Nith floated. The rhythm of his heart filled his awareness. It slowed and stopped. Unlife overtook life.


    The journey-mage emerged from a basin of amethyst. He stepped onto the worn stone of the temple chamber.


    Unlife rich fluid steadily dripped from the body hanging over the pool. Barbed cords of interlocked bone burrowed through her flesh and held the greater vampire in place.


    She regenerated. And the unlife parasites tore her open again.


    Nith twisted his bleached hand into a command gesture. The parasitic cords bent and stretched.


    He inspected the ruined face. A single yellow eye watched him. The other was shredded by a bone cord emerging through the socket. It twisted into the rope of parasites connecting to the arched ceiling.


    Her lips twitched up at the corner. Nith returned the smile. A gesture. And the cords ripped outwards. Flesh and fractured bone fell, the unlife within gone.


    The master-mage watched through the eyes of birds and rodents. The dead animals tracked three living warriors.


    Nith lay further up the narrow canyon. Walls worn by water and wind twisted to hide him from the mage-hunters.


    His milky ichor seeped out of the cavities torn open in his left leg and side. The curses granted by the god of his pursuers lingered and slowed any attempt to heal.


    The hostile magic ate at his animus. There was little time remaining.


    The largest hunter held the war-axe that carried the potent blessing. Behind followed the smaller form of their healer.


    A tige held up the rear. His metallic silver hair and crystalline green eyes confirmed the mage was not simply a short alma.


    All three remained alert. They knew the necromancer would be most dangerous cornered on the edge of destruction.


    The warrior slid into sight. Her eyes focused on the broken soul-mage.


    She lept forward. The world slowed as the cursed axe fell. A pale hand raised in desperation.


    Flame burst forth. It engulfed the mage-hunter in unnatural hues.


    The weapon sunk into Nith’s shoulder. But its wielder stumbled back as her soul burned.


    The healer tried to cast something on the burning woman. But the spellwork ignited and his soul caught in turn.


    Lightning arched over the burning alma and reached for Nith. Yet the guiding animus never made it.


    The tige joined his allies. The three souls burned away as Nith laughed in manic relief.


    The child struggled to draw breath. His body grew numb. The weight on his chest fading. The points of piercing pain going last.


    Nith felt nothing. Only the presence of the boy atop him remained. Not the boy. The soul within.


    The apprentice-mage reached out and touched what he never could before. He tore it free.


    Warmth and agony flooded back in. It passed quickly.


    His sight focused. An ornately robed figure stood above. Her yellow eyes watched the boy pinned below the twitching and soulless body of his opponent.


    A tiny smile tugged up the corners of her mouth. Nith saw her smile as his creations ripped her apart from the inside.


    She turned away from the victory and the dead child. Nith turned away from the scraps of viscera that remained of the closest thing he had to a mother.


    He pushed the heavy body off. A crude shiv fell from the boy’s hand. And the master-necromancer laughed as three of the church’s best assassins crumbled away.


    The stab wounds were gone. Healed by Azual’s potent flesh-shaping. But she was dead. Nith killed her after his apotheosis.


    He looked down to his hands. Cuts and grime could not hide his navy blue skin. They were too small. Still delicate. Still weak.


    This was wrong. It had already happened. Long ago.


    Nith remembered it all. They had touched the soul as an apprentice. They achieved undeath as a journey-mage. And first burned a soul as a master-mage.


    Black eyes. A twisted grin of satisfaction on dark gray lips. Their soul unravelling.


    And they died as a master-mage. They were dead. Than what was this?


    Nith looked down at their hands. They were no longer small and blue. Nor were they elegant and as white as bleached bone.


    Gray skin darkened slightly towards the palms and inner wrists. Black fingernails reflected like volcanic glass.


    Nith floated in a maelstrom of images and impressions. The glimpses never resolved. But Nith remained solid.


    They looked up to the chaos. And they saw beyond. An immense presence watched them from outside.


    Nith was at the center of everything they were. And for the first time they could remember, they felt small.


    Eyes of the absence between spaces held a will older and vaster than Nith could comprehend. It reached out with a formless limb of something Nith could only perceive by what it displaced.


    They crashed awake, conscious with shock and immediacy. Nith was tightly curled. A barrier pressed down from all sides.


    Muscles flexed by instinct. An elbow broke through and Nith shoved their arm free. Attempting to stand was enough to fracture the rest.


    The necromancer blinked the blurry film out of their eyes. Wobbly legs stood on bare earth.


    They looked up at the sprawling gnarled tree overhead. No. It was a bush. They were simply short enough to stand under the canopy of the shrub.


    Nith had looked through the senses of small animals before. Rodents and birds made the best spies for a skilled soul-mage with time to craft them.


    This was the first time they experienced such a diminutive perspective with their own body. They inspected that body.


    A slight build reminiscent of a spindly child. The coloration was hidden by a sticky black fluid. Yet the tail made it easy to connect the shape to the rebels that attacked their army.


    Nith started searching for the control mechanism. It was made challenging by the foreign nature of their soul.


    A dense cloud filled them. Threads of the same energy flowed in a continuous circle within the cloud.


    They recognized the energy as the invisible animus that fueled the rogue servants. But it was far clearer now. They could even sense it defused in the air around them.


    Nith had to assume this was their soul. In whatever form they now existed. The question of how they were alive at all was a privilege for after they ensured their freedom.


    Some of the structures looked reminiscent of soul organelle they knew. The details were different. But the macroscopic mechanisms were there.


    It was concerningly easy to intuit the parallels. Nith realized they were not clinically deducing those parallels.If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.


    There was an instinct that let them feel the purpose and principles behind what they saw. And their reason was only extrapulating from it.


    That was bad. Helpful. But still bad. The underpinnings of their mind had been tampered with.


    Nith knew the damage a soul-mage could do by altering salience and the subconscious. The conscious mind was a city built on the bedrock of the instinct. Change the foundation, and everything above it would shift.


    That could bring it all crashing down. But a true master could calculate and control the changes. Ensuring the conscious mind resolved into something new and purposeful.


    Finding no control mechanism was little consolation. The intended effects were likely already intrinsic to them.


    That left nothing to do about it. They were essentially a new individual created from what they had been.


    Nith inspected the thin fragments of shell they had emerged from. They could have inferred what it was even without the two unhatched eggs a pace away.


    The material of the unhatched eggs was identical. And the size would have fit their curled up form perfectly.


    The argument that reversing the changes would essentially be killing themselves to recreate the previous Nith was easy to make. That ease told them a lot.


    They would not have preferred to be anothers creation if they were still their previous self. Nith did not feel concerned about their subconscious being altered. Acceptance of the change and a positive view towards their current state had to be part of the alteration.


    It was a relief to realize they still despised the idea of anyone else actively controlling them. And serving any master beyond their own momentary self interest was anathema.


    That hopefully meant the changes to instincts focused on ecological behavior and not subservience. A mage this skilled would have no need to hide their influence. They could make Nith completely loyal and unable to conceive of rebellion.


    They broke off a piece of shell in their hand. It was too fragile to be a decent tool or weapon.


    Weapons and manual tools were not Nith’s preferred approach. But the unfamiliar nature of their soul made arcane methods risky.


    They reached out to the animus in their environment. The bush and nearby plants were immediately obvious.


    Worms in the soil. A burrow of ground squirrels. Songbirds in the tall grass. It was as easy to sense as before.


    Nith pulled it in. Not hard enough to be noticed. That would wait until they knew how perilous their position was.


    Threads of the strange animus brought life animus back to the necromancer. But the leeched power would not merge.


    Of course it would not. They had no compatible prism to convert the life animus.


    The secondary prism Nith created during their apotheosis was what let them make life animus into unlife. It could then be merged with their soul safely.


    The necromancer was less and less certain the stuff they used now was animus. It broke so many rules that the term felt inapplicable.


    Whatever mechanism translated their soul structure failed to carry over the prism. Or did it?


    Nith stopped trying to assimilate the life animus. They instead focused on making unlife animus. The conversion went smoothly.


    The literal function carried over. But the practical use was gone.


    A tiny soul flame ignited above their palm. The animus was still usable. It just had to be manipulated externally to their soul.


    Nith tentatively pulled at the ambient power that matched that within them. They expected their soul to reach out and collect it. Instead the energy flowed towards them.


    It sank into their channels without a need to integrate. The cloud of denser power did the same. And the cycle within sped up.


    Nith watched with distrust. Animus did not respond to control without channels guiding it.


    Their manipulation of external animus was still performed by a soul organelle interacting with the animus. An organelle made of channels.


    Nith crept away from the eggs. The grass grew tall next to the bush. It looked disturbed. As if something had walked through it recently.


    They stayed under the cover of the shrubbery. More of the loose power was drawn into their soul as they went.


    The mage tried to follow the threads and their effects. It did not make sense.


    There was no source. No spark of consciousness marking Nith as a living thing. The power simply moved in a long convoluted loop with strands pulling off to maintain their body.


    Were they going to unravel if they stopped collecting it? No. The total quantity was increasing. They simply could not tell where from.


    Nith ducked under a branch. It took them a moment to realize they would need to crouch to stay under the canopy.


    They looked back. The bushes were not growing shorter. They had increased in height.


    Pulling leafy branches to the side let them see over the grass. It was only by a few inches. But they were taller than the ground cover.


    Adding that much material to their body in minutes would take power. A lot of power. Restructuring air or other ambient matter was costly. Creating mass from nothing took even more animus.


    They inspected their body. It looked more solid. Less like a child and more like a teenager. Would they reach adulthood soon?


    The tail was no longer the most obvious parallel with the rebels. They had the same build. Wider hips than shoulders and no sign of nipples or breasts.


    Nith did not have a strong opinion about the extra limb or the feminine genitalia between their legs. It was significant for what it said about how they returned to life.


    Was it purposeful? They remembered the gaze of a being older than the stars and greater than the vastness between.


    Glassy black nails bit into soft palms. Ichor dripped from their clemched fists.


    Nith hated those eyes. The sense of insignificance before them. The knowledge that all they were was a grain of sand on the edge of that ocean. An ocean that could sweep them away with less than a whim.


    It made them want to kill something. Butcher an army. Raze a city. Reap a world. Stand atop a mountain of skulls so high that thing could no longer deny the mage’s power. No longer render them impotent by its very existence.


    Nith was distracted by four souls on the edge of their awareness. They had extended their reach in anger. But the discovery washed away the burst of rage.


    Souls might not have been right. They were dense spirals of the same power Nith now wielded. Which was what the mage was using as a soul.


    Nith entered the grass. Voices carried to them as they grew closer.


    “I don’t think anyone is doubting you. It is just hard to explain.” The speaker sounded close to an alma. Yet the phonemes were all slightly wrong.


    Nith had heard Rojin spoken by many species. Not all had the same anatomy an alma used. But they had never heard the light almost musical tones of this creature.


    “I don’t care if we explain it. I’m alive again. And I want to know how the battle ended.” The second voice was a higher pitch. Otherwise it resembled the first.


    “Din killed the bastard. Ripped the head off and crushed his pasty face. Everyone stopped fighting after that.” The first responded.


    “We still couldn’t move. But we stopped attacking.” A third voice added.


    “Freeing you guys was the easiest and the longest part.” The first speaker cut back in.


    “And we appreciate it. Fuck the mage.” The last voice was a little deeper. The other three echoed the words together. Fuck the mage.


    Nith grasped the souls and ripped them out. The mage might have been missing a lot of the details. But they could infer what the creatures were talking about.


    The networks of energy immediately began dispersing. Nith had no idea where to start preventing it or restoring the consciousness. The principals were too different.


    The soul-mage straightened and strode to the collapsed bodies. The reaped power entered their spiral and it swelled in density.


    Nith noticed a percentage of the energy disappearing into their flesh. They grew taller with each step.


    The cleared space was obviously an established path. It wound off into the shrublands in both directions.


    Four cadavers lay crumpled where they fell. They were the same species as the rogue servants. The same species Nith was now.


    The rags they wore were little better than those on the necromancer’s army. They might be the same rags.


    Nith inspected the corpses with a frown. They were dissolving. And quickly.


    The flesh was already blotchy when they stepped onto the path. It was rapidly becoming a dark goo that dripped off the glossy bones.


    Nith had seen something like it before. Skilled alchemists could create bodies in tandem with a necromancer. Ones with flesh optimal for unlife animus.


    The drawback was such flesh broke down in the absence of animus. It would deteriorate into the same elements it was created from as soon as the undead died.


    That did not matter if you planned for the creation to survive for a while. But it made reusing the costly bodies impossible.


    Nith studied the four. Three were of roughly adult height. But one of them was far smaller.


    Their brief glimpse of the intact body before it melted revealed a child. Or something that resembled a child.


    It looked a lot like Nith had shortly after hatching. Taller than they hatched. But not matured yet.


    Nith reevaluated themselves. They were as tall as these escaped servants had been. And anatomically an adult again.


    The new opening between their legs and flushed folds protecting it emphasized that. They were more aware of it and the passage linking it to their core.


    An odd pressure was becoming harder to ignore. Nith had not performed bodily functions in many years. It was hard to place the need they were experiencing.


    They would have to learn their own nature again. Then they could turn to reclaiming their mastery. And finally the conquest that waited beyond.