Completed [The Midnight Gem] Bending Ones Body To One's Will I

[Kelski]

Timestamp: 55th of Winter, 518 A.V.

Kelski carefully fingered the journal that had been so lovingly had written by the woman whom Aer’wyn had loved and married… and ultimately murdered. There was so much history in her hands. She clutched the journal, thinking of the Akalak and hoping he was well. There were disturbing memories buried around the journal too… a fight, a fireplace, and rage that was unending. She didn’t remember what had happened surrounding it, but she remembered the emotion embroiled in it. This book had come with a price, and something had been lost because of it. But Kelski wondered even though she didn’t have the full story if the price wasn’t worth it.

The journal was precious to her, because it reminded her of Aer’wyn and his life – his struggle with his dark self – and the lessons he’d given her about courage and quiet strength in the face of really hard obstacles. No matter how bad her life was nor how lonely she was, she didn’t have the burdens of a dark brother that hated her nor the memories of her dark brother strangling her wife and killing her child.

The Sea Eagle leaned forward and kissed the book. She rubbed her forehead along its length, almost caressing it, as if she could comfort and somehow smooth the history that surrounded it. Time wasn’t something she could control or change though.

Her life would be too short while Aer’wyn would live on and either suffer his pain or find a way to make peace with his dark brother and peace in his life. She hoped wherever he was, he was doing well, and that his long dead wife was in a happier place – maybe even born anew, where she could have a second try and life and at love.

Kelski wasn’t sure where the sentimentality was coming from. She wasn’t sitting down with his journal to actually remember him. Aer’wyn was firmly lodged in her memory. She was sitting down with his journal to learn. That’s why he’d left it for her. The Sea Eagle broke open the book, splayed it out, and began reading. Soon, all too soon, she was completely and utterly engrossed in what appeared to be a history of the magic.

Morphing was old… perhaps one of the oldest forms of magic. The journal had notations of sightings of art and pottery that held images of men with changed forms doing various tasks or even in battle. There was even notations of ancient cave paintings done long before the Valterrian which showed the magic happening with the humans. Kelski thumbed through what she could read and finally got to the important part.

The Mage used his djed to fuel changes in his or her physical form. Kelski knew this. It was the basics of any personal magic. The magics could last as long as the mage fueled it, so little changes could be maintained indefinitely. Once the fuel ran out? The magic vanished and the properties of the physical structure returned to normal.

Morphing was painless, though she knew from experience that it caused some tingling and you definitely knew things were happening. Bones didn’t break, though, for example, and as you transformed into something else – something more – you didn’t pay a price in pain.

[Kelski]

She wondered if Morphing had played a hand in her own race’s construction and bet it had. Kelski held out her hands, looking at her long hard black nails. They were a dead giveaway to her Kelvic nature for she almost had talons rather than human fingernails. Licking her lips, she leaned back, concentrated on her large hard thumbnail, and thought of the nails she often saw women having. Kelski concentrated a long time, focusing her mind on bleeding the color out of the nail.

The nail was stubborn at first, fading to gray and not going to the skin tone and white tips that normal humans sported that had good hygiene and health care. It seemed like a tug of war, a battle of wills, as Kelski fed djed into her thumb, pulled at the color and attempted to bleach out the thick talon. It went colorless finally, then reverted to a more skin toned shape. Pooling more djed into the effort, she willed bits of it to thin out, visualizing the material flowing away, being reabsorbed into her body. The nail shortened, thinned, and blunted on the end finally.

By that time Kelski was panting and halfway upset. If it was this hard to thin down a talon to a human nail, how hard was it going to be to do the whole hand or even shift her whole form. She studied the new nail and frowned.

It felt… weird.. to say the least. It felt soft, vulnerable, and very sensitive. She ran her other fingers and her opposite hand’s thumb over it and marveled at how normal it looked… human normal not her own normal. Her skin was still milky white and the nail was incredibly pale, but it looked better… more human.

Tears welled up in Kelski’s eyes. She blinked them back and whispered a thanks to Aer’wyn again.

Going back to what she was doing, Kelski extended out her other fingers on that same hand and started the process all over again. It only took her a little bit of experimenting to realize that shifting one nail took as much effort as shifting the nails on her entire hand.

It took just the same concentration and about the same djed, which was a minimal amount. She knew from experience with other magics that this was a change she could fuel indefinitely. And starting over again, letting the nails reform into talons once more, she held out both hands and started again.

[Kelski]

What seemed logical proved true. On her third attempted, it took just as much effort and concentration as well as djed expenditure to change all of her nails at once to normal human nails as it did for her to do just one thumbnail. Kelski held them out in front of her and visualized pulling the color from them, smoothing them out, thinning them out, treating the flesh and bone like clay as she worked.

The secret, she soon discovered, was in knowing that the flesh would give and take – believing it would change as she willed it – instead of just waiting to see if it did. When she believed it could be manipulated, it manipulated easily. But when she waited for physical proof, as if she doubted what Aer’wyn’s journal said, then the change took far longer and was far harder leaving her panting and sweating.

It was almost as if magic was part psychology… a sort of mind over matter. It was an interesting revelation, one she hadn’t had any cause to determine before today.

Shifting in her chair, she kicked her feet out in front of her, dragging over a foot stool with a toe, and propping them up on it so she could clearly see her toenails. They weren’t exactly the talons her fingernails were, but they were the same shiny black of her nails and while not ending in points, they were just as thick and hard.

Kelski released the magic holding her nails into ‘normal’ human shape and let them revert back to talons. Then, in a final attempt at experimenting, she pulled at her feet and hands at the same time, willing the toenails and fingernails to thin, grow colorless, and flatten.

Since she had done it so many times previously successfully, she believed it could be done, and she found less djed was required and even less concentration. In just a few chimes, perhaps five, she was staring at normal feet and hands. Human hands. Human feet. She wiggled her toes and loved them.

Rising, she made a mental note to keep feeding the change the thinnest trickle of djed… a tiny hair’s breath… and walked to her dressing table. She sat delicately down upon it, and opened the robe she was wearing so all of her body was revealed in the mirror. She studied her tissues… around her tear ducts, her lips, the inside of her mouth, and even the darkening around her nipples and the black skin that was revealed around her sex.

Kelski hated this at times. It made her feel inferior and like she was less worthy than a human of freedom and of life. Studying herself in the mirror, she tried to love her differences, but they’d gotten in the way so many times. Men coveted the exotic or were disgusted by it.

Even other women had normally looked upon her with wrinkled noses in expressions she couldn’t begin to understand. Often, she’d longed to ask them what was wrong, but she’d never had the guts to do so.

[Kelski]

The situation made her so sad. If she moved to Zeltiva… could start fresh, put on a normal face, not look so feral and so Kelvic. The humans might respect her more. They might treat her as an equal. She might even get fair business deals on land and real estate.

Kelski could only hope.

With a sigh, she pulled her mind back into what she was doing, and tried to tell herself it was okay if she didn’t succeed on the first try. But somehow, she felt confident in the success she’d had with her nails. And after all, she wasn’t trying to change her shape exactly. She just wanted to change the coloring.

A novice might try to work on her tear ducts or the mouth area one patch at a time, but Kelski was a quick study and knew from working on her nail’s moments ago that with Morphing, it seemed all the same to work big areas or little areas. So, being as enthusiastic about the change as she could be, the Kelvic tried to do it all at once. It just made a weird kind of sense to her. Kelski looked at her whole nude form in the mirror, parting her legs slightly and opening her mouth so she could see all the darkened tissues at once.

Then the Sea Eagle pulled, drawing djed into her body from her Well, tapping it deeply and pulling in one slow cautious steady tug. She visualized the darkened pigment in the tissue bleaching out, leaching out, being pulled from the flesh and smoothing away elsewhere, to become one with her body in another way.

As she was doing so, she grinned a little as her mind wandered, her imagination visualizing the dark pigmentation flowing in rivers from her dark areas, flowing across her body steadily, with no real destination in mind. Her eyes blurred as she concentrated, so focused on the sensation that she wasn’t really seeing herself in the mirror but seeing what she wanted in her mind. It was an internal struggle of pulling and flowing, her imagination running wild until she blinked and actually looked into the mirror.

Just as she pictured, the black pigmentation had indeed flowed away from her darkened mucus membranes. Stripes covered her body, some leading from her breasts, some from her mouth and nose, some from her eyes. As she swiftly turned in the mirror, she saw stripes leading from her ass to crisscross her back and from her genital area north and south to coat her legs.

Kelski groaned, hoping no one would walk in on her at that particular moment because she knew immediately where she’d messed up. She should have visualized the pigmentation fading instead of flowing across her body. She’d failed to completely focus on where it would go… whether it would fade or change color.

She had instead just made it flow away, and it had done as she had actually asked and striped her body as she’d visualized – rivers of black pigment turning her into a human tiger.

[Kelski]

“Okay… okay… you know what you did wrong.” She said thoughtfully and looked at the mess she had created. She could either cut off the djed supply feeding the change or further work with it to correct her mistake.

She opted to further work with it. Why not? If she could get her newly formed stripes to fade, she could get dark pigment to wash out anywhere right? Kelski rose, circled the room, and sat down again, studying her bare body with its newly migrated stripes. It wasn’t a half bad look, but it would land her in the slave pens for sure as some exotic toy to the gangs or wealthy of Sunberth. This had to be fixed.

Meeting her own silvery gaze, she decided a pep talk was in order. “You can do this. You made stripes which seems harder than making black pigment fade. Get too it. No excuses.” She said, meeting her own gaze and then suddenly in a rare moment of understanding offering her own reflection a look of understanding and love. Kelski captured that feeling, that love for herself and that determination to do better, and pulled at more djed. She created absolutely focus, not letting anything distract her, and concentrated.

The stripes on her body wavered slowly, then suddenly began to fade. They didn’t do it in pieces or one individual stripe at a time. They did it suddenly, all at once, as if someone had dipped her in a bleaching agent and the agent was going to work on her whole body. Kelski stared hard, concentrating, trying not to get excited at what she thought of as success or discouraged by the mess she’d created initially.

Instead she just focused on those stripes, concentrated hard, and watched them slowly fade away revealing pure firm ivory flesh. When she was done, she left a finger of djed feeding the change, and admired her new coloring.

Gone was the dark lips, the dark mouth, the nostrils and tear ducts and even tissue around her eyes that were dark. Gone too were the dark aureoles and the tissue that darkened to grey and then finally black around her sex. She lifted a leg to double check her rump and found the tissue in that place pale as well. When her visual inspection was done, she ran her hands over the areas, feeling for differences in the skin texture or shape, but it all really felt like her own body. She stood, turned around in a circle, shedding the silk robe completely, and wondered if this was what true vanity was.

Kelski was too thin, her hipbones visible along with her collarbones and a few of her ribs when she flexed. But her muscles were corded around her body neatly and more importantly she looked strong. With a critical eye she felt she was perhaps too tall for most men’s tastes, nor were her breasts full enough to be to their liking.

But she couldn’t help wonder if this was the reason…. the abnormal coloring… for why she’d never bonded. Could Zeltiva offer her a new start? A new life where no one but the current members of the Midnight Gem would ever have to know she looked different? Did she even look like herself?

The Kelvic wasn’t sure, torn by the fact that she was used to looking one way. But she wanted to be appealing to someone who might want to bond with her. The black skin sometimes looked unhealthy, maybe even diseased, whereas the pale whiteness like a Konti without scales was purer, and strictly beautiful.

The Kelvic just didn’t know.

Continued in: Bending Ones Body To One's Will II

Word Count: 2602

[Kelski]

G R A D E S

Kelski-

Morphing +5, Research +4, Psychology +2

Morphing: Oldest Magic Known, Morphing: Mage Uses Djed To Fuel Changes In Her Physical Form, Morphing: Changes Lasted As Long As Fuel Lasts, Morphing: Isn’t Painless, Morphing: Nails To Talons, Psychology of Magic: Mind Over Matter, Morphing: Lightening Her Dark Mucus Membranes to More Human Tones, Morphing: Failing A Shift Due To Lack Of Concentration, Psychology: Talking Oneself Into Something

PM me with questions or concerns.