[Sacred Arch Hotsprings] Play Pretend [Solo]

[Victor Lark]

69 Summer, 511

The topic of djed had infested his mind like a swarm of advancing, breeding, buzzing insects. He had experienced firsthand how dangerous it was, and how painful—but he was not afraid, as he should have been. Far from it; Victor had developed a nagging fascination for the art, perhaps because of the danger. Djed, as he saw it, was beautiful and mysterious and strange, and yet despite his various attempts at meditation and study, it eluded him. The problem was that he still did not quite know how. No matter how much he wanted to, he could not figure out how to recreate what he had seen in others and which had felt that night, how to summon up that energy which she had so easily and wholly pushed onto him. He did not consider that it was that desire, that consciousness, which separated him from the Weave.

He was about to give up. He did not take kindly to continued frustrations. He was near to simply calling himself better than the ostentatious tricks of half-mad mages and quitting their impossible game. Almost half a bell had passed since he had departed from the temple, having sat patiently there for another thirty chimes, searching the quiet emptiness of the immediate universe and the shallowest pools of his own mind. That building did not help him, he decided. So he stumbled around until he found another place.

He found himself approaching the edge of the city, in keeping with his habit of wandering to where the sky was widest. A whim told him that he might be better off outside the city’s walls, so he bowed through the giant threshold and followed the guarded path towards the forest. He could see other dots of people ahead and behind him, busy coming to and from some mystery attraction between the trees, and wondered what they looked like. He amused himself in guessing their appearance in the shortest amount of time, mentally filling in the details even on faces that he could barely see and skipping to someone further every time they came too close. Sometimes he tried to guess their moods, or their conversation if they were not alone, and sometimes he tried to see if he could feel those moods by mimicking their gait or posture. Mostly they were happy, refreshed; mostly they sighed and strolled and laughed. He liked to pick out the ones that still walked straight and firm, like knights or surly wrights. He loved to discover the few that sulked, burdened by unsung sadnesses. With that diversion in his head, he reached the smell of hard spring water in what seemed like minutes.

There were a lot of people around the pond in that leisurely afternoon. Perhaps too many. Victor resisted the temptation to join them by continuing his game of distance: he found a tree with a low branch that was far enough from the springs for peace but close enough for people-watching. With a short running start, he jumped against the trunk in order to build enough momentum to wrap his elbows around the limb and hoist himself up. Straddling the branch, Victor leaned against the thick body of the tree. Before he resumed with people-watching, his gaze dropped to his itching hands. He wiped them of the stray pieces of bark that had been embedded there in the climb, and what he saw behind the debris made him hesitate. A single line, only slightly darker than the surrounding skin, tarnished the middle of both palms: scars left by improper care after one of many disputes.

There were plenty of marks on the otherwise soft skin of Victor’s body, as per the nature of his various hobbies—but these were difficult to hide. Despite his less glamorous exploits, Lark managed to fashion an illusion of wealth and dignity whenever he could, and these blemishes perturbed that end. With the thumb of his right hand, he pressed reproach against the scar on his left. He followed the line as if it were only made of dirt, as if it could be wiped away with enough effort...

And then it was.

[Victor Lark]

Victor paused. Only his brow furrowed on his frozen body, his thumb lingering inches from the hand beneath it. The scar was gone, the skin there as flawless as he would have liked. After a few more moments of staring, he inspected the finger that had committed the miracle, as if he would see the remnants of the little brown line smudged at the end of his thumb. Then he regarded the other hand, the one that was still marred. There he mirrored the same gesture, rubbing the soft flesh on his right hand with the weight of his left thumb.

The scar came off even easier than before, like filth in water. “Ha!” Victor exclaimed aloud. He was not sure exactly what it was he had done, but marvel in the feat trumped any confusion or question that might have crossed his mind. He turned his hands over a few times, to see if he was mistaken, if the scars would return if he just looked away long enough. They did not.

His fingers closed into soft fists so that he could concentrate on his magic thumbs. Uncertain of their other capabilities, he pressed them together in a futile attempt to make something happen. Nothing changed. So he traced them against other parts of his hands. No effect. He loosed a forefinger and with it squeezed the opposite thumb, and when the result was the same, he bothered to give a little pull.

It stretched beneath his grasp like wet clay—his own living flesh! The whites of his eyes flashed with awe as he bent and flexed the compromised appendage, which moved smoothly around the similarly extended bone. All the muscles and joints seemed unperturbed, and yet they looked different. Fascinated, he pulled the other nine fingers a fraction of an inch longer, then watched them move in a few experimental flourishes. His hands had always reflected his family’s slenderness and grace, but now they looked absolutely womanly. Reminded of his mother’s meticulously beautiful hands, he carved a slightly more severe arch onto each fingertip, then extended his fingernails with ten careful tugs.

The end result might not have looked extraordinary to a stranger, but Victor was infinitely proud of his work. He raised his hands, or rather Alessa’s, to his face. They had always been so soft; they had done nothing but comfort him, even when her words turned to whips and hot irons. As his hands dropped to lean briefly onto the craggy tree branch beneath him, a smile returned to his faltering lips. He beamed candidly at his female gloves, twisting his wrists over and around again as he tried to comprehend what was happening and what he had done. But he could not concern himself with the why or the how, not yet. He was too engrossed in the fact that he could do it. He wanted to do more.

[Victor Lark]

Sometimes, his mother colored her nails a malicious red. He tried to remember the exact shade, but when he used his paintbrush thumbs to make the color real, nothing came of it. Frowning, he closed his eyes and tried to imagine them. Her nails had been naked when they had eaten together last, but there was a party last Winter during which she had worn a black garnet ring and blood-red polish. He could not see it, though, not as exactly as he needed in order to recreate it. His mind’s eye had been broken since before he could remember, his memory full of imageless opinions and fleeting scents. The distraction of frustration swam in front of his attempts until he could not concentrate any more, and he opened his eyes.

Victor’s grip on his own forefinger had tightened in the absence of his attention. Wincing, he loosed the fingers of his other hand. As the color returned to his mother’s finger, he saw that the unfocused djed had turned the nail black. There was someone else he knew, with a few black nails.

After smearing his left thumb with the same pitch black and pushing the other four nails down to a more proper length, he paused to deliberate on how to change the hue of his skin. Aimless willing came to nothing, not even blackness; having neglected to do the proper research, Victor was still grasping at the mechanism of his new talent. What could he do, if he could not imagine? If it were night, he might have had a reference color. The closest thing he could find was the glare of the sun, and it was painfully colorless.

Fidgeting, he focused on the nails he had painted. He touched them gingerly, as if he might erase his progress otherwise, then considered his other hand. It was still his mother’s. It did not belong in this stage of his exploration. He pushed the elongated fingers on his right hand down to their natural length, and discovered that they shrank to normal with little effort. At least there was that.

Victor laced his fingers together and observed how they moved, experimenting. Though they were clumsy to objects more often than not, Seven’s hands had their own grace when he moved them through thin air. They were positively liquid when they touched Victor’s, even when he pulled him firmly through the crowded corridors of the city. His left hand became buoyant and lithe, and his right wrapped fondly around it. Then his hands separated, and his affection dripped white between the fingers of his left, his Seven side, where the grasp of his unmorphed right had left its mark. He held his breath.

Slowly, he touched the white marks and drew them out over the remaining yellow tones on the back of his hand. The color reached beneath his touch like milk over a polished wood floor, moving beyond his fingertips’ suggestion and filling in the gaps. Once his hand was stained to the sleeve, he wrapped ivorn ribbons around each of five digits, one by one. As he brushed each knuckle, he flexed the joint and tugged at it, recollecting the way the knobby bones hooked onto his. Then with a little extra stretch on his ring finger, his hand became Seven’s.

The old smile of pride broke his look of concentration and dominated his expression. He scrutinized the front and back of his work with less frantic astonishment than before, then let it fall to his lap. On his thigh, the scars beneath the fabric reached out from where that pale hand so often liked to tease them, and Victor tried his best to imitate the touch. He gave up on getting it right quickly enough. Instead, Seven reached up to touch Victor’s bottom lip. With the side of his thumb, he pulled it gently downward, flashing the scars of their lust to the world as Victor tried in vain to recollect the taste of venom. He did not think to try and stretch out his teeth and fill them with his own. For now, this was a game of skin and flesh.

[Victor Lark]

Djed was moving quickly around him, hot and invisible. He could feel it, but he did not know what it was. So he took it for confidence, mixed with the fresh warmth of Summer air and the excitement of discovery. It made him feel invigorated, inspired. It pushed him to stretch his mind and think of the possibilities. If he could change this piece of himself, he could change the rest. He could become another person, if he wanted. Looking like a person was the first step to thinking like that person, probably. He could barely imagine... but for the first time, an imagination seemed within reach.

He tipped his left hand to his right, the beautiful white one to the plain one that looked like his own. When they touched, the pallid complexion spilled out as if from a broken pen. A little guidance painted the rest of his hand so that they matched, at least in color. He no longer thought about recreating Seven, though. The thought that had been left on the edge of his scarred lip rose up again as a brief reflection on venom. It was unique to his lover because of his Symenestra heritage, and the true spider people held a greater pain in their fangs than Seven’s could ever match. A symenestra’s hands were similar to those Victor held before him.

But they were longer, thinner, softer and more delicate. He squeezed the bony knuckles of his left hand between his thumb and forefinger, smoothing them until they looked slight and frail; he twisted the joints of his right until they appeared similarly nimble. Then he used the techniques he had already learned to paint his nails black, referring to the first two as models. By the time he had colored them all and begun to pull them into long claw-like points, his fingertips tingled with the beginnings of inexplicable numbness. He stubbornly ignored it until he forgot about it, instead shaping the length of his fingers until the flesh seemed stretched to an alien dimension.

Before he had finished extending each of ten digits, he was already considering how to achieve the texture and strength of a symenestra claw. He would have to imagine it, to remember what it felt like or to think of something similar. But when he turned back to the first claw he had made, he noticed that it was short and round and grey. He watched with desperate incredulity as black and white began to fade to the pink-olive hues of his humanity.

Hastily he ran his fingers over each other, trying to regain each piece that he lost, racing the escaping djed for control. The magic thrashed around him, resisting his design at the same time that it pressed its own wild will on him. It was essential that he hold on to what he had found. He could not lose it. He had come so far, and he did not know whether he could ever decipher how to recreate it again. Between the pushing and pulling on his mind, sweat sprouted over his brow. It was a different kind of fight, internal and external and beyond the two, on a realm akin to ones he had briefly visited in meditation. He fought harder than he ever had and ever thought he could. If he could see himself from outside himself, he might have laughed.

Suddenly, or perhaps inevitably, his head felt light. Darkness warmed the corners of his vision and, for a moment, there was nothing but. He was awoken by the sensation of falling... from the tree where he sat, to the hard ground below. Gasping, his reflexes tore his arms through the air so that he could at least cling to the thick branch as his legs slipped from it. Gravity pulled him taught for an instant, and then he dropped to the ground.

[Victor Lark]

He fell to sitting against the base of the tree with an audible, “Oof!” then closed his eyes to recollect his thoughts. He could not know what his hands looked like as they pressed against his eyelids, trying to remove the warmth that was accumulating there. Swarming djed mingled with adamant concentration at in the darkness of his mind. From the two, a distant blue glow appeared, the one that sometimes came to him in meditation. He should have grabbed it, held onto it, focused on it and calmed himself. But that color reminded him of the past and its fruitless struggles. Idle meditation—in the face of real, tangible results like these—was not a solution, but a distraction.

Victor opened his eyes and, even as his vision swam, looked down at his hands. Fingerless white gloves remained on the greater part of them, but everything he had put into his nails was dissolved into their old familiar shape. A few strokes pulled the color up, but it fell down again like elastic, receding even further with every attempt. He groaned, knees bouncing with frustration.

He had to scrap the idea of symenestra, Victor realized. Obviously, whatever it was that allowed him to change... that entity had decided that he did not need to dwell on it, that its level of the experiment was over. But what was the next level? What else had he seen, that he could become? That color, that blue, wafted again to the front of his attention. He had met a man once, who was tall and angry and blue.

Knotted up by concentration, his face turned again to his hands. He moved to touch one to the other, but before he could use the old techniques, that azure complexion rose onto his hands on his own, like light into the morning sky. He only watched as his intentions manifested without any movement to guide them. His eyes straightened and fell into focus; in fact, he thought he could see with more clarity than before. He had stepped out of a haze, and on the other side was lucidity.

He needed only to touch his fingers to see them flatten and broaden, only to trace the edge of his knuckles to turn them hard and rough. The muscles beneath the skin grew with what seemed to be new strength, but before he could even think to test that strength, he realized:

They were not his hands.

[Victor Lark]

Another pair had grown in place of his, choking and cramping his true body and his true identity. He felt nervous and sick and irritated, all at once. He forgot about every stress and impediment that had plagued him only moments previous; even the miracle of his discovery became a trivial, distant thing. He had to fix this. For a few long moments, he simply glared down at them. Then his lucidity granted him the perfect solution. The end to his momentary grief, which seemed liked it had lasted a lifetime of deliberation, was clear.

He had to cut them off.

Those hands that were not even his, which did not share his blood and could not possibly obey his muscles’ command, somehow scrambled for his dagger. It was where he had left it, fastened to his side on a black leather belt. He could feel it in his fist, warm from the heat of the summer and the proximity to his body, and yet he could not see the real fingers that held it. Large and blue and malicious, it was an Akalak’s hands that moved before his eyes, threatening painful retaliation for the mere offense of wearing them. His breath caught in his chest and sank like a stone. He looked up at the vague distance, to brace himself. Then he felt the edge of the blade press gently, almost hesitantly, against the back of his wrist.

He did not know what make him look down. Maybe it was the surprise of having actually felt the pain that he should not have, maybe it was some peculiar sense of pity for the unmet man whose hands had been stolen from him, or maybe he simply realized that he needed to see in order to do the amputation justice. Whatever the reason, his eyelids wavered beneath the heavy weight of djed and directed his gaze downward.

There he saw a full set of human fingers. Their callouses extended onto the balls of two pale palms, which were marred by two matching brown lines. For a moment, he relapsed into amazement with half a gasp. Then he recognized the hands as his own, ordinary and ugly with scars. Despite the heat, a shiver climbed his spine as the last of the djed escaped into the world, leaving Victor empty and tired. His dagger slipped into the dirt beside him and his hands followed after. Then he slumped against the tree and closed his eyes.

[Templar]

Victor: Climbing: 1 - Meditation: 2 - Morphing: 5 - Dagger: 1 Lore: How to Morph your body - The concequences of magic - Overgiving: Any use of Djed for 2 weeks will result in Victor feeling a cripling migraine. Any excessive use of djed in those 2 weeks and the migraine will be permanent. - After the two weeks, the use of djed will only result in less severe headaches until after a month and a half where there will be no repecussions. (In other words from 69 of Fall to the 25th of Winter.) Warning: Your character shouldn't even be able to morph that well. At all. Morphing a set of hands would require a well trained morpher and lots of researching into how hands work.