Eva opened her eyes, surprised to find she had eyes to open after watching the avatar being torn apart in the walls of the teleportation tunnel. She had fully expected to be torn apart as well. Even if Void reclaimed her, she would still have awoken in that void where nothing existed save for her mind.
Awaking in a familiar place, staring at a familiar cracked sandstone ceiling, Eva let out a soft sigh. The women’s ward. Her own bed. Definitely a far cry from the endless abyss that had been her earlier death. The blankets felt soft and fluffy against her skin, as if they had just recently been laundered.
She didn’t want to get out of bed. For so long, she had felt this stress building up. And now, everything was over. Or it should have been over. Unfortunately, she couldn’t say that with absolute certainty. As much as she wanted to just lie down and relax for a week straight, Eva needed to find out what had happened. To find out whether or not everything worked out properly.
Mustering up her willpower, Eva threw off the blankets and swung her legs out of bed.
Only to fall straight to the floor, unable to even catch herself on the edge of the bed.
She had no legs. Her arms ended as stubs just beneath her elbows. Unlike how she had woken after using her beacon, no coalesced blood served to replace her missing limbs. Neither had Arachne’s carapace returned. Just raw skin that terminated around her bones.
However hard she tried, she couldn’t force her blood to pierce her skin. Or move it much at all, for that matter; trying to manipulate her blood within her veins worked, but the blood couldn’t escape her body.
Which wouldn’t stand.
Maybe it was her skin being too demonic, too strong for such a weak manipulation to work. Maybe it was something else entirely. Even if she had a cut, she doubted that her control over her blood was to the level where she could form limbs from it.
If her demonic power involved blood, that was great. She knew blood. Practically her entire life had been spent as a blood mage. But if it only activated when she was under extreme stress, what good was it? Especially now that she lacked Arachne’s limbs, she really needed it.
Propping herself up into an upright position, Eva glanced around with a scowl on her face. Nothing around the room would help her. Her dresser held clothes and books. The end table had a few runes to control the lighting of the room—which she hadn’t activated, and yet she could see perfectly fine despite the dark sky outside the window. Perhaps another demonic aspect? Night vision? Neat, but useless as far as mobility was concerned.
She didn’t have a wheelchair. Even if she did, she wouldn’t be able to wheel it. Her thaumaturgy wasn’t good enough to help. Fire wouldn’t do much except make a mess and her skills in air magic levitation were lacking. Earth magic might be able to push her around, but she was barely experienced enough to work with dirt, not the hard cement of the women’s ward floor.
Dragging herself around was a possibility, if an unpleasant one. She hadn’t had clothes since before her transformation at the ritual circle, so she would be dragging her bare skin across the ground. Bearable until she reached someone, she supposed, but that was another problem in and of itself. Did she really want to appear before anyone else while crawling across the ground? Juliana and Shalise might help her out without question, but they weren’t likely to be at the prison. Catherine, Devon, or Devon’s demons were the ones who should be around.
Eva had a sinking feeling that the demons would lose all respect for her while Devon would see it as an opportunity to lock her up and keep her from getting into more trouble. All for his experiments, of course.
Arachne was the only one she would trust and she was obviously not around. If Arachne were anywhere nearby, Eva had no doubts that the spider-demon would have sensed her presence and sought her out above all other happenings. Even were the world back in peril of ending.
In attempting to clamber back onto the bed—because so long as she was stuck thinking, she might as well be stuck in comfort—Eva knocked over the end table. A crystalline dagger, one she hadn’t touched in years, slid across the floor away from her. The hilt lacked a bloodstone. It hadn’t had one in years as well, the same years in which she hadn’t touched it. Neither did she have the means of creating a new bloodstone.
Her void metal dagger, and the gems it held, were likely lost. She had the dagger on her person before the ritual began. After transforming into the bloody winged version of herself, she hadn’t checked for its presence. After returning to Earth from Hell, she had wound up naked. Maybe it was lying out on the surface of the ritual circle. Maybe it was gone forever. She would make a few attempts to look for it, but obviously not at the moment.
There should be a few spare stones lying about from her trip to Florida however.
Before she could get excited about digging them out from whatever corner of the room she had tossed them in, Eva realized just when her trip to Florida had been. She had gone on the very first day school had ended. While she had spent a few days wandering about before finding the gang she had dismantled, it hadn’t been a significant length of time. Which meant that the bloodstones were at least seven months old. Probably closer to eight.
Normal bloodstones lasted only about three months before deteriorating. Those left over from her altercation with Sawyer would be nothing but dust. Her void metal dagger and its stones had spoiled her.
Slumping back against the bed, Eva scowled. She had such a simple solution to her problem and yet no bloodstones with which to enact that solution. She could try teleporting to the dormitory. Crawling around, she would be more likely to encounter Genoa, Shalise, or another human. But there were also a number of demons there. Possibly including Catherine. They would be able to sense her without much difficulty and might investigate.
Though, given that no one had come to see her at all was somewhat strange. Her room was a separate ward scheme than the women’s ward and the rest of the prison, but they could still have knocked on her door without exploding. Something… was wrong.
Eva slid herself across the floor, angling herself towards the window. Nighttime, just as she had seen before. But it wasn’t a proper night.
There were no stars in the sky. No clouds, not even a wisp. She couldn’t see the ground or any prison walls from her position, but she bet that there wouldn’t be much out there. Nothing besides sand and an endless ocean outside the walls of her women’s ward.
The alternate women’s ward.
Eva grit her teeth. Of course. She should have realized the moment she woke up. The normal women’s ward had been destroyed by enigmas during the attack. She had seen it with her own eyes.
Her first thought was to simply use her beacon to return to the real world.
But she didn’t have one. In the short time between returning to Earth and taking the Avatar of Life through the teleportation tunnel, she hadn’t had time to create one. She hadn’t even thought of it.
“Void!” Eva shouted. “Put me back on Earth! There are still things that need doing.”
She waited, but for once in Hell, only silence answered her. Eva had to concentrate to keep her teeth from grinding together. The plan to return Life’s avatar hadn’t included this. Had it even succeeded? Void was supposed to have used the connection Life had forged between their realms to punt the brain back at the Power. But if she were here, was it here as well?
Eva did not want to walk outside to find chunks of Vektul or the avatar lying strewn about her domain.
Though, she didn’t want to be in her domain in the first place. In fact, she really didn’t want to be in her domain. There was nothing here. Nothing at all save for what she created. Which she knew about, and had known about for a while, but it hadn’t really registered with her until just now. She had always figured that Arachne would be around to keep her company. Unless some significant amount of time had passed, she doubted that Arachne would be hanging around in her domain. Same with Lucy. Not that Eva ever wanted to return to that domain, but maybe she could have gotten some imp to go to Lucy’s domain and extend an invite. Catherine and every other demon that she knew would be back on Earth.