My head hurt.

  Why wasn’t I asleep? I’d been having the most pleasant dream. Like I was safe in a warm cocoon. Loved and embraced on all sides. Fulfilled in every way. As I had been since...

  What was it again?

  Anyway, that but more so.

  Attar was kneeling above me. It was hard to see, it was so dark.

  I brightened my skin until I could see Attar wince, but it was still dark.

  “Your spells, Oswic. You need to heal yourself!”

  Spells?

  Oh.

  Right.

  My spellbook was still in my hand.

  I turned the page.

  It hurt. I just wanted to sleep. Why couldn’t I sleep?

  Heal V

  Heal IIII

  “Is there anything else you can do?”

  My eyes wrenched open again. How was he doing that?

  The stone. Right. Probably for the best.

  “Need to bind wound. Describe for me. Will tell how.”

  There. Sorted.

  I went back to sleep.

  ***

  “Save yourself!”

  Ah!

  My eyes jumped open.

  I couldn’t feel my body.

  Save myself?

  How?

  All you have to do is ask.

  Right. Dark magic.

  Was it worth it?

  “Save yourself! Please!”

  I was too weak to resist. Orders were orders.

  Wearying Bolt

  Tongues which spoke like hooks pierced my soul. This was different from growing in power with dark magic. This was worse. This was wrong. Reality itself felt unstable. It cracked outward from a point starting at myself.

  And the spell was wrong. I was already weary. The centipedes, where were they centipedes? The bolt wasn’t needed on them either.

  Save yourself.

  I tried again.

  Lightning Wave

  That was familiar.

  Again.

  Mesmerizing Word

  I barely heard the whispers. It was growing dark again. Sunrise must be coming to Elysium.

  Save yourself.

  I could go back in time. That might work. Maybe. But I didn’t want to...

  What was I...

  I didn’t want to lose everything again.

  Acid Colossus

  My body began to dissolve.

  Attar screamed. His voice was getting clearer, even as the world fell away.

  It was shrinking.

  Attar screamed again, this time in pain.

  “Attar?”

  My voice was the voice the goddess again, only this time more so. Louder like thunder.

  I tried to modulate it, and failed.

  “Attar, are you alright?”

  I could see again. The darkness had faded away. A darkness which was quickly being replaced by a thick cloud of smoke, rising from the ground. The ground heaved and slipped away. I fell as the floor turned into a slope, then a cliff.

  Attar screamed again, this time in terror from somewhere beneath me, and then I crashed into the ground.

  A series of hacking coughs let me know Attar was alive. He must have gotten a lungful of that smoke.

  Despite it all, I felt amazing. Life could only look up after stabbing yourself in the groin with a sword. Amazing, but strange. My sense of my self was off. I still knew where my limbs were in an abstract sense, but I could no longer sense their length or position. Sense itself, touch, hot cold, had also gone the way of the abstract. It was almost as if I didn’t have a body at all. And yet, I had arms and legs, fingers and toes. I could move them.

  I rose into a crouch. Despite being unable to properly sense my limbs I succeeded without trouble.

  Acid Colossus.

  I winced and looked back at where I had been standing a moment before. That smoke had been—

  Round?

  Round balls of smoke rose to the ceiling above a sphere of flagstone fit together like a sculpture by a master mason.

  The floor scooped downward into a sort of divot around the sphere, then back up to give it its shape, but nowhere was the surface broken. The sphere could not be moved, it was part of the floor.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Somehow.

  About half my things had been destroyed, from the looks of it. My clothing was gone, as was my belt and pouch, and many of the items which had been in the pouch.

  Thus had the floor and my gear been changed.

  As for myself, it was too much to take in.

  My entire body had become translucent, and clear like water. The only reason I wasn’t entirely see through was the distortions rippling through me like light on a pond. I’d be very hard to see in the dark.

  Clear liquid dripped and rolled off of me constantly, like I’d just come back from a swim. Where it touched the ground the stone smoked and scarred. That would be the acid.

  Despite being made from liquid (at least, as far as I could tell I was) non of the smoke mixed with the surface of my being nor discoloured my feet where they met the floor, but I could see the scorching and discoloration through my feet.

  I couldn’t stand fully in the room. Where the ceiling had before been at my fingertips it now pressed into my upper back, curling me over. Attar barely came up to the bottom of my ribs. That would be the colossus part of the spell.

  At least, I thought it was my ribs he came up to. I couldn’t tell, for my body wasn’t my own and my ribs were obscured by the largest pair of breasts I’d ever seen, both by sheer scale, and relative to my body. Even Attart under the influence of the holy man’s cards had not been so gifted.

  My ribcage was entirely covered, as were my arms if I held them by side. I wouldn’t have been able to see the lower half of my body including my legs if not for the fact that, one, I was see-through, and two, my hips were equally as enormous, half as wide as I was tall.

  It would have been comical if it were not my own flesh and blood.

  Except...

  It wasn’t.

  It wasn’t me. It wasn’t flesh. It was acid.

  My feet were not my own. Nor were my legs, hips, waist, breasts (obviously), or arms. And yet, I couldn’t feel the difference. Couldn’t feel anything. I had not body to feel. I was liquid given shape rather than a (enormous) woman made of liquid, yet still the transformation disturbed me.

  Not for how I felt. I didn’t feel anything. Couldn’t feel anything.

  The disturbing thing was the Why?

  Was I now the demon in the mirror? The form prophesized by the warlocks? The form of the time goddess? I had her voice once again. Did all acid colossi look as I did now? By the Scoured Plains, what was an acid colossus?

  Attar had finished coughing. I winced. He must have inhaled some of the smoke. His skin was red with burns. I’d need to heal him before that got infected. His voice was ragged when he spoke.

  “Oswic? Are you okay? I thought I lost you there.”

  I examined myself with more than a little disorientation. Nothing was as I expected nor where it should be. My height and translucent nature both lent to the feeling that I was standing on a high ledge above Attar. It was giving me vertigo.

  I sat to try to stop the world from swaying, and so that we were of a more equal height. And to stop myself from swaying. My prodigious size was not content to stay still.

  “I don’t feel like I am dying anymore, so things are moving in the right direction.”

  I tried to smile but was unsure how it came off. I really couldn’t properly feel my own body. I didn’t feel fully up for smiling in my mind. I wouldn’t be in this alien form if not for my own stupidity. Turns out after almost killing myself it was easy to have regrets.

  He squinted at me, “What are you supposed to be?”

  “I’m not sure. An acid colossus? Tell me, did I keep my face?”

  He shook his head, “Not at all. Don’t recognize you one bit. If you didn’t have such an unmistakable voice I’d not believe it was you.”

  I sighed in relief. This wasn’t the warlocks then. This was something else outside their plans.

  “Can you change back?”

  I shrugged, keeping my palms pressed against the floor, “I hope so. I’m not sure what will happen though. I might keep my injury.”

  My voice sounded remarkably calm considering the amount of panic I was starting to feel at the prospect. Perhaps I should have let a little more into my tone. My heart sounded like a signal drum in my ears.

  I looked down at my chest. No heart that I could see, but I could see the floor on the other side. Weird.

  “How long was I out?” I asked. Before I’d lost consciousness for the first time there had been half a dozen centipedes ready to eat us. Now there was a dozen mounds of corpse where they’d been bisected torn in half or crushed. Attar had done fine without me.

  “Less than a minute, I think,” said Attar, “maybe two? My attention was split and it took me a moment before I remembered the mind control stone.”

  I blinked. Two minutes? At most? The warlocks should have used me as the test run, not the other way around.

  How had I just blinked? Weren’t my eyelids transparent as well?

  I closed my eyes.

  Darkness.

  Opened them.

  Light.

  My eyes shouldn’t even dry out. I was more of a simulacrum of a human being than living—

  Light grew in my refracted heart, a sun rising up through a pond. Higher and higher and then my skin was awash with rainbows and the light vanished, as quickly as it had come.

  Attar shielded his face with his hands and two ogres appeared, one between the two of us and one guarding his back.

  “What was that?”

  I laughed. It was a delightful sound. Tinkling and joyous and happy. It warmed me even as it came from my own throat. The second suns were real. More than just a strange quirk of my mind.

  “All is well. It merely means I can write a new spell.”

  The ogres disappeared and Attar sheepishly lowered his hands.

  “I’m going to be a paranoid wreck by the end of this. I need a sanity check. Do you think the food is safe?” Attar asked, pointing to the other side of the room. A midden of bones and filth nearly as bad as the ogres had been mouldered there. On top rested a turnip and several strips of... leather? Meat? Wood?

  “Not in the slightest.”

  Attar smiled and let out a breath of relief, “I didn’t either, but I was worried my fears were starting to get the better of me.”

  It looked to be a pile of corpses the centipedes had dragged back to their lair. Was that normal behaviour for centipedes? I’d never paid attention. I’d have liked to check if any of the corpses had treasures on them beyond the occasional piece of rotten food. I’d have also liked to write a spell. As I was, I couldn’t risk either without dissolving what I wanted to interact with. But neither could I change back without my spells ready to act. And I also couldn’t abandon my spell writing for fear of the sun going out.

  “Can you search my things for the bundle of bones? We need to secure this room until my spells return. Then I can try to heal both your wounds and mine.”

  Attar climbed down into the divot around the strangely round floor without a word. The burns I’d given him didn’t seem to be slowing him down much. Or he was hiding it well. He’d still spent time in a prison cell before I’d rescued him in this reality. It hardened you.

  Now how was I going to write a spell? And what of?

  I could burn the floor with my touch, trace out the runes that way. I wouldn’t be bringing the spell with me but perhaps it could help us if we were attacked?

  I cupped my hands experimentally. The acid dripping from my limbs pooled, quickly brimming to the surface and then over and around, trickling back down my arms to drip from my elbows.

  That was something.

  I could hold the form of the rune in my mind while my hands were busy, but I traced the outline with my feet since I could. The pool of acid continued to fill as I rose to my knees, and then I awkwardly began shuffling around the room, moving my hands from the ceiling to the floor. Acid spilled and hissed everywhere. Attar was forced to keep on eye on me to avoid further burns, but I also stayed out of his way. My knees didn’t get sore in this form, though I did tire from holding my hands in the air for so long. Still, I managed the full hour by leaning back on occasion to rest my the backs of my hands on my breasts and stomach.

  Acid Pool: An endless pool of acid the size of two ordinary man’s fists pressed together drips ceaselessly over the course of an hour. It moves half the speed of a man walking, following the whims of its master, slowing as the hour’s end approaches.

  The end result was spattered, spotted, and difficult to make out among the hundreds of other burns I’d left as I walked about the room, but it was still there, still legible.

  “Done.”

  Attar dropped the masquerade mask he’d been examining from the centipedes’ mound

  “Some strange things in there. I don’t trust myself to examine half of them. That mask was made from the front half of a human skull.”

  Grand surprise! I doubted the centipedes had done that, and while evil, it didn’t seem the warlocks’ style. Not if Attar hadn’t noticed any magic from it. That said, absolute power over others corrupted men in the vilest ways. I’d no doubt the warlocks could succumb. Breaking the promises of nature and propriety was what they did. It was in the name: Oath Breaker.

  “Anything in particular you think I should examine?”

  “Not right now. You’d probably destroy most of it. Better we sleep and try when you’ve restored your form.”

  When.

  We would see.

  “The perimeter is secured?”

  “I’ve made a square around the room. Couldn’t budge it with a tackle.”

  I let my weariness settle down into my bone—into the liquid where my bones should be. Despite being fully healed and healthy I was still exhausted from the attack.

  “Let us rest.”