Whatever words Nevin was going to say in response to her rather odd statement were frozen solid in his throat when he looked up and caught a view of her back. Arcane sigils stretched out across the smooth dark skin, and his mind ground to a halt as he tried to figure out what it was that he was seeing.

Step. The movement brought him closer, the symbols etched upon her skin now standing out in sharp, clear relief. The exhaustion that had settled over his mind as the night wore on was now cleanly banished as his dark red eyes scanned the scarred expanse of bare flesh. She turned, one hand up to preserve her modesty as she asked him something, but her words, oddly flat though he didn't notice it, slid off of his thoughts like water off of glass. One symbol, brought to focus as she turned, caught his attention, and Nevin's thin hold was snapped.

Nevin gripped her shoulders and spun her around, once more facing her back towards him. Whatever she had said didn't matter - he had recognized that symbol. He needed to figure out what he was looking at. Swift steps carried him back into his kitchen and through it to his writing desk, where he snatched up the notebook and text he had been copying runes down into. Long strides brought him back out where he reoriented her again so the light caught the symbols, bringing them into clarity.

His fingers brushed against the rune he had recognized, then his gaze shot down to his notes where he had just finished inscribing a shirt list. The one that had caught his eye wasn't in that list, but he knew he had seen it, so the alchemist switched his attention to the text. There, skipped over because he hadn't yet run across a plant or mineral that had it as an associated runic property.

Motion. Nevin bumped against his counter. While there were other runes attached to that one, modifying it, this rune was a core rune, meaning whatever array it was in, this was the focal point. He spun her, and mirrored on the other side there, it was again, in an identical array. And at the base of her neck, in an even more elaborate array. Now that he knew what he was looking at, looking for, he could see other alchemical runes on the woman's flesh.

There were other runes, there, runes that meant nothing to him, branches of magic he didn't recognize on sight. But he had seen enough to know that whatever had been done to her, it had warped her. His eyes went wide and he sagged back against his counter.

"Fertile Crimson. What...." words to describe, to question, to analyze - they escaped the normally eloquent alchemist, and he stared, dumbfounded, at Ezra's back.