Day Two
"I have no idea what practical purpose they might have served, but I see a story here... Oh yes, I see a story." The pearl catcher eyed the collection again. "And even the tools to tell it."
She lit the candle from her own ghost flame candles, before extinguishing or blocking up the other lights. "Allow me to set the scene ..." She picked up the marionette in one clawed hand, and began to weave the story with shadows on the wall, using the puppet and her own claws. But as she wove the story, not all the shadows came from such obvious sources. Some shadows simply seemed to come from nothing.
"A long time ago there was a dragon. She was an alchemist of great skill, and great renown. In time she took an apprentice, a young nocturne.
The nocturne quickly grew in skill beside her, learning her ways and earning the trust of her master. And as the difference in the skill grew less, the apprentice began to suggest the topics for their shared research.
At first these were innocuous things, new potions and cures, new ways of preserving art works to last against the test of time.
But some of the suggestions were not so innocent. The nocturne moved from preserving inanimate things, like beautiful porcelain, to experiments on living beings to find ways to make them immune to the passage of time. And this too, could have been justified as a way of helping others, indeed that was how the master alchemist excused it.
But nothing the apprentice tried had the effect he wanted, for trying to bestow timelessness is the domain of the gods, and not for mortal alchemists. The master understood this, and she called a halt to that project.
But the apprentice continued his work in secret, delving deeply into the forbidden arts. And at last he found something, a potion using the vile magic of bone priest venom to extract the soul of a creature so they could be bound to a lifeless object, and use their magic to give it animus.
But he knew better to try such a thing himself, when he could test this on another dragon. And so he crafted a life like doll, and tested it on his master.
The apprentice knew it had worked when he saw the writhing spirit surrounding the doll. And so he brewed a second batch, that he might use after crafting himself a suitable vessel.
And as the master woke, her spirit trapped in the eternal black porcelain, she realized what he had done. Having seen his ambition for what it was, she knew he would not stop. And the apprentice had made a mistake; he underestimated how well the potion would work.
Neither of them were fighters, but the very nature of her new form, one which could not feel nor break, meant that she was able to over power him. Rather than allow her to stop him, and take her vengeance, the apprentice drank his own vile concoction.
In haste, she sealed him away into the nearest container, an ornate porcelain pithos. The very same one he had first tested ways of preserving porcelain with." The Pearlcatcher moved the light and her viewers attention, away from crafting shadows on the wall, to lighting up the porcelain jar sitting on the table. "This one in fact, where he would stay sealed for eons until an earthquake would set him free to wreck more havoc."
"Of course, this just a story." She bowed, before going to re-light the lights she had put out to tell her story. And she moved with a disconcerting clicking noise, the same sort of clicks that they had been hearing earlier, from the marionette.
