Her body before had been heavy, in a way. It was a weight that pulled her underwater easy, with muscle not quite enough to keep her afloat. This was different. She felt weak now, shaking from the drugs, the fear, the horror of it all. It was hard to tell what put more of a chill down her spine, the hollow coldness of her surgeon or the new feeling of her body. And yet, the weight was born on the wings of relief.
Seeing him take her uterus, his hands melting into her flesh and the awful feeling of twisting guts and searing wounds fluttered away when she saw the hellfire consume her organ. It was well and truly gone. No going back, no repeating past pains. She’d given her soul to chain herself to this beast, but hadn’t he set her free in turn?
When she thought too hard about it, everything in her mind turned fuzzy. Stepping away from the instruments of her bodily destruction, she started delicately toward the mirror. When she’d come into the room, she was Tshael, the Dranak mage who had in decades past climbed from the darkness of Concordia to hew a life among the humans of Radasanth.
She didn’t recognize what was in the mirror. Sure, her crimson curls tumbled around a familiar face. She knew the eyes that watched from beneath the new crown of antler. She’d been born anew beneath the tiefling’s fingers, and the Tshael that so gingerly cantered to the side was not the same woman who shed woken as that morning. Somehow seeing herself like this, feeling so removed from the reflection that gleamed back at her made her feel less alone. Thoracis and Dan gone, she’d been lonely. Even when there was a baby to care for, she’d felt one step away from everything around her. Now there was a doorway.
Her eyes moved from the bulge of muscle around her neck to the place where her navel met horseflesh. She’d never seen a centaur but if it weren’t for the dried flecks of blood that had escaped mopping up, she wouldn’t have been able to tell she’d once been different. The contrast between human skin and the fine flocked flesh of the rest of the – her – body was more startling than on her old form but she liked it. Red ripples caught her attention when she turned a little more, lines and curves in scarred, angry flesh peeking over her shoulder. She remembered the pain on her back, more bright and vivid than even the pain she felt now.
“What?” she asked, anger itching on the edge of her mind. He branded me. Like cattle.
“Seals the work, luv,” he said, his words caught in a billow of acrid smoke. No such thing as a deal with the devil without a little fire and brimstone. No such thing as a masterpiece gone unsigned. From what she could see of it, a geometric pattern, a pattering of runes she’d never seen before, it might even be beautiful. She came for power, but oh now vanity had clung with her need for war.
“It is exactly as I had asked,” she complimented, bowing her head. Her skull felt as if it swung downward faster than she expected, toppled by the new headdress fused at her temples. He’d warned her neck would be stiff, and it ached and complained when she looked back up, but somehow that was dulling as her senses were awakening. There were greater pains and aches along her body to take up her attention, after all, and the strange muted feeling of her thoughts. She was unaware that her mind had been melded and molded with that of the mare, neurons and memories necessary for the new half of her body now firing and sparking at her unconscious command. She just knew that thinking was different, as if her mind had been packed away in gauze and still had some thin fabric wrapped and clinging in places.
Her magic.
The fear came to her like a shot, an arrow that tore through her chest. The flicker of understanding that this muffling of her thoughts might mean her magic had been stripped just as sure as her old body…. It was worse than knowing she had no soul. It was worse than knowing she’d never have another child. It was worse than knowing her first child was lost forever, and the guilt of that pain hung around her neck like a shackle.
A trembling hand reached up and fingers combed through curls. Of course she’d had a back-up plan. Tshael knew demons enough to not step into their lairs unarmed, and what she’d heard of Aurelianus was far more sinister than the incubi that flitted about Concordia. The seeds themselves were innocuous, but if the Dranak’s spells still held…
“A gift,” she told the tiefling. “But these don’t take in dirt. They need the living.”
She moved to the side of one of the fleshcrafted assistants fast, faster than she meant to. Her face pale with pain, eyes wrenched closed and mouth in a scowl as her aching muscles chastised her, the room reverberated with the sound of hooves on stone as loudly as her body shook with the ache and stab of pain blooming through the anesthetics. His mouth, a lipless slit on an unnaturally smooth face, had been of little use thusfar. At least, she couldn’t remember hearing him speak. It hung slightly open now, and Tshael shoved her palm to it. The seeds were pressed in, though he tried to shove them out with his tongue. Before he could, she called on it, the strands of magic that held together the very plane of existence.
Her grasp on the strands wasn’t as fine as it was before the surgery. The fog of the new brain made seeing the finer points of spellcasting difficult. Rather than pluck as she did before, now she grabbed and pulled. Still, it worked. She felt the power start to flow and channeled it. The seeds burst to life within the sentry’s mouth, vines twisting out from around her fingers from his mouth, two tendrils snaking from his nostrils. Wide-eyed horror overtook him, and Tshael did nothing but grin. Somewhere within her something was terrified at her pleasure, but it was quickly squashed. The Dranak – no, the centaur – pushed forward, commanding the seeds to bloom. As the stems swelled and gave way to buds, she pulled her hand away. Slowly the buds opened, revealing flowers that were a swirl of red and black, mottled as coals burning away in the bottom of a stove.
“They make quite a bit of pollen,” she said, watching as the sentry slumped down on his knees, clutching at his face as the thin vines thickened, more blooms popping open along the stems. “You’ll find that drying it out gives it properties that makes gunpowder seem… boring. Wait til the blooms have died to harvest the seeds, and as I have shown you, give them a warm place to grow.”
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