Utterly Mad

She rubbed her head and read the letter again. The dreams had been real. Her adventure had been real. What had happened to her hand was real. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and what she felt there was not what she expected. She stood with a gasp, her back complained horribly, but she had to find a mirror. She remembered seeing a mirror in the farm house somewhere. Where? There, just where she left it on the top shelf in the corner. She took it to the table and sat down. She could see the object against her throat, it looked like a metal strip and sure enough it terminated at her voice box. The other end curled up over her chin. and the whole thing had been covered over in a layer of some kind of paste. Her eyes though. It was the second big shock. They moved as they should, but they didn't express as they should. Ferret's bright brown eyes were gone, and in their place was the familiar bottomless pits of the irises painted onto that old family relic. She dumped out the contents of the bag left for her just to be sure, even checking her pockets, and returned to the mirror. What had happened to her eyes? The last she remembered was the elf holding her up. She could remember choking on foul air. Vaguely, she remembered it holding something else up where she could see it. A long curved blade like the one described by the first of her line to bear the eyes.

Time passed, for three weeks she lay in bed or spent time picking through incomprehensible writing. She had spent the first few days of her recovery in shock, weeping for the fundemental hurt she had suffered and for the loss of her friend.  It was weeping, that brought on more weeping though. The nature of the eyes was quick to show itself, and they proved more expressive than she believed. She hadn't noticed at first as the tears dampened her face, but she had noticed right away when the smoke poured from the edges of there exposed surface. She had stared, sobbing, into the mirror and watched as black smoke drifted from them. Later she found that any high emotion appeared as smoke from them. She hated it and wondered if it had been some trick, some joke. Against her? No. Against Damon Painterly? Probably not even a trick at all really. The old record claimed the eyes were an "experiment." The smoke was probably the reason Damon got the only pair. What purpose such a property would have other than making it impossible to hide ones emotions or intent was not clear, if it was intentional. She couldn't see the smokes anyway, and she rapidly grew accustomed to the new eyes. For one, they were sharper than her real eyes had been. More importantly though, she didn't have to notice them every day. Her right hand though, she did. A lot of her time was spent looking at it and toying with it. One thing she had taken to doing was reaching into the hearth and pulling out coals with it. She would do this until the hand itself grew too hot and the heat could be felt in what remained of her arm. Later, she had experimented further. It was no stronger than her old hand had been, but Ferret found that prying something from it was next to impossible once she locked her grip. She could feel the tendons in her upper arm flexing when she squeezed down with it. More over, it was dextrous. While attempting to sew up damage caused by the elf to her clothing, she discovered that with this new appendage she could accomplish a quicker, more appealing result. The stitches she made were nearly indistinguishable from the clothing around them. The skin of her arm had rapidly regained feeling and apperance to the point where the only indication that the hand was not original, other than the appendage itself, was the silver cap at it's end. The withered appearance of her face slowly reversed itself and color refilled it. The entropy  of the elf was reversing, except for the length of grey her hair had picked up in the undercity. When the paste over her sounding tab had fallen away on it's own, she found that her skin had swelled flush with it, much like with her arm and hand. It simply looked as if she had painted some kind of metallic stripe on her chin and throat, except that the stripe was quite rigid and made her voice sound vaguely metallic. She noticed a long thin line running parallel to the left edge of the tab, but running further down her neck and ending just above her chest and realized it was a scar. The blade used to make it must have been incredibly fine to have made such a minimal mark. Whats more, the skill in whatever had been worked on beneath that scar was clearly expert. She had not seen it on her first inspection. If it had been stitched she would have, but it hadn't been. Over time, she managed to find several more scars and through the various notes discovered that a great deal of decay had been excised. She was disturbed to find that, according to the notes, she was now short several ribs and a few "nonessential" organs. Some had been removed because they had been subject to entropic forces, but for the most part they seemed to have been removed for reasons that were not explained. The more she examined herself, the more she found missing or changed. After the first day of the second week, she realized many of her back teeth had been replaced. The day after that when she realized her face was filling back out, she found a pair of pins in the hinge of her jaw as she poked at it. Her skull, she determined, had had a great deal of work put into "restoring" it. Why not though? If the elfs touch had been as bad as it was made out to be, she was surprised that more hadn't been done. Only that whoever had worked on her had left very little visible evidence of his efforts and that she hadn't felt any lasting pain regarding any of it. Maybe it had to do with the numbness of slowly recovering nerves? It didn't matter. Instead of subjecting herself to a headache struggling with the notes, she burned them. Ferret wouldn't need them. At least she didn't think so. The next day she prepared to leave. Her sword was not in the farmhouse. It had never occurred to her that she no longer had it. It was hard to believe her tutor would allow it to be taken from her, it must have been lost. She had it when she had left the chapel with Lydia. That meant it would be in the college court yard. Some pool in the courtyard, she remembered. She had lost hold of it when the elf had slapped her. She would have to go back for it.

If Gulgatha had been quiet, it was even quieter within the foyer of the college. Ferret moved past the plinth and into the museum floor. Made her way up one row of empty or shattered cases and down the next until she reached a specific door. Inside the small dim room beyond it, Ferret rediscovered the stelle she had previously given only a cursory inspection before being surprised by a lonely ghostly woman. Her own age, if she had been alive. This had been her examination room. Dead or alive, this was where Lydia had performed her duties to the college day after day. She was gone now. Wasn't that what the notes had claimed? Gone. Again, she found herself staring at the blue glazed clay hand. This time though, she thought about it. "Volunteered to serve as the power source." Lydia gave up what was left of her existence to power the appendage. Perhaps she wasn't gone though. Perhaps Lydia was still with her. One of her fathers old sayings came to her. "Remember the dead always. In that way, they will live on forever." She realized she was crying again, and wondered what Lydia would think of the smoke no doubt drifting from her eyes. The thought only made her cry harder. Awhile later, she wiped her eyes and looked to the stelle. It was still the same piece of crudely worked stone as before. Bearing the images of men and elves and undead at conflict beneath the gaze of the Lords of Gulgatha. She was sure that's who they were now. The city had filled her with wonder at first. Now though, she could taste the bitter salt of the air which filled it and the foul rot of decay permeating the fog. She turned to leave this office and something caught her eye. A pair of spectacles resting on one of the rooms trio of tables. Such a small delicate item, but familiar. She had seen their facsimile resting upon Lydia's ghostly nose. She took them and dusted them off. Ferret would never need spectacles, but she decided she needed these. Carefully, she folded them away into her bag.

What of Ferret though? She has a journey of her own to make. She would one day return to bright point, but whether she ever found her father after her first adventure is a story for another time. For now, we will close the book on Nora "Ferret" painterly of the house of scrolls and may some day reopen it. For now though, this part of her story is over.

I'll happily poke through it and try to get legit criticism, but dude, you have to chop that into paragraphs and re-format it. It turns into a blur on my crappy work monitor.

Having poked through a few of them already, I'd suggest just putting a space in between people talking, or between your characters having different thoughts. Fairly standard writing convention, and would make my low-res eyes have an easier time. Also keeps the flow together, since I'm guessing that's what you're going for with pre-seperated paragraphs.

Spoiler (hover to show)

So, paragraph, etetetetetetetetetetete

"Speech here" said a dude. write write write write write

"I agree" said another dude. paraparapara.

I personally like seperate lines for speech (which you might have noticed if you ever saw any of my crap on the cata forums), so it would look like

Spoiler (hover to show)

"blahblah" said a dude

write write write

"I agree" said another dude.

paraparapara

But that's the way I like to write, not necessarily the way I like to/have to read. Fairly sure it's bad technical form, too. It just makes formatting for my sorts of stories simpler in my head when I'm writting them.

Just overall.