CW: blood, autovivisection (consensual), etc.
The structure of human hands had always fascinated her. The same hands that firmly grasped the sickle and the war-axe could deftly pluck the strings of a lute, or shape formless clay into a ribbed bowl or pot. She had never been especially pious, nor had the hymns of the priests (for all their undeniable beauty in their symmetry) done much to move her heart. But the quickness of fingers, the nimbleness of thumbs, the machinery of bone and muscle just barely visible below the elastic skin—in these, she saw the seal of the All-Maker quite clearly.
When the banded serpent had sunk its fangs into her wrist a month before, it had filled her with no small displeasure to watch her near-perfect hand, with smooth brown skin and neatly cut fingernails, swell with the venom and turn to an alarming shade of purple. Even more to her dismay was her master's diagnosis; though he had arrested the flow of the poison before it could reach her heart, she would still suffer gangrene which would likely claim her hand and arm up to the elbow. Her melancholy lasted but a day, however, as she went to him with a request for use of a full jar of embalming oil. The master's expression, normally a stoic frown that gave an impression of deep and serious thought, loosened into a broad grin as she explained her plan. After all, she reasoned, her hand would soon rot away into elemental disease regardless of her present actions; what harm, therefore, could come of an effort to better understand what it once had been?
So she had begun, starting with her softened fingernails and going in patches, frequently brushing on the embalming oil to repel the beetles that crawled on the floor and walls. She had carefully sliced into the skin below the far knuckle of her middle finger—the blood, stopped by the leather strip tightened painfully around her upper arm, was dark and slow to ooze out—and peeled off the soft outer layers of her fingertip. The thin, frail bone, the twine-thin muscle and sinew, were now finally revealed to her, but not in death like the several corpses she had helped her master disassemble; the end of this digit, though skinless, was still faintly alive. Nor was it the alien appendage of a prisoner or an intruder—for eighteen years, it had done her bidding, and been nourished by her own blood. She held her fingers straight out, and noticed how small and vulnerable the one looked next to the others.
Though impatient to peel the obscuring flesh back further, she shifted her attention to her inner forearm. As she flexed her fingers, she could see the tendons rubbing against the skin, pulling back and forth like cords, and her curiosity was diverted. The slender blade of the skinning-knife was cold against the fingertip of her good hand, but there was no feeling of chill or pain in her swollen, violet forearm—only a blunted pressure, like a nail wrapped in thick cloth. Watching the blood run down her arm, an idea came to her as if from a great distance, and she moved an empty vial so as to catch some of the dark fluid; perhaps the alchemist in her master’s employ could derive an antidote from her corrupted humours, for future use.
So she worked, down, across, up, and back across. She carefully removed the small, rectangular strip of skin. The underside of it was wet and still warm, and she quickly set it aside, picking up a piece of linen to soak up the remaining blood. Several strokes with the embalming brush dried and yellowed the exposed structure—bones and fibers like her fingertip, yes, but the muscles were much thicker here, and a vein untouched by the steely blade still feebly throbbed. As she looked on, transfixed, she could almost see the vein in another shape, as one of the thousands upon thousands of arms of the All-Maker—or the roots of the Drinker of Worlds.
Her mind wandered back to her oaths, what seemed an eternity ago. When prompted by her master, she had given the expected rote responses whose committal to memory had supplanted sleep the hours before midnight, but his last question had paralyzed her tongue for nearly half a minute.
"How do you see death?"
This question was not one for which she had prepared; her reply was a surprise even to herself.
"I... see life—" She swallowed nervously. "—as an interruption... to the tune of death."
He showed not the smallest change in his expression, but she could see the faint glimmer of a smile in his eyes. Whether he also know the poem from which the line originated, or thought that she was its author, it seemed to please him.
In the present moment, her own eyes stung and began to water from the vapors given off by the embalming fluid. She wiped her sleeve across her eyes, then continued examining her decaying appendage. The question she faced was whether to remove one of the fingers with the skin intact, or to render her whole hand skeletal before dissecting it further. While pondering this, a thought crossed her mind, and her eyes grew wide.
The disease had permeated everything soft and fluid in her limb—the skin and nails, muscle and sinew, blood and bile (black and yellow alike)—but she knew from digging up more than her fair share of corpses that the processes of putrefaction rarely caused bones to rot except in the most dreadful cases. Perhaps... this pattern, so common in death, might be repeated in her spell-touched life?
Such a possibility, no matter how thin, was far too exciting to leave unexplored. The digits of dead folk were easy enough to come by, and rumor suggested that the town's trophy-maker had a sizable collection in a cedar box under his bed; if there was a shortage of embalmed fingers, some social or steely pressure might convince him to part with a few. She started making more shallow, long cuts in her skin. Normally, she would have simply tossed the scraps away, but the necromantic-calculating part of her mind was nearly glowing now, and she carefully put the strips of skin aside to try making parchment from them. Superstition inherited from her first master (a man with more bluster than magic, and who was more inclined to brew beer than potions) suggested that making a magical scroll using one's own blood for the ink would increase its potency, and writing it upon her own skin might have a similar effect.
Minutes stretched into hours, as the cold blade sliced and sliced again. By the time she set down her skinning-knife and took in the sublime, shining structure that was once an ordinary arm, she had reached a pinnacle of intellectual ecstasy that lay beyond the power of ordinary words to convey—but, perhaps, the hymns dedicated to Saint Mortus would suffice.