The vaulted cellar beneath the Artisan Guildhall smelled of damp limestone, harsh cleaning acid. The choking, metal sweetness of clotted beast venom. Outside, the steady heavy, shaking thud of trench warfare shook through the foundation stones, knocking loose flakes of mortar that drifted like gray snow across the blood-slicked flat stone slabs.
Five stretchers lay side by side across heavy oak workbenches, lit up by hanging brass hardened carbon-iron lamps. On each stretcher lay a frontline defender—three guild militia and two Academy border scouts dragged from the collapse of Drainage Line 9. They weren’t bleeding to death from deep cuts. They were choking.
An underground Burrowing Gorgon Drone had burst the wastewater under-road drain beneath their outpost, discharging a cloud of packed turning to stone fine mist directly into their trench. The victims’ necks were swollen to twice their normal outer rim, the skin turning a mottled, marble-gray as the turning to stone toxins spread through their fluid-draining vessels. Their eyes bulged, fingernails digging into the oak boards as their tracheal cartilages hardened into solid hardened rings.
“Their larynxes are ninety percent occluded!” Dr. Morrigan Calder shouted over the roar of a nearby mortar blast, her face smeared with soot, her messy chestnut hair pinned back with bent silver-steel stir-rods. She slammed a glass beaker onto the bench, swirling a glowing amber solution. “I’m administering four hundred milligrams of Marrow-Chelate Buffer via intravenous drip. But the chelating agent needs six minutes to break the calcium bonds! Their throat cords will…
