Timestamping: Mid Fall, 513 AV
Continued from: Morphing Isn't What You Think
It was another couple of days before Kavala got back to her Morphing study. That was perhaps a good thing because she was prone to taking magic too far at times in the pursuit of ‘what ifs’ and in the capacity to answer questions. There had been forty eight bells worth of time that had passed in semi states of crisis throughout The Sanctuary. Even though it was late fall, there were lots of lambs being born that should have been born in the spring but weren't due to the animals still being slightly off track due to the big djed storm abd it's power. Some of these births were troublesome and needed the Healers of Sanctuary’s attention. Kavala herself, though heavy with child, had made five different house calls.
She’d taken the pony cart having been finally forbidden riding by Vanator until her son was born. She was just too close to term. But the resulting successes and one loss had been worth the effort. For if she hadn’t been able to heal and in one sad case ease the passing of an old farmer’s friend, then there was no point to calling herself a Healer. Kavala might have had a lot of irons in the fire, but the Rak’keli's marks on her leg meant a great deal to her, whether she cared to admit it or not. Kavala defined herself a great many ways: Konti, Drykas, Healer, Mother, Lover, Sister, Mage and Friend. But each one was critically important to her. Each one had worth.
Because of all the hats she wore, it took Kavala some time to get back to the ‘mage’ aspect of her personality… but once she had, Kavala was ready to take up the mantle and start practicing again. And too that end she’d gathered a box of horns to study. Well, to call it a box of horns wasn’t quite accurate. There were antlers in there as well. Any time anyone hunted on the sea of grass, they tended to save things from the kill. The meat was all consumed while the brains and entrails often went to tanning the hide which was also used. Nails, hooves, and horns went to make glue and roof coating, things that were in need of waterproofing. So they always had ‘parts’ around stored safely and dried out to specifications. So all Kavala had to do to really collect a box of things was to go down into the storage rooms off the lab and start rummaging through the shelves. No one ever threw anything out.
Kavala couldn’t remember where she last left off, so the Konti had to get out the book she was writing and review where she left off where she’d stopped last time. She knew she wanted to fuss more with the foot and not just the claws, but she’d found it pretty intimidating last time. The Konti figured she’d try something that might be a bit easier for the beginner: horns and antlers.
Still, she caught up on her writing:
I have to admit I was quite discouraged by my lack of success altering my foot. I had a great deal of success making my hands into wings so I am quite puzzled and frustrated why simple feet would be so much harder. Half the battle in Morphing is telling your mind how easy it is to do something. Your mind believes you, and then it does it without much of a fuss. When other things happen that discourage you, it puts chinks in you mental armor and I suspect you start feeling like you can’t do something and so then you seriously can’t.
So the task is going to have to be to find a way to make feet easier to morph. As I waddle through this day pregnant with my second son, I’m going to be thinking on this problem and decide how best to tackle it.
Kavala was thinking about it. Her feet had 26 bones apiece which included 33 joints, 107 ligaments, 19 muscles and tendons for a total of 52 bones holding her up and walking her around. And that didn’t include her leg bones. There were another 27 bones in her hand… 14 phalanges; proximal, medial (all except the thumb), and distal in the fingers. That count included 5 metacarpals, I, II, III, IV, & V in the hand. There were 8 carpals: scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform, hamate, capitate, trapezoid, and trapezium in the wrist. One-fourth of all of her bones are in her hands. And half of all her bones 206 body bones were in her hands and feet between the four limbs. But she was more familiar with her hands because she used them daily and was ‘conscious’ of them like she actually wasn’t of her feet. And that’s why they were easier to Morph.
The healer had no consciousness about her feet. She’d never paid attention to them. So Kavala spent the day walking around barefoot, being very conscious of how the bones moved, worked, and how weight was supported. It was an enlightening moment for her, because Kavala always prided herself in her martial arts work of dwelling within the whole of her body and just not within her brain. But she realized, in doing this work, that she’d never considered her feet as part of her body for some bizarre reason. She’d just simply never given them a thought.
Kavala paid attention to how she walked, how she shifted, and what her body had to do to hold her up. The exercise was a meditation of sorts, one she decided needed to be incorporated throughout her body to help her more understand both her mobility and anatomy. And it was an odd thing to explain, to staff, to her family, as to why she was walking around with a puzzled expression on her face, barefoot, and moving oddly at times… shifting weight from one foot to another, walking upright on her toes, shuffling and sliding.
But when asked, she simply smiled and continued the study, being sure this was what she was going to do to correct her inability to shift her feet. And after a whole day doing so, she settled back into The Commons, before the great hearth with a fire roaring, and put her feet up on a table that rested in front of a low couch. Studying the naked and webbed digits, Kavala thought of bird feet and once more emptied her mind of all else but that image.
She visualized her body once more and the djed within it as warm swirls of light all gathering and condensing around her feet. Kavala kept the image of what she wanted in her mind firmly, holding onto a raptor’s clawed dagger-like feet, knowing she could do it. Kavala had done it with her hands… it had been easy… and with her arms too. Her feet could follow suite. Slowly, with a warm burn that the Konti was starting to associate with morphing, her digits began to change. Her feet fully switched allocations, toes receding, bones lengthening, and her heel becoming fundamentally structured completely differently. Nails formed claws as one of her toes receded into her foot, lengthening and moving about. It took an eternity, namely she thought, because she did both at once, for each bone to restructure and switch around, scales to form on her skin, and her feet to utterly change into that of a hawk’s.
More than twenty chimes had passed as Kavala worked on the change, but Kavala did not care. She simply laughed instead, knowing she was on the right track and that the super secret trick to morphing wasn’t knowing exactly what you were morphing into – as one might assume – but knowing what you already had so well that you could give it up for another shape. And she sat there, a full couple of bells, enjoying the way the feet felt, and how they could strongly grip things, before the magic wore off and she sighed in contentment.
Funny thing too... she hadnt even gotten to the box of horns. Heh.
