Doom and gloom. A spiral of inevitable decay. A fall from grace. A degradation of humanity from one generation to the next, that sons and daughters will inevitably be lesser than their fathers and mothers. The end times are a comin', the apocalypse draws near! The end is nigh! Repent of your sins, o wayward sheep, and follow me, your shepherd to salvation and enlightenment! Look upon me as I spread my arms wide, simultaneously inviting embrace and deifying myself by taking a pose associated with a god made flesh.
Fill my pockets, ye lost lambs, for in these darkest of days, in these end times there shall soon be no need for worldly goods of the coarsest nature. Armageddon draws near, and as the human race begins its inevitable circling of the drain, money, gold, silver, and jewels will serve you no good.
Coins will not fill your bellies with sustenance and you will be hard pressed to drink dollar bills and stock certificates. I am the way, the truth, and the light. Surrender your worldly goods to a greater good, ascend to a grander glory, and embrace your drawing demise. The darkest days of the world are ahead, days wherein the survivors will be the unfortunate souls and the dead will be envied for their places of rest. Free of pain, free of strife, free of sickness, and free of disease.
Believe in me, follow me, heed my words and I will lead you to salvation. I will lead you to a bigger, better tomorrow. A tomorrow that looks suspiciously like yesterday. A world of wonder and grace that our forefathers had created and that their children and children's children ruined with their wickedness.
Turn away from the present and embrace the past. Reject the false god of change and adaptation. Salvation lies not in turning the eye towards the light of a hopeful future, but instead looking over the shoulder towards the past looked upon through rose colored glasses.
Oh Brandon.
Brandon.
Brandon.
Brandon.
It warms the depths of my black, icy heart to hear you wheel out words like that. To dig up the old foibles and follies of discarded relics, of living fossils that cling to outdated notions, to ideals of a past that never existed, to misunderstandings, exaggerations, distortions, and lies about what once used to be.
Brandon Vow and his gospel are not unique. They very closely mimic the religious trappings that he rallies against, that he rejects and demeans, that he attacks and assaults. The more alike two things are, the darker and more violent the battle between them grows. The bitterest wars are fought over the slimmest of stakes.
And so it is that Brandon Vow stands hand in hand with the ministries of people like Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, and the deranged spawn of Fred Phelps and Westboro Baptist Church.
Oh their words are often different, but at the dark, hateful heart of each and every one of them lurks a false premise. Each ministry is built on a foundation of original sin, that in the beginning there was the big, wonderful, perfect creation. And then mankind mucked it up. That the divinity made something grand and beautiful and that Adam and Eve took a big steamy dump all over it and shattered God's perfect design.
You hear it from people who think the world is six thousand years old, because some bishop way back when added up some numbers from the most mind-numbingly boring bits of the world's most popular holy book. That God made the world in a perfect state where entropy didn't exist, where T-rexes ate watermelons, where nothing ate meat, where there was no disease, where men lived forever.
And then one little bitty piece of fruit fucked everything over for all time.
Nibbling on a peach brought death into the world. Noshing on a plum turned the teeth of carnivores sharp and gave them claws and a hunger for blood. Taking a big, wet bite out of a pear dragged decay into the otherwise perfect, unchanging Eden of the divine creation. A bite of the Fruit of Knowledge damned mankind.
As so for the better part of a few thousand years people like Brandon Vow, Ken Ham, and Kent Hovind have decided to instead embrace ignorance. To deny reality. To dumb down each and every question about the wonders of cosmic creation to the answer of "God did it," realizing fully that that is NOT an answer. That is a full stop. That is a deflection. That is a barricade to curiosity and inquiry telling the questioner to go no farther. To stop the train of knowledge here, thanks, we're getting off; we don't need to go any further!
And do you know what the funny thing is, this shunning of knowledge, embracing of ignorance, and condemnation of social and scientific progress isn't old. This is a new movement, brought about by shouting on pulpits from positions of power crafted by the new and the novel.
The only reason that the past looks so bold and bright compared to the present and the future is that it's a known quantity. We can dig through the years gone by and sift through the sands of time to find the shining gems and ignore all the cat shit.
Every generation talks shit about the ones that come after and hold themselves at the height of human society. It used to be that Jazz and Swing were the Devil's own music. Then it was Rock 'n Roll. Then heavy metal. Then rap music. Then whatever genre is the next one to come riding the log flume of the Billboard Top 40 charts embraced by today's youth, becoming a niche genre fondly enjoyed by the adults of tomorrow who decry their offspring's musical choices. Just as their parents did, and their parents before them, and their parents before them.
In the last hundred or so years mankind has gone from gliding a scant 120 feet of powered flight to setting foot on the moon. From the average human lifespan has gone from 31 for the average of the whole world, to 67, to countries sporting modern technology reaching an average of 80.
We live in a world where children can be reasonably expected to grow into adulthood. You don't have to look very far back to find the horrors of childhood disease. Take a look in your family trees back to the age of your grandparents and your great grandparents. See how many of their siblings made it to adulthood. See how many didn't. See the heartbreak of your grandpa sharing his name with two older brothers that never had a birthday.
And yet for all this wonder, all these modern medical miracles so many people seem so keen on throwing it all away. Of embracing ideologies of so-called "medical" practices that a spellcasting blue dragoness thinks are patently ridiculous. Of refusing to provide a safety net for your fellow men and women. For the cost of a few large pizzas, a week without trendy coffee, a scant few hours worth of overtime pay every month no one would be without medical care ever again in the United States.
And do you know why this is, Brandon? Why the home of the bald eagle, baseball, and apple pie refuses to join the rest of the modern world? Belief. Belief in a glorious shining past and a fall from grace. A remembrance of the supposedly glorious 1950's, the stability of the nuclear family, Coca Cola costing a nickel, and the looming specter of Communist Russia on the horizon painted as the devil incarnate.
America spent fives decades painting their rival national as the ultimate evil, decrying everything that they stood for. And it is because of the ghost of the long-vanquished Lenin and Stalin that we will let people die because they don't have the bucks. To go into crippling debt for daring to get sick.
But in the bygone age of the lost eden of Leave it to Beaver, those five cent Cokes were six and a half ounces. Those five cents are the equivalent of forty. A can of pop these days usually runs twelve ounces, and you can get a 20 ounce bottle from any given gas station for a buck and a quarter. Hell, if you want to really splurge on soda, have another quarter, and don't mind something that won't fit your cup holder you can snag yourself a nice hefty 2 liter, clocking in an an astonishing ELEVEN TIMES the sweet ambrosia as those nickel bottles of the bygone era, for about one third of the converted price per ounce.
You know how much I paid for the store brand fizzy drinks in my fridge? Seventy five cents for 2 liters.
Think about that for a second. I'm paying one sixth the amount per ounce that people reminisce and daydream about, that shake their canes, hike their britches up to their navels, and cackle "Back in my day!" at the grandkids about.
Oh Brandon talks such a good game about how he wants the youth to rise up, to embrace him, to follow his words, to cling to his chosen ideology, to walk behind him on his chosen path. But the trail he's professing to blaze isn't a new one, it's the oldest path that mankind has ever walked upon.
Faith.
Believe in me, believe in my words, believe in the divine revelation that I speak to you. Faith is fiction. Faith is unreality. Faith is taking the words that someone says and letting them into your heart before running them past your brain.
Faith, by definition, cannot be real. If there was proof behind it, it wouldn't be faith, now would it? Trust in me says the prophet, the shaman, the reverend, the liar, the thief, and the con man all.
Do not trust the man that demands your faith, who operates through coercion, through manipulation, and through exploitation.
Me? I never wanted anybody's trust, anyone's loyalty, anyone's obedience. All I've wanted to do since the beginning was to entertain people, all I wanted was to make people happy. To fill people with wonder and awe at the sight of me. I'm unique; power and grace wrapped up in the same cerulean package.
I tower over 99.999% of humanity. I'm the strongest wrestler in the whole of ULW, the tallest, and the heaviest. And yet despite my size I also display an agility unlike any other. My draconic nature gives me a mastery of my body and my movements that is unparalleled. If something is capable of being traversed by a trained human being, I can move across it at the speed of at least a walk, if not a run.
I can run across ring ropes, I can balance on ring barricades, I can move across the side of a cage faster than the rest of ULW can jog.
I don't break. I don't wear down. I don't wear out. I can not only take take hits that would literally kill anybody else, but I can keep going after taking them.
If I looked like Priest or Brandon Vow, or Jason King no one would have a problem with me. I would be heralded as the greatest rookie sensation in professional wrestling. A powerful, agile, durable Jack of All Stats that with even the densest human being on the planet ought to see could blossom into a Master of All.
I can brawl, I can fly through the air, I can lock on submissions, I can literally throw my opposition across the ring. The only thing I'm lacking in is time and experience, and I'm slowly accruing that.
Despite having every conceivable obstacle thrown in my way during my one year's worth of in-ring career, I've managed to acquire two World title matches, both of which required interference to prevent me from winning. Matches that I didn't lose. I've been pinned a few times, but I've never been beaten. Truly beaten.
You think you're so amazing for having a perfectly spotless singles match record? Guess what? Up until your cheating ass threw your feet up on the ropes so did I. Let's tick off my six non-wins, shall we? Interference leading to a pin by Clay Colton during the one night tournament, taking place in a battle royal. Not a singles match, not a clean loss.
Pinned Willow Wilkes after a referee decided to basically dive right behind me. Someone else's incompetence prevented me from becoming World Champion. But even with interference, Willow Wilkes couldn't pin me and get the job done and the match went to a draw.
She didn't even manage to lay a debilitating beat down on me in the three way ladder match for the World title. Jason King had to be there to divide my attention and on top of that Dante needed to interfere in order for her to scamper up the ladder and grab the title.
A match that she needed weeks to recover from, while I was out there the next show wrestling.
It took three people for New Eden to finally get a pin on me, Adam and Willow in the ring, and der Vaart outside of it preventing any and every potential partner that was willing to replace Silencer to be added to the match.
They tried to end my career after, and two weeks later I put an end to Adam.
Then you waltzed into the ring, threw your little tootsies up on the ropes and decided that despite me being completely capable of ripping your arm out of the socket and beating you to death with it earned you the title of "dragonslayer."
You didn't slay me, Shitbeard, you got lucky and you managed to sneak out a victory while I had a hell of a lot more to show you in the ways of brawling and brutality.
And this past show? I was looking for SOMEONE to butt in where they weren't wanted, because let's face it, three fourths of my matches have some cum-guzzling ex-prom queen, horse fucker with bad teeth and a gimp mask, or a mental disorder and a future as a Bride of Dracula putting their snoots where they don't belong.
It was a three way match, and I was one second too late to stop a pin.
I've had two and a half times as many matches as you have, Vow. And the only singles match loss I've ever had was a fluke, just you getting lucky that the referee didn't see your blatant cheating.
If you'd had to deal with the shit that I've had to deal with, Vow, your record would be a hell of a lot worse than mine.
What hardships have you had to deal with in ULW, hmm? How hard have you had to struggle to actually get a fucking match on every show? How many autograph signings have YOU been banned from appearing at? How many times have you been called a freak? How many times have you been compared to an animal?
Tell me, Vow, how many people have told you that you belong in a motherfucking zoo? TELL ME! Tell me what you've had to suffer through in ULW. "Ooooh, people have booed me, they're not taking my message seriously! They think I'm a creepy cult leader who sodomizes choir boys with Priest and spends the weekends with Camereon MacNichol in our special not washing our Hair Club for Men!"
Show me on the doll, Vow. Show me where der Vaart's touched you. Point to the color swatch that matches the most red or purple that his face has gone while chewing your ass out for whatever imagined slights that have been performed.
Where's the never ending horde of corporate goons, demonic possessed glamour models, and bitter assassins hired to stop YOUR career dead in its tracks, hmm? Where are they, Vow? Where are the hardships, the struggles, the conspiracies, and the red tape that YOU'VE had to put up with?
How much loathing and hate have you had to put up with because of the color of your skin? How many insults and racial slurs have you had to endure because of your differences? How many times have you been called unmarketable because you don't conform to certain standards of physical attractiveness?
So go on and tell me, white boy, how much you've suffered for your art. Explain to me the challenges you've faced in professional wrestling just for being you and how I'm the inferior being for being able to two thirds of my matches despite all this bullshit.
I'm sick of it. I'm sick of being treated like a third class citizen. I'm sick of being told that I'm a freak. I'm sick of being told that I belong in the circus. I'm sick and tired of being punished for doing things that other people are rewarded for.
You think you're better than me because you've left a few bodies broken and battered in your wake? So what? I've got two of 'em, and they happened without me even trying. I impaled some fucker for interfering in one of my matches, and I fucking ended Adam's career with a sick as all fucking hell Brainbuster that looked totally awesome that no one else could even DREAM of pulling off!
And this happened AFTER New Eden tried to end my fucking career, could very well have ended it if I wasn't the indestructible towering mountain of badassery that I am. What would happen to you if you had YOUR head sandwiched between unforgiving steel and a chair swung high velocity, Vow?
You'd be drinking broth through a fucking straw, communicating through eye movements while your jaw is wired shut, and needing the symptom of Mya Denton's mental defect to wipe your fucking ass for you.
I see nothing that I've done thus far that makes me any different from any other professional wrestler. I've attacked people that have interfered in my matches. I've retaliated against co-workers who have taken extracurricular liberties with attacks beyond the scope of what is required to perform our in-ring duties. And I feel that so far I have been almost saint-like in my tolerance for people telling me that I don't belong.
I am a powerhouse that is capable of flipping cars on her own that whose grip on sanity can and has been called into question repeatedly. I am an anti-authority misanthrope that feels nothing but disgust and loathing for a large majority of her co-workers and her bosses in the company. I am quick to anger, hold grudges so strongly that they have a tendency to explode messily, and have predilection to solve my problems through applications of intense physical violence.
Tell me again how I don't belong, Vow. Tell me about how I'm a freak show. Tell me how I'm a tired gimmick, nothing more than a spectacle. Go ahead, say it again. Say it, sing it, shout it to the motherfucking heavens.
Say it again, Vow. Go into detail, give us some fucking depth to it, hmm? Tell me, Vow. Tell us. Tell the world. Explain to them how one of the most versatile performers in all of professional wrestling is wearing out her welcome amongst the people that matter.
Go ahead, Vow. I'll sit right here while you pontificate to the fanbase that they don't in fact enjoy the novelty of an absolutely massive wrestler who is strong, agile, graceful, funny, and creative.
Because I want to see this.
I want to see how you can peddle that crap to the crowd with a straight face, and then go on to say that you've never lied. About how they ought to trust you over their lying eyes.
I want to hear your sermon about how the fans don't really love what I want to give them. I want to see how you try to manipulate them into believing that they don't want to see solid, good quality, decisive wrestling matches performed by men and women who love the art form of professional wrestling.
Because that's what I am, Vow. That's what I represent.
I am everything that pro wrestling fans want to see. I am what millions upon millions of people will pay money to go and see in person. I am the best rookie wrestler that ULW has ever seen. I've gone from a complete unknown to the driving force behind the most watched portion of television that this company has EVER had.
And you, Vow?
You're not a savior.
You're not the leader of a revolution.
You're the Barabas to my Jesus, a so-called savior whose message is full of hate and violence. But unlike that particular savior, I'm not going to be sacrificed for the sins of the world. I am not going to be a martyr for my message, even if a coalition of bitter, hateful fossils whose time has since passed decide to conspire against me and persecute me for what I am.
You've seen what I did to Mr. Joshua, so you know that around here I'm the one who spikes people to large, immovable objects.
I am not a hero. I am not a savior.
I do not want your faith. I do not want your blind devotion. I do not want to lead those in ULW to a promised land, if only they would follow my words.
I want to cut out the rotten heart at the center of this federation.
I want to improve the quality of life in ULW for everyone, from the title holders, to the folks hovering just out of reach of the main event, to the assholes eating Jackson Adams' special mushroom blend pizza out in the parking lot before the shows and wrestle the shittiest of shitty matches.
The pawns of the Shadow Cartel are already screaming about how monstrous I am, and now you're adding your voice to the chorus. I thought you were different. I thought that despite our differences that we might have something in common.
But no. You're no different than Raymond, than Cassandra, than Lenore, or Angel. You look at me and you see something different than you. Something wondrous, something magical. I am something that no one from this world could ever be, and you all loathe me for it.
You all want to drag me down to your level, make me just like you. Hateful, hurtful, bitter assholes interested solely in promoting themselves and their special inner circles. I stand head and shoulders over every one of you, not just literally, but figuratively in my potential as well.
I'm the third ranked wrestler in the League of Superstars my first year in the business. Everyone here has more in-ring experience than I do. Hell, Willow Wilkes was unbeaten or something for supposedly years. And yet she's never been able to beat me in a one on one situation.
If I stick with this, if you people don't crush my love of the sport and drive me out of this industry, in a few years I'm going to be an unholy fucking terror in the ring. I know it, and you know it. And that's why you're pulling all this crap to try and break my spirit, to try and drag me down into the festering shitheap with the rest of you.
I am a dragon and dragons fly over the heads of mortal man. We fly higher even than crows, who are little morsels of meat and feathers that are so tiny they are not even worth consideration.
You haven't slain me, Brendon Vow. You've done nothing of the sort.
I am not like you no matter how much you tell yourself that I am.
I do not bleed. My bones do not break. My muscles do not tear.
The worst you and yours have been able to accomplish in the span of one year is to give me a bit of severe sunburn and severely piss me off.
You don't dream of soaring with the angels, Brendon Vow, you dream of snagging them by the ankles, dragging them down to the ground, and ripping off their wings for daring to have been born better than you could ever dream to be.
You may succeed in dragging me down to the ground, Vow. ULW may yet rip off my wings.
But you won't have succeeded in raising yourselves up, and I will never be satisfied with the ground when I can have the sky and the sun and the stars.
I will fly again, without wings. Even if I have to hop upon a broomstick to do it.
And you, Brendon Vow?
But trust me, you'll be the first to hear my witch's cackle, and the first to suffer my curse.
But guess what?
Dragons don't have to stay in the skies. We can drop down to the ground any time we damned well please. Especially if there's something irritating to set on fire.
The loudest voices in ULW already see fit to call me a monster, Vow, and you profess the desire to see the one that dwells within me.
Just remember that you asked for this. That is this what you wanted.
You all want a monster?
Then let me show you just how monstrous I can be.
After months of being a bodiless specter, one would think that having flesh and bone again would be welcoming, that it would be like a homecoming, that it would be like slipping back into a perfectly tailored outfit and having it fit you like a second skin.
One would be wrong. In order to have something fit like a second skin, you'd have to have a first skin, and unfortunately mine had sloughed off in a few places.
My name is Claudia, and I am the poster child for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I used to be a psychologist and got paid to diagnose what I thought was an insane professional wrestler as a certified nutjob. I mean what else would you think when you hear about a seven foot tall behemoth of a human being that thinks she's a fire-breathing dragoness from another world?
Unfortunately for me not only was she actually a fire-breathing dragoness from another world, but she was being targeted by demonic forces. She kind of hacked me out of the memory of the entire frickin' world and I decided that despite my attempt to brain her with a barbell and that not working that shooting her might actually have some effect.
Spoilers: it didn't, and I just so happened to coincide my impotent threatening of a pissy, decidedly bulletproof dragoness with an assault by an abyssal SWAT team that wanted to do naughty things to Kalinda to get in the good graces of some dark sorcerer or uber-demon or something.
So only recently having found out that not only are extra-dimensional dragonesses real, magic scythes that remove you from history, and bigfeet a total hoax made to sell tabloids and "History Channel" specials, but demonic possession is totally a thing and there's a magic fungus thing which is where zombies come from.
It's called Abyssal Rot and it basically makes everything break down and decay to a state of bare functionality. It makes most people shambling, moaning, screaming, constantly pained walking near-corpses. But I was spared that pain when said otherwordly she-drake used her spooky magic necromancer powers from a smug gauntlet with sights set on evil overlord-dom to yank my soul from my body so that I wouldn't have to live with the agony of having my everything rot around me.
Well, up until I had to hop back in the driver's seat of my husk-like meat suit in order to have the potential cure for the thing properly work. Existance as a spirit without a body isn't a whole lot of fun. I mean it wasn't terrible, there were bits that were kind of relaxing, but also rather scary.
Without being tied down to a body, for example, you don't have a wake/sleep cycle, but your mind still needs to rest. You also don't have any limiters or signs to tell you about your fatigue. You just all of a sudden stop functioning in the real world and hop right in to full-on dream state at a moment's notice. It really fucks with your perception of reality.
It's also hell on your emotions, or lack thereof. Without a body to provide hormones and glandular secretions and whatnot it's very difficult to actually maintain an emotion. You have to actually think about being angry or happy or sad or much of anything.
And even when you're awake, without anything to drive you like hunger or thirst or needing to go to the bathroom there are times where you can just sit, space out, and basically stop existing. You're still there, you're just not thinking of anything, about anything, or plotting anything. You're just there and your mind is a complete blank and you don't realize you're doing it until something pops up that nudges you into thinking about something.
I lost a whole week to that. I've been told that it's normal for living, yet bodiless spirits. Eventually they end up doing it for years and then when their body finally dies and they pass on there isn't much of a soul left. It's all drifted away into nothingness.
Proper ghosts require an insanely intense emotional experience related to their death in order to maintain long term cohesion in the ethereal plane. Like the intense, screaming agony that I felt upon being forcibly yanked back into my body.
No one was quite sure how exactly the cure was supposed to work. What Kalinda had done was repurpose a draconic ritual for infusing mundane creatures (like humans) with draconic blood, transforming them into a partially draconic being with traits inherited from the blood provider, who would become their lord and master.
While I wasn't feeling particularly thrilled towards the prospect of living out Fifty Shades of Blue, a live of potential servitude as a monstrous draconic abomination sure sounded better than having a mind blanker than the resume of the holder of as Liberal Arts degree and eventually floating off into eternity with less personality than Ben Stein.
Neither Kal, the skull gauntlet known as the Hand of Arimus, or the creepy, slithery hydra-goddess that we both somehow managed to get tricked into devoting ourselves to were sure exactly how to properly trigger the ritual. If a simple anointing with the resulting enchanted blood concoction would do, if it needed to be consumed, or if I needed to take a full on dunk in the stuff.
The vat used for the ritual was big enough to serve as a hot tub for two rather obese sumo wrestlers, or four normal people if they didn't mind getting a little friendly so there wouldn't be any real difficulty in tossing me in. The biggest worry was that if we had to do that the whole batch would potentially be tainted with Abyssal Rot. It'd cure me, but it wouldn't be good for anything afterwards, and you never know when an army of draconic thralls might come in handy.
So we'd started out with the simplest method; flicking a few drops onto my not-quite-corpse. That had the effect of immediately yanking me back into my body. After months without experiencing physical sensation being stuffed into an existence where every single nerve ending felt like it was being grated on by a flaming belt sander was enough to make me wish for the comparative comfort of nothingness.
I would have screamed were my lungs capable of it, but all I could do was creakily open my mouth, my dessicated skin feeling like well-chewed gum that's been stuck on the bedpost. Hard and reluctant to move at first, but ever so slightly stretchy. I could feel the places where the dragonspawn elixir had struck, I could feel them trying to knit back into working order.
Having been without a body for several months, once I set my mind to it I found it relatively easy to ignore the sensations that I had been without for so long. I pushed aside the pain and reached out for the dragon's blood concoction, which was contained in a ridiculous plastic cup that's probably older than I am. It's from Hardee's and sported a moose on it.
"Down the hatch?" Kalinda asked, and I nodded best I could opening my mouth. I don't think what I did would be considered swallowing, it didn't work right. It was more like whatever I put in my mouth was sucked right down my throat and into my stomach, as if to fill a void within me.
The taste was like what you'd get if you mixed blood, added a dash of chocolate syrup, mixed in stale saltines, and then topped it off with the worst tasting chewable tablets known to man. Yet I still gulped it down hungrily. I could feel it begin to work, driving the sickness from my flesh.
It began in my belly and worked its way outward, not as a healing warmth but as an icy chill. My skin at this point was utterly incapable of forming goosebumps and it felt ten time worse, like a sneeze that refuses to happen, but with every single inch of skin that I had remaining. Then every muscle I had remaining, and then even my bones were trying to have goosebumps.
I looked like a zombie with almost every drop of fat or fluid sucked out of me, just raw, lean muscle that was revealed in places by leathery, grey skin drawn in too tight and torn to reveal the red meat underneath that oozed sluggish black blood.
There wasn't much to me between hips and ribs, and it was my belly that bloated outward first. Or at least it looked that way compared to my stick-thin frame. New skin grew to cover the gaps and the old grey stuff fell away like the world's grossest snake shedding. The new stuff came in pure white. Not the pink-ish tan that one would consider a pale caucasian skin tone, not even the yellow-white of an albino, but complete and utterly pure porcelain white.
I hoped it would gain some color later on, but for all I knew I was going to end up covered in armor plates and scales anyway, so I wasn't going to be picky. Especially not since the moment the new skin grew in the pain of Abyssal Rot stopped completely.
Despite being a robust and virtually unkillable magical plague fungus, the stuff was actually pretty fragile once exposed to raw magical energy. Then again human flesh also happened to be pretty fragile when exposed to raw magical energy as well, so blasting me with a fireball was never in the cards for a potential cure to begin with.
The elemental power of the dragonspawn elixir triggered at the genesis of my transformation, just as planned, destroying the sickness that had literally devoured me and then restoring the flesh that the rot had stolen.
It would be doing the same thing anyway on a soon to be dragon that wasn't suffering from an infernal hell plague. The body would be restored to optimal condition on its way to being reshaped into its new form.
I watched as my chest filled out, ripping the tightly wound bandages that had been wrapped around me torso to make sure my insides stayed inside. Thankfully they let me keep at least a little bit of my modest as I went from genderless mummy to well-endowed woman within the span of about fifteen seconds.
I drew in a proper breath into my lungs and it felt like heaven. The restorative effect of the elixir continued to work outward, flowing over my hips and down my legs, up my shoulders and neck, and trickling down my spine.
I let out a soft, whimpering moan as a new sort of intense pain filled me. Rather than being assaulted with a burning belt sander, it now felt like every muscle in my body had decided to protest against its ill treatment at the tendrils of the hell fungus, and decided that each and every bit of muscle mass would unite against the tyranny of the host consciousness with a full-body charlie horse.
I arched my back hard enough to draw some worryingly loud pops and cracks from my spine, pops and cracks that seemed to be continuing long after the herd of charlie horses faded away, leaving me whole, hale, and hearty, my body restored to a pale, monochromatic state.
The popping isn't coming from my back, but rather my backside. I roll over and look with wide eyes as a good eighteen inches worth of wriggling tail spasms from their place just above my buttocks. I can't help but stare as my new appendage grows. The popping and cracking sounds are the formation of new bones, each new one forming at the very tip, the flesh filling in around it, forming one vertebra at a time while the rest thickens just a little bit more.
I look over myself, trying to spot any other changes. But aside from my weird skin color (well, lack thereof), there doesn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary. Aside from the tail. But I guess that's to be expected considering the source of the draconic essence was Kalinda, who is basically a big blue elf with a tail.
I'm relieved at the normalcy of my restored form, but also a little bit disappointed. I was kind of looking forward to maybe having wings and being able to fly. Sure, I was capable of flight as a disembodied spirit, but that wasn't proper flying. It's not flying unless you can feel the wind wooshing through your hair.
I get my feet under myself and stand up a bit wobbly. It's like riding a bike, you never quite forget how your legs work. Though these legs look a bit thicker and more muscular than what I had before. And were my boobs always this big?
"Um, boss lady, do you think you could get me some clothes, and maybe a mirror?" I say, and then I wince.
It's like hearing yourself on a recording. You have this idea of how you sound like in your head, but until you have actual audio of yourself right there in front of you you don't have a grasp of how you actually sound.
Only this time it sounds weird to me because I'm using actual vocal chords to talk, rather than simply manifesting them by pure will. Good lord, hearing via actual vibrations is mind numbingly awful. It fells like hearing audio from the bottom of a well.
Kalinda winces, "Dammit, why didn't I think of that to begin with?" she grumbles, "Slipped my mind what with the whole ritual of unimaginable, unspeakable power. Don't run off with the vat while I'm gone." she teases.
She calls forth her innate draconic magic, linking the water in a brightly colored plastic wading pool on the floor to a prepared tub of water somewhere else, making a portal between the two and she hops in.
"Well, that wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting." I say to myself, wondering where exactly the whole undying forced loyalty thing was supposed to come in. But there's no answer, just the continued Rice Krispie sounds of my rapidly lengthening tail. It's longer than I am tall, and seems to be slowing down.
I can't quite get it to move exactly how I want, so I end up grabbing it with a hand and pulling it around so I can get a better look at it as it finishes up. Just as I take my hand away there's loud snapping sound joining the pops and cracks. My jaw drops at the sight of a pair of thick, black spikes several inches long that have emerged from the new flesh near the end of my tail.
That's something Kalinda doesn't have. Her tail is a simple thing, no dangerous adornments or thagomizers to be had, just a fluffy tuft of hair that matches the fire engine red mane atop her noggin.
Another snap, and a second pair of spikes further down on a new segment of my tail. They're even bigger. I poke the tip with my finger and they don't feel sharp, but I'm sure if I hit something with it the right way they'd do some damage.
Another snap and a third set that damned near poke me in the chest. I release my new limb in surprise. The damned things have to be at least a foot long. And then they're joined by another set, not quite as long, but thicker, position on the end of my tail and aligned to make an effective stinger.
No, nevermind, now THAT is an effective stinger. A final spike appears to cap off my newly formed draconic appendage, centered upon the end of my tail, slightly curved and the longest one of the lot. With all the weight I have in my tail, that thing is capable of doing some real damage.
But my new limb isn't done with its alterations. Not content to be merely spiked, a yellow, translucent membrane, like that of a fish fin, grows between the spikes. With the horizontal positioning it reminds me a little bit of the way a dolphin's tail is arranged.
Kalinda is a water-aligned dragon, after all, and the possibility did come up of me gaining features that Kal herself might not acquire for decades yet due to the slow accumulation of her draconic state.
And just like that my changes seem to be over. I look over my pale white form, standing as still as I can, trying to sense the slightest sign that there could be any sort of further alteration taking place.
But there's nothing. Not even the teensiest, tinsiest twinge.
And then I feel the hot pressure of someone's gaze upon me. A lot of someones. Hot and cold, slithery, dark. The same thing I've felt before when Kalinda has manifested the presence of the Manyfold Matriarch around me.
I feel her looking over me, more than looking over me. I can feel her faintly in the back of my mind, lurking just over the edge of my consciousness. She's hungry, always hungry. Waiting, poised to snatch up my soul the moment it parts ways from my mortal shell so that she can devour it, adding fragments of my self to her near-infinite existence.
She's so faint, just a whisp of consciousness tenuously clinging to reality. Kalinda's spoken of her, our goddess, as being a draconic supremacist, of loathing the humanoid form and all its trappings.
Thus I expect her to radiate disappointment at the simplicity of my dragonspawned shape. Just a slight bit more draconic than Kalinda, with my tail sporting proper natural weaponry. I don't even have fangs, or a forked tongue. I test each tooth with my tongue's tip just to make sure. So maybe I'm a little more dragon in the tail department, and a bit less in the mouth.
But she isn't disappointed, she's amused.
And expectant.
She's waiting.
And then suddenly my mind is inundated with a deluge of thoughts, images, memories, and ideas that are not my own, as well as an obnoxious little voice in my head that sounds obscenely cheerful and chipper rattling off dialog at an incredible rate.
I feel someone else's thoughts entirely in my head and though I can't quite see through their eyes, I get a sense of what they're looking at, and at present they're trying to figure out how to get a mirror off of the bathroom wall.
And then both thought streams are aware of me, and I get a faint echo of my own thoughts appearing in theirs.
"Your mind is full of fook!" says Kalinda's little dragon companion, Spark.
"Billions and billions of fuck." Kalinda adds, almost absentmindedly.
And then my skull breaks. Not a metaphor for being overwhelmed by the presence of other beings right in my mind, nor for the pain of Spark rambling endlessly and spouting internet memes and then explaining them to me in meticulous detail when I don't recognize them.
No, my skull actually breaks, cracking and splitting, the bones shifting and reforming, moving into new positions. Fully healed and restored to a baseline form, it seems that my body has taken a few moments to get settled before leaping fully into continuing my transformation.
I can feel the Matriarch, gleeful with anticipation as well as another presence. Though Kalinda I can feel the sinister presence of the Hand of Arimus, looking on with clinical detachment, amusement, and a twinge of mad scientist's curiosity at the progress of an experiment.
I'm their test subject and I scream as the bones of my face rip through my skin.
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