21. Face-Off (Patreon)

The goddess smiles a faceless grin as she takes my breath. It is a joyful smile, though not at all a kind one.

I recognize the goddess' presence as a simple fact of reality, the same as I know my heart beats in my chest even when I'm not feeling for a pulse. She's here, right in front of my face, drawing in the air from my lungs and leaving me breathless. Yet she's barely a consideration as my eyes focus on the knife in front of me, the threat, the danger that I only have one way to remove. Speaking a spell takes time, time that I'm not sure I have. The weapon is close, plenty close enough to stab me in the time it takes to say two words. I need to already be moving, already be striking. With the incantation spoken, my claws reach nearly a foot in length. More than enough to take his wrist… or his head. I open my mouth, twisting my body to strike as I and the goddess say—

"Hannah, stop!"

A hand grabs my shoulder from behind, and for an instant I'm certain I'm about to die. Someone is behind me and I'm not ready and I can't stop their attack. Then I remember there is no one behind me but Autumn, and there is no attack at all. Not even the mugger is moving, his eyes wide and hands shaky. Is he afraid? I know I am. The incantation catches in my throat. The goddess twitches in annoyance, my words left unsaid on the tip of her tongue.

"Are you fucking insane?" Autumn hisses at me, pulling me back and glaring at me face-to-face. "Don't attack an armed mugger, you moron, just give him your money!"

Stunned, I do nothing but stare at her for a moment. I open my mouth to respond, but no words can come out because my lungs are still empty. The goddess holds my breath.

Autumn sends a nervous glance towards the kid with the knife.

"...You're not gonna like, rape us or anything, right?" she asks him bluntly.

The mugger jolts a bit, rapidly shaking his head. Autumn turns her attention back to me.

"Yeah, see? He just wants our money. We just give it to him, nice and easy, and we go on our way. Let's not get ourselves stabbed over whatever's in your wallet."

I blink at her, still unable to respond. Unable to breathe. Though she has no limbs, I feel the goddess tap her foot impatiently.

"Your wallet, Hannah," Autumn snaps authoritatively, and I fumble for it, pulling it out of my pocket and handing it to her. She opens it up and pulls out the bills. I probably have eighty to a hundred dollars of bills in there, collected from various twenties I would get in birthday cards and then never use because credit is more convenient.

"Y-your phones, too," the boy says.

"You don't want our phones," Autumn firmly insists. "Tracer apps."

…Is that a thing? I feel like even if it is a thing, it's a thing that can be negated by just removing the battery. The mugger hesitates anyway, and by then Autumn is already collecting the drastically smaller number of bills from her own wallet and handing them over to him, staying towards his left side. The unarmed side. She's watching the knife very, very carefully, but the mugger doesn't attack her. He just snatches the bills and stuffs them in his pocket, jabbing towards the shopping bags I dropped on the ground with his knife.

"A-anything valuable in there, too," the mugger insists.

"It's women's clothing," Autumn says, stepping away from it. "Do you even know what's valuable?"

Her question isn't a mocking one. It's genuine. He's staring at her now, confusion obvious on his face.

"You want purses. You want shoes. You want jewelry. We didn't buy any of that. You can rummage through there anyway if you want, or you can make me do it, but the more time you drag this out, the more likely someone is to walk by."

And the more time we drag this out, the more my lungs burn. Pain crawls through my chest as my body screams for air, the goddess still waiting on me. But I don't want to cast anything! I made a mistake!

A crushing pressure closes in on all sides, a thousand misty limbs wrapping me, crushing me, demanding to know of me: a mistake? Really? I called a goddess, I summoned the divine, for a mistake? For a waste of time? Exactly whose time do I think I'm wasting? Did I forget my place? She strokes my face, slowly and sensually, and the brush of unwanted intimacy almost makes me scream. It would have, were she not still holding my breath. I am still favored, she promises. I am still loved. But love only forgives so much.

The goddess opens her mouth, her face so close to mine that I feel her breath on my cheek. I feel my own soul on my cheek, the tiniest puff of air nearly crushing me to death. Her wispy fingers crawl into me, peeling open my lips and winding down my throat, wrapping around my voicebox, pulling and twisting and forcing words that I cannot refuse. The mugger glances between Autumn and the shopping bags one last time before scampering off, leaving Autumn alone with me in the alley.

"Poor kid," she mutters. "You okay, Hannah? We should be safe n—"

"Spacial Rend," the goddess says with my body, and my world becomes blood and pain.

No familiar pulse of magic engulfs my claws, because though I spoke the words it is the goddess' magic and the goddess decides what is done with it. This is the lesson she teaches me as a hundred claws tear open holes in my body, separating skin from skin and muscle from muscle with the effortless grace of the omnipotent. My own spell turns against me, and I feel the agony of it. No blade slides between my ribs, no sword cuts into my flesh, yet the wounds form all the same, obeying the natural laws of the world even while those laws are taken out back and shot in the head. There is space between two parts of me. Therefore, I was cut.

I collapse to the ground immediately, streams of red erupting from countless wounds. The goddess glares down at me, watching and waiting, as I finally manage to take half a breath before choking on my own blood. Coughing makes everything hurt even more. I'm already lightheaded.

"Hannah? Holy shit, Hannah!"

My whole body hurts. I feel my clothes getting soaked, wet ooze blossoming all over my body. It's impossible for me to know how many times I've been cut, there's simply too much pain. But I'm choking, aren't I? My throat was slit by my own miscasted spell. I'm going to bleed out in seconds. I'm going to die.

The goddess watches, and she waits. I'm not going to disappoint her twice in a row, am I?

I'm vaguely aware that Autumn is squatting next to me, putting pressure on me, doing something with her phone. But my vision is blurry and I don't have time to consider her, not in the seconds I have left. The prospect of trying to cast magic right now is utterly horrifying, but what choice do I have? If I don't figure out a healing spell, a powerful healing spell, I will die. But healing is order, and the last time I tried for a healing spell I got something completely different. Which makes sense, if magic reflects who we are. I'm nowhere near a good enough person to be a healer. I was about to kill someone in order to… what? Save myself a hundred dollars?

So that's it, right? I'm dead? The goddess sneers at me, turning away in disgust and irritation. Why? How can she expect better from me? She's the one that gives spells, so she should know if I have a solution. Which… which means I do. Right? So how can I heal my wounds? …No, wait. That's the wrong question, isn't it? The real question is 'how do I prevent myself from dying?'

An idea starts to form. A stupid idea. I don't have enough power for it. I need… I need a named spell. That's why she's still here. She knows I have to say it out loud. But… she cut my throat. I can't speak! …No, wait, I'm a fool. My body in the other world can't speak, but that's no obstacle to a goddess.

I have, of course, been thinking about what to name my magic. My first spell was somewhat of a whim, but I think it worked not just because it was perfectly descriptive, but because it was perfect for me. Spacial Rend, the name of an attack from a game that is near and dear to my heart, that I have invested myself into and obsessed over more than any other thing in the world. In some stupid, nerdy way, Pokémon is part of me in a true sense, and with one spell already inspired by it, I like the idea of naming all of my spells with the same theme.

The goddess' gaze turns back to me, her ethereal lips quirking upwards. She likes the idea, too. Good. Without her favor, I'm dead. She smiles more broadly.

My favorite spell is a cleaning spell, but it's more than just a cleaning spell. It is a spell of Order, a spell that presupposes the idea that there is a way that things should be, and makes it so. What makes it more than a cleaning spell is that it's really more about 'putting things in their proper place.' To cast it, I need something to be in the wrong place, and I need somewhere that is the right place to relocate it to.

My blood is in the wrong place. The right place is my veins. The goddess beams with delight.

"Refresh," she intones, my coughing ceasing long enough for my mouth to mime the words.

To restore. To stimulate. To wash. The word 'refresh' has many relevant meanings. In Pokémon, it's a move that cures the negative status of the user, removing conditions and restoring to the default. On a computer, refreshing a page is often the first and most useful troubleshooting tip online, clearing up errors by starting things anew, returning them to their initial state. It is a word that fits me well, leaden with the implications of cleanliness and Order, and the goddess approves.

My blood runs backwards. The stains in my clothes unsoak themselves, sucking backwards out of the fabric and into the wounds. Blood slithers back up out of my lungs, out of my perforated organs, and I'm allowed a real, complete breath for the first time in a long time.

Then my heart beats, and it all pours back out my wounds anew.

"Refresh," I hiss, the goddess delighting in copying my intended intonation. Each blood vessel, each artery, each vein… it all has a direction it is supposed to be traveling in. The proper state of blood is not a singular place but in motion, and whenever it incorrectly falls out of a severed tube it needs to be relocated to the other side of the cut, stuffed back into the far end of its broken road, to continue properly on its way. Raw power bridges the many gaps in my flesh, each cut now perfectly dry but for the tiny, lightning-shaped patterns of dancing red indicating where an unsevered vessel is supposed to be.

But the cuts are still there. I don't have a healing spell. I can't mend them.

"What the fuck," Autumn breathes. "What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck."

"Ma'am?" her phone chirps. "What was that? Are you still there?"

Magic churns through my entire body, guiding the flow of my life where my heart alone is no longer capable of doing the task. The goddess gives me a condescending pat on the head before her presence vanishes, leaving only the power of the spell literally thrumming in my veins.

"Ma'am, just stay where you are," the voice on the phone commands calmly. "We have an ambulance and police en route."

Oh, fudge sunday. She was on the phone. They have a recording of my spell!

"Off," I order Autumn, gesturing shakily at her phone. "Turn it off."

"What… what just…?"

"Turn it off!" I snap, and she fumbles for the device, quickly complying as I unsteadily get to my feet. A certain amount of oxygen belongs in my brain, and it's there now. The lightheadedness is gone.

"We have to go," I insist, leaning against a wall as I feel the holes in my body twist and move alongside me, each side of the many cuts scraping against their matching face. "Grab the b-bags."

"Wh… the bags!? Really? Hannah, I just saw you—"

"The receipts have my name on them!" I bark at her, holding back an adrenaline-fueled hiss. "I can't go to the hospital, I can't talk to the police, we have to go. Now!"

She stares at me for a moment, a shell-shocked expression on her face. I have no idea what she sees when she looks at me. There are cuts on my face, my clothes are shredded, my mask is in pieces. She sees what I really am, at least in part, and as her eyes twitch to take in details I can't help but be terrified of whatever it is she's thinking. What if she runs? What if she leaves me here? Can I even escape on my own? Can I even walk?

"Okay," Autumn says simply, none of the stress she's under audible in her voice. She stands up, and rather than leaving she collects all the shopping bags on one arm, and offers me her other one. Her face has locked down completely, showing no expression.

…Which is for some reason extremely hot, but I can't exactly afford to focus on that right now so I just take her hand, struggling to walk on my deeply lacerated legs. My mutated limb doesn't need anywhere near as much magical maintenance in terms of keeping the blood going where it should, thanks to how rigid it is, but a lot of the cuts are still deep enough to damage muscle. Autumn takes my arm around her shoulder and I let her guide my body as we flee the scene together, most of my focus occupied with maintaining the magical 'cleaning' spell that's somehow barely keeping me alive.

"...Where are we going?" Autumn asks.

"I don't know," I snap without really meaning to. The pain seems to be making what parts of my lips that still actually work curl up into a sneer, and I'm certain that I'm only conscious thanks to adrenaline. By all rights, I shouldn't even be able to think with my body in this much agony.

"You don't know?" Autumn repeats. "Well I sure as hell can't take you back to my place."

"Understandable," I grunt, trying to keep the edge out of my voice. She's helping me. She's staying with me. Holy crap she's staying with me. "I can't really go home looking like this either."

Autumn just nods, like that's the most natural thing in the world.

"I know of some places we can hide out," she admits. "Are you gonna be okay without medical attention, though?"

"Autumn, I'm a freak," I growl. "Will I be okay with medical attention? What would a hospital even do with me?"

She glances down to where my shredded pants and shoes are slowly revealing more and more of my mutant leg as we walk.

"...That's a good question," she acknowledges. "I almost want to ask if this is all real, but…"

"It is," I confirm. "Unfortunately."

"Yeah," she nods. "I heard… I don't know what I heard. You spoke and then someone touched me. I didn't like it one bit."

"Yeah, that was the goddess," I groan. "By the way, religion is solved and magic is real."

She chews on her lower lip a bit, biting off some dead skin and glancing down at my leg again.

"...That is not going to be fun to process later," she decides, her voice flat.

"I am surprised and very, very appreciative that you're not freaking out about it right now," I tell her. "Thank you."

Autumn shrugs very slightly, which is very painful.

"Crisis management is what I do," she dismisses, taking a sudden turn and crossing the street with me. Off in the distance, I hear sirens, but I can't see where they're coming from. Turning my head hurts like a habanero anyway.

"...Like the robber?" I say, trying to keep talking because it's something other than agony and the jittery heat of blood-sorting magic.

"Well technically that was a mugger, but yeah," Autumn grunts. "What the hell were you thinking? Were you about to cut up that poor kid the way you cut up yourself?"

"'Poor kid?' He drew a knife on us! I freaked out and thought we were about to die!"

"Well, we weren't," Autumn grunts. "He was even more terrified than you were. Total amateur, that was probably his first mugging. Fell for some obvious lies. People like him don't commit crimes unless they're really, really desperate."

I look her way, peeling my eyes up from my own feet and enduring the pain required to actually see her rather than just soak in information from my budding spatial sense—which is a thing I've been doing, apparently—and really look at her blank expression, the way the hardness of her face and the experience evident in her words paint a clear picture that even I'm not too dense to understand.

Autumn has some significant criminal experience. That is not going to be fun to process later. As of right now, though, I can hardly fault her. She's being far more awesome than I have any right to.

"...Thank you," I manage to choke out. "For stopping me, and for stepping in. I… I'm pretty sure I would have killed him if you hadn't done that."

Autumn doesn't respond at first, leading me off the road down into a ditch, and into one of those big concrete tubes with roads built on top of them that are probably used for drainage or something. She sits me down on the damp ground, then extracts herself from me to sit on the far side, facing me.

"You ever kill anyone?" she asks.

I swallow, looking away. I guess at this point she deserves to know.

"Yes," I admit. "I have."

Her emotionless demeanor cracks a little bit at that, her eyebrows raising.

"Huh. Okay. Well, at least you seem pretty torn up about it." She wrinkles her nose. "...Uh, poor choice of words on my part, sorry."

I wince, which hurts and causes me to wince harder.

"It's, um, fine."

"You doing okay?" she asks.

I could try to blow this off, I guess. Deflect, try to salvage like I always do. But that's too much work. Too much of my head is dedicated to the image of my blood flowing correctly and Orderly through my body, maintaining the link to an outpouring of magic that suffuses me. I'm in too much pain to add a lie to the anguish.

"...I'm using magic to circulate my blood," I explain. "Everything hurts. The only thing currently stopping me from having a panic attack is the knowledge that if I stop focusing on keeping this spell active I'll die."

"That sounds bad," she hedges.

"It's pretty bad," I confirm. "On the other hand, I'm kind of freaking out about the fact that I can apparently do this at all. Like… look at this crazy gumbo."

I peel off a ruined glove, then peel back a deep cut on my hand, opening the lesion wider so that internals are visible, pale skin on fat on muscle on bone. All throughout it, thin spiderweb lines of red snake through the air that's now between them and the other end of the cut. Blood and guts and internal organs look very, very different to my spatial sense than they do to my eyes, but even then I don't feel much disgust in the action. I'm simply too inured to the insides of bodies on a daily basis to care much about seeing my own fat and bone exposed to the air.

"I'm doing this," I marvel, ignoring the sharp increase of pain that comes with the demonstration. "I'm holding myself together, my own life clenched in two fists. With a cleaning spell. I'm just… I'm really not human anymore, huh? Shame I don't know how to actually heal the wounds, so I'm kind of stuck in a holding pattern here."

I glance over at Autumn, who is very stoically trying to avoid letting her queasiness show on her face. I let the cut on my hand go, hiding the insides from view. The way she looks at my face makes me suspect there's something similarly gross there, though.

"...But hopefully I can start working to fix myself," I assure her, continuing to babble as is my wont. "No healing spell is a problem, but… maybe I can spoof one with a Transmutation spell? Like, I have a spell which accelerates my mutation into a horrifying inhuman monster, and maybe accelerating my changes will also accelerate my healing?"

"Um, so about that…" Autumn starts, motioning vaguely in my direction.

"About what?" I ask, since it really could be anything I've said in the past five minutes.

"...The, um. The monster thing."

I don't know why, but her sudden hesitance makes me grin with the half of my mouth still capable of it.

"Y'know, I'd really like to know the answer to that myself!" I say with false cheerfulness. "This just sort of started happening one day, and like, I could give a lot more context and details behind that but frankly I'm pretty sure all of it would just make things more confusing. All I really know is that one day while I was showering my bones started growing out of my toes, and now… well."

I wiggle my toes, my monstrous limb having long since been freed from my torn-up shoes.

"...That's why your feet were bleeding in gym," Autumn realizes. "Not because you cut yourself open like this, but because you were changing."

"Yes! Exactly. I don't usually rip myself to shreds and have to barely hold on for life, I promise. Having magic at all is actually more recent than the monster thing."

"So you started mutating, and then you got magic," Autumn clarifies. "You didn't use magic to start mutating."

"Correct," I nod. "Well, I mean, magic is probably responsible for me turning into a monster, but I certainly didn't cast that spell on purpose.

She nods slowly, grabbing her chin between her thumb and forefinger as her eyes go distant. Again, she's back to not looking stressed, just… calculating.

"...You're taking this really well," I note. "Like, suspiciously well. Are you okay?"

She frowns slightly.

"I'm not really sure that it's sunk in yet," she admits. "This is a lot, even for me. A big part of me keeps trying to explain this, to rationalize it. But even if your limbs and teeth are just strange prostheses, your wounds and blood… there's no way. I can't figure it out. And I don't think you're lying about being in danger of dying, so either way it's kind of not the top priority right now."

"Oh, right, I guess I should probably try to stop myself from dying, huh?"

"Preferably yes?"

There are two problems with that, though: one, I'm not sure I can focus on Refresh and unnamed-Transmutation-spell at the same time. Accidentally halting the only spell that's keeping me alive is probably A Bad Plan™. At the same time, though, I'm just sort of in a holding pattern so I'm not sure I can afford to not take the risk. This leads to the second problem: I don't want to. Accelerating my changes means I come out of this even more of a monstrous freak than before, and I'm already a maniac that's jumping to murder as my first option in dangerous scenarios. I don't want to cast a spell that basically just uses magic to make all of that worse. Obviously though, just like with problem one, I don't have a choice. I'm forced into this horrid situation by my own mistakes, and it's time to pay the piper. I'll become a freak and my chance at anything normal or good in this world will be over.

"Is there anything more I can do to help?" Autumn asks.

…Unless she stays with me. And she is staying with me. Why? No, no, stop, now is not the time for my self-esteem issues, I am dying. Anything she can do. Hmm. Well, I've been ignoring it all day for trauma reasons, but I haven't eaten anything but a milkshake and I'm very, very hungry. If I'm going to repair myself and grow new body parts, I'll need fuel.

"...I need meat," I tell her, trying not to think about the fact that she's made of it.

"Alright," Autumn nods, pulling out her phone. "Chick-fil-a is closeby."

"I'd prefer meat from a company that isn't owned by a bigot that keeps donating to anti-LGBT orginizations."

"Well you're fucking dying, so you're just going to have to deal with that?"

"...I guess I've given in to worse excuses to pay a bigot."

"That's the spirit," Autumn sighs. "Be back in like… ten minutes. Please don't die, my fingerprints are all over you."

And with that, she turns and sprints away. Woah, she's fast. Now I'm alone. At night. Bleeding out and visibly inhuman. …Nope can't think about that, have magic to do. I close my eyes, doubling down on the feeling of magical power moving my blood through my body. I can't lose my focus on this, even when I'm casting another spell. I mean, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm not sure if it's possible to cast two spells at the same time. Maybe there's an arbitrary limit. …Still don't have a choice, though.

Okay. Don't panic. Just… work through this. My blood is where it belongs. My body is not, but I can't heal it just by moving things around. My body has to heal itself, and that means it has to change. I need to focus on the Transmutation magic in my soul and channel that alongside my Order spell. So… focus. Transmutation. Change. Order is complexity, and Transmutation is the pathway to increasing complexity, the ever-advancing nature of life. Order says there is a way things should be. Transmutation says but what if we make it even better?

…For a certain definition of better, of course. As much as I might be stronger, faster, more dangerous, more powerful… it's not all upsides. Although those things are pretty cool. I mean, I don't wanna murder people, and those attributes mostly just make me better at murdering people, but… I dunno. Not important! Focus on transmutation!

I find the energy that's somehow Transmutation-flavored, drawing it out slowly like I did before. Last time, I tugged at a link between my two bodies, but this time I want to try to avoid messing with that if possible. It seems… I dunno. Ominous. It's like, part of my soul probably? I don't exactly like the idea of yanking on my own soul.

…Ugh, I used to be an atheist. I guess I'd be a pretty crummy skeptic if I ignored literally having divine magic, though. So sure! Souls exist! Why not! It's as good an explanation as any in regards to sharing a consciousness between entire universes.

Oh, right, I need to focus so that I don't literally die. As terrible and terrifying as my life is, as dangerous as I'm afraid I'm becoming, I absolutely, positively do not want to die. The idea of death is terrifying, even more so now that I've met god. She's… kind of scary. Incredible, sure, but definitely scary. So that means I need to make this work.

I find the feeling of Transmutation inside me easily enough. I carefully fill myself with it, making sure not to drop Refresh while pulling more and more of the energy into my body. I breathe in, and I breathe out, ignoring how alone I am, how I can feel the damp ground soaking into what's left of my underwear, how easy it would be for Autumn to abandon me, how every single insect and night-creature nearby is marked in my mind as a potential threat every time they move. There's just me and the magic. Nothing else.

Time drags by, and I don't start feeling any better. I pull on more and more Transmutation magic, trying to use it to fix my body, but it spills out between my metaphorical fingers, refusing to touch me. I mentally grab for it, chasing it like a cat would a laser, but it's as ephemeral as smoke. What am I doing wrong? Am I going to have to pull on my soul after all?

"I'm back," Autumn announces. "Please say something."

"Hey," I answer quietly, my eyes still closed.

"Um, hey. I have chicken for you. Are you doing something? The air feels kind of… tingly."

My eyes shoot open at that, panic making me drop focus on the Transmutation magic and nearly doing the same with Refresh.

"You could feel that?" I ask.

"Um, yeah? I could feel something, anyway. Is that bad?"

She hands me a box of chicken tenders, which I hesitantly take and start shoving into my mouth.

"It might be?" I admit between bites. "I was experimenting with Transmutation magic, so…"

"Transmutation magic? Like, the stuff that's probably… urk. Gah!"

She suddenly doubles over, breath going fast as she starts clutching her stomach, groaning in agony as she staggers towards me.

"What… what's…"

"Oh god, Autumn, I'm so sorry!" I shriek, dropping my foods I gape at the absolute, unparalleled fuckup I just caused. Is she changing!? Did I ruin her life in the same way I ruined mine? Oh no oh no oh no oh no I—

"Just kidding," Autumn smirks, standing up straight.

I stare at her, open-mouthed. She stares back.

"Don't do that!" I yelp, throwing a waffle fry at her. She laughs, plopping down to start eating her own share of food.

"Eat and get back to trying to fix yourself," she orders. "Don't worry about me."

"...Alright," I allow, and close my eyes again.

If it's really been enough time for Autumn to get food since I started trying to use raw Transmutation magic to fix myself, though, I bet it's the wrong track. Why, though? The spell that transmutates me is probably a Transmutation spell, I figure? Hmm, wait. Of course it's a Transmutation spell. It's just not only a Transmutation spell. I don't control what I turn into. I don't get the option to stop it, either. The spell keeps going, keeps applying itself, because my transformed state is a predetermined goal. It is, at least in the spell's eyes, the way I should be. And that way is clearly inspired by my second body, in color and design and even in number of limbs. There's a body I'm supposed to have, and this spell is slowly but surely shifting me into that. It's shifting both of me into that. That's why it felt like I was tugging the line: I'm figuratively pulling my two bodies closer together.

Somehow that… that feels right.

I've never been fully human, have I? Some part of me has always been that fourth-dimensional spider from another world, scuttling along barely a foot off the ground. And I like that. It feels right to me. But so does being human. As a spider, I'm too small, too restricted. I'm slow and I don't have hands and in many ways I'm more of an accessory than a person. I love that, but I want more than that. Growth. Change. Merger. The way I'm supposed to be.

I take a deep breath, feel the power in my soul, and tug the line.

This time, the feedback is immediate, the familiar thrum of a successfully activated spell filling my body. No… filling both my bodies, at least to the limited extent that I can feel the sleeping form of my hyperspider self. But my desperate hunch is right: 'full of cuts and holes' does not match the form my spell is shaping me into, and so they will be transfigured. The pain of my many lesions multiplies and pairs with a horrid itching sensation, my magic sealing up the broken flesh and undoing the damage dealt. It's such a terrible feeling that it finally breaks my wavering concentration on Refresh.

Panic flows down my throat along with the contents of my jugular, my mouth opening to re-speak the spell. The goddess arrives between slivers of moments, pouring into our world and happily wrapping herself around me, giggling joyfully as my life's blood leaks onto the ground.

"Refresh," I silently croak, and she sings the words real, seeming to luxuriate in the moment like a cat stretching in a sunbeam. Autumn shudders, her stoic mask cracking and nearly shattering before the goddess finally has mercy on the mortals in her midst and the weight of her attention leaves.

"...Do you get used to that?" Autumn asks quietly.

"I certainly haven't yet," I answer, and return to focusing on my body.

I can see why Sindri was so afraid of miscasts, now. I take a deep, shuddering breath and pull on the line between bodies again, letting the fiery itch of healing pass through my flesh, the horrible feeling knitting my wounds slowly, oh so horribly slowly back together. And I know that this isn't just healing, not really. As my chitin repairs itself, bubbling and growing and hardening anew, I also feel it reinforcing itself, growing further up my leg. Each flap of skin seals itself shut with the promise that one day, something that isn't skin at all will take its place. Worst of all and best of all are the parts that don't seal up at all. On each side of my abdomen, just above my waist, a cut doesn't close. It's waiting for something to grow first. My dear limbs number five and six.

I usually don't move the parts of me that are trapped inside my body, since why would I? I wiggle them when I'm happy from time to time, but overall they just feel weird to move. Still, I find it as natural as breathing to maneuver them, feeling them grow larger and stronger, questing for the exit to the prison of my skin. I let out an involuntary grunt of pain, pushing one through the inside of an open wound, stretching it white and gleaming out into the open air of night. There's no blood on it, of course, since that's not where my blood is supposed to be.

"Ohhhh holy fucking shit Hannah, I swear to god if you're chestbursting right now—"

"Nope! Nope, it's fine, this is fine!" I hiss, crying out in pain as I navigate my other extra limb into the world as well. It's… nothing special at all, really. Just a leg. Almost exactly like one of my other body's legs, even down to the barely foot-long length. One joint at the base, two more joints along the length of the limb, ending in a sharp tip that can be used as a weapon. It's beautiful. I love it. It's completely and utterly useless.

"I'm okay," I continue, speaking the words out loud and being surprised to mean them. "I'm fine. I'm healing, I'm getting better, I'm going to be fine."

Autumn spares a worried glance at both of my new limbs as I wriggle them freely in the air, the holes they emerged from slowly but surely starting to close up after them. It feels so, so good to have them. I don't care how terrible this is for me in terms of my daily life right now, I'm just excited to be alive and to be just a little more free from the agony of the morning. Six limbs down, four to go. Autumn lets out a huff of air, visibly centering herself before reaching into her back pocket and pulling out the little notebook she always carries, flipping through it quickly. A scowl grows on her face as she does so, getting deeper and deeper until she finally growls in frustration and puts the notebook away.

"What is that, anyway?" I ask. "Your little book. Why are you looking at it all the time? What do you write in there?"

Normally I wouldn't pry, but I'm somewhat curious and this seems like a good environment as any to be spilling secrets, considering Autumn just learned pretty much all of mine. Not that I'm going to try to press her into answering because of that, it's just… y'know. A good opportunity. I guess that's manipulative, but it doesn't seem like it's manipulative enough to actually work. My question only serves to make Autumn seem more irritated.

"...So you haven't figured it out yet?" she grunts. "And of course you haven't been told."

"Um, I mean, who would tell me if not you?" I ask. "It's okay, though. You don't have to say anything if you don't want to, I really don't mind."

"It's not really a decision for me to make alone," she answers, shrugging. "Though I guess it's starting to seem like she doesn't really care about that sort of thing anymore."

I nod, my curiosity increasing drastically but my restraint actually functioning for once in my life regardless.

"I understand if it's not really the sort of thing you talk about on a first date," I assure her. "All this magic stuff certainly wasn't planned on my part."

Autumn jolts in surprise, her head suddenly whipping up to stare at me like a rabbit stares at a fox.

"Wait, back that one the fuck up," she demands. "You and Alma went on a date!?"