Are We Truly Saved?

Grak ignored him, aside from his last words and their clues to Kaj'ik's condition. He sent tiny tendrils of magic into her womb, looking for the tainted magic there. What he found was vaguely infant shaped and growing at an alarming rate. It linked to Kaj's own life, siphoning it to fuel its abnormal growth. It was killing her.

The link between mother and "child" was intractable, immovable. There was no way he could see to sever it and purge it from Kaj's body. Grak stared down in the warrior, despair and hopelessness threatening to overwhelm him.

But again, Grak wasn't one to sit idle when he might be doing ANYTHING.

He drew on his own magic, reached out to Kaj'ik's shamanic magic to pull in the natural forces around them. Then he began the delicate task of replacing the corrupt magic with the less toxic shamanic and sorcerous magic.

He found himself mimicking memories from his childhood, his grandfather's delicate and intricate weaving. He used to watch the old orc for hours when he should have been sleeping. He paid for it with knuckle-swats the next morning, but never regretted it. His grandfather was truly an artist, he had decided a decade later, in the human cities with its art galleries and museums.

He put a stranglehold on the magical umbilical cord, encouraged Kaj's own body to produce a normal placenta to give the "child" flesh, siphoned the toxic energy into the corpse next to them until he could find a proper way to dispose of it. The "child" was attempting to use up its "mother" in its own growth. Grak spared a bare second to wonder just what this "child" was supposed to do.

Sweat drenched his robes and dripped down onto the warrior. He desperately wished for some food, but focused on burning through his own fat stores for energy to fuel his... would "purefication" be presumptuous? But there was not time for these thoughts, when toxic magic sought ways to escape his grasp. He bound it into the corpse, mixed green and blue magics surrounding it like a cocoon.

Kaj's breathing eased from its frantic pace. Grak's muscles protested his chronic position, but he tied off the two magics with vicious precision. The warrior was saved.

And pregnant, with... something.