I watched the ve drop from my hand. It gradually slowed as the essence woven around it was expended to consume its momentum.

The naked alma scrambling away missed the ve landing lightly on the rocky cave floor. I used a more costly version of the same weave to drop him into the pit an hour earlier.

The alma man had initially proven a problem for me. Not because of anything he was doing directly. But because the outpost had given him the horse I was still controlling.

I considered going wild and fleeing. But that risked failure and potentially discovery if the recaptured equine was studied too closely.

My effective range of control was limited to a few miles. So I improvised a plan that turned the situation into an opportunity. Albeit one with its own risks.

The man lost his footing and ended up on his hands and knees. That proved disaffintagious against a ve’s agility.

The ve coiled and sprong. It landed on his backside and immediately lashed out.

I watched attentively as the seam across every ve’s head split open. It latched onto the crest of the alma’s crack, where I knew their spines ended in a bone fused to the pelvis.

My presence could see inside his body as easily as I saw the surface. But it did not give satisfactory detail at range.

I instead relied on weavings to show me the filaments unraveling from within the ve. They appeared to less puncture and more shape flesh and bone around them.

Yet I could not identify any mechanism for the effect. Neither animus or essence was involved. It was most similar to how I repaired my body when damaged. A process I could not explain beyond my own experience.

I retreated from the opening. A few of my animated insects remained to watch on my behalf.

The alma male seemed to panic at first. He even tried to remove the ve physically. But he soon calmed in a way I had seen from many gam experiencing an external crisis.

I discovered the cave after Rekon was judged sufficiently healthy to not be constantly accompanied. Hiking the planes and brushlands around the outpost gave a chance to extend my insects’ range and fully explore the terrain.

A rocky hillside proved to contain many small crevices. The one I ended up turning into a crood prison was already hard to climb in or out of when I found it. Breaking a few select spots made it nearly impossible without aid.

The ve had begun moving as a natural limb. As if under the alma’s conscious control. Was it attached to his nervous system?

This was my first test exposing an unrestrained ve to an alma. There had never been a way to do it without risking conflict.

Not to say my current test was without risk. It was just less of an increase in risk. Not when I already had to get the horse away from the outpost’s courier.

My guess was this had never happened before. Ve were not resilient enough to survive long on their own.

The resemblance to the tail of a gam was obvious. It affixed itself in the corresponding place on the alma. And now it was moving in the same manner.

The scale was still vastly off. It was one of the larger ve hatched from the eggs I laid while alma sized.

Part of my reason for storing my unfertilized eggs unbroken was to perform tests on alma when I got the chance. But the size of the eggs had proven to affect the size of the ve.

The ve still looked tiny on the alma man. It might almost reach the back of his knees if pointed straight down. And the girth was less than impressive.

I wanted to watch the experiment first hand. But there was no way to know the full effects or their duration. My only existing data was from my own origins more than half a millenia ago.

My departure was already somewhat abrupt. I had been watching Ginger do her equivalent of work when the groom started equipping the horse.

Ginger was the third formally educated mage in the outpost. I was a little uncertain about her role. She evidently had less status than Saræ or Alve.

She called herself a research student. That appeared to mean she spent all day in her workshop making enchantments with almost no practical purpose and occasionally caused something to explode.

It made Ginger a much more useful person to observe. Alve only worked with kinetic force. Saræ only worked with healing. And both performed the same tasks frequently and did not really have time to talk while working.

Ginger would talk whether or not anyone was visibly present. And she seemed as interested in explaining what she was doing as actually doing it. Which meant very interested in both.

Leaving her workshop only required staying quiet for about a minute. After that she appeared to have forgotten I was there.

I simply walked out and left the outpost by foot. The grasslands and wooded patches around were so tame that I could enter them as an unprotected alma without raising suspicion.

It made me wonder what would have happened if I found my way here in the first century of my life. Would the gam have flourished in the idyllic landscape?

Many might have been saved. But that had not come to pass. And now we had a foothold in the Moors.

A biting fly soaked in beetle vine extraction proved effective in knocking my rider unconscious. The vine was covered in filaments that stuck in the skin and had no greater effect on most creatures.

However it incapacitated insects and small animals that used life animus. The vermin’s unconscious bodies acted as a food source for spear beetles.

The large carnivorous insects would set up territories around beetle vine and kill all the herbivores that might go after the vine. It was an educated guess that a concentration of the toxin would affect alma. And I was pretty relieved it worked without outright killing the man.

He was unconscious for less than an hour. That was still enough to drag him to the pit and take all his equipment. But it meant I would be missing from the outpost for several hours in total.

I hopped from boulder to boulder. A handful of my flies would let me watch the alma. And the many detection patterns woven around the small cave would record what happened inside his body.

My form began to shift when I was a few minutes from my usual hiking path. The organic mask broke apart and was reabsorbed by Rekon’s face.

My generic body regained pigmentation and distinctive blemishes. Soon I was a copy of Rekon again.

The appearance I used to hide my identity was based on a mask Ginger had on her cluttered bookshelf. It was part of a joke she played on one of her teachers back in the capital.

She snuck into his room while he was out. Then she glued herself to the ceiling under some kind of concealing enchantment.

After he went to sleep, she dropped onto his bed wearing the mask and nothing else except black body paint. She also mentioned screaming “Give me your soul, motherfucker!” while falling.

I suspected there was some cultural context to the joke I was missing. But Ginger appeared to think it was quite funny.

She mentioned that the same professor had sent her to the outpost for two years. That implied they must have been on good terms despite Ginger’s sense of humor.

My torso split open briefly and tendrils of flesh spat out my travel pack. I then resolved my internals into a convincing alma.

The cavity I formed to store it was dry and skin lined. So the bag and clothing within was unaffected.

I dressed quickly and returned to the path. All the casting and shapeshifting should have left me dangerously low on essence.

But the first thing I did after capturing the alma courier was send the horse as far away as possible. Then I cut off the false animus sustaining it.

The amount of essence I was using on the horse was substantial. And my regeneration rate was greatly improved by no longer animating a large animal.

I noticed something interesting through my flies. The stark line between the ve and the flesh of the alma was no longer discernible.

Not only was the seam gone to the naked eye. But the gam gray was spreading onto the surrounding green skin like ink dropped into clear water.

The process of me integrating into Gæri The’s body had no such stage. But I had reconstructed their body almost immediately, causing the alterations from their original form in the process.

It was possible the same thing I was observing would have occurred without my conscious intervention. But it was just as possible the conditions were different.

Ve had never shown signs of higher reasoning. My consciousness took over Gæri The’s body. Yet that did not mean the ve’s consciousness was taking over the alma’s body.

The man noticed a few minutes later. That appeared to trigger another session of high activity. It was enough to make me worry about how well I removed the escape routes.

It was already nearly impossible for me to get from the bottom to the entrance without expending essence. But a trapped sapient would eventually find nearly any way out. Even one nigh on impossible.

There was something else happening with the ve. It was very gradual. But over the last half hour the ve had grown at a slowly increasing rate.

It looked like the tail of a gam by the time he finally gave up. It was actually larger, being proportionate to the alma’s size.

The alma eventually caught onto this fact. He spent some time examining the end. I did not miss the distinctive reproductive slit that formed there.

Ve had no such structure. It supported the idea that the ve was truly becoming a tail for the alma it attached to.

The outpost came into view as I crested a small rise. It was hard to draw a clear line where the settlement began and ended.

The core building was a squat fortress of stone. But it was obscured from close up by numerous less imposing barns, sheds, warehouses and even tents towards the outermost edge.

The refugees from Rekon’s failed expedition bloated out one side of the collection with a small tent city. It reminded me of a flesh barnicle burrowed into the side of a powerful beast without the flexibility to dislodge the parasite.

The outpost’s manager gave me the impression he saw our temporary camp in a similar way. I appreciated his politeness to our faces. But it was obvious we were not meant to be his responsibility.

That alma worried me. If he was an alma at all. There was something strange about his soul I had not seen in any other alma.

It appeared to have two layers. One was a sort of shell. Saying it was outside of the inner layer was strictly inaccurate.

Animus constructs do not really obey physical dimensions within their own structure, even if they occupy fixed points in space. Both animus and essence can move in directions nonexistent for physical materials.

But the outer layer felt like it occupied the places on his soul directly exposed to the outside world. My guess was whatever alma spells interacted with the soul would contact that layer.

The inner layer was much larger and vastly more complex. It was the single most complicated soul I had ever seen.

I only understood a fraction of how souls worked. The rough functions of many organelles were easy to figure out and certain things were even simple in practice.

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

But large regions were completely incomprehensible. And even the parts I understand were made possible by much smaller and more intricate parts I did not.

That did not prevent me from recognizing when a soul was more or less elaborate than another. The pure volume and density of his channels was several orders of magnitude greater than any other alma I had seen.

And that was nothing to the vast amount of animus he contained. It was several times larger than every other alma in the outpost put together.

That was in sharp contrast to the outer layer. Only a tiny trickle of animus traveled through the few junction points to the shell.

It contained more animus than the average alma I had seen. But still less than any of the mages.

I was pretty sure the shell was some sort of disguise. It had things reminiscent of nonfunctioning versions of the organelle normal in an alma soul.

The fact that those organelle did nothing was obvious to me. But I was using my presence to see the entire soul at once.

I had no alma spell for seeing souls. My best bet would be trying to take apart the magic diagnostic spell I learned to let it target animus in a soul. That was still clearly beyond my ability.

The courier drew my attention when he began sweating profusely. Gam do not sweat in response to temperature. We are essentially immune to temperature not sufficient to burn or freeze our flesh.

It was interesting that the alma was sweating so heavily. And I was even more interested when he started melting.

Melting might have been an exaggeration. His body was secreting a creamy gray mucus that quickly covered the gray skin entirely.

He fidgeted on the cave floor. It seemed like he was in some level of distress. But the obscuring slime made it hard to gauge facial expressions.

The mucus was left in trails on the stone with every movement. And I would swear the frame underneath was shifting. I was looking forward to studying the recorded data back at the cave.

Entering the outpost was not especially eventful. I nodded or waved to a few people as appropriate for our level of familiarity.

I only stopped once to check in socially with an alma woman who acted as a guard on Rekon’s expedition. She had stopped limping over a week ago.

But it was good to know the lingering ache was no longer keeping her up. Sleep seemed very important for alma. For me it was just very dull to fake.

I slipped into the small stone building that served as Ginger’s workshop. Heavy protective trousers and metal reinforced boots were sticking out from under the second largest table.

The table itself had been subsumed by a tangle of tubes leading in and out of several apparatus on and under it. Fluids moved through many. But a few appeared filled with powders or only air.

I returned to the same chair I was in four hours ago. The woven grasses that composed the seat and back were beginning to come apart, letting me sink more than was intended.

“Just a tad more red mercury. Need to make that stress response sing.” The commentary came from under the table. It had likely continued through my entire absence.

“Does the red mercury actually damage it? Or are you tricking the seed?” I recalled what the device was for when I left. It was reasonably likely it still had the same purpose.

“In nature, fuck yeah. Drake bones are full of the crap. And anything more than a faint trace kills all the vegetation. That’s how they find drake skeletons.” There was no acknowledgement of my absence or return.

“Are you keeping the dose down?” The adjustments to the air and water entering a glass grow chamber at the thicket’s core had been under refinement since I arrived near dawn.

“No. I’m adding lots. But Ginger-48523J is going to inertly bond to the receptors that trigger apoptosis when the red stuff bonds.” I assumed she was referring to some custom enzyme or similar substance she made to fix this problem.

It was a little unclear if a mage officially named anything new they made. But every time Ginger created something distinctive enough to not have a name, she would use her own name and a continually increasing number to refer to it.

I inferred the number was how many things she had named. And the letter was how many prototypes there had been.

It was also unclear how legitimate all of the creations were. I once heard her refer to porridge made with mead in place of water as Ginger-1647f.

“We can’t add too much, or Ginger-48523J won’t be effective.” She probably meant the enzyme could not bond to a high enough percentage of cells to counter an abundance of red mercury. But no clarification was provided.

I leaned back on the fraying chair. Moving my presence and detection spell through Ginger’s project was helpful in catching up on her progress.

My mind's eye also kept tabs on the slimy alma I was holding captive. His movement had calmed. He was now focused on removing the viscous covering obscuring his body.

I was increasingly uncertain alma was the most accurate term. The bulky stature of an alma male had significantly slimmed. His chest and shoulders were narrower, and his hips looked to be the widest part of his body.

His eyes were obviously the solid black of a gam before he even began removing the layer of goo. I became even more certain once he did.

The more angular bone structure and obviously non-alma musculature was externally identical to a gam. The complete lack of hair was interesting. But it was possible that would regrow naturally.

The pseudo-gam spent the most time examining the entrance and surrounding anatomy between his legs. Doing so exhibited a level of flexibility I had not seen from alma so far. However it was normal for my descendants.

“Flip that switch.” Ginger’s demand drew more of my attention to the workshop.

I hopped up and found the indicated switch. She only came out part way to point. Her face was still under the table. A massive poof of scarlet hair prevented me from seeing anything past her.

The device hissed as gasses released into the glass chamber. The sandy soil darkened with a cocktail of fluids. And in the middle a tiny seed received an influx of growth magic.

I watched the seed soak up the fluids and break open. A tap root went down. And soon after a sprout went up.

The cotyledons unfurled and were quickly replaced by true leaves as the sprout rushed to maturity. A blossom formed and unfolded.

The resulting flower was a deep navy with vibrant red speckles at the base of its petals and stamen a clashing yellow. Ginger popped up to inspect it as soon as the blooming began.

I watched as intricate analytical spells moved through the flower. A massive smile spread across the orange skinned alma’s face a moment later.

“Full hermaphroditism.” She whispered with a strangled manic glee. “It might even self-fertilize.”

I was more interested in the magic being used to understand the flower. But that did not reduce my interest in the flower itself.

“You said alpine lotus was very hard to breed?” I knew relatively little about the alpine lotus. It was a rare plant with valuable properties.

“They are terrible at it. The females are only fertile once a year, usually in winter. And the males produce pollen after a heavy rain following a warm drought.” My grasp of seasonal patterns outside the Moors was shaky and abstract. But those situations sounded unlikely to coincide.

“And this one will not have that problem?” Her fingers danced as magic moved through the lone flower.

“No. It should bloom again after going to seed. As long as we feed it. No need to heed nature or any god but I! The perfect organism…” Ginger began giggling.

Then she threw her head and shoulders back and started laughing maniacally. It was not the first time a success had been celebrated like that.

I was watching something odd from my own experiment. The courier seemed distressed in a way I recognized.

He found his way to the low end of the cave and squatted. The body language as he lay the first egg was typical of an adolescent’s first time laying.

The entire thing was odd. Any gam at sexual maturity could lay voluntarily. But not every adolescent realized that before having it explained.

Some did not figure it out or become fertilized by themselves or another for more than a month after their body was ready. The result was the same undeniable need to lay that always followed a month of abstinence.

The abruptness and urgency of his laying looked more like the need to lay than realization of how to do so. But there was no way to know from visual observation alone.

This did confirm that a ve attaching itself to an alma would create something very similar to a gam. Only his height separated the courier visually from an average gam.

I could not confirm many of the biological differences yet. But the range of motion and laying of a proportionate and otherwise typical egg was good evidence.

It would be foolish to extrapolate or assume too much. I could not say whether this outcome was universal for alma or applied to other species. It was also uncertain if the changes had ended.

He might change further or be unstable and die. And the mental effects were hard to confirm.

I had taken Gæri The’s body. That was complicated by Gæri The leaving their body shortly afterwards. But it was possible the ve was somehow in control of the gam I was watching lay his third egg.

The close to immediate laying was a possible deviation. He might have just noticed the capacity very quickly.

I was skeptical. He seemed blindsided by it. The whole thing looked like a sudden and unexpected need.

That implied an alma turned into a gam by a ve would not just be fertile. They would have an egg that already needed to be lain immediately. At least that was a possible explanation.

The fact he was laying his eighth egg as Ginger finally ran out of breath was not inherently strange. It was definitely less strange than the amount of time Ginger could laugh for.

Adolescents often laid a lot directly after learning how. Not to say adults did not do the same thing from time to time.

Unfertilized eggs solved themselves in the Moors. Either something ate the eggs or something ate the ve that hatched from them. The only problem with spending a few hours laying a couple hundred was making sure you did so out of the way.

It was still possible that the continued laying was not simply recreational. Relieving stress made sense in the situation. But he had not paused. Maybe he could not?

Ginger finished messing with the flower’s support system. She sat herself on a crate serving as a bench and began working on a mess of metal and wax located in a different section of the table.

I took the opportunity to make porridge with the bag of grains and enchanted kettle that lived on the bookshelf. The bowls all being self cleaning was the only reason Ginger had any usable dishware.

I still needed to collect bowls and spoons from the floor. Adding dried berries made the slurry taste like anything worthwhile to the alma tongue.

One bowl I set by Ginger’s elbow. The other I started eating myself.

Eating was one of my least favorite parts of passing as an alma. The food was fine with alma senses. Most even tasted good, if still not as good as fresh flesh or blood.

But the need to digest it and excrete the remains at least once a day was tedious. That was nothing to the constant intake and voiding of fluids an alma body required to maintain chemical balance.

I could have stopped performing all those processes without negative effects. But that would have given my non-alma nature away to magical diagnostics.

Ginger needed to perform all of them. But she seemed worse than me at doing so. Putting food in her line of sight was one of the few ways to prevent her from randomly passing out from malnutrition.

I was interested to see if the courier would need food or water. He was still laying. And the volume of eggs confirmed his body could create material without consuming its own. That supported the idea he would not need outside resources anymore.

I was uncertain if I should still be using masculine language to refer to him. The way alma incorporated a subject’s sex into their language was tied into their culture in a way I did not entirely understand.

All verbs and adjectives in their language had a prefix attatch marking the person performing the verb or that the adjective was describing as female or male. The same was true for titles and jobs like boss or mage.

When the subject lacked a sex or had an unknown sex, the prefix was left off. That was always the case for referring to objects.

It was relatively easy to understand once you spoke the language for a bit. But leaving off the prefix to mark sex when talking to or about an alma seemed to offend them.

Some alma referred to gam with feminine language. My guess was that our stronger resemblance to alma females than males caused that. But most traders simply left off the sex markers.

I had never been able to determine if that was a strange insult that failed to cross the cultural differences. No gam I had met cared one way or another.

It felt like unnecessary information to encode in nearly every sentence. But the alma said the same thing about the gam use of animacy in our language.

The alma had no animacy markers. But gam used a completely different set of articles to refer to things the speaker considered to have a conscious will.

A tree or rock would usually lack animacy. A tree that could move and defend itself or a crustacean disguised as a rock could react actively and had animacy.

That was natural when you hatched speaking the language. But every alma trader who tried to learn our language found it aggravating.

The artificial gam finally paused. That only lasted long enough to move away from the pile that collected under them.

They found a spot to sit on the stone slightly above. The laying resumed a moment later. That at least showed they physically could stop.

I had to assume it was a recreational clutch. Was the instinct somehow harder to control for them?

Laying even unfertilized eggs was certainly still pleasurable. But most gam would prioritize any immediate concerns over indulging our baser instincts.

A large clutch was the sort of thing you did with time to kill or a need to clear your mind. It could be meditative.

The systematic pattern of your body and innate sense of purpose provided a clean break from runaway thoughts. Afterwards you could organize things more clearly and reassess.

Maybe it was as simple as a panic response. They were trapped. And their body had undergone significant changes without knowledge of what those changes meant.

They might be trying to escape the situation by retreating into physical pleasure. That was still an unusual reaction. At least with this immediacy and duration.

I wished there were more alma I could test without the disappearance bringing on greater risk. It was impossible to know if this behavior was an individual response or innate to the process.

More ve hatched under my tent every day. But I lacked both discrete test subjects and more places to effectively contain them.

I would need to direct my inquisitiveness towards the culture and magic of the alma. For now.