Chapter One hundred eighty-nine (Patreon)

Kaz rolled to his side, reaching for the little dragon, but she was already climbing to her feet, her eyes blinking sleepily. She had worn herself out doing… something. But what?

<You weren’t doing it right,> she told him, eyes gleaming with their own light in the soft shadows.

Kaz finished rolling over, then maneuvered to a sitting position. Something felt terribly wrong, and it didn’t take long for him to realize what it was. He had no tail.

He reached around, feeling his lower back through his loincloth, which suddenly felt a little too loose. There was something there, but it was just a bump beneath the skin, and he couldn’t make it move at all. He felt a sudden horror. How was he supposed to communicate without his tail? He would be like Berin, whose tail hung limp as a result of an injury, except at least her tail was there, so she didn’t look like a…

Li huffed. <You wanted to be a human!> she told him, but he could feel the concern in her as she muttered, <I was trying to help. He said he wanted to change. Isn’t this what he wanted? Should I have tried to make him a dragon after all? Dragons are better, so surely he wouldn’t be angry…>

Kaz stroked her head, noticing that his claws had become rounder and thinner, looking like they would snap if he tried to pry open a jiachin’s shell with it. His skin color was different, too. It almost looked grayish in the fading light, more like a husede’s skin than either a kobold or a human.

“It’s all right,” Kaz told the dragon. “I just wasn’t ready.” He reached up and touched his head carefully, feeling fur on top of his head, but no ears. “What do I look like?”

Helpfully, Li offered her own eyes, and Kaz looked at himself. He traced his fingers over the large, pointed nose that thrust from the center of his face, then the thin lips that now framed white teeth. If those teeth were a little sharper than the humans he knew, well, hopefully no one else would notice.

He had hair much like Raff’s, though it was blue and didn’t curl like the large male’s. It was coarser and far more unruly than Lianhua or Chi Yincang’s, and it draped down to cover the tops of the ears stuck to the sides of his head as if they’d slipped down from where they were supposed to be. The tips of his ears were sharper than he thought they should be as well, but not nearly as pointed as his kobold ears.

He blinked his eyes, which were large and blue and framed by thick, dark lashes under heavy brows. They were too close together, changing the way he saw the world, but while it was disorienting, he thought he would become accustomed to it soon enough.

His proportions looked similar to those he’d had before, with broad shoulders and strong-looking arms. The fur that should have covered all of his skin was now far too sparse, though it was actually thicker than it had been since he left the mountain. Kaz drew a hand over the soft blue fur on his forearm and then touched his leg. His straight leg, which led to large, flat feet instead of slender paws with tough pads on the bottom.

All in all, it was a step in the right direction, but he didn’t look human, unless human had a much broader definition than he thought it did.

“Kaz?”

It was Lianhua, and Kaz felt a moment of panic. He wasn’t a kobold, and he wasn’t a human, and he didn’t look anything like the image he’d had in his mind when he started. Was that because Li had interfered? Was this what she thought he should look like? None of that mattered, however, in light of the fact that Lianhua would see him sitting there in the grass if she came looking, and she would have no idea who he was.

“Wait!” he called, then clapped his hands over his mouth. Was that his voice? It was too high, and there was no growl in it at all.

The soft sounds that had heralded the human female’s approach paused, and when she spoke again, there was something both worried and wary in her voice. “Kaz? Are you all right?”

He tried to force his voice to sound the way he thought it should, and said, “I’m fine.” He had to cough. That made his throat itch.

“No, you’re not,” she answered, and he heard her start moving toward him again. His current ears were definitely not as sensitive as his kobold ones, and he was having a hard time telling which direction she was coming from, but the camp was to his left, so he turned that way.

A burst of light nearly blinded him as Lianhua summoned a ki orb, but his eyes quickly adjusted as she approached. These eyes definitely couldn’t see as well in the dark, but they did seem better at handling bright lights. At least, recovering from bright lights. Kaz lifted a hand in front of his face, but he clearly heard Lianhua’s sharp gasp of indrawn breath when she caught sight of him. 

The moment stretched, and he lowered his hand slightly, finding Lianhua staring at him, eyes first sharp, and then searching. “Kaz?” she finally asked, and Chi Yincang stepped into visibility beside her, his weapon vanishing into the ring on his hand with a pale spark of ki.

Kaz nodded. He wasn’t quite ready to try that unfamiliar voice again yet, but he didn’t have to, because Raff came next, moving with surprising stealth as he slid out of the trees behind Kaz. Kaz tried to back up so he could see all of them at once, but his strange body, especially the legs and feet, scrabbled uselessly in the grass.

Seeing this, Raff moved around so Kaz could see him more easily. He still had his sword out, but after a glance at Lianhua and Chi Yincang, he slid it into its sheath and offered Kaz his hand. Kaz reached up, grateful that his hands were his own, and pulled himself up to his huge, flat feet.

“What’s going on?” Kyla yipped, and Lianhua bit her lip.

“Stay there, Kyla,” she called over her shoulder. “We’ll be back in a moment.”

Raff shook his head, looking Kaz up and down. He was still head and shoulders taller than Kaz, even though Kaz had clearly imagined himself to be closer to his height. Now that he was up, however, Kaz could tell that he was at least a few inches taller, since his eyes were nearly at the same level as Lianhua’s.

“Did ya do that on purpose, Blue?” Raff asked, attempting to take his arm back. Kaz immediately started to topple, his balance completely wrong, and the large human caught him again.

Kaz sighed. “Not exactly,” he admitted, cringing at the sound of his voice. At least he’d gotten one thing right, because he definitely sounded like a human, with a smooth tone that lay somewhere in between Raff’s almost kobold-like timbre and Lianhua’s light, relatively breathy inflection.

Raff chuckled, and Kaz could feel the muscles of his hand relax a little more, letting Kaz know that the other male hadn’t quite believed that this stranger was Kaz. Apparently, his voice was familiar enough for the humans to recognize.

Raff scratched his jaw. “Well, you’re still blue.”

Kaz sighed again. “I know.”

“An’ your nose is, ah,” Raff was clearly searching for an inoffensive word, “imposing.”

Lianhua reached out and gently brushed Kaz’s fur - no, hair - away from one ear. Her eyes still looked slightly dazed, but her voice sounded almost like the one she used when she was looking at old books or carvings.

“Your ears are too big, and they’re pointed, though not quite as much as an elf’s. I’ve never seen nor heard of a race with blue skin, but it’s slightly grayish as well. You’re short for a human, but too tall and hirsute for a dwarf,” she said critically. “Can you change back or try again?”

Kaz looked at Li’s core, then his own. They were both drained, and he doubted if he could do more than create a ki light at the moment. “I don’t think so,” he admitted. “Li helped, and I’m not entirely sure what we did, but I do know I can’t do it again right now. Is it…?” He trailed off, wanting to ask if he looked as ugly to her as he did to himself, but too embarrassed to do so.

“Well,” Raff said cheerfully, “then we might as well eat dinner, eh? Nobody here but us, and we’re all tired an’ hungry. I reckon we can get a better look at our friend here tomorrow.”

Lianhua looked like she might object, but with another sidelong glance at Kaz, she nodded. His changed appearance was clearly disturbing to her, but he didn’t understand why it should bother her more than the others.

Before Kaz could decide whether or not to ask, Raff turned in place, causing one of Kaz’s long feet to hook behind his other ankle, which very nearly resulted in him falling down again. Li gave a long whistle, leaping up into the air to circle around them, clicking and hissing at the human as she told him to be more careful with her kobold. Fortunately, Raff couldn’t understand her, so he just ignored the little dragon as he helped Kaz get himself untangled and walk back to the fire.

Of course, when they arrived, Kyla was waiting, practically quivering with curiosity. Kaz was amazed that she had listened when Lianhua told her to stay, but perhaps that was because she had acknowledged that the other female was in charge of their group. It was one thing to wander off, and quite another to disobey a direct order. A pup who disobeyed was often a pup who didn’t live to grow up.

The puppy stared at Kaz, taking in his straight, fuzzy legs, his sagging loincloth, and the bizarre configuration of his face. Then she scrunched up her nose and drew in a deep breath, leaning toward him. “Kaz?” she asked wonderingly, and then she began to laugh, the short, sharp yips of a truly amused kobold.

Kaz held in yet another deep sigh and allowed Raff to guide him to a spot by the merrily burning fire. Heat swept over him, driving away a chill he hadn’t even realized he felt. He actually had more fur now, so it wasn’t that he was feeling the slight chill of the oncoming night, but something that resulted from his drained core and the bone-deep weariness that was settling into him.

Li flew in and landed in the grass beside him, one wing brushing against his side as she closed them. The dragon rested a paw on his leg, which had bent in a way that now felt very natural, even though it made him feel like he was looking at someone else’s body when he looked down. <Did I make a mistake?> she asked, in a small, uncertain voice that was entirely unlike her.

Kaz shook his head, lifting her into his arms. Even if nothing else felt right, her weight and the pressure of her scaly body against his chest was the most natural thing in the world. “Thank you,” he murmured as she pressed the side of her head to his jaw. She purred, small puffs of cool water caressing Kaz’s cheek as her body vibrated gently.

Raff cleared his throat, and Kaz looked up as a bowl appeared in front of his face. It was one of Chi Yincang’s bowls, made of some fine white material and painted with beautiful blue patterns. Kaz freed one of his hands, which made Li click unhappily, but she took a bite of the contents quickly enough when Kaz offered it to her.

The group ate with unusual focus. Kaz wasn’t even sure when the last time he ate something was, and though refining the body meant it needed less food, air, and sleep in general, he was fairly certain he had crossed what Lianhua called a ‘threshold’ earlier, and now that he allowed his body to make its demands heard, he was hungrier than he had been in a very long time. Not the hungriest he had been in his life - as the lowest ranked member of a small, weak tribe, he usually ate last or went hungry - but close.

At last, long after the night truly fell, blanketing them in a darkness that would have been comfortingly familiar if not for the stars hanging so far above them, Raff and Lianhua set their utensils aside. Kyla had eaten the least of all, since she had already attempted to clear the stream of fish, and the pup was curled up nearby, her leg twitching as she dreamed. Unlike the previous night, she wasn’t pressed up as close to Kaz as she could get, but she was clutching Mei in a way that made the fuergar look very uncomfortable.

Lianhua glanced at the pink ball of fur and murmured, “I should go to bed as well.”

Raff nodded, stretching and yawning hugely. “You sure it’s okay if I sleep in the tent with you?”

Lanhua gave a little snort. “Yes. It was Gaoda who didn’t trust you. Well, anyone, really.”

The male shook his head. “That one was a piece o’ work. Still is, I guess. I do kind miss his liquor, though. That stuff’d burn a hole straight through ya.”

Shaking her head, Lianhua smiled and waved as Raff stood and made his way to the tent. Chi Yincang was long gone, having eaten a single bowl of stew and then vanished into the night. Kaz was sure he was out there somewhere, but wherever he was, even his blur of ki was out of sight.

That left Li, Kaz, and Lianhua as the last three awake, and the crackle of the dying flames almost managed to cover the sounds of the strange insects and animals that roamed the shadows beyond the firelight. Kaz expected Lianhua to follow Raff, but the female didn’t, and her hands began to twist the edge of her light-weight sleeping robe, which Kaz had come to recognize as a sign that she had something to say, but wasn’t sure how to say it.

“You-”

“I-”

They both spoke at once, and Lianhua stopped, biting her lip. Kaz found himself copying her without intending to, and yelped softly as his sharper teeth pinched his flesh painfully. His skin was strong enough that he didn’t draw blood, but it definitely wasn’t pleasant.

Lianhua shifted as if she would reach out toward him, then settled back. Her brows pinched, and then the corners of her mouth lifted, almost unwillingly.

“You still ‘feel’ the same,” she murmured, raising one hand and tucking a strand of her loosely bound hair behind her ear. “But you look like a stranger. A very strange stranger.”

Kaz thought about it. Lianhua could sense ki, could even tell which creatures had cores, and which couldn’t. This allowed her to tell where Chi Yincang was when no one else could, and she had been able to tell when Kaz broke his core, then again when it was fixed. It was an imprecise thing, to say the least, but how would Kaz feel if a kobold suddenly appeared with Lianhua’s ki pattern? Or a human with Li’s?

“I should have warned you,” he said, and Lianhua lifted a pale eyebrow.

“You should,” she agreed. “There are many ways of changing one’s appearance, and though most of them require either artifacts or great power, I might even have been able to help.”

Kaz shifted, partially extending a grayish-blue-skinned leg dusted with cobalt fur. He could now sit in the same way Lianhua did, but found that he had to keep moving or his legs started to tingle and grow numb. “I could have used your help,” he admitted.

<I helped!> Li chimed in, opening one offended eye. She was snoozing with her head atop her curled tail, in a pose eerily reminiscent of the one Heishe had adopted while questioning him.

Kaz smiled, feeling his lips stretch in a way that was completely different than they had when he was a kobold. He wished he could wag his tail to communicate his affection, but his tail was entirely absent, and wiggling his rear end was not at all the same.

Lianhua tilted her head and spoke slowly. “I think this will work, even if you can’t change it to look more human. You don’t look quite like any of the races I know of. You don’t look like a kobold, either, and in the cities, people are used to seeing members of other races. I just hope… can you change back?”

He blinked, then nodded. “I’m certain I can do that. I’m not sure if I can look exactly like this again, though. It may be a little different each time, at least until I get a clearer image of what it is to be a human.”

Her eyes lit up. “So you are using an image! And without a rune?”

Kaz frowned. “Would a rune have helped?”

Lianhua smiled. “It would have helped me, but not Raff, Chi Yincang, or Gaoda.”

Absently, Kaz began to stroke Li, who settled down, closing her eyes again, though he could tell she was still listening. “Why not?”

“Do you remember when I told you about images?” Lianhua asked.

Helpfully, Li brought up the memory, and Kaz nodded as he heard Lianhua say, “Everyone has their own image, and mine is words.” She touched a finger to her forehead. “I have a library here, and when I need something, I take out a book, and find the rune and draw it. The rune looks real to me, though of course no one else can see it.

“My servant, Yingtao, has a garden as her image. Each plant she grows there has its own meaning, and the more she learns, the more of that meaning she can imbue into them. For some people, their ‘image’ is actually sound, and for others, it’s color. A simple image is faster, but lacks depth, while a complex image, like mine and Yingtao’s, can take a while to activate, but we can do almost anything with them, given enough time.”

Kaz hadn’t understood then, but he thought he was beginning to. For quite a while, he had been using Lianhua’s image, learning the runes she knew, and drawing them himself when he needed to produce their effect. But that was very limited, not only because of how few runes he knew, but because he didn’t know how to change them when he needed to, which meant he had to ‘understand’ them differently in order to change their effects.

When he was in the mosui city, he had had to create mana, which required him to try something completely different. He understood that mana was unrefined ki, but in some way, it was also a combination of all the different kinds of ki. That understanding, combined with his own memories of weaving scraps of leather, cloth, or plants together to create a larger whole had allowed him to force his ki into something that looked and acted as mana, even though it wasn’t as amorphous and wild.

Since then, he had found that he could sometimes imagine runes and get the same effect as drawing them, though it took more ki to do so. He hadn’t needed mana since he’d finished freeing the captive kobolds, so he hadn’t practiced that ability, mainly because it felt like he was doing something he was never meant to do.

“I don’t think you have your own image,” Lianhua said. “You can see ki, which allows you to manipulate it in a way that no one without immense power and decades of training should be able to do, because the image in that case is just your eyes, telling you what’s in front of you. But when it comes to doing things you can’t see, you falter.”

“That’s why I couldn’t become a human?” Kaz asked.

She nodded. “The fact that you got this far means that it’s possible, but you don’t have a deep enough image of what you need to allow you to succeed. If I was trying the same thing, I would write out a very precise description of what I wanted, using the most definitive runes I could. If Yingtao did the same, she might pluck a mandrake root from her garden, then carve it into the shape she needed.”

Her lips twitched. “I’d like to see that, actually, but Yingtao is nowhere near strong enough to do it. I’m not sure I am, for that matter, unless I managed to refine my image down to the point where it was incredibly efficient. Of course, if I miscalculated my own strength and ran out while trying something like that, I would probably kill myself. At best, I would leave my body in some halfway state, which might or might not allow me to try again.”

Lianhua’s voice held warning, and Kaz flinched. He hadn’t even thought about the consequences of failure. What would have happened if he started the transformation, but Li hadn’t been there to help him finish it? Would he have ended up a twisted version of something in between a kobold and a human?

“Fortunately, you made it this far, and you seemed confident when you said you could change back,” Lianhua went on. “That’s a good sign. We usually have an instinctive understanding of our own limitations, which keeps us from trying anything beyond our strength, if not our skill level.”

He nodded slowly. That made sense, though honestly he hadn’t found many situations where he felt like he simply couldn’t do something. Didn’t know how, absolutely, but wouldn’t be able to? No. Did that mean he didn’t have the feeling Lianhua was describing, or did it mean that he really could do so much more than her?

“You need to develop your own image, Kaz,” Lianhua said. “And you need to do it before you try this again.”

Kaz looked down at Li, who had relaxed beneath his gentle fingers, her body lying limp and defenseless in his lap. Had he really risked his own life in trying to change into a human shape? Worse, had he risked hers?

“Should I try to change back, then?” he asked softly.

Lianhua sighed. “I… wouldn’t. I think you’re beaut- Ador- Pleasant to look at, in your own shape, while this one is, um, disconcerting. But it’s closer to human, and far from kobold, so you should be safer among humans, at least until people get to know you as a person, rather than a…”

“Monster,” he finished for her, when it seemed she couldn’t force out the word, and it was her turn to flinch, though she didn’t deny it. He nodded. “I won’t do anything else, at least not until I have a better image of what I want to look like.”

“Look like, feel like, breathe, and see, and walk like,” Lianhua said, rising gracefully to her feet. “I’ve never attempted a transformation, of course, but I’ve read texts by sages who could shift into the shapes of other creatures.” Her eyes sharpened. “Thinking creatures, Kaz. If you become an object, or something that’s unable to think in the way we can, that’s it. More than one cultivator has been lost when they forgot who or what they had once been. Cao Zhenya’s personal records told of a very promising apprentice, Hao Rong, who managed to transform himself into a cherry tree. She had several estates, but her descendants swore that the cherries from one particular tree were always bitter, and if anyone tried to cut a branch to use in ikebana, the tree would pull away, or weep a dark red sap.”

Kaz swallowed hard. “I understand.”

Lianhua gave him an unusually critical look, then leaned over and picked up a stick with a burnt and blackened end. Scratching the tip against a patch of bare dirt, she drew a rune.

“Here’s your first lesson,” she said. “This is the rune for tree.”

Kaz stared at it, and when he looked up again, she was already vanishing into the tent.