Majutsu-shi no Chikara Ch. 05

"Steel yourself, Thikkit."

"Ser commands. I am ready." Thikkit lifted her chin, thinking she was ready for whatever horrible pain might follow. A Wizard's gifts rarely without price.

Esmeray nodded, eyes narrowing against the moonlight. She found the strands of magic that she needed for this task, and her fingers played across them artfully back and forth through the air between her and the kobold. A gentle river of words bubbled up from her belly, catching on the strings of magical energy and swirling to mist around the scaly scout a numbing vapor of blue-green light shining like deep-cave mushrooms -- the crescendo of the spell splashing upward into the sky as Esmeray inhaled during the final intonation. Thikkit's limbs thinned dangerously, bending awkwardly backward as wrists and claws drew close and elongated, her torso grew more slim and her scales sank below sprouting fur. Her tail shriveled to a shadow of itself, tufted and swishing side to side...

Triangular ears, catlike wedges of silky fur and puffy down filling sat atop the feline head, Thikkit's snout smashed shorter and narrower, whiskers springing from the face around a twitching nose. Her tongue was numb, unable to taste the air, and her teeth were too long by half, and too few.

"What have you done to me, Ser?" she demanded in impudence -- but only the feralmreowr of a wildcat escaped her mouth. Clapping a hand to her face, a fuzzy, soft paw batted at her nose -- wide-spread whiskers alarming her to the shift in air and impending impact. Claws, sharp and deep-set, sprang forward and nearly shredded the delicate nose perched at the end of the squashed snout before her eyes.

She was hideous!

"That form should see you back to the Sidero, unmolested." Esmeray nodded, teeth just visible as her lips parted in the onyx-black way she smiled. "Nothing preys on the puma in its demesnes."

Another pained yowl, as the puma sat on its haunches and glared accusations at Esmeray. Nabid laughed at the kobold's discomfort, but a hiss and swipe of razor claws quieted the imp.

"Don't fuss, Thikkit." Esmeray pouted playfully. "It will end -- but you must be swift... this will make you swift as you've never been. Keep far from the orks, and you will win through to the camp soon enough. Do be still a moment more -- Nabid, your hand please."

The imp groused wordlessly, gripping its left wrist in the thin, strangling fingers of its right hand. Sinking through the soft clay of its flesh, Nabid worked right hand back and forth as if uncorking a wine bottle... the left hand fell loose of its mooring and plopped to the ground. Retrieving the severed appendage in its remaining hand, Nabid offered it up to Esmeray -- the beady black orbs of eyes huing red as the narrow, pinched face looked up through moonlight.

"This token shall make you tireless, for a time." Esmeray's hands swept about, fingers dancing odd angles and shapes in the air around the homonculus' bodiless hand. The Wizard's voice gave a sharp, metalic sound like a falling pot striking cobblestones from a second-floor window, and the spell took proper shape.

Thikkit mewwed anxiously, wondering not for the first time how Wizards came to be able to pronounce such impossible syllables. Esmeray plucked the echanted imp hand from Nabid and turned it over, nodding approval of her own work.

"Yes, this shall serve." Esmeray thrust the horrid trinket toward Thikkit's face. "Take this, and you shall suffer no fatigue while it remains. We do not have time for anything more robust."

Already, Thikkit saw glittering, fine sand shedding from the hand. Attempting to grip the device in her paw, the kobold's mind and body recoiled in shock -- serving only to knock the charm to the ground.

"Do with my gifts as you will, Thikkit." Esmeray pulled her hair back and tucked it carefully into her close-fit hood, before drawing the broad shelter of her cloak up and over her head. "Dawn is coming, and I have business in South-wold, yet. Should we meet again, perhaps in another life, I will remember you kindly."

The puma...kobold... Thikkit gave a low, thoughtful purr -- briefly stunned to silence only to resume the pleasant rumbling within her own throat that soothed her nearly as much as hissing had done in her normal body. Gingerly, she fretted-about with her teeth to heft and carefully carry the splay-fingered imp hand in her mouth. The gritty, sandy texture shedding from it was blissfully without taste -- but Thikkit was delighted at the sparking tingle of magic it gave while it rested on her broad, rough tongue.

The world shaped differently around her, but Thikkit saw it as she had seen it before... instead of tasting the air, her nose dredged scent from every direction and her whiskers gave tremble to every mote of movement and told her its distance. Thrilling and terrifying, familiar and foreign, her senses collided and colluded within her mind and she saw the night in a warmer glow than previous.

After running full-tilt until sunrise, Thikkit was painfully aware of another reality of this new (blessedly temporary) form... being a fur-coated beast was absolutely, murderously hot business.

She stopped at a familiar headwater, cooling her throbbing paws and drinking the icy water with relish. While not tired, as such, she had a powerful, fierce, painful thirst. Her belly grumbled loudly, as well. Not wanting to stray from where she had set the imp-hand charm, she sniffed about and gave her eyes time to study the Willow Wood. Sunlight dappled the underbrush and game trails with greenish glows of the early morning, the day star not high enough to burn white-yellow overhead. A pleasing, mouth-watering odor caught her attention. Eyes wide, tail stiff, body hunched low, she waited until the stag was positionedjust so, with its flank to her.

...

Clad in a shroud bending daylight around her, with the air stifling slow, Esmeray placed a wide net around the fire-haired apprentice, even as he was boasting to his fellows and playing at not showing-off his newly learned "talents". With a few, well-placed and subtle enchantments, she drove a wedge between him and his magic -- such that when he at last relented and began summoning fire to his hand, the pressure within him began to increase.

Her task complete, Esmeray retreated -- dismissing her own magical camouflage even as screams erupted in the distance. She breathed deeply, thick sweat rolling from her skin. Her chest hurt, feeling like she'd been holding her breath the entire time -- but she forced herself to take even, calming breaths. Casting her vision about, she checked for signs of tampering with her own wards and contingencies... finding nothing amiss, she continued a more reserved pace to her observation post.

"It went well, by the screaming." Nabid remarked as Esmeray Saran ducked into the magically hidden shelter.

"I'll need to watch him closely, to see if he suspects." Esmeray only nodded agreement, and tucked her legs beneath her on her sleeping mat. "If he's half so deranged as he seemed last night, then I need but wait for the nymph to be away a few minutes."

"Why wait?" Nabid made a show of scratching the stump of its left wrist against a tiny, angular jaw. "Just distract the nymph by burning someone else... or fuck someone, that's always a good distraction..."

Esmeray sighed, casting another scrying spell onto the small, handspan-wide mirror. She shook her head, even as the hurrying shapes took form and she watched the Elemental and the nymph chasing the throng toward the now-smoldering wreckage of his apprentice's corpse.

"She's twined with too many of them... hells, probably everyone in town." Esmeray sipped cold tea from her morning repast. "If I didn't know better, I'd say she's been here for years, drawing them all into her spell."

"Or else... what?" Nabid frowned, noticing that the tea was empty and laboriously shifting about to start a small fire and bring another pot to boil. "Doing this all with one hand and a stump is not as easy as I make it look."

"Else, she's older than the Elemental, and more dangerous." Esmeray shook her head again. "It doesn't fit neatly, but I think more than half that village are tied to both of them, somehow. I wouldn't put it past her to be... I've never heard of a nymph becoming pregnant."

"Bedded many nymphs in your day?" Nabid grinned wickedly, tongue wagging suggestively, eyes shining black. The coals of the miniscule fire pit flared, and the flames danced up Nabid's leg -- scorching limb, belly, and face of the little construct. Unperturbed, Nabid gave a resigned sigh and set the pot of water to the metal heating frame before swatting the flames with the one hand.

"Enough to know they do not carry children." Esmeray frowned, eyes only on the mirror, even though she could smell the rancid odor of burning homunculus. "Unless there is some magical incubation, or another plane to which they retreat -- even from other fae creatures."

"Sounds like a lot of uncertainty, that." Nabid spat, finally smothering the flames and only smoking a sickly green fume from blackened and cracking pseudo-flesh.

"Not really." Esmeray quaffed her tea. "My notes are easy-enough to sift through. Nothing there suggests fae folk to operate so grossly outside the known conventions of our shared reality."

"How much reading have you completed?"

"I've skimmed the lot, but I'll need a few weeks to fully absorb..." Esmeray pursed her lips, leaning closer over the mirror. "...certain volumes... hand me that..."

She gestured vaguely toward the tiny bench of apparatus to her left, her eyes unwavering from the scene within the mirror. Nabid looked where her fingers pointed, gently snapping as she gestured. Adopting the aggrieved air with which he was most familiar, he hopped to her command and swept the smooth, polished steel-sheen bangle to her hand.

Esmeray made deft movements with her fingers and the bangle expanded,click-click, clack as it did so. Setting the device in the air between her and the mirror, she gave a quarter turn and the image from the mirror filtered up through the bangle.

She watched, and listened, as the Elemental chastised and barked all around. Nurcan, as she'd learned the severe-looking apprentice of advancing years was so named, asked about the manner of Jyran's death, and how Matta intended to teach them anything as he lost his mind. Esmeray was not interested in this -- she was focusing on the nymph... called Prende, or Lada, depending on who was speaking and when.

The nymph, often ignored through deliberate effort, was studying the charred remains with a kind of detached bemusement -- Esmeray recognized the angle of her eyes and wondered exactly what the nymph was seeing... then, her eyes started trailing upward.

Sensing the danger, Esmeray dismissed the scrying magics with haste -- the energy hurling itself wildly within the confines of the tent and causing pots, jars, and imp to be thrown about in a sudden cyclone. Ashes, fire, coals, and simmering water flew in all directions. Fortunately, the fabric of the tent was reinforced, as well as enchanted to disappear from prying eyes. The other sundry accoutrements, while ordinarily robust, where not nearly so endowed.

"That was excessive." Nabid looked down from a hook overhead, where a lantern once dangled... now, the hook suspended the imp neatly by the eye socket. Other than looking quite put-upon, the imp was otherwise undamaged.

The rest of Esmeray's traveling gear was not so lucky.

"She almost spotted me." Esmeray breathed, flop-sweat rising on her neck and face. "I had to dismiss... if she suspects... shit, shit,shit..."

"Hmph.Quite." Nabid nodded sagely, tiny legs crossing thoughtfully, though there was no ottoman on which to prop a foot where the imp swung like a grotesque parody of a fisherman's prize catch.

"Shut up." Esmeray leaped to her feet and ducked out of the tent, inspecting the exterior for damage.

Seeing these wards still in place, she looked into the sky between her and South-wold. As she feared, a glowing orb was rising into the sky overhead -- hidden from non-magical sight. The flare, such as it was, erupted at a zenith a full bow-shot above the nymph... it might as well have been accompanied by a thunderclap, for Esmeray shook to see the sparkling shards of the flare drifting lazily outward in all directions.

"Damn her." Esmeray, before ducking back into her shelter. "We have to move."

"Of course." Nabid levered the left wrist-stump between the curve of the hook and the imp's own face, and used the right hand to pull itself free of the intruding metal prong and drop half its height to the ground.

Esmeray made a short, trilling sound, dashing her fingers together in several asymmetrical patterns, and swept the whole of the contents of her shelter into the imp's flesh.

"Madam!" Nabid cried out, flesh distending and swelling impossibly around the growing accumulation of detritus and apparatus. "It thatabsolutely necessary?"

"No time, Nabid." Esmeray growled, stepping out of the tent.

Nabid continued to swell, becoming misshapen and ungainly... almost translucent, so thinly stretched was the clay-flesh matter spread over so many objects. Esmeray, not completely without her wits, pulled a small decanter -- no larger than a tea cup for a human child -- and unstoppered it with a violent jerk of the cork. The syrupy, red-black sludge that oozed from its mouth as Esmeray upended the decanter over Nabid's face, moved with the inexorable speed of loose, tarry mud, and smelled just as foul.

"Oh, thank you ever so much." Nabid smiled, yellow teeth drooling with the ichor from the decanter. The mixture swelled as it touched the imp, and the two substances mixed in a most unseemly way for standing flesh -- no matter how facsimile.

Thus fortified, Nabid'sbeing was not only more substantial, but much darker in hue. Now, it moved with the liquid semblance of clotting blood, and the imp... if it could still be called an imp, lumbered on thicker, shorter legs. In as much as Nabid's legs had not increased in length, only in thickness to bear all the added weight of this new volume, and the added mass of Esmeray's traveling possessions, the construct moved with a more pleasant adroitness -- a jolly, fat elf of a servant construct nearly eye-level with Saran's breasts -- with dainty, absurd arms that couldn't even span its own chest, so swollen was its torso.

"Come on." Esmeray snapped her fingers again, the tent collapsing on itself into a tidy roll, which the Wizard promptly shoved down Nabid's gullet. "Before her damn spells get here."

"Feh." Nabid gulped heavily and spit, waddling pendulously forward. "Could have made these stumps abit longer."

"Whine later." Esmeray frowned, scrubbing layered spells across the area to gradually erode trace of her presence. Her breathing hitched, and the sweat rolled from her obsidian skin. She was able to stop the next spell before she lost control of it entirely, but only just.

By the time the nymph's sniffing, inquisitive tracing magic reached its limit, it had only covered half the distance between Esmeray and the fae guardian of South-wold... but the funnel pointed out her direction clearly enough. By nightfall, the fae would know exactly the location of Esmeray's now scuttled campsite.

So much the better, Esmeray clasped her hips and dragged a deep breath as though she'd been running ahead of a charging bull. If the nymph spent time chasing Esmeray's footsteps, it could buy the Wizard time to make her assault on the Elemental. If the nymph entrenched herself, it would openother lines of attack on her target. Rattled and infirm as the Elemental had become, it seemed to Esmeray's brief study that Prende spent far more energy bolstering the Elemental than was right, proper, seemly, or safe. Unlikely to blunder a spell, the fae was still every bit beholden to the same rigors and limits of magic as any Wizard, named or no.

Grimly aware of the boot knife secured in her robes between her breasts, the grip and sheath slick with her sweat, Esmeray could only savor the nearing totality of her anticipated victory over the first hex placed on her by the Tower.

The Elemental...dead. The idea titillated her in vulgar fashion, the fomenting bloodlust gurgling and bubbling just behind her eyes. She wanted, so very much, to be the instrument of the Elemental's death... to feel and see his life's blood spilling before her eyes. It blistered, seethed... suckled... caressed... she yearned for it.

"Soon." she sighed, clutching a hand over her chest -- the warding gloves grazing lewdly the grip of the dagger -- and her other hand pressing tentatively to her groin.

"Din't you say t' hurry?" Nabid jiggled and wobbled, stomping unevenly back up the road toward Renks Cairn. "How far we running?"

"Not far, Nabid." Esmeray turned about, her compulsion suitably sated. "Not far."

...

"-piss and... and...dragon droppings!" Thikkit swore, slapping at her snout several times.

Her limbs were taxed to their limit, and her flesh was restored to its proper shape, thanks to the failing of the spell that had transformed her body to that of a great hunting cat.

Oh, it had been singularly enlivening, to pounce upon that stag from ambush and tear its flanks to useless ribbons with those razor claws. To feel its warm blood spraying from its throat when she was finally able to drag it to the ground, fang and claw piercing and ripping... such decadence! The taste of its liver had been the pinnacle of her time inside the hot, fuzzy,strong feline form. Yet, in her exuberance and haste, Thikkit had followed the stag on a merry chase through the Willow Wood. Then, enervated, she had slouched her trail back to where she'd left the imp's claw. Wanting to sink into her familiar half-sleep, to recover, she rested briefly...

Now, it was nearing midday or just beyond, and Thikkit only knew that she was lurking at the forest's edge, just west of the Sidero camp. Her cloak was gone, the imp charm was gone, and she felt she could sleep for a fortnight. Huffing and hissing to herself, she considered the dangerous, double-edged gifts Wizards were wont to give.

Do not go to sleep while transformed. Thikkit noted to herself, guessing (certainly more rightly than wrongly) that it had something to do with her current state.

In truth, she wasn't even certain it was the same day. It had been mid-morning when she'd caught and killed the stag, nearer midday when she'd take her rest... she decided it could not be the same day. Shadowy, ghostlike... images danced through her mind, and her limbs twitched in feeble, marionette fashion, the faintest memories of a lost day fighting from the abyssal depths of the fugue. A crisp mid-spring wind swept through the trees as thick clouds scudded overhead and dripped shadows deeper through the trees and carpeted the Sidero for a time.

The smell stirred acidic life to her limbs. Death... decay...ash... What had been the thin streamers of numerous cooking fires took shape before her eyes, the lazy, trembling black strands of a burnt ruin. Fear. The wind had carried it, the stink unmistakable and coating her tongue a sticky sap she could do nothing but taste. Not the fear of the hunted... this was the fear of the dead... the soon-to-die... clinging to the wind a spectral rider from the depths of nightmares, given life as it whispered, hushed through the grass and leaves... it bounded from branch to branch, coiled a viper of insistent warning around Thikkit's leg and teasing its way up to her spine... shivering with coppery chill, Thikkit crept closer to what looked to be the pyre of the Sidero.