Dying was nothing like they said it would be. There was no cold embrace, no transformation or rebirth into a new life. It was pain. Every drop of blood spilled and organ that shut down hurt like hell and would never ever stop. The world was done with him, all the potential that had been his life was colpsing into a single point. No more futures.
They said that your whole life was supposed to repy itself when you died, and Gamel was terrified that it would. He’d fall apart to see it all again. Instead, he focused on one memory, looping it like a bad dream. He was twelve again, and pulling buckets of water from the well behind the eastern hall of the abbey. They'd forced him out of the workrooms with a menial task, ink stained hands pushing him out into the cold, and now no matter how many buckets he threw into the dark, and despite the spsh, every one came back dry. Turning the crank to coil the rope was so slow. The throwing sted seconds, but retrieving the bucket took minutes, slower and slower as he tired with each successive attempt.
After he’d been at it for an hour, one of the nuns came out from the library— which was the one building that had windows looking out onto the west, and the well— and she showed him his mistake. It was Sister Roesia, one of the younger nuns, the ones Gamel secretly thought were the right age to be his mother. Roesia even looked like him, and she was kind, but she wasn’t his mother. She had the telltale limp of the dethroned but still staffed cyclical pace, whose house servants had their ankles broken as young children. “To make sure they never strayed,” she’d told him when he asked about, on one of the rare nights there weren't other women around to scold him for asking about her injuries. The pace continued the practice out of tradition now, not obligation. Roesia hadn’t meant to ever leave the pace, despite what they did to her. It was some of the most respected work that there was in the old royal city. Ever since the royal family was dissolved by the conquering perenians and their harduzi armies, the servants, rgely, had free reign over the pace. Their saries were paid by some interested nobility from the civilized northeast, who liked to visit and see “history preserved, just as it always was.” Roesia had been born there, and had expected to spend the whole of her life on the castle walls. She hated the north, and the harduzi nguage, but after she’d been kicked out of the pace, for some crime she would never confess, the abbey took her in, a quarter way around the world, far to the north. She’d arrived when Gamel was three. It was one of his earliest clear memories, her sitting straight backed and chin high atop the cart, surrounded by their weekly delivery of grains and vegetables they couldn’t grow themselves. She climbed down from her throne atop a bag of rice and, slowly, walked over to greet them.
Roesia limped over to the well, wincing whenever she put weight on her right leg. The pain got worse in the winter, and it was hard for her to walk over the rocky path to find him. Still, she joined him at the well and told him how to draw water from it. They made her do the same thing, in the first months she was at the abbey, before the other nuns realized that it wasn’t as fun a cruelty when carrying the buckets back and forth left Roesia unable to get out of bed the next day. But she made the walk to help him, and told him that the well was old, and how finding the right spot to dig had been harder in past centuries. It curved to the left a hundred feet down, avoiding a rge rock that the diggers hadn’t removed. He was throwing the bucket and nding it right on the rock, while the sck rope slid down into the water, making the spsh he was hearing. It wasn’t his fault, she told him, with the careful patience that all of the nuns tried for but most couldn’t achieve— at least never with him, the annoying boy who always tested their patience; or with her for that matter, the failed servant who came to them as punishment.
“Throw it like this, and you'll soar right past the rock outcropping and hit the mark.” She helped him carry the bucket, ignoring what it surely cost her to do so. She was the only one who ever saw he wasn’t as strong as they assumed he was. That being a boy didn’t make him so much stronger than the full grown adults around him, all because they were women and he wasn’t. Roesia was the only one who didn’t make him feel jealous that he couldn’t be one of them. She simply accepted him as he was.
And then the memory started again. He was throwing the bucket, oblivious to the trick Roesia had shown him. And with each throw he grew more tired. His body was slowly giving out, deteriorating. He was still dying.
Roesia appeared again, but unlike all the other times, now she was bathed in mist, her eyes glowing with two points of light instead of pupils. Just being in her presence made him warm. With care, she id him down in the grass and cradled Gamel’s head in her hands. When he looked up at her, she opened her mouth and spoke with a voice that he didn’t recognize, one that sounded like fire and buzzed like crickets in the night.
“I see and understand you; not the dying animal of your terrible body, but the countenance of your soul. You possess no fault of spirit nor do you make a foul idol of the flesh.” The world around them was melting away. He was dying, lying on the ground with the grass waving around him from the wind. So warm. She breathed out and fog rolled from her mouth. Tree branches unfurled and bloomed with green leaves.
“I offer to you a choice, one that the others who came before you have made long before I permitted them such intimacy with my spirit. I make for you, poor creature, a rare exception, as you are dying. Your life is at an end, your blood soaks foreign soil. Not enough remains within you. This is the end of your body. I offer no salvation to that flesh.” Her words echoed in his bones, and there was blood all around them. He was in a pool of it. Bruised, battered, and cut open. This was not Roesia. He hadn’t seen her in nearly ten years. Did Gamel even know for sure she was still alive? No, sad as it made him. He’d never gone back to the abbey to find out.
“I don’t want to die,” he whispered, his mind traitorously enamored with the memory of Roesia. He couldn't die without seeing her again. Not without telling her that he'd taken her example and tried to help a girl in need, when the world wanted too much from her. Yes, years ago when he was still fresh out of the abbey, on nights where he was too alone with his thoughts, he would have begged for a death in her arms, but life had built itself around him, and there were people who needed him.
Roesia, or whatever had her face, didn’t react as if she heard him.
“The choice will transform you utterly. There is no returning from this path.” Her voice was all around him now, abandoning its body. “Not germinated but grafted on to, tied and bound to. To be not my fruit but my boughs.”
“What will happen to me?” He spoke clearer, and this time she answered.
“You will awaken in a new body, one that is not familiar to you, but is to me.”
Gamel’s st night at the abbey, when he was eighteen, had been warm like it was in not-Roesia's arms. It was te summer, and the nights were short. There wasn't enough time to burn off the heat of the day. At the gate of the Abbey, one that he’d repaired that same spring, after the thaw left the wooden posts soaked and rotted through, Gamel stood watching for several minutes, as women gathered around the doors and windows. Half the nuns came out to see him off, while the other half had refused to acknowledge him for some time. He was too old, too much now a man. To keep an orphan boy around was one thing, but a man?
With no visitors, it was the kind of night where the nuns would usually wear cooler clothes, ones that covered less and let them rex more. They wore their full dress that night. All to see him off as a stranger. Gamel looked into the eyes of the women who had raised him and saw their warmth, the filial bond they had allowed him into while he was young, be closed to him, locked away behind cold stares. The practical way that women looked at strange men.
Roesia was not among those who saw him off. She’d taken ill the month before and her recovery was slow work. They’d gotten to speak only a dozen words since her sickness, and now there wouldn’t be another chance. They hadn't gotten a goodbye. Even in this memory, where she held him and he looked up at her, the details of her face were indistinct.
He left the nuns, and traveled for hours in the night, using the moon’s light to illuminate the road. He walked when it was easy to leave, and ran when it was hard. Gamel refused to stop, not until he was sure he wouldn’t go back. Even in the darkest hours before dawn, he’d worked up a sweat, and kept moving until the morning broke itself on the horizon, and light spilled into the world.
For several hours he slept under a tree, waiting out the heat of the day. There, he determined his new way to survive. A way that would save him from the heartache that threatened to undo him.
He didn’t want to lose his body, and be something new. But he didn’t want to die, and that was another way to lose his body too, wasn’t it? The earth would have him either way. Better to try and keep living, even if things were different. That fit his private creed, and a decade after leaving the abbey, it always kept him alive. Being given the chance to keep moving was a blessing. No matter what his body was, he would keep marching, and never turn back. Looking back hurt too much, and he had refused to for too long. The sight might kill. A man had grown into Gamel’s body, and he had been able to accept him there because he never stopped to worry over it. The man he was had the strength to endure anything, as long as he kept moving and didn’t reminisce— like getting lost in memories of Roesia— even on the brink of death he couldn't allow such weakness.
He made the choices that kept him walking, so if he was rewarded for that effort with an escape from death, he’d take it. Stop remembering and grab the future with both hands, to keep himself from reaching back.
Roesia faded away, and only the glowing points in her eyes remained. The light intensified, growing and stretching like a physical thing. It spread itself over his body and covered him. His being roiled and transformed, and Gamel, the body of the man that had gotten him this far, was destroyed forever, and he was someone new. Someone he still didn’t understand, but who would carry him from here on out.
The glow withdrew and dark chased it away. He didn’t awaken, since whatever state he’d been in was not sleep, but instead felt the changes gradually. His mind connected to each part of his new body one piece at a time. Normal hearing, but his ears were covered by long hair. Legs and arms, numb but there. His vision was different too, when he opened his eyes, colors were brighter and more distinct.
There was a girl, poking and prodding at him. She was young, he would have guessed ten, or maybe as high as fourteen if she was as malnourished as her appearance suggested. Either way, she was far too young to be so deep into the woods, unless whatever had transformed him had also moved him, which actually wasn’t out of the realm of reason. Not-Roesia hadn’t specified if his new form had once belonged to someone else, and now that Gamel considered it, the idea that he’d stolen his continued life was terrible. Had he banished some poor soul to death, and snagged their pce?
God, what if he’d stolen the body of this girl’s father? She wasn't acting as if she was in the presence of a strange man. It wasn’t so uncommon for people who survived tragedies to flee to the wilds in the mountains. More so in recent years, when the cities were always threatening to restart old conflicts that would only hurt the ones already unlucky enough to live on the edges.
When the girl saw him looking at her, she sat back and pulled her hair over her shoulders. The bottom six inches were ruined by splits. The rest was tangled into a single mass, and debris was stuck in it wildly. She looked over Gamel’s whole body, interest pin on her face. That was good, it lent to the idea that it was his own body that was transformed. Maybe she’d seen it happen.
She spoke to him, and there was an unexpected bitterness in her voice. Something too hard for how young she was. “She could do this the whole time?”
“I don’t understand… What could who do?” His voice felt tight, up in his head as if he had a cold. The vision he’d seen, the voice that had echoed through him, it all seemed too unreal. Better to not acknowledge it. He tried to stand, and staggered back onto his ass. A wound in his leg had reopened. This was his body, after all. He’d been transformed, and his injuries healed, but not fully. By weeks, maybe.
“Don’t stand up!” she shouted at him. Maybe he was right the first time, and she was closer to ten. “She just healed you and you already hurt yourself again.”
“What happened?” again his voice was too light. He sat up, careful with his leg, and registered that he was wearing his own clothes, but bigger. As if they’d grown, or he shrunk.
He really was transformed. Like rumors and legends always said, if you got too close to pces of magic, then it would come for you too. Make you as uncanny as the pce itself. And Gamel… he’d come looking for one. Oh god, realization hit him hard, he’d come looking for this one.
He looked again at his body, under the loose clothes. The few pieces of armor he’d saved up for felt so much heavier, now, almost impractical. Under the yers of his travelling clothes, he was different. He was… yes, he’d been given the gift he came in search of. Only it wasn’t meant to be him, this was supposed to be for her.
If anyone saw them now, what would they see? A young girl, dirtied from a life lived outside, and… what? Her mother, in men’s clothes too big for her? The girl had the same look as him, vaguely proliferant. They could be sisters. The memory of leaving the abbey seemed so hirious now. If they could see him now. He’d been given a new body all right. A woman’s.
