in. They came in waves. Grotesque and endless, each horde was worse than the last, and entire districts could vanish overnight and nobody would give a damn. Nobody believed humanity could stand a chance against the Nightspawn, and most believed survival itself was temporary. A quick death was something to be grateful for.”

His gloved thumb rested against the margin of the page.

“It wasn’t until a single inquisitive mind decided to kill one Nightspawn—just one—and harvest its parts that everything changed,” he said. “That mind studied their bioarcanic properties. Dissected them, measured them, and failed to obtain any useful results again and again. There were failures that detonated whole laboratories. There were failures that condemned countless assistants to hell. There were failures that burned entire districts to ash… but knowledge alone persisted. Notes passed from hand to hand. Research survived life and death. Eventually, we forged the very first bioarcanic system from the parts of our worst enemies, and that is how we learned to stand toe-to-toe with demons that bled.”

Breeder felt a shiver trace his spine as the Myrmur Doctor finally looked up.

He saw the devil in the Raven’s eyes.

“Science is not about asking whether something is possible. It is about acknowledging what is impossible and doing it anyway.” Benedict held Breeder’s gaze through the raven mask, and something weary bled through the stillness. “I still hear her every night. In my dreams. She whispers to me, and she says ‘the Myrmurs can wear my true face’.”

The silence that followed felt heavier than before.

“... My plan will work,” the Myrmur Doctor whispered. “Faith is not necessary.”

And the Breeder didn’t argue with that. He simply dipped his head, accepting the Myrmur Doctor’s prognosis.

“Very well,” he said. “I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of it.”

At last, the Myrmur Doctor finished reading the report, closed it, and slid it under his coat.

“Everything is in order,” he said. “Keep doing what you’re doing. In time, we’ll both be the gods of this accursed city.”

Then he stepped back, bent his knees, and leapt up through the opening in the glass dome.

The Breeder watched the shadow melt into the night of Bleakhearth, then slowly leaned back in his chair.

… And to think you were once considered a hero of humanity.

Just how far will you go to bring her back?