Unlike before, she wasn’t mass producing an endless supply of blood. That had been some demonic power. Maybe she would learn to harness it fully one day. For now, she only had the blood in her body.
Trying again, this time Eva did not make solid arms and legs. Her hands were thin and bone-like. As if the bones of her arm were the only things that extended out, no meat and no muscles. Her legs were the same. She only had narrow bones of liquid blood stretching out from the stubs at her hips.
She still felt a little anemic, but it was better than nothing. So long as her body continued to produce blood cells, she could fill out her thighs and hands to their proper shape. For now, skeleton Eva it was.
And she stood, shaky at first. Whether the shakes came from how narrow her legs were, the dull thumps of pain still pounding in her chest, or simply because she wasn’t quite used to walking around just yet—using the blood as legs before had felt a whole lot more natural—she couldn’t say. But she did stand.
Standing was an improvement worthy of praise in and of itself.
Technically, she didn’t need to stand. Neither did she need long legs. Floating around on platforms of blood should be possible. It was basically what she was doing anyway—unless she hardened the bones of blood, they were fairly poor supports for her body. And she could harden them, and probably would later, but only once she had enough blood to spare for proper legs.
However, half her reason for not wanting to crawl around was appearances. Specifically not wanting to appear weak in front of other demons. Floating around on a platform of blood might be convenient, but didn’t look imposing enough. In that respect, skeletal legs were probably more intimidating than filled out thighs.
Similarly, she didn’t really need hands. She could form her blood into tentacles or just leave it all within her body until she needed to manipulate something. Even in that case, she wouldn’t need to move her arms. Floating blood was a trick she had learned a long time ago.
Maybe some day, she wouldn’t feel the need to maintain appearances. For now, she walked out of the room on two feet made of blood with two skeletal hands.
And, as she left the room, she found herself in the common room of the alternate women’s ward.
In the real world, and the last time she had seen the alternate version, the common room merely held a table and a few stolen couches. It normally sat between all the cells of the prison and led out into the main walled off courtyard.
However, as she walked into the common room, Eva found herself face to face with an obsidian column. Sandstone bricks from the roof and floor of her domain littered the floor around the common room as if it had risen from under the ground.
Eva found herself staring into her own glowing red eyes in the reflection of the smooth obsidian wall. “Huh,” she said, slowly walking around the construct. “I don’t remember creating that.”
Chapter 032
After ensuring that she was indeed alone within her domain—she hadn’t found any enigmas, humans, or demons wandering around, nor had she sensed the presence of any—Eva returned to the common room to further inspect the column sticking through the roof.
As it turns out, it wasn’t a column. All four sides angled inwards ever so slightly up until high above the roof where the angle bent sharply towards a central point. She had searched every inch that she could see and found nothing. No markings or inscriptions of any kind. Whoever had built it hadn’t even had the decency to slap on a sticky note telling why they built it.
Eva certainly hadn’t built it. Sometimes her domain did odd things related to creating structures or items that Eva felt she needed—such as a potion kit when Genoa had been injured—but this was a bit beyond anything her subconscious would muster up. Unless it was supposed to have been something meant to help her move about with no legs, but if so, it obviously hadn’t worked.
Luckily, her blood legs worked perfectly.
Under other circumstances, she might have left it behind and pursued a way to get out of Hell, or to at least get a message out to Devon. He would surely summon her. But the strange obelisk wouldn’t have just appeared in her domain for absolutely no reason.
Rubbing her hand, or the blood making up her hand, over the surface, Eva found it completely smooth. The liquid couldn’t find any holes or seams. Each corner was just as solid as the rest of the structure.
Eva did realize a slight problem with her hands as she moved her hand over the obelisk. While she could tell that the obsidian was as smooth as glass, she couldn’t feel it. She saw it. Just like she saw all sources of blood. Her fingers didn’t have nerves. The obelisk could be scalding to the touch and she wouldn’t know. Arachne’s hands suffered from a similar problem, as they were a hard carapace exoskeleton, but there had still been some tactile sense feeding back to her mind.
There might be a solution buried somewhere in her blood books, but it wasn’t such a big deal that she had to drop everything and work on it right this very second. Just a minor annoyance.
Backing away from it, Eva turned and walked out of the alternate women’s ward. The sandy ground was annoying when grains got caught within the blood making up her feet. Too much and she would lose control of the blood as it became more contaminated. Hardening the soles of her feet solved that problem for the moment, but she could fix it with a little construction work around her domain.
First, however, she had a different project in mind.
Standing clear of the women’s ward building and the obelisk sticking out from the center, Eva concentrated on tearing down everything. Her entire domain needed to return to its base state from coast to coast.
Thankfully, her domain bent a knee to her will. The entire alternate women’s ward cracked and shuddered. Bits and pieces chipped off, falling to the ground where they broke apart further. In seconds, the building was indistinguishable from the sand of the island.
All that was left was Eva, a little tree without any leaves, and the towering obelisk.
Of those three, only two were supposed to be around. Eva still wasn’t sure what purpose the tree served, but it had been there on her very first visit. Staring at it, she couldn’t alter it in any way no matter how much she concentrated. It stayed its same brown twiggy sapling without sprouting leaves or crumbling to sand. Some day, she would ask Arachne or Catherine about it. Maybe they had trees in the center of their domains. Maybe they had built their domains over the top of the trees and had completely forgotten that they existed in the centuries since then. Maybe they had nothing at all and it was something unique in Eva’s domain.
For the time being, however, Eva turned her attention over to the obelisk. Bare now that it didn’t have the women’s ward surrounding it, Eva could see it without obstruction. Which only made it seem larger than before. Like the tree, it remained static no matter how much she concentrated. The women’s ward had crumbled to sand at a mere thought. This thing didn’t seem to notice how hard she was thinking at it.
Neither did it light up, change color, turn from the glossy obsidian to a rough granite, or anything else she tried to do with it.
Which really meant only one thing. It wasn’t a part of her domain. It was something foreign.
Something left over from Life’s assault? A beacon? Except Life had been using the enigmas as beacons. Living creatures fit much better with its theme than cold structures, even if the enigmas didn’t count as living ‘enough’ for the sake of her blood magic.
So Void then? Why would it plop down a big obelisk in the middle of her domain. In the middle of her women’s ward, no less. The island wasn’t large, but there was plenty of space outside the walls of the alternate women’s ward. Void could have put it somewhere else without forcing her to relocate her building.