Leaving the corpses in a snow-covered stone shed behind the pub, I shoved my domain sled through the doorway, scraping the edges slightly as I maneuvered it inside.

  The medieval pub with its low ceilings, wooden tables, benches, large fireplace and round windows was a welcome sight after the horrors of the dying forest.

  The small black kitten had remained curled atop the soil during our entire journey, occasionally opening its milky white eyes as if to check on me, despite its obvious blindness. Now, in the relative safety of the pub, it stirred, stretching its tiny limbs with a squeaky yawn.

  "Welcome to my humble warlock abode," I said, closing and barring the door behind us. "It’s not much, but it's Sirin-proof… mostly, so there’s that."

  I rummaged through my salvaged supplies and found a small wooden bowl, which I filled with water from one of the barrels I'd brought in. Setting it beside the kitten, I watched as its nose twitched, detecting the liquid. With surprising precision for a blind creature, it padded over and began to lap eagerly.

  "Thirsty little thing, aren't you?" I murmured, cutting thin strips from my store of smoked fish. "Let's see if you're hungry too."

  The kitten's reaction to the food was immediate and enthusiastic. It pounced on the fish strips, its tiny teeth tearing into the meat with surprising vigor. For something so small, it had a formidable appetite.

  "Easy there," I chuckled. "The fish isn't going anywhere."

  After gorging itself, the kitten returned to its spot on my domain soil, circled three times, and promptly collapsed into what appeared to be a food coma. Its tiny chest rose and fell in the rhythm of deep sleep, clearly worn out from its ordeal of nearly becoming a Sirin snack.

  I watched it for a moment, wondering what other secrets it might hold. A blind kitten surviving in a forest of horrors seemed improbable at best. Was it merely lucky, or was there something special about this small creature?

  The scientific part of my brain itched for proper equipment—a centrifuge, a spectrophotometer, a decent microscope. But medieval Svalbard wasn't exactly equipped with a state-of-the-art laboratory. I would have to improvise.

  For my first experiment–using a plank balanced on a rock and a bunch of strewn bricks, I created a makeshift scale to assess my weight vs the weight of the soil within the backpack.

  Then, I gradually altered the amount of soil inside of the bag, reducing and increasing it and venturing away from the glade with the backpack.

  Using this method, I discovered that as long as I had enough soil in the bag that weighed approximately as much as I did, I felt like a mundane human. Increasing the weight threatened to rip the backpack apart but also incrementally reduced my hunger/fatigue.

  I considered what else my lab might need to expand my understanding of magic.

  A microscope!

  I remembered reading about Antoni van Leeuwenhoek's simple microscopes—essentially magnifying glasses that nevertheless revealed an entire world of microorganisms. With the right approach, I might be able to construct something similar.

  Constructing a metal microscope would take a lot of energy and time however, time which I didn’t feel like spending today.

  Then I recalled making a rudimentary water microscope in grade nine. It didn’t even require special lenses.

  The ruins of Svalbard yielded exactly what I needed for my improvised microscopy. I found a thin, flat shard of glass from a broken window pane. A small glass jar came from a half-collapsed pantry, its narrow mouth perfect for my purposes. The broken mirror shard I discovered among the personal effects in one of the less-damaged homes—perhaps once part of a woman's vanity set. Two smooth pieces of wood from a fractured furniture leg would serve as my frame.

  Back in the pub, I cleared one of the sturdy wooden tables, arranging my scavenged materials with methodical precision.

  The kitten watched from its perch atop my soil mound, opening its milky eyes towards me as I made noises.

  "Science class is in session," I announced to the kitten, holding up the glass shard to examine its clarity. "Today's lesson: how to see the invisible with nothing but water and glass."

  The kitten yawned and closed its eyes again, clearly uninterested in science.

  I recalled the simple water-drop microscope from my school days—a primitive but effective tool that had allowed humans to glimpse the microscopic world centuries before modern technology. The principle was elegantly simple: a droplet of water, suspended in a small hole, would act as a lens due to surface tension.

  First, I needed to create my aperture. Taking one of the wooden pieces, I used the modern chisel from the smithy to carefully carve a small, round hole about the diameter of a pinhead. The precision tool made the work surprisingly easy, the sharp edge cutting through the wood with minimal effort.

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  "Perfect," I murmured, holding the piece up to check my work. The hole was clean and circular—ideal for holding a water droplet.

  Next, I arranged my apparatus: the piece of wood with the hole became my slide holder, while the mirror shard was positioned below at an angle to reflect available light upward through my specimen. The flat glass shard would serve as my slide for placing samples.

  "Now comes the tricky part," I said. "The lens itself."

  I dipped my finger into the jar of clean water and carefully allowed a single droplet to form on the tip. With steady hands, I transferred this droplet to the hole in the wooden piece, where it settled perfectly, held in place by surface tension. The curvature of the water created a natural magnifying effect—not as powerful as ground glass, but sufficient for basic observations.

  "Let's test this thing," I said, selecting a small fragment of the Sirin's feather.

  I placed it on the glass slide, positioning it carefully beneath my water-drop lens. Then I angled the mirror to catch the afternoon light streaming through the pub's window, directing it upward through my specimen and into the water lens.

  Lowering my eye to the apparatus, I adjusted the distance between the slide and the lens until the image came into focus. The result was incredibly crude compared to modern equipment, the magnification rather weak for my liking.

  The feather fragment appeared transformed under magnification. What had seemed like a simple emerald-black filament to the naked eye now revealed itself as a complex structure of interlocking barbs and barbules. But unlike normal bird feathers, these seemed to be partially crystalline, with miniature fractal facets that caught and refracted the light.

  I sketched my observations in charcoal on a scrap of parchment I'd found, noting the unusual structure. Then I moved on to my next specimen—a tiny scraping of the emerald blood I'd collected.

  Under magnification, the blood revealed its true nature. What appeared as a viscous emerald fluid to the naked eye was actually a suspension of hexagonal crystalline structures floating in a clear medium. These crystals seemed to move independently, shifting and reorienting themselves as if possessed of their own tiny will.

  I continued my examinations, moving through my collected samples methodically:

  The white mold from the forest trees magnified into a network of thread-like structures, each terminating in a tiny bulb that was less like mold and more like a peculiar snowflake. Freakishly enough, all of the mold snowflakes were exactly the same, which should have been impossible if they were mundane snowflakes formed through random chance and specific fractal mathematics.

  A scraping from the massive oak's interior revealed more of the crystalline webwork, but here the hexagonal structures were arranged in repeating spiral fractal patterns, almost like a triskelion symbol.

  A tiny piece of flesh from one of the Sirin's victims showed how the emerald crystals had begun colonizing the tissue, replacing cell structures with their own architecture.

  "Curiouser and curiouser," I muttered. "Not hemoglobin-based at all. Perhaps more like a living colloid?"

  The Sirin wasn't just a magical predator—she was a vector for something else, something that used her to spread and colonize organic matter. My mind speculated.

  The emerald substance appeared to be a form of crystal organism that could subsume and transform biological material.

  The transformation process seemed incredibly gradual and directional, moving from simple animal forms toward the more complex Sirin-like state, suggesting purposeful evolution rather than random mutation.

  Moving on from the Sirin samples, I snipped off one of the violet flowers from my magical witch-earth pile. I carefully sliced open a leaf and then observed the blurry intricate network of thick plant cell walls.

  To my amazement, I saw that the damaged cell walls of the sliced leaf slowly healed themselves. I also noted that the verdant life birthed by the magic-infused earth shared my immunity to the cold, thriving in defiance of the harsh winter.

  Next, I grabbed some standing water from a rotting root right outside the pub and examined it as I placed it directly above the glade.

  My mouth fell open as I beheld a mesmerizing if somewhat blurry display of micro-animals, tardigrades and single cell Stentor roeselii, dancing within the water drop. The microscopic creatures somehow bred and multiplied at an unprecedented rate, their existence fueled by the potent, invisible energy that pulsed within the enchanted soil.

  It dawned on me that the radiation emanating from the witch-blessed ground was a veritable furnace of life, a force that nurtured and sustained all organic things that thrived within its sphere of influence. This force stood in stark contrast to the deadly dragon fire that had wrought destruction upon the village, targeting living things and turning them to ashes.

  My mind raced with the possibilities as the pieces began to fall into place.

  Was this the source of a witch’s power? A ray of life?

  This revelation coalesced into a solid theory: the enchanted soil produced life-altering effects that, in turn, transformed the plants and animals within a witch’s personal garden. It stood to reason that ingredients suffused with this life-rad magnified the efficacy of their organic components, unlocking a wealth of incredible potential for both healing and harm!

  I continued my observations late into the evening, sketching what I saw and developing hypotheses. The kitten eventually woke, stretched, and padded over to investigate me, sniffing at me.

  "What do you think?" I asked it absently. "Is this magic just unexplained science, or something else entirely?"

  The kitten merely purred in response, rubbing against my hand, dark fur parting to reveal white hair at the base, almost like lightning flashing between clouds. It was incredibly friendly. I wondered if it was someone’s pet that had escaped the village before the dragon struck it.

  Cats certainly seemed to possess a sixth sense of danger. According to what I knew, cats could feel minimal tremors not perceptible to humans that allowed them to escape earthquakes far more effectively than people. Perhaps, the same case had applied here.

  “I’m going to call you Stormy,” I said as I checked the dark kitten, determining its gender to be female.

  “Mrrr,” the kitten answered, seemingly accepting her name.

  As darkness fell, I secured the samples in separate vials, tucking them safely into a small box. Tomorrow would bring more experiments, more questions, more answers. For now, though, I needed rest.

  I retired to my mound of soil, the kitten following to curl against my side. Its purring created a soothing rhythm, a counterpoint to the howling winter wind outside.

  "No murdering me in my sleep," I reminded the fuzz ball drowsily.

  The kitten responded by purring louder and kneading her tiny paws against my stomach.