With a dark swirl in the mirror the presence was gone. The heaviness in the air – like that before a thunderstorm – immediately began to dissipate, but Varnell could not so easily relax.
Someday, that tension would not dissipate but rather come to a head like a clashing of elemental forces. The day was coming; he knew it. But knowing doesn’t give me much of an advantage if I can’t find a way to make it count.
He rolled his shoulders, the tenseness of his muscles making his neck ache, and threw the cloth back over the hated mirror before retreating into the central solar once more.
Limpit stood just inside the doorway, cringing and looking as though it wished to disappear into the wall it was pressed against. Varnell could sympathize; he felt much the same way, though he couldn’t show it lest he risk his patron’s disgust.
Limpit’s huge black eyes – all four of them – stared piteously up at Varnell, who sighed, nodded and wearily held out his half-tattooed arm. With a whimper, the familiar reached for it. As it did, the creature’s waist-high bipedal body shifted. Its limbs retracted, sliding smoothly away into a shrinking torso which instead began to sprout short spiky legs from either side of its segmented centipede-like body.
Now barely two feet long, Limpit skittered up Varnell’s outstretched arm and curled around his neck like a peculiar scarf.
Varnell was long past being repulsed by the creature’s odd combination of fur and chitinous scales – on the contrary, the scolodrake’s gentle weight on his shoulders was reassuring. He even found it pleasing to feel the number of legs that scritched against his skin and caught on the fabric of his robes. There were many more pairs of the little limbs than when he’d first found Limpit as a grub; the creature had been through many molts in the decades they’d been together, and come out of each stronger and larger than ever.
But Melakor reduced it – reduced both of them, Varnell thought bitterly – to a shivering terrified mess. And while there had never been much that Varnell could do against him, he knew the time was coming where he’d no longer be able to stand his current existence. Whether or not he’d truly found the means to weaken his “master” and break free of his influence, he had to try. After all, what did he have to lose?
One thing is certain above all, thought Varnell, gently stroking Limpit’s quivering form.
The purple Core must be destroyed.
One
Double Sight
Corey
The tunnel stank.
Sour and filthy and… ugh. Just ugh.
The musk of my enemies was foul beyond words. It was as though a thousand stink-badgers had sharted into a blanket then left it in the sun to ferment. Now we’d come along and unwittingly trampled it, releasing its skunky effluent to crawl up into my sensitive nostrils to sting my sinuses and make my eyes water. Or at least it would have, if the body I was currently borrowing had been in possession of tear ducts.
“How is it that you always manage to find a way to complain about everything?” came the disembodied and sleepy-sounding voice of Ket, my sprite.
I’d left her watching over things back in the Grotto. The sun was setting; the skylight in the ceiling was limned with its hazy orange-red light, the evening shadows were long and deep, and the fireflies were just beginning to kindle. Ket was a morning person – the relentless and annoying kind, because of course she was – and this time of day always made her drowsy, yet she still managed to not only detect my emotions from a distance but also berate me for them.
“Always look on the bright side, Corey,” she added with a yawn. “And take care of Ris’kin, all right? That resurrection ritual is still on cooldown and will be for a while yet.”
Seemingly satisfied that she’d sufficiently irritated me, she withdrew her presence, returning once more to whatever she’d been doing. Surveilling my gem for even the slightest change in color that signaled my mood, apparently.
I rolled my eyes at her advice, though I could hardly argue with its soundness. And, truth be told, it was easier to focus on the positives these days.
There might be limitations to this form – through no fault of its owner, I hastened to add in response to the flash of disgruntlement from my gracious corporeal host – but it sure beats being a floating chunk of invisible nothing. Or a rock.
It was true; at least I had a body, for the time being anyway, and it came complete with all five senses and the capacity to once again experience the wonder that was gravity. And it was glorious.
Well, mostly.
Muzzle wrinkled against the tunnel’s odor, I padded along the passageway, claws sheathed so that my feet made no sound on the rough stone.
In the days after I first learned the Double Sight ability – which allowed me to view the world through the eyes of my forrel avatar, Ris’kin – I’d made use of it as much as possible, taking great delight in not only seeing the world outside my Sphere of Influence but also smelling, tasting, hearing and touching it too. Even better, this method of travel did not drain my mana like some of my insidiously dangerous other abilities did.
After many hours of its extended use, my Augmentary had dinged with the most delightful notification I’d had in days: my bond with Ris’kin had leveled up, unlocking a new feature called Double Insight. This gave my avatar access to my Insight capabilities so long as the two of us were sensorially connected via Double Sight.
I’d squealed almost as loudly as Ket, and immediately taken my avatar out beyond my Sphere of Influence again to try out this new combined ability (though not too far; neither of us wanted
