Celestara Veylin's Arc

Chapter 5 of 9

The wand's light still hung in the air when the pain began. Celestara dropped the wand and gripped her arm. Under her skin, the fortress power moved on its own. It had left a shape inside her, and now that shape spread. Her fingers stretched too long. Gray crept up her wrist like frost. She had blinded the hunters, but the power she borrowed was eating her from within. "Stop this," she said to the stone. "You marked me. Now pull it back." The presence answered slow. "I cannot pull it back. The power took your shape and made its own. It will finish what it started unless you master it." Her knees hit the floor. She watched her hand curl, the nails darkening, the joints bending wrong. She had seen this shape before. On the plain, in the horde. The thing inside her was becoming one of them. Celestara reached for the stone with her mind, the way she had reached into the hunters below. She had read their thoughts through the walls. Now she turned that same reach inward. She followed the gray up her arm to the well it fed from. There, deep, she found the power itself, wild and hungry, with no master. She did not fight it. She commanded it. "You serve Veylin blood. You swore it. Obey the blood you run in." The power fought back. It pushed harder into her chest. Her heart slammed. For a moment she felt herself slipping, felt the vacant hunger of the horde flood her thoughts. She saw through their eyes, ragged and blank, hunting a girl across an open plain. The girl was her. She seized that hunger and named it hers. "You are mine. Not the horde's. Mine." The gray stopped. It held at her elbow, trembling. Then, slow, it settled. Not gone. It sank into her skin and stayed, quiet, under her control. Her hand kept its long fingers and its gray tint. But it obeyed her now. She flexed it. The nails were claws. They moved when she willed them. Celestara stood. Her breath shook. She lifted her changed hand and looked at it in the wand's fading light. She had not stopped the transformation. She had claimed it. The presence spoke. "You carry their nature now. The hunters will feel it in you. They are blind, but they can smell their own." Celestara understood. She had survived the change, but the change made her kin to the things that killed her family. The horde outside had lost her thread. Yet a new pull had opened. She could feel them now, scattered on the plain, and they would feel her. She picked up the wand and turned toward the gate. If they hunted their own kind, she would learn to hunt them first. The throne was still hers to take. She would take it wearing this new skin.