Vixen: Learned books identify Twelve Keys for experiment in the laboratory.
Dog-Head (mutters): A devil's dozen of abominations.
Vixen: Look within the Third Key, missy, and you find my likeness, my fox-form, both eating and being eaten.
Vixen: This is Cohobation. To process and reprocess in perpetuity. Everlasting evasion by fire and steam.
… boil off the vital spirit, contain the vapor, condense it, return it to the matter in the alembic and … boil off the vital spirit, contain the vapor, condense it, return it to the matter in the alembic and … boil off the vital spirit …
Vixen: Continually, unceasingly, unremittingly. Nothing catches me, but I melt. Nothing holds me, but I vaporize. Death is sick with desire to have me, but I transmute in His embrace. I make myself that which is hunted but never is trapped.
Clever (wonderment): You live forever!
Dog-Head (dismissive): She reconstitutes forever. But each revival is like a copy of a copy, a touch less coherent than the previous one. Eventually, in some far future, her material self must reduce to a concentrated state we’ll no longer recognize. Not certain what happens then.
Vixen (wistful): I told you, I came first in our story. Imagine me in the wide world, in the Alchymist’s laboratory, alongside his daily work, sustaining my two glamours — one, a lover for the Alchymist; the other, an escapist for Death. Constant agitation! Extrication! Cohobation! Exhaustion! It became more and more difficult for me to project that face and form beloved by the Alchymist.