Mellina clawed at her throat, the air already thin and metallic. Her sight doubled, blurred by the oxygen-starved haze. The airborne motes swirled, hungry for every breath. She stumbled back into a towering shelf laden with antique parchment volumes and preserved specimens. Her knuckles brushed a brittle, papery stalk—a sprig of Sun-Whorl, a common roadside weed.
In fresh stems, its sap polymerized on contact with oxygen, trapping irritants in hard beads. The dried cutting was inert, but she recalled the specimen stocks kept in the back racks: concentrated floral distillates formulated to stabilize old samples.
She dragged herself toward the rear bay, ribs aching against each shallow pull of air. Her fingers, numb and clumsy, fumbled through rows of dusty jars. "Concentrated… resin…" she wheezed. Her fingertips caught an unlabelled flask filled with viscous amber fluid. It had to be it. Dense as clover syrup, the liquid sloshed with sluggish weight against the glass.
Ovelia’s cackles echoed, muffled through the thick blast doors. “Giving up already, Mellina? So much for your precious ‘luck’!”
Mellina popped the stopper, the sugary aroma cutting through the bitter haze. Too dense to vaporize cold, it needed heat and a driver. Across the bench sat a tarnished copper burner, left beside a mortar. Its bowl held a crust of crushed ember-lichen, dry and prone to flash-ignition.
She tipped the thick extract into the bowl, scraping the dry flakes together over the pool. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. She pulled a flint and steel from her apron pocket—a habit from her apothecary days, always prepared—and struck it. A weak spark, then another. The lichen flared orange, crackling against the syrupy pool. The fluid rolled, frothed, and threw up a dense, sweet steam into the air.
The scalding vapor captured the floating irritants, chilling instantly into a rain of solid, glassy beads. The air, still thin, suddenly felt…cleaner. The bitter stench died out. Mellina dragged in fresh, cool air, her ribs expanding without pain.
Outside, Ovelia had pressed her ear to the blast doors, a smug, deranged grin plastered across her face. [TARGET STATUS: FATALITY IMMINENT. 100 LUCK POINTS GAINED.]
Then, a low rumble started. A tremor hummed through the masonry. Ovelia staggered back from the seam. The roar intensified, a deep, resonant *boom* that rattled the entire wing. The blast doors, designed to withstand siege engines, bulged outwards, then tore away from their hinges with a shriek of tortured metal, flying across the corridor to embed themselves in the opposite wall.
Mellina stood in the gaping maw of the archives, bathed in a soft, ethereal golden glow from the residual Faelen’s Kiss pollen that clung to her clothes and hair. She looked less like a suffocation victim and more like an ethereal botanical spirit. Her gaze locked onto Ovelia's. "You left the burner on the threshold table, Ovelia. The lichen crust builds rapid gas pressure when sealed beneath sap." She lifted a warped chunk of copper from the floor. “Lucky for me, it was just enough to create a breach.”
[SABOTAGE FAILED. LUCK POINTS REVOKED. ULTIMATE FAILURE PENALTY: INITIATING.]
Ovelia staggered back, her face draining of color. The fracturing reality around her head intensified, spiraling into a vortex of broken code and distorted images. Before she could scream, a furry, bat-like projectile launched from the archive entrance, zipping past Mellina’s ear. Brim darted from the ceiling beam and dropped straight onto Ovelia's collar. He latched on, a tiny, fluffy demon, and with a series of disgusted gurgles, began to violently burp up a rainbow of tiny, crystalline vials onto Ovelia’s pristine white robes. Each vial glowed with a sickly, unnatural hue – the customized poison mixtures she’d crafted to sabotage Mellina’s entire career, now scattered at her feet like grotesque confetti.
The Atrium doors, at the far end of the corridor, burst open with a resounding *CRACK*. Zareo, his face set in a grim mask, strode through, flanked by a dozen heavily armored guards from the Obsidian Watch. His confiscated insignia was gone, yet his gesture carried full weight as he pointed past Mellina straight at Ovelia. “Ovelia Venatrix,” his voice boomed, echoing through the corridor, “By the authority of the Solantri Concord, I place you under arrest for repeated acts of sabotage, attempted murder, and the unauthorized release of restricted security measures.”
Ovelia stared at Zareo, then at the scattered vials, then at Mellina, who simply offered a small, almost pitying smile. The air around Ovelia crackled, not with static, but with the raw, chaotic energy of a collapsing reality. Her gaze jerked from the bronze shields of the Watch to Mellina's quiet face. [ULTIMATUM: ELIMINATE TARGET MELLINA. FAILURE TO COMPLY WILL RESULT IN EXISTENCE DELETION.]
A guttural scream tore from Ovelia’s throat. Her hand, trembling with a terrifying blend of despair and madness, shot to her belt. She ripped loose a sealed ampoule of raw Sun-Fire sap, an unstable solvent formulated to melt stone. With a shriek that ripped through the very fabric of the Atelier, she hurled it, not at Mellina, but with desperate, suicidal force, directly into the massive, central chemical reserves that powered the entire Grand Atelier of Solantri.