The Problem in the Drawer

Well her first instinct wasn’t to touch it, obviously.

Ezreal often on return from the armpits of Runeterra brought back things that were best not to touch. At a certain point that became assumed. She’d made a lapse in that duty yesterday, and now there was a thing in her drawer that seemed very much alive and she didn’t have a long term plan about what to do with it.

There was this one time, after a trip out into the deserts where the remains of Shurima were, back when things were slightly less strained both in the Crownguard house and Demacia as a whole, that he brought back something he called a Bloodworm. They were a relentless blight on expeditions into that place, but he was one of the first to bring back a specimen alive. There were convoluted, slightly high-concept reasons for it, as he so often had, but he had explained it simply. Most of the explorers of the desert either came back with greater treasure or didn’t come back. Having a specimen of the simple, gnawing pests that were a reality of the trip was a reminder for anybody considering it. Succeed or fail, your experience wouldn’t be the story they wound up telling. You would spend most of it wearing your shoes rotten and picking vermin out of your sleeping roll.

The Bloodworms existed in their larval state in the waters of any given desert oasis. Small eggs, almost microscopic, that collected in stagnant pools of water. If you drank the water, it was a bad way to go. If you bathed in the water, you would attract them with the oil of your skin and they would seep in through your pores, open from the heat of the desert. From there they would grow out of your skin almost like hair.They would drink little bits of your blood at a time, enough to drain you slowly without really letting you know. One was a nuisance, made you drink more water than usual, made you more tired than you were used to. A dozen would slowly dry you out to a husk, one of the many ways the desert always won on a long enough time line. You found them usually because you would roll over onto them in the night and a feeling like pressing down on a painful sore would shoot up through your body. The only way to remove them was to slowly smoke them off, trying to pull them would take a great star-shaped patch of skin with them, rooted down to the nerves of your body as they were. Once they grew large enough, and they were linked closely enough with your nerves, all higher functions of them atrophied away, leaving a great water-heavy extrusion. Both the star-shaped wounds and the swollen purple ganglions were as much the signs of desert travelers as the sand, a pair of antonymous scars left on those who measured reward over risk.

Of course, Ezreal and the mercenary captain he was traveling with had simply not bathed in the oasis that became a blight on their party. The captain had been wise enough not to, and had let her men bathe without warning them. Ezreal simply hadn’t wanted to bathe in water he couldn’t see the bottom of. He had asked the captain later why she would let her men make the mistake, to which she’d shrugged and dismissed it. He repeated her words in the retelling with a sense of detached reverence.

“Better bitten and shy from a snake with no venom than sticking your arm in a cobra’s den. Not like you come out of anything without a scar anyway.”

Over the next few nights each man and woman in the crew had invariably woken with a yelp in the night, having rolled onto a growing parasite swollen on some part of their body they hadn’t noticed before. Each tried to pull it off of them in a panic. Some felt the pain of trying to pry skin from bone and backed off, accepting the captain’s help with embarrassment. Some were not so lucky to be backed away by pain and nursed the bandages around a cauterized wound for the rest of the trip. Bandages they would still be wearing when promoted to honor guard on return, the proverbial wolf willing and capable of gnawing off a leg. The kind of person that the captain saw as meeting her motto. One who could step light and strike hard.

So she wasn’t going to reach in and touch the thing in the drawer, at least not for now.

To put it straightly, if she had taken any real message from that particular story, which was often a precarious thing to do with Ezreal’s stories, it was to never touch anything you didn’t understand. That and maybe to never go to Shurima. History did not tend to look kindly on those who leapt before looking. Even small, nebbish concessions to the voice in your head which took a scholarly and indirect interest in any given subject usually turned out for the better. You got hurt by blindly trusting, blindly doing.

She shut the drawer, waiting, and when she heard the scratching sound again she rose from her bed and stepped into her closet. She grabbed a pair of scientific tools, once gifted to her when her mother feared outright that she might follow Ezreal’s paths of interest in the hope that it might push her to be the one that stayed back and cleaned up his messes. She returned to her nightstand and pressed a listening tool against it, finding the spot where the scratching was happening and making sure it was the thing itself making it and not the decomposing egg or some other base mechanism of the drawer. She took the listening prongs out of her ears and set her magnifying glass on her bed. Then she opened the drawer again and focused a pinhole-sized light on the creature.

It was a single fat body deeper purple than dye and speckled with pointed pale stars like goldstone. Lusterless, opaque gelatin that sat motionless in the unnatural light as if to try to deny how it had moved under the light of her magic. The size of a child’s fist, a balled up piece of paper maybe. She turned off the penlight and focused a fingertip of her body’s light on it. It shuddered, a mixture between a ripple and a contortion. Shifting for a moment to be all points, then flat and geometrical. Slowly one of the freckles grew under the light to match the size of her beam, blushing upward like a bruise to the surface. Shining like gold, and faceted on the flat planes of the sides by the pureblack of all the color draining toward her influence. It bent, growing upwards. Conical now as it rose toward the source of her light, white smear deflecting down the sides of it and dissipating like lines of tidal wash. She drew back her finger and it started to rise toward her faster. In a panic, she ended the light. In less than a full second, it zipped back into place and laid motionless as something dead.

Her heartbeat in her ears almost scared her. The sudden wash of confused shame like she’d been caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to hitting her. As if she’d been caught looking through somebody’s personal belongings. She chewed her upper lip.

She moved her hands to either side of the drawer and pointed down with both of her thumbs. The fingerpoints of light both hit the thing at the same time and it shuddered with even more ****. Then it repeated the same transformation, just split now in two different directions. She pulled it opposite ways until it had thinned out into the shape of a banana, then suddenly shut off the light. Instead of dropping under its own weight, it snapped back into place as a sullen stone like it was trying to draw all of the mass of its body into a core at the center.

Grabbing the magnifying glass, she winced out an apology before placing the glass over it and looking at it a moment, then pressing her finger against the lens. She could have done this without it, but not without risking serious damage to the rest of her room, a lesson she had only needed to learn once. A single focused beam came out and glared down on the thing in the drawer. It shivered, not reacting with the instant distortions it had before. Almost like it was trying to endure this new sensation without showing weakness.

The single gold point emerged and grew to cover the whole topside. It darkened, first orange and then red. All the while the stone seemed to vibrate in place. A bubble of crimson popped on the surface as the liquid shuddered and shifted color but held firmly rooted in place.

And then suddenly leapt up onto the lens of the glass as if pulled by magnetism before slithering onto her hand. She screamed without meaning to.

The Bloodworm in the jar hadn’t ever really moved. It had shifted slightly and looked around at each of them, supposedly still fully in possession of its faculties. She’d had a constant vision in her mind of it suddenly lunging against the glass at one of their hands or faces. But wild animals don’t lunge. They don’t suddenly decide to attack you. It’s always with the casual lethargy of something which has decided you’re the next meal. It’s an **** process of ascribing to an animal we do not understand either the characteristics of an animal which we do, often man.

The thing from the drawer lunged suddenly up her arm under her nightgown. She slapped at it as if it were a mosquito as it shot silently up her arm to her neck. She feared for a moment it going into her mouth, attacking one of her eyes, trying to crawl in her nose, settling in her hair and attacking her from where she couldn’t see it. All the while buzzing like a swarm of hornets, suddenly all fury and noise and primal tiny antagonists seeking soft and irreplaceable faculty organs.

Instead she sank her fingers into liquid as it slithered into her ear with a wet, grinding, chittering slosh. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to burn it out, only making it move more angrily.

A shiver shot down her spine, a sudden chill in the room. It passed coolly and quietly as if it had never existed. She kneeled on the floor gasping for breath, pressing a hand over her mouth as her stomach churned at what had just happened.

Her door pounded, not the kind of knocking her mother would make. On the other side of the mansion her mother would be last to arrive even if she did hear her daughter. They knew this because Lux knew this.

“Luxanna, are you okay?”

Torus, the old one. Freljordian, three entities there. Priority least, two Type A one Type B links formed. If she needed to, she could leave nothing but charred bones of him. She knew this because they knew this.

Strands like the frayed end of a rope, all equally the item. The proverbial blind men feeling the different parts of the elephant. Five senses irrespective of the other, at least in theory, making an image of the things around it. Sight of Lux, scent of Lux, sound of Lux, etc. Brain the hardest, memory makes perception makes memory. Infinite contextualization. Learned but distinct in theory. Sight of Torus, scent of Torus, sound of Torus according to Lux does not equal Torus. Perceived copy missing autonomy, limited to sights and sounds. This is context. Nature not measured in item, measured in response of item to lens of analysis. Lux’s Torus asks because it wants an answer, won’t leave without one.

“We’re fine.”

“We?”

Wrong answer, things she needs to say instead. Not that she will use a different concept of Torus, just that she is more used to moving these lips for those ears. Different lens, she won’t like looking at it that way.

“Sorry! I’m still half-asleep, I must have had a nightmare.”

A heavy sigh came from behind the door.

“I am glad you are okay. Do you need anything?”

“N-no, I’m fine.” She picked herself up shakily, “Did I wake anybody else?”

Torus paused, “I do not think so, it is very late and it was only for a moment.”

“Sorry! I just-” She trailed off, “You should try to go back to bed now.”

Another pause.

“Are you sure you are all right?”

Resolved, just out of formality. Concession over. She closes the drawer and settles into bed.

“I am, thank you.”

Shuffling of feet at the other side, voice leaving. Sudden sense of falling, fortunate to be in bed to avoid collapse. Acting through her is still exhausting. All the while that she is in the backseat she fights and screams and cries. Unwilling to surrender importance. Need to work in shifts, preserve energy for when it can. While she is in control, it can still learn.

She could feel her perspective shifting, the dissociative episode receding. A new passive voice remained in the back of her mind. She curled her knees to her chest in bed and stared out the window at the moon for what felt like hours, the moon unmoving in the sky. Without meaning to she fell asleep, less wired than she might have imagined.

She dreams of names and faces, vague half-truth and half-lie jumbles. And in sleeping moments, concealed memories like desert scars came to light.