A pail mage looked around the laboratory on the second floor of the building. Candles lit the sunless room. The shapes of crystal containers surrounded him. All of them glowing faintly of moon light. Enchanted so they would not break. On an operating table in the room was the naked body of a bronze skinned man. He had been dead for a few days. The living mage deemed it not yet to late and was searching the unfamiliar workshop for something he hoped would help him extract the dead man's blood. In a drawer he found a set of syringes. The polished metal needle and crystal tubes had been very well soaked in moonlight. They glowed in his hand. The seemingly delicate instrument made harder with moon light.
The young mage approached the dead body a piece of cloth wrapped over his mouth so that he wouldn't cough and get the black flehm on the body. He stabbed the body in the neck where he thought the blood would be. He pulled the handle of the syringe, but no liquid entered the tube. The young man felt discouraged but not beaten.
The Mage felt his phantom pain eat at his chest and shoulder. The life force he could take would be from the monstrous bee acting as his assistant. Albie had decided to call the creature May. Eating May was not an option. The giant acid spiting bee sat on a table nearby waiting for instructions. She showed an eagerness to help. Albie sensed that the bee meant help eating the body. Without the moon light Albie was not strong enough to stand on his own and was leaning against the table. He could use the moonlight he had stored in the moonstones on his cloak but wanted to save the light. It then occurred to him that here might be blood in the mages heart. Hunched over the table Able took out his knife and began cutting the dead mages chest open. Cutting out a human heart was second nature at this point. Fowl half rotten bile and other puss leaked out of the openings he created. May chittered excitedly offering her own brand of help. Albie responded he was enough.
The heart became exposed to the world. Albie stabbed the rotting organ with the syringe and began extracting a thick semi clotted liquid. He drew a second syringe and extracted another syringe of blood. A third syringe pulled nothing from the organ. The mage stumbled away from the operating table to a nearby counter. He wasted no time emptying the syringes into test tubes and opened his books. He read the instructions about making blood stones and began the process of turning the first tube of over ripe mage blood into a blood stone. Moon light was needed. On this he would not hold back. His wounds burned. His excitement to create the blood stone had exited him a bit too much. His chest writhed and Albie suffered a coughing fit. The flehm clung to the rag he used to cover his face and quickly began to rot. He removed the fowl cloth from his face and dropped it to the ground. He regained control of himself and resumed his work.
Albie pulled moonlight from his favorite crystal. Cats crystal had full moon light in it. The finger length bottle of blood condensed and shrunk as a jagged stone began to form from the liquid. It looked like a dark red piece of gravel. An unpolished stone perhaps a bit chalky. The stone was ugly but Albie felt the power in it. It seemed to radiate a bit of life force. He felt May in his mind take an interest in something that wasn't the dead body for the first time. The process had drained Cats stone and nine others. The other blood was not getting any fresher, so he processed it to. He would miss the stored moon light, but he could make some interesting things with the stones.
When he finished he stared at both the ugly little rocks and began thinking about what he wanted to make with these stones,