Kashur

“Get undressed? Like, all the way?”

“Your power may manifest in your hands, but it resides in all of you.”

Kashur tugged off a boot. “It smells terrible.” A warning was going off somewhere in his chest, like the flashing of heat lightning in a shelf of clouds. It’s only nerves, he told himself. He piled his clothing on the floor. “What will this do to me?”

“Have you ever had a splinter?” Mol Morin asked.

Kashur shivered, naked, in the cold room. “Yes.”

“And did your mother have you put your finger in a salt bath, to draw it out?”

“Yes.”

“It’s like that.”

Mol Morin motioned to the vat. Kashur peered inside. The liquid was too dark to see anything. He plunged a foot in. The water was scalding hot.

“Ouch!”

“It’s not hot enough to burn you,” Mol Morin said. “You do want this, don’t you?”

Kashur gritted his teeth and stepped all the way in. “It’s all I want.” For a moment Yelora’s face flashed through his mind. He’d have to find her after this, without gloves on. See how long it took her to notice. Maybe she’d even reach for his hands. Touch them. He lowered himself the rest of the way into the water. Flaming toadstools, it was hot!

“Get comfortable.” Mol Morin smiled down at him as Kashur sunk into the water up to his neck. Only it wasn’t water. It was thicker. Soupier.

“Are you cooking me up for supper,” he joked uncomfortably, “because I already helped Moyshec in the garden, so it’s not necessary.”

“Wizard soup!” Mol Morin grinned at him with a beaker in each hand.

Sweat broke out on Kashur’s forehead. “Did you just make a joke?”

“Did I?” Mol Morin dumped the contents of the beakers into the vat and went back for two more.

Mol Morin rarely joked. No, Mol Morin never joked. There was a manic energy about him that wasn’t like his mentor at all. Was it possible..? Kashur lifted a hand out of the water and snapped his fingers.

Still Mol Morin. There was no illusion here. This prospect of war must have truly confounded the old man. Kashur wiggled his shoulders in the water. He just needed to relax. Accept that the water was hot. That he would be uncomfortable. But the prize was that his curse would be gone.

“How sure are you that this is going to work?” he asked.

“Quite sure,” Mol Morin replied, dumping two more beakers of liquid into the vat.

“Is it a different spell from the last one?”

“The last time we tried to take your power away. This time we’re going to transfer it, with the power boost from the convergence. Transferring something is easier than making it vanish.”

“Right.” He knew that. The laws of physics were easier to manipulate than to outright break. Two more beakers splashed into the water. “So what are you transferring my power into?” Just then something touched Kashur’s calf. He sat upright. “Something’s in here with me!”

“Relax,” Mol Morin said. “They’re just fish.”

“Fish?”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“You like fish, don’t you? You used to be a fisherman, as I recall.”

Kashur settled back into the water. Fish he could handle. But every time the slippery things touched his skin, he recoiled. “They don’t feel like fish. Fish bump you. These things... caress.”

“Do you wish me to stop?” Mol Morin halted, the final beaker in his hand.

“No, of course not.” Just make it quick, he added in his head.

“Stay still,” Mol Morin said. The Alchemist closed his eyes and uttered the first lines of the spell. Kashur wanted to wriggle and fidget in the water, but he fought the urge. Each time a fish, or whatever it was, slithered against his skin, he did not let himself react. Mol Morin’s incantation fluttered over him, like silk. The spell was working. He could feel the change, a shifting of cells, of energies within his cells. A transformation.

“Think about your power,” Mol Morin said. “Put it at the very front of your mind. Don’t let your mind wander to other things, lest they be taken from you, too.”

Kashur cleared his mind and held his hands in front of him, staring at the mottled, pink skin.

How much of you is this ability? Is it linked to other parts of you? If we tear it out of you, what might it drag with it?

That’s what Mol Morin had said to him the last time he’d tried to lift the curse. Kashur stifled a groan as the things in the water moved like tentacles against his bare skin. What if this was a terrible idea? His resolve began to pull apart, thread by thread, revealing the underlay of fear beneath. This power. This curse. What if he was meant to have it? The Age of Peace was ending and they were plummeting headfirst into an Age of War. What if Mol Morin was right? What if this power was needed?

But no. It wasn’t worth it. Not when Kashur could still feel the Sky Engineer’s cheeks collapsing under his touch.

“Think about your power!” Mol Morin boomed. “Think about when it manifested.”

An even worse memory. Head on his mother’s lap as she read to him by the fire, he’d reached up to touch her face and watched her turn into an old woman before his eyes. His father hadn’t been there to witness it, but Nyla had. She hadn’t lived with them long, was still barely speaking, but she’d been the one to drop her practice-stitching and pull Kashur away.

“Hands,” she’d whispered, as their mother wept at her reflection in the mirror. “Look. Hands.”

Pink and mottled, like they’d been soaked in lye.

“It is finished,” Mol Morin said, bobbing his head. Dark circles had appeared under his eyes from the strain. “Your power is not gone. But if you refrain from using it for the next week, until the convergence has passed, the transfer should be complete.”

Kashur lifted his hands and stared at them. They were pinker from the hot water; other than that, they didn’t look any different. “How will we know if it worked?” Just then something pinched him. “Ouch! Your fish just bit me!”

“That means it worked.”

Kashur jumped to his feet in the vat, turning to see an odd, pale creature attached to his side. “These aren’t fish! They’re leeches! Except they don’t look like leeches, either.” He felt another pinch on his calf. “Hey!” In one violent motion he vaulted himself out of the vat of water with a splash.

“Careful!” Mol Morin glided over and removed the creature from his side, sliding it back into the water.

Kashur reached for the one on his calf.

“Don’t touch!” Mol Morin slapped his hand away. “You’ll activate your powers and this will all be for naught!”

“Right.” Kashur got a good look at the thing attached to his calf as Mol Morin removed it for him. It had no face. It was like a gray fleshy tail with a mouth. Some fish. “Thank you, Sir,” Kashur said, letting himself feel momentarily overcome by the gravity of what had just happened—his curse had been lifted! He was free! Or, he would be free, in only a week. “I’m truly grateful for this. If you give me a towel and my gloves, I’ll hug you.”

Kashur stood naked, holding his arms out as if for an embrace. Mol Morin shook his head and shuffled back to his laboratory. “Why don’t you shake yourself off like a dog?”

Kashur rubbed the itchy spot on his side where the leech-thing had been suctioned to him, then hopped up and down to shake the water off. Mol Morin had done it! Kashur could feel the difference in his hands. They felt... normal. Like there wasn’t electricity tingling through the muscles and tendons. How he longed to test them out, even as he stuffed them back into his infernal leather gloves.

Mol Morin padded back to the vat, unwrapped two purple crystals from a cloth, and plunked them into the water. The old man looked almost giddy.

“Now we’ll meet with the Elf Queen and formalize our alliance. Move our forces to the crash site.” He frowned and waved at Kashur. “Get your clothes on, boy! What are you waiting for? Make yourself decent.”

Kashur stepped into his pants and hesitated. Pulling them up while his body was still wet would be akin to having intimate time with a roll of sandpaper. He left them pooled at his feet.

“She’s on her way,” Mol Morin said over his shoulder.

“What?” Kashur shimmied into his tunic instead.

“She’s here.”

Just then the door to the cargo hold burst open. There stood Yelora like a warrior queen, eyes blazing, staff in one hand, a rope in the other. The other end of the rope was tied around the neck of her creature.

Kashur reached for his pants and yanked them up.