Mina reappeared, what seemed moments after her disappearance, in the same place where she had been standing.

  But she was far from the same person she had been at James’s last sight of her.

  Oh my God…

  There were no words to express how James felt at seeing his wife again. Or perhaps there were too many words. Impressed was a feeble word for it. Awestruck fit more. And intensely aroused.

  Mina had always been a pretty woman, especially in her husband’s eyes. Now she literally glowed with radiant beauty. She had lost an inch or so in height and some of her weight, including all of her baby weight. Her body type had changed to a slimmer version of itself. She was more beautiful in a way that was difficult for him to immediately define. Her ears seemed to come to slight points at the top.

  And she had acquired a gentle golden aura that cast light all around her.

  “You look like an angel,” he said, speaking before he even realized the words were on the tip of his tongue.

  Mina smiled gently, and James felt his pulse race. He controlled it with an effort.

  “I am still the same old me, skapi,” she said.

  You sound like an angel, too, he thought. Her voice was still recognizable, but it was

  “I think that’s not quite true,” James said slowly, again carefully restraining himself from what he wanted to say. It took a conscious effort of Will. He thought that if his body was not in such terrible shape, he might have literally thrown himself at her.

  Mina stepped closer, and James noticed he could not hear her footsteps anymore. Even though he usually took little note of them, the sudden silence despite his superhuman senses was strange and a little alarming.

  Then she leaned down—she did not have to lean so far anymore, since she had actually lost a little bit of height with her Evolution—and kissed him delicately on the lips.

  She pulled away. “See? I am the same. Even if I may look a little different now. I hope my Race Evolution was not too terrible?” Her lips curled into a more uncertain smile, as if she was worried that James would reject her at any moment.

  “Why are you wondering that?” James asked. “Just look at yourself in the mirror. You might be the most beautiful woman in the world now.”

  Mina did give herself a glance in the mirror. James was gratified to see she was almost as surprised as him.

  “Well, I guess I haven’t changed too much,” she murmured as if reassuring herself.

  James thought that the changes he had noticed were fairly positive—mainly subtly more delicate facial features, shaping her previously pretty face into movie star good looks—but he had the good sense not to say something that might imply he had been anything less than satisfied with her original beauty.

  “What’s your new Race?” he asked. “Obviously not human anymore.”

  She turned back to him with a slight sadness in her expression. A sudden vulnerability seemed to overtake her features.

  “No, not human anymore,” Mina confirmed in a melancholic whisper.

  Her eyes are bigger, aren’t they? he thought. The difference would have to be slight, because he could barely distinguish it with the naked eye. But those eyes seemed to hold so much more emotion than they ever had before.

  “It’s all right,” James said.

  Mina nodded, seemingly half to herself and half to him.

  “I hope Yulia will think so, too,” she said.

  “Of course she will,” James said. “She’ll be happy for you. And it’s something we’re all going to go through at some point or other.”

  “Yes,” Mina said doubtfully, her eyes faraway, “but most of the people in the Kingdom remained some form of human. I haven’t seen any other people walking around glowing. The ones who stopped being human are few…”

  “Well, people will reconsider that once they see you,” James promised. His lips broke into a grin. “They’ll want to be whatever you are.”

  “Fae,” Mina said. “That’s the name of the Race.”

  “Like fairies?” James asked.

  Mina nodded. “I guess. I should probably know, but—” She chuckled awkwardly—“there were no search engines in there. Honestly, it was not a very hard decision. The other choices were mostly pretty bad. The only other reasonable choice was your Race, the Evolver Human, but—I didn’t think I could meet the requirements.” She lowered her eyes. “The constant growth thing—it’s too much. I don’t expect to keep up with you. And if I dropped back down to System-Boosted Human, after however many months or years, I would be so far behind you that I would be totally useless. So I had no real choice but to become this unrecognizable thing…”

  “Why are you so sad?” he asked quietly. He could hear real anguish in her voice. “You’re beautiful. You’re alive. You’re going to be stronger than ever. I know it’s a lot to get used to, but—”

  “Our son probably won’t recognize me, skapi. Our baby boy!” A few tears began to flow from the edges of Mina’s eyes as she continued to speak. “It was so painful, and all that so I could turn into something—something beautiful, yes, but—something our son will not recognize. He will be afraid of his own mother, like I was some monster…” The floodgates opened, and the trickle of tears became a waterfall.

  James wanted desperately to take his weeping wife in his arms, hold her tightly, and whisper comfort into her ears until she calmed and all was right again. Unfortunately, he still couldn’t move his body.

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

  “Mina, come here,” he said softly. “Come over here and lie down next to me.”

  He had to repeat himself again before she finally crawled over his body and lay down beside him. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and laid her head on his chest. James could not help noting more differences in Mina’s body from before. Her arms were slightly shorter, her fingers longer and more delicate, her skin somehow even softer than it had always been, and her stomach, which was pressed against his arm, felt flat and toned.

  I can understand why she would feel like she’s lost a great deal, he thought. Unlike with me, the System really didn’t just make improvements to her existing appearance. It threw out a lot of what made Mina herself. Her body doesn’t even feel like she was pregnant before… and she’s right that there’s every chance Junior won’t recognize her. He’ll learn to love her again eventually, but there’s no way it wouldn’t freak out a baby if his mother’s appearance changed.

  He turned to Mina and whispered sweet nothings into her ear for the next ten minutes, including denying what she believed about James, Junior being afraid of the sight of her. Even though his verbal Skills were extremely potent, he avoided saying that the baby would recognize her. That seemed a little too much to promise, and he did not want to see his wife have her heart broken.

  At last, Mina seemed to calm down. Her whole body relaxed, and she moved her head up to rest it against the hollow of his neck. He inhaled the scent of her hair, and he noticed that her natural odor had shifted. It was something sweet but indescribable, like no fruit or flower he had ever smelled before.

  “So, tell me about the Fae,” he said, finally breaking the silence that had fallen.

  “The System downloaded a lot of information into my brain when I changed,” Mina said, seemingly happy to move on now. “This is a Race that actually exists in some universes, though I don’t know if it’s real in our particular one. They are a Race that hides from humans, mostly. In fact, I have Invisibility, now.” She blinked, and suddenly she vanished from James’s sight. The strange thing was that he could still feel her and even smell her.

  “I don’t think this is a very useful Stealth Skill,” he observed.

  “What?” Mina reappeared, her eyes suddenly boring into him. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “You hid your appearance, but if you were in a forest or something, the animals would still smell you,” James explained.

  “What?” She shrunk back from him, lifted her arms, and sniffed underneath. “Do I smell? I don’t really smell anything.”

  “No, you—you smell good,” James said, letting out a low chuckle. Quickly changing the subject, he added, “What else can you do?”

  “The main Race traits I gained are the abilities Basic Sacred Magic, Invisibility—” She shot him a dirty look, and James laughed quietly again—“Mark of the Fae, Sacred Affinity, and Zone of Enchantment. Oh, I also gained access to the Charisma Stat.”

  “Interesting,” James murmured. “We’ll have to test all that out.”

  “The first one I want to test is Zone of Enchantment,” Mina said, beaming. “I think it might help—with our current situation.” She gestured at James’s immovable body and then toward where Zora lay.

  James raised an eyebrow. “You think you can heal us with this new magic? When the actual dedicated healing magic didn’t work? That would be cool.” He added those last words as he realized that he was being negative unnecessarily, when he had spent the last ten minutes trying to cheer his wife up after she started having a near existential crisis over her Evolution.

  “Well, even if it might not work, I’ll at least try,” Mina said. She nodded to herself and sat up.

  Then she walked around the room, stopping at each corner and making strange movements with her feet, tracing patterns on the floor that only she could see. James resisted the temptation to ask her what she was doing. Apparently, Fae magic involved some form of dancing.

  Once she had repeated the pattern in the fourth corner of the room, James felt something. He sensed the change both in his physical body and through his Fisher King awareness. It was as if his body had observed a foreign pathogen entering and asked him if the immune system should attack. James dismissed the warning.

  No, please do not kill my wife and purge her energy signature from my territory, he thought mildly. This intruder is friendly.

  The changes he felt in his body were anything but negative. With his Full Body Control, he could sense much of the activity going on inside himself, as a function of his ability to exercise inhuman control over those movements. Now he felt as if large numbers of cells that had been damaged or killed were suddenly being purged and replaced at a much faster rate than they had been before.

  If my feelings are right, Mina might have doubled my healing speed, whatever it was before…

  “What did you do?” James asked, looking at his wife respectfully.

  “Like I said, the Zone of Enchantment.” She shrugged. “You can place a number of different enchantments on it, but I chose healing this time, for obvious reasons.”

  James nodded. “Well, it’s working. I can feel it!”

  “Really?” Mina asked.

  “Yep. And I think it’s working for my mom, too.” James tried to raise an arm to point at his mother, but his shoulders rolled, and his wrist just wiggled limply, and that was it.

  Still nowhere close to fixed, he thought. Big improvements happening, though. I just have to be patient. But there was at least one thing he did not want to be patient about.

  “I can actually hear her breathing and her heartbeat,” James explained. “I could hear how they improved after you and Yulia spent time healing her, and now I can hear how they’re improving even more quickly in your Zone of Enchantment.”

  Mina smiled broadly under his praise, and her slightly crooked expression just drove home that this woman, no matter how ethereal she seemed, was still the same person, the woman he loved, even if she looked like a completely different sort of being—and technically was an entirely different Race now.

  “That is wonderful, skapi,” Mina said. “How long do you think it will take for you and her to recover?”

  “I don’t know about me,” James said, “but if you bring her to me, I think she might recover very quickly.”

  “James?” Mina’s expression turned a bit worried.

  “Yes, I want to bless her,” he confirmed. “I know it takes a lot out of me, but please don’t try to talk me out of it. I’m already going to recover resources twice as fast with your Zone of Enchantment in effect in this room anyway, and in fact, my Stamina and Mana are already full. It’s just my Health that’s artificially low.”

  “I wasn’t going to try to talk you out of it, skapi, it’s just that—if you’re not healing normally, why would she?”

  “I’ve been thinking a little about that,” James said slowly. “The best I can come up with is that I defended her from the brunt of the pressure with my body. She was crushed into the ground, but that was entirely by me crashing into her. The System didn’t smash her at all, only me and Vidarr.”

  Mina nodded slowly.

  “My theory makes sense to you?” James asked.

  “It makes very little sense to me, but what else is new?” she said quietly. “Nothing has made sense to me since the System separated us and threw us into other worlds to fight for our lives. Why should that change now?” She shook her head as if trying to dispel the negative thoughts. “Forget what I just said. I’ll bring your mother over to you, skapi. So you can bless her.”

  Mina forced a smile, and James thought that he had been very lucky in choosing his wife.

  Then she picked up Zora, cradling her like a child, and she laid her down by James’s side. Mina lifted James’s right hand and placed it on Zora’s forehead.

  James gave his Queen a grateful smile, gathered his power, and he began to speak.

  “As the Fisher King recovers rapidly from infirmity, so must your vitality and strength recuperate…”