I did not expect it to be this damn difficult to find a dragon. It's like they don't want to be murdered, or something.

"How long have we been out here again, Norah?" I ask, my tentacles flicking outward to intercept a furious swarm of disintegration wasps (which are basically like normal wasps, except their bites inject some kind of magically-charged chemical that rapidly dissolves everything in a cubic foot around the application site).

"Just over a tenday, I think," she answers. "We should probably head back soon."

"But we haven't even seen a dragon!" I whine. "I thought the deep forest is supposed to be where dragons live!"

"I mean, it is. The deep forest is just a big place."

I whip her around behind me to block a few shots from the leechspitter that's been harassing me, slurping up the souls of its ill-fated projectiles. Those things launch their own babies at their enemies, apparently, which then devour the target from the inside. They'll stick around when the host dies and end up in the belly of any scavengers dumb enough to swallow them. Once they've eaten enough they kill their current victim and start a metamorphosis into the weird, round-bodied, thin-legged, tree-climbing… fuck, I don't even know. It's like, a tapir-monkey that shoots children out of its nose. It's gross.

"You think if a vrothizo ate that thing, they'd be able to like… vomit high-speed Larks at people?" I wonder.

"Oh Watcher, what kind of question is that?" Norah complains, twisting up and somehow managing to glower at me without a face. "Come on, Vita. That's disturbing even for you."

I smirk at her, flicking my wrist to get her to retract her chain before leaping upwards, driving her blade into a nearby tree, and yanking myself up even further. The leechspitter jumps out of my range, but not before some of its projectiles hit what's left of the disintegration wasp swarm, a mistake that will not end well for the poor baby-blaster.

Norah is, of course, a scythe. Or more accurately, a scythe-revenant made almost entirely out of vrothizo bone. Designed by Margarette to be both an awesome weapon and a viable body for an undead, the blade is made from a huge, curved vrothizo tooth, cut to be double-edged and fully capable of imbuing itself with the vrothizo's classic 'cut anything' properties whenever Norah wills it. A second, speartip-like tooth juts out the top as well so my friend can be used for stabbing. The shaft of the weapon is a foot taller than I am, and it's also hollow. Inside is a chain, allowing Norah to detach her blade from the shaft and extend it however she pleases. It moves under soul power, so it doesn't matter that I don't have the slightest fucking clue how to use a chain weapon; Norah simply bends her body however she likes, fighting on my behalf whenever it's most efficient.

And that's just the basic structure of her body! Metal pulled from the Sword of Skyhope (or what I didn't eat of it, anyway) is also installed in various places, giving her a multitude of passive enchantments like the kynamancy one that lets her speak. And obviously, since she's Norah, she can still imbue herself as well as any nonliving thing on my person with her talent, rendering the pair of us functionally invincible. Yeah, Norah's pretty fucking awesome.

"I didn't think it was that disturbing," I argue, hopping across the thick tree branches to where the wasps are currently removing the leechspitter's flesh from existence. "It just sounds funny to me. And kind of cute!"

"You think a vrothizo that could launch entire other vrothizo at people would be cute," Norah summarizes incredulously. "I thought vrothizo freaked you out in a big way?"

"Eh, they used to, but they're not really much of a threat anymore," I answer, shrugging. "It's like little disciples, you know? They certainly scared me back on our first mission, but now they're like… free food. Not really intimidating. So I get to focus on their good qualities instead!"

"I… guess that makes sense?" Norah admits. "What exactly are a vrothizo's good qualities?"

"Eh," I shrug, nabbing the leechspitter soul and slurping it down. "Animavores are kind of spooky, but I also feel a certain kinship with them, y'know? It's like… whatever I am, it feels like it's a lot closer to a vrothizo than it is to a human."

"Vita…" Norah says sadly, "even with this lich stuff going on, haven't you always been human? You certainly qualify as human in my book."

"My body is human," I correct her. "I am not my body."

Resting her on my shoulder, I hop back down to ground level, feeling outward with my senses to try and decide where to go. I suppose if it's been over a tenday we should go back to the camp, as much as I don't really want to. I'm just… there's so many responsibilities there. I'll be devastated if I find out that anyone is going hungry under my care, and that's the easiest problem that needs dealing with. I don't even know how to start dealing with the rest of them, though. I don't want to deal with them.

Yet I don't want to be nothing more than a predator and parasite either. I don't want to give into my urge to avoid effort. So regretfully, I turn to head out of the deep forest and start the journey back to camp. It's a long walk back, one that's probably going to take most if not all of the day, but I've never had much of a problem dealing with boredom. At least there's nice scenery to look at. It's… a big upgrade from my cell.

"I'm glad we could come out here together," I say after nearly an hour. "It's been really nice actually talking to you."

Norah extends her chain, wrapping around me and giving me a light squeeze. Even the chain is made from the same vrothizo's bones as the rest of her body, so naturally it's completely jet black.

"The feeling is mutual, partner," she agrees. "I was always happy to listen to you from time to time, but it's been jarring constantly moving between bodies and hibernation. I've definitely got to thank… what's her name? Margarette? I've gotta thank Margarette again for making this for me. Being able to talk is super cool."

"Yeah, Margarette is super cool," I agree. "You, uh, adjusting to being a scythe okay? I imagine it must be weird."

"It's a little weird," Norah confirms, wiggling around a little. "But it's also pretty awesome! I mean, We fought Remus! We kicked his ass! I parried the Sword of Skyhope! And that was back when I was just a dumb farming tool, not this sweet-ass magical custom war scythe that can fly and cut through souls."

I sense her intent to show off a little, so I let go of her handle and watch her zip around through the air using the kineticism spells carved from metal on the inside of her shaft. I smile, soaking in the genuine joy she exudes as she whips through the air, ripping through foliage like it's water. She really does seem to be happy like this, which is surprising enough to be a concern.

"How much of, uh, being okay with all this is the fact that you're a Revenant, do you think?" I ask.

She slows and I catch her out of the air, her chain draping over my shoulders as she settles down.

"...If I'm being honest?" she answers after a while. "Probably most of it. Everything is just… way less stressful than I'd expect it to be. Like… I know intellectually that my mom has thought I'm dead for the past two years. I know that any of my friends would freak the fuck out and probably try to destroy me if they saw me. I know that I would have considered myself an abomination before this. But those things are all just… distant? And I get that's weird but I also can't imagine any way that freaking out about them would make my life better. Things are just… nice like this. I'm content. Especially since I get to keep this body rather than being constantly swapped around into whatever you happen to have nearby."

I wince.

"Sorry about that. I didn't have many opportunities to talk to you in prison, and things have been a bit… crazy."

"Yeah… I get it," Norah sighs. "I can't believe how wrong I was about the Templars. Ugh."

"Well… they didn't kill me at least," I mutter. "You were right about that."

"Might have been funny if they did, though," Norah chuckles. "What could you have done with Cassia the Maelstrom's body?"

"Depends on if I get her talent or not, I guess," I shrug. "I probably don't, though. Not unless I keep someone's soul intact while I possess them somehow, or like… merge their soul with mine? And that all seems like it'd have its own problems."

"I guess that's true," Norah concedes, and the two of us fall back into silence.

We're attacked a few more times over the next couple hours, but not by anything noteworthy. I haven't made a Risen since the start of this trip; I want a dragon or nothing. The problem, of course, is that I don't have any idea what a dragon soul actually looks like. My sensory range is so long that I wouldn't be surprised if I've sensed a bunch of them over the past few days, but I've never gotten close enough to the vast majority of the powerful souls I've detected to actually know what they are. It has been a bit frustrating.

Also frustrating is the increased progression of my still-mutating body. I've been eating a lot more food lately than I had been in prison, both physical and anima. The result seems to be causing me to grow new unwanted bits a lot faster: I now have a second, fully-formed flesh tentacle growing out of the side of my torso, anchored between my waist and ribcage. I've also grown a new eye on one of my biceps and the opposite calf. It's getting seriously excessive.

I hate it. And yet, presumably some part of my magic is doing this to me. Why? Can I direct it? Change it? I suppose even if so, I wouldn't know what to do with the power to grow tentacles and eyeballs. Can I make it stop? I feel like if I could, it would have happened by now. Plus, this is probably the same magic that's making the changes to my body that I actually do like… which is to say, the practical ones that make my bones super sturdy and stuff like that. Despite all my complaining, having a skull that can withstand dragon-slaying explosions is pretty fucking worth all the annoying extra additions.

I remain lost in thoughts like that until I'm suddenly jolted out of it by the sound of a horrifying screech. Which isn't that weird in the deep forest, honestly; horrifying things screech here all the damn time. I recognize this particular screech, though. I've heard it two other times recently, each louder than the last, so I'm probably being followed. I mentally start tagging off the relevant souls nearby, trying to figure out if any actually dangerous ones are currently heading towards me. Sure enough, one is. Well, that's neat.

"Everything okay?" Norah asks, having noticed me stop walking.

"We got some prey serving itself up, is all," I answer nonchalantly. "And not a vrothizo, for once."

"Oh, fun!"

"I'm… not a hundred percent sure it will be," I admit, limbering up my hand by giving Norah a quick spin. "Feels like it might be a Wight."

A weird Wight. Unlike the ones in Skyhope that were made of dozens upon dozens of shards, this one feels more like a bunch of mostly-to-completely intact souls vaguely squashed together like someone left a bunch of caramel candies out too close to a fire. I can actually recognize a good chunk of the souls as belonging to various forest denizens, along with what I'm fairly certain on close inspection are no less than three human souls.

Well, maybe they were human souls. I don't think they are now.

"Yeah, I don't think this is gonna be fun at all," I sigh, lowering myself into a combat stance. "Play serious, Norah."

"Yes ma'am!" she barks, pulling her chain taut and locking her blade into place.

The abominable melted-soul-pile is heading towards us at a pretty rapid clip, but once it gets within half a mile of us it really starts to accelerate, its screech sounding out again and raising higher and higher in pitch as it approaches us at more and more rapid a pace. Just ten seconds later, it's nearly on top of us.

"Five! Four! Three!" I call out, using the same method I alerted my team to approaching monsters as I did when I was a hunter. "Two! One! Zero!"

I'm already jumping out of the way when a thin line of gold rips through a tree to impale the ground where I had just been standing. It's less than half an inch thick but well over twenty yards long, judging by the width of the tree it just stabbed through to reach me. The golden color is strangely familiar, but only when I realize it's liquid do I recognize what it is.

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"Ozoid!" I call out. "It's an animavo—!"

Before I can finish speaking, the thin spear of golden goo suddenly flattens, expanding parallel to the ground in a rapid flash that completely bisects the giant tree from the inside and nearly does the same to my legs. I leap upwards, Norah extending to grab a different tree and pull me upwards moments before it gets sliced through as well.

"I thought Ozoids were supposed to be like… slow-moving scavengers!" Norah squeaks.

"I mean, normally, they are!" I confirm. "This one just bit off a lot more than it could chew. A bunch of times, by the looks of it."

"Doesn't that phrase normally mean you get fucked up? Not that you become super fast and strong?"

"Well," I explain patiently, "we animavores have a slightly different relationship with food than the rest of you."

While Norah and I bicker, the golden cutting plane below us snaps back together, forming a single, rapidly-shifting mass of ooze only slightly larger than a person. It immediately starts to scream, a cacophony of discordant noise created by half a dozen separate sounds working in tandem. Three of those sounds are human voices, shrieking "Save me," "Kill us," and "Die," all at the same time.

"Hey, this thing has nearly as much social aptitude as you do, Vita," Norah snarks, and I glower at her with a few of my eyes that aren't doing anything else. Unfortunately I don't have time to formulate a witty response, because the Ozoid-Wight decides to stop screaming and extend four more ultra-fast spears made from its own body in our direction.

I try to dodge out of the way, but the liquid spears immediately make a sharp turn to follow me, smacking into my greaves and hitting hard enough to knock me silly as they ricochet off of the invincible armor. I manage to turn my flailing tumble into somewhat of a roll as Norah yanks me up a tree again, the spears converging nearby to reform the screaming ooze-mass.

Before I can even finish processing this freakish movement method, the ozoid launches itself at me again. I'm a bit more ready for it this time, though, and track where its soul is stored during the attack, thrusting my tendrils that way in order to intercept. Unfortunately, the moment they permeate the ozoid's body I feel them start to get devoured, and I pull back, yelping in pain. Then I am, of course, slammed in the chest by all four slime-spears, which causes me to fly backwards and slam into a tree.

Then the tree explodes.

Thanks to Norah's talent, my armor is functionally invincible. That is to say, it cannot be bent, broken, scratched, pierced, corroded, or otherwise damaged. Only truly absurd amounts of force—enough to overpower all of Norah's metal-enhanced magical potency by a significant margin and still have enough energy left over to destroy the armor—can break it. But not being broken by extreme forces doesn't mean it's not affected by them; Norah's talent doesn't make my armor weigh any more, and so I'm still fully capable of being flung around by heavy impacts. Which is bad, because I'm inside the armor, and while I'm pretty damn sturdy I'm decidedly not invincible.

I'm not entirely sure what causes the tree to explode when I hit it, but I chalk it up under 'bullshit Wight stuff' while I'm careening head-over-heels through the forest with an angry ooze monster chasing after my uncontrolled trajectory. My body is definitely bruised, if not suffering a bit of internal organ damage, but I figure I'll probably be okay as I crash through a few branches and start to slow my descent. It kinda hurts, but I've fought through worse. Still though, as I slam hard into the forest floor, I have to wonder how I'm actually going to kill this thing.

"You're on offense, Norah," I tell her, crawling to my feet and coughing out a small splash of blood. "I can't yank it."

"Is cutting a liquid even a thing that will help?" she asks.

"Probably not," I admit. "So you're going to aim for the soul. A vroth tooth blade should be able to cut it."

"I can't see souls, though," she points out.

"Yeah," I admit. "That is kind of a problem, huh? Let me swing you when it gets close, but otherwise just… slash at the biggest mass you can find with reckless abandon, I guess?"

"Reckless abandon! Got it!"

Her blade unlocks from the shaft, chain rapidly extending to meet the incoming ozoid head-on. Her twisting body clashes with the rapidly-moving jets of ooze, spinning rapidly to cut them open as they curl around her to reach me. Out of the four thin golden spears of liquid, however, the one with the soul successfully dodges past her blind strikes. I flick Norah's shaft so she returns to me, readying a swing at the incoming mass of fused anima.

Norah's body is, unfortunately, a lot more unwieldy than my own tendrils. I need more practice fighting with her, and I end up missing my target by nearly a foot as it travels past at rapid speed. I'm smacked in the chest by more parts of this thing's body, but rather than knocking me away it wraps around me, pulling its body in and trying to push itself through gaps in my armor. Yeah, fuck that. I start pumping out mana, which gets soaked into the ozoid and reacts somewhat violently with its already-dense mana environment. The monster shrieks, leaping away from me as I try and fail to cut its soul with Norah two more times.

"You sure you can't yank this thing?" Norah asks.

"Not without damaging myself more than I'm willing to," I answer. "But you're right, this isn't going to finish things. All we're really doing is getting you uncomfortably sticky."

"Pfft," Norah snorts for some reason. "Haha, holy shit."

"What?" I ask.

"Watcher's fucking eyes," she laughs. "Never change, Vita."

"What!?"

Before she can respond I feel a snap-collection of mana underneath me, so I shove my tentacles down and break the spell before it can form. The ozoid screams at me again.

"Anyway, why can't you yank it?" Norah asks, still laughing slightly. "Too tough?"

"No, it just… eats me back," I answer. "Best case it'll try to integrate part of me into its own soul, which… huh. Actually, wait, that could work."

I dig my tentacles into my own soul, pulling out a nice, big control shard.

"Let's see if this does the trick," I smirk. "Hey, gooey! Quit wailing ominously and come eat!"

It does so, launching my way yet again. I shove a tendril inside it, which hurts like hell, but I manage to drop my shard near its core before getting flung through the canopy again, though this time I barely manage to land on my feet. The ozoid follows me, magic blooming from behind as it tries to pinball me with explosions again.

"Stop," I order, and the precise attacks dissolve immediately. My shard tries to seize control from the dozen other souls inside the ozoid, and while it's far from a perfect success it certainly causes enough chaos to make the poor creature start having a seizure.

"Hey, it mostly worked!" I announce happily.

"Kill us," the ozoid hisses.

"Can do!" I answer cheerfully, lifting Norah up to start carving chunks of its soul out of its body.

After all, I want to try to save the human souls if I can. Unfortunately, the more I try to carve them apart the more confident I am that at this point they're just one single oddly-shaped soul. I can't find a safe way to break it apart back into the people it used to be. But the longer I take in the attempt, the more my shard gets integrated into that freaky melted soul-mass, and the calmer the ozoid becomes. By the end of my impromptu attempted scythe-based surgery, the poor thing has stopped flailing around in a mixture of fury and agony and is now just humming contentedly in a little ball at my feet.

Shit, he's kind of cute. Now I don't wanna eat him.

"Hey there, buddy," I coo, squatting down next to him. "My gooey buddy. My gooey goober. How are you doing?"

"Kill me," Gooey chirps affectionately, reaching a pseudopod up to squeeze my hand.

"Aww," I murmur, patting the top of his… mass. "Yeah, we're totally keeping him."

"Of course we are," Norah sighs.

I spend a while giving my new friend some extra-sticky pets and scritches, then leave him with orders to stay close enough to hear me but otherwise do whatever he wants. Gooey seems pretty smart, and understands me perfectly. It's probably all the people souls that went into making him, though I don't think he's a person himself? Or I guess it's not a person itself? Gooey isn't technically male or female by any metric, but it just seems weird to call him an 'it.' Eh, whatever. I can think about it on the way home.

I'm pretty sore after all that, but my body doesn't stay hurting for long. It rarely does, these days. No, it comes with other problems instead. A couple hours later, after catching and devouring a number of additional soul snacks along the way, I suddenly double over as an intensely revolting feeling shivers through my body. Eventually it settles on my shoulder, where a horrid itch blooms as new muscles start to twitch to life underneath my skin. A flesh tentacle. I'm already growing another flesh tentacle, and much faster than before. Why? Why is this—agh!

"Vita? Vita! Hey, are you okay?" Norah asks, hovering protectively around me.

"I don't… know," I hiss. "Probably? I just… fffuuuuck!"

This feels so goddamn awful, it's like there's a worm writhing inside my shoulder that keeps growing bigger. What the fuck, body? Why are you… no. Wait. This isn't my body's fault, is it? This is biomancy, so my soul is doing it. I'm doing it. I just need to know how, and maybe I can stop it.

I focus inward, but not all the way to my mana ocean like I usually do. Instead, I walk the threads of anima that spread throughout my entire body, tracing where my mana is going and what I'm doing with it, consciously or otherwise. It moves, flows, and gathers itself to my wounds, to my muscles, and of course to my shoulder, where it twists and flows and changes my flesh into something else, something new. There it is. I just have to reach out and stop it. I feel myself take conscious control of the area, pulling the mana away, but as I do I'm hit with an unexpected dread.

I still hate my shoulder. It's still wrong.

I don't want a flesh tentacle. But… I don't want not a flesh tentacle either. Both manifestations of disgusting meat sicken me equally. The flesh tentacle isn't worse, it's just drawing active attention to a hatred I would otherwise just be ignoring. It's not any more offensive, it's just a deviation from the status quo. And so as I twist my essence to remove it, my soul yearns to answer the question: what should I do instead? What wouldn't I hate? Because the core of my being is so, so desperate to find the answer to that question it's willing to grow fleshy facsimiles of itself in random areas just to hope that they'll somehow be better than the current state.

That, and the fact that I'm rapidly reaching the limit of what my body can handle. My bones can't get tougher, my muscles aren't getting any stronger, but my body is still getting fed so much food and so much power that it doesn't know what else to do with it all. I'm just… not right. My body is like a shoe I've worn since I was six years old, and it's growing eyes everywhere because it needs new holes for the toes to stick out of. I have to change. My current vessel isn't enough. So if not this, my subconscious challenges me, then what? What do I want my body to be? And I don't have an answer to that.

I stand back up, using Norah to cut a small hole in the top of my armor so the newly-growing tendril can poke out without getting squished. What to be. Has that been my problem? Objectively, the thought that I could make my body however I want is extremely fucking cool, but to face it is… overwhelming. I can't think of any shape, human or inhuman, that feels right. It's all still made of meat. That's a fucking food! I want to eat food, not be made of it! But what else is there? If I don't make my body out of food, then my soul becomes food. Misty will gobble me up if I make a body of metal or wood or dirt or stone or… anything else, really.

I seethe in quiet fury the rest of the way back to camp. I'm still thinking about the problem when night falls. The more I think about it, the more issues I have. I don't consider myself human and don't particularly want to be human. Yet the best things in my life are all human, and I don't know if I would have been physically capable of appreciating them without a human brain guiding my soul. All the other masses of mana that surround my ocean don't really feel… I don't know. Alive? Aware? Was I a person before Ars put me in a human baby? If not, will I stop being a person if I abandon my flesh?

I'm so much of a grumpy mess that I refuse to talk to anyone when I finally make it back, instead just ordering Gooey to stay outside of the perimeter so I don't have to explain him and staggering into the first empty tent I find to attempt passing out. Unfortunately, I've still recently ingested huge amounts of anima, and my mind isn't the slightest bit tired. Fucking stupid body, always being dumb and wrong and annoying.

I barely even feel better when I feel Penelope teleport into camp, strutting towards my tent like she owns it. And who am I kidding? She pretty much does. If she wants anything here, I'll let her have it. Sure enough, I can't so much as muster up a glower when she throws the tent flap open.

"Vita," she greets me with a tired smile. "Did you kill that dragon?"

"Nope," I grumble. "Never even found one."

"Ah. Unfortunate," she says. "Well, I need to talk to you about our plans regarding the Inquisition."

"No," I mumble.

"We… what?" she asks, blinking.

"No," I repeat. "Cuddles."

She tilts her head, smirking at me.

"I'm sorry, what was that? I can't quite hear you."

"I am the Queen of the Broken and the Dead!" I declare. "And I demand cuddles!"

"A foreign monarch?" she muses. "Unfortunately, as a First Lady I think I have to declare war on you, now."

"No war," I groan. "Gimmie cuddles. Please."

She sighs dramatically, entering the tent and closing up the flap behind her.

"Well, I suppose if you're bringing your dusty old manners to the conversation, of all things, I've no choice but to give in. How would you like to—oop!"

I yank her towards me with my tentacles before she can make any more mouth-noises, curling myself around her in every way possible. Obligingly, she falls into silence, hugging me tight as we lie on the floor of the tent, my exhaustion and stress slowly leaking away in her arms. This, this right here is something I learned from my human body. The simple joy of touching a person that I love. Whatever it is I become after this, one thing's for sure: I need to be certain that I'll still appreciate this feeling.

Squeezing my tendrils tighter around her, I find myself poking around her butt more than usual. Something weird is going on here. I dance my tendrils down her spine to the endpoint where it should vanish into the pelvis, but… it doesn't. It keeps going. I grab the extra bit of unexpected Penelope and give it a little tug.

"...Are you growing a tail?" I ask her.

"Finished figuring that out, have you?" she murmurs back. "Indeed I am."

"Huh," I mutter. "Like, uh, on purpose?"

"On purpose," she confirms. "I've been planning one for a while."

"Um… could you explain why?" I ask. "Not that I don't like it, I mean. I do. I just… how did you make that decision?"

She hums happily, taking a moment to decide how to answer me as relief floods through me. I forgot. I forget too often, really. But I'm not on the streets anymore, and I'm not stuck in prison either.

I'm not alone. And this is definitely a problem Penelope can help with.