Serrell took the components and sorted them out. After a quick spell she had the candles she needed: the wax bubbled and melted out of the papery outer substance the hive had been made of, then slid across the floor to where the quasid roots were standing still, against gravity. The puddles of wax left a trail of dust and honey behind, purifying themselves as they went. Soon she had four cylinders of wax about a foot tall and three inches thick, the sort of things that could burn for hours if necessary.

Corbin watched all this with his mind half on the last bits of Kyessy’s goodbye speech. Clearly she’d meant to send him a message of some kind, but he had no idea what. He replayed her words over and again. ‘Pleasurable af’ was not how she would describe her time with him. She called him bird, not by his name. None of this helped him understand what he should be doing right now, except maybe being vaguely distrusting of Serrell, which wasn’t helpful. He was already vaguely distrusting of her.

He tried to Inspect the various ritual components, but came up empty after their descriptions. None of it gave him any clue. The relk’s tails weren’t needed but were poisonous if you cut yourself with it. Did she mean he should stab Grotok and Findell with the tails and poison them? He doubted Serrell would transform him once he tried to poison her two associates.

With no good idea of what to do with the information given to him, he did what most people do when they’re confused and unsure. He did nothing, and simply hoped for the best.

Serrell returned, grinning sheepishly. “I may have told a little white lie when your friend was here.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, it is true I can’t do the ritual I really had planned without the head priest being dead or giving us permission on behalf of the gods… but I can begin your transformation immediately.”

“What?”

“Oh,” she said, and grinned, “don’t be alarmed.” She had filed her teeth down, or magically transformed them so they were pointy and creepy looking. “We can get started right away.”

“Are you… sure? What was all this stuff for then?” he asked.

She waved dismissively at the white candles running through with black veins of quasid roots, and the huge, bizarre frillux skull. “It’s all for the magistrate. He has a special project we’ve been working towards for a little while now.”

“That’s… nice. And not at all disconcerting.”

You have failed a Charm (Mingle) check!

Your capacity for subtlety is sorely lacking.

You’ve succeeded a Luck (Kismet) check, however. Which is good, because the warlock Serrell is no joke and was about to put you out of your misery and hers, possibly by eating you.

“Look at you,” she murmured through her terrifying smile, “looking so cute and naive and trusting. I could just eat you up. But I tell you what: you’ve been a good sport this whole time, you’ve made all this possible. I’m feeling charitable. Why don’t you hop over into that ritual circle right now and we’ll get your transformation started.”

A thrill of absolute terror shot through him like a bolt of icy lightning. “Yeah. Yeah, let’s do that.”

“Oh, there’s also someone I wanted you to greet.” She picked up his card and placed it in the smallish circle that intersected his circle.

The nellywynian stepped into his field of view, the assassin. The admittedly pretty garbage assassin.

“What a plot twist,” he croaked.

“Nobody saw that coming, did they?” The little guy asked.

“Everybody saw that coming. If there was an audience right now, they’d be groaning with how awful and predictable that was. So glad we’re not live streaming this.”

The assassin turned to Serrell. “Can we just stick him full of daggers and be done with it?”

Serrell chuckled. “Afraid not,” she said. “We definitely need another soul for an echocrystal, so no stabby stabbing. Unless you’re volunteering.”

“Can’t we just stuff him into an echocrystal as he is?”

“Not sure,” Serrell answered. “We could end up with an animal spirit in there, or a soul. We transform him and we’ll have a human… or at least a fully sentient being.”

Rude.

Serrell fished around in a small leather tote on her hip and a greasy, glittering crayon he recognized from the ritual circle beneath him. He realized that none of these circles were really complete; a bit of each had been left unfinished. The game-oriented part of his brain knew he was about to be locked into this circle by magic, and that knowledge came about two seconds before she reached down and yanked one of his feathers out, dealing him one damage. He yelped, despite himself, as he failed an Endurance (Grit) check.

Then, with a stub of glittery crayon she closed him in. He peered up into her blazing eyes, and watched as globs of her dripping aura plopped down onto the marks that had already been made.

The certainty he was going to die grew exponentially.

The whole thing went alight the moment her aura dribbled onto the circle, blazing with purplish (sometimes reddish) magic. It spread by following the lines, to where she delicately set his feather. Then, she produced several hairs and put them in another rune-bounded portion of the circle. Another object was one of the echocrystals.

“Very kind of you to have these soulstones filled up,” she muttered.

“The shardmage did that before we showed up.”

“Good friend of mine, Yltaeus.”

“Mine too,” the nellwynian said viciously.

“The guy stealing the souls?”

“You had your chance and you blew it,” Corbin told him. “Just sit over there and be a third-rate villain who tries to look menacing but dies making the main character seem like a badass, okay?”

Serrell hissed laughter while the little assassin snarled with rage. His eyes darted back and forth between Corbin and Serrell, and though Corbin might’ve wished the guy would go plant his knives in the warlock’s back, it didn’t happen. That tired trope of the henchmen betraying the main villain wasn’t about to play out here.

Serrell placed the last of the components in the last empty spot. This was a small skull, of what appeared to be a tenrill perhaps. It had the round, arrowhead shape of a snakey creature. She then began chanting in whatever language made magic happen. Every word dripped with her grimy aura, threaded through with gold and pulsing with power, like she was spewing out hot tar.

“I’ll be really upset if you kill me,” he said.

“Me too,” the nellwynian said, adding a whole lot of sugar for overdone sarcasm’s sake.

“Never seen what happens to a Familiar if they’re killed off,” she purred. The fiery hair and the filed teeth both gave her a chilling effect. “Does the card disintegrate? Curious. But no… I’m much more curious to see what happens to this card of yours once the ritual is complete.”

He was staring so intently at her aura that he began to notice the temple itself had an aura all its own. The holy aura was something like the sun, only infused with whatever the god’s aspect was… its domain maybe. The one with the monks meditating facing the walls, for instance, was hardly noticeable, except that it had slithered out and was touching Serrell’s back foot. It was also subtly probing the edges of the ritual circle. They retreated afterwards.

The remainder of the hall was awash in godly auras, and now that he noticed them, it was all he could do to keep from being blinded. Most glowed with golden power, each competing to outshine the others, though some remained near their shrines, reserved and content to take up only the space allotted to them. One flashed with reddish, then brownish colors, shoving at a greenish gold godly aura. The whole thing made his brain ache. The effort of tamping down the aura sight ability caused him to miss whatever Serrell was doing above him. She was still speaking, still gesturing. Now she had some powder and was sprinkling it around the circle?

Globs of Serrell’s purple black magic reached up and out of the drawn lines of the greasy lines she’d drawn, and formed into spear points, then thinned until they appeared more like needles. As one, they all plunged forward into him.

He felt… weird.

***

Corbin lost all sense of time in the middle of the circle, with all the magic stabbing at him. He wished she’d given him a magic anesthetic. At times he was stabbed repeatedly up the butt, other times sporadically in both wings, and in several cases, he was poked in the eyes. He expected to hear the magic make some Three Stooges noises while it was poking and prodding him, but no woob-woob-woob! was to be heard.

In between stabbings and the blinding pain, and listening to himself caw over and over again, he noted Findell enter the chamber again, followed by Grotok. The foppish half-fae eyed Corbin with distaste.

“What’d you do to him?”

“I began the ritual.” Serrell shrugged, as if that were enough of an explanation.

“He looks… awful.”

“To be fair,” the nellwynian interjected, “he always looked awful. Never seen an avian with only two wings and two feet before. It’s unnatural.”

Corbin couldn’t see himself, except for flashes of quills, or scales, or… hang on a second. He didn’t have either of those things as a raven or a man. He opened his maw to roar out, except he couldn’t get any oxygen in through his gills to make a noise. He was suffocating, but only for a few… moments, possibly. Minutes, probably. He flopped around in the circle and bounced off the protective layer of magic keeping him in. A hiss of electricity, a purple flare of energy, and a smell of grilled salmon followed. Then the pain surged through him and he changed into something else.

“Well, there is a way to home in on the form he used to be, before he transformed into a raven… I just didn’t include that part.”

When Corbin next got a look at Findell, the little man’s face had gone greenish. “What does that mean?”

“The ritual will cycle through the available forms until it reaches the one he’s supposed to be.”

Corbin groaned… or rather, he squeaked.

***

Corbin came back to consciousness when the temple broke. One second he was unaware of anything except for the bizarrely uncomfortable feeling of constantly changing shapes, and the next second all the inner light fled the place. All the bizarre extradimensional space he’d seen before, the long hallway to the woods, the little alcove with the monks facing the walls, and the other ones he didn’t want to poke his nose into, gone.

Through the film of his shifting eyesight and his shifting hearing, and oh yeah, the horror that was his sense of smell, he became aware that Grotok, Findell and Serrell were jumping up and down in delight, cheering and hugging each other.

“I can’t believe she actually did it,” Grotok said.

“Without the bird no less,” Serrell said.

“I didn’t get the impression he was the heavy hitter of the operation,” Findell said. “Only level six when he arrived.”

“Imagine something that blends in with the night, it’s small and difficult to hit, and it has all the special attacks the ranger has. Plus, he has a head for tactics. I’ve seen it in action.”

“I’ll admit to underestimating him,” Findell said. “You too, eh?”

The nellwynian assassin snorted and mumbled something Corbin couldn’t hear, because he didn’t have ears maybe.

“Are we doing this, or are you gonna congratulate the help all day?” Grotok asked.

“You’re about to bear witness to history, little… bird,” Serrell said, and gagged looking at him. “The last avatar of He Who Slumbers remade the landscape and terrorized thousands. He was the unmaking of the treefolk people, who walk the world and tend their groves no longer. He brought the humans to heel with the magic of his personality, and they waged war on the other species. Together, the angellin were nearly pushed to extinction. You have a front row seat to the creation of the newest avatar of Vethros. You should be honored.”

Corbin just shapeshifted between more forms. He was pretty sure right now he’d shifted into a sloth. He tried to appear indignant.

“Look at its widdle smile!” she cooed. “That is the most adorable creature I have ever seen.” Then she straightened and turned back to the ritual, which she set up with much more speed and efficiency than she had with Corbin’s. The echocrystals she set to magic, so they stood up on their points in the midst of the runic circles she drew on the suddenly non-magical floor of the temple.

“The ritual circle has to be drawn in a temple, Corbin!” she called while she drew with her black glitter crayon and placed the frillux skull in an open space amongst the other words of power. “It has to be shown to Vethros that he stands above the petty concerns of the gods. His essence is more powerful than all of theirs, and this shows him we are serious about lifting him up above them. He won’t take us seriously otherwise. This way we have the greatest chance of convincing him to allow us some of his power, to walk and shape the world.”

She stared over at him. “Now, worlds.”

“Convince?” Findell asked.

She finished closing the foppish magistrate into the circle. “Don’t be such a child. It would be an honor to die inviting Him into your body, and an even greater honor to host Him. Now, first we light the candles, then we cleanse the magistrate’s core cards. Afterwards, we prepare the way. Don’t squirm too much… this is going to hurt.”

It looked much worse than what Corbin was going through.

Whatever pain the ritual caused, it was full of purple and black fire, purple and black lightning (he wasn’t sure how black lightning worked, but it did), and Findell screamed continuously until his voice gave out. The magic, the fire, and the lightning also lifted him off his feet. Curiously, a character sheet appeared behind him, partially translucent but definitely like a video game UI Corbin knew from his days as definitely a human. The sheet came complete with attribute data (he had a Charm of 22 and an Intelligence of 16) and level information (18th to be precise), special abilities for being a half-nellwynian half-fae (a complete mishmash Corbin couldn’t see well, because Findell’s body was blocking the way), but the core cards were all just big icons. The equipped cards spot was empty… Corbin hadn’t seen him hand his equipped cards to Grotok, but he guessed something like that had happened. His Core cards were hearts, people talking with one another, and one with a bunch of smiling happy people, which made sense. Findell was all about getting people to do what he wanted. Like a bard but less fun.

The ritual magic began to pull these off, zapping and burning at them until the icons started peeling like stickers. Weirdly, also, beside the three boxes for core cards, a fourth box was shoving itself into being. Findell was done screaming, but was now whipping his head back and forth, trying to curl into a ball, with black and purple lightning wrapped around his wrists and ankles.

Serrell, meanwhile, was chanting, and when her aura flickered into being (his True Sight was intermittent now), her aura was directly sinking into various runes she’d drawn on the floor. Most of these were active, but she also tossed dust down into portions of the ritual circle that weren’t yet active. The echocrystals burned with sickly greenish radiance when True Sight was with him, like powerful spotlights. Purple and black and red flames had overtaken nearly all of the black lines she’d drawn, but not all. Yet.

Corbin stared in disbelief, then even more disbelief as he transformed into a mantis shrimp, and beheld colors he’d never even imagined. Like, so many colors he’d never before beheld that Findell was forgotten.

The time for doing something was running thin, and he wasn’t even himself yet.