Henry Westcroft/Ghast Dissection: I

Ghast Dissection: I

In-universe date	Era Nova, February–March, Year 6
Real-world date	2026-10-08
Author	Henry Westcroft
Category Type	Character News

The heavy copper doors of the Grand Warehouse in Clockhaven were bolted from the inside long after the day workers had gone home.

Importing a healthy, full-grown ghast all the way from the northern markets of Kheta-Kedet was no small investment. I had a merchant a few years back drop one off here in Clockhaven for my own use. They are exceptionally rare, fiercely guarded commodities — prized assets of our supply chain which I had been keeping and tending to out in the sweeping wheat fields on the outskirts of Clockhaven to pass time... which made losing it all the more bitter.

Caught in the reckless, indiscriminate crossfire of roving skeleton archers right among my crops, my finest specimen had perished, its buoyant frame punctured and lifeless.

I had my men tow the carcass through the capital's back alleys well past midnight. The public has enough concerns with our rail initiatives and northern friction. They certainly do not need to see an expensive Kheta-Kedet import dragged through the streets like a slaughtered farm animal.

Under the harsh glare of a single copper lamp, I set up the surgical components on the cold warehouse floor. With a pair of trusted handlers standing guard at the doors, I put scalpel and saw to work. A ghast is not built like standard fauna; its anatomy defies the very laws of weight and gravity.

Hours into the dissection, past the layers of rubbery hide and dense internal membranes, I found it: a specialized, highly pressurized dorsal sac containing a residual, luminescent gas-fluid matrix. Even post-mortem, the tissue resisted the pull of the scale, humming with an inherent, dormant levitation property.

The creature's life was forfeit to a stray arrow in my wheat fields, but its biology holds the key. If I can manage to stabilize and harness this buoyant essence within a rigid metallic frame, we aren't just looking at cargo transport along rails anymore. We are looking up.