Book One – Chapter 13

The wizard’s body contorted under the assault. He convulsed, writhed and shifted. Chunks of ice broke away from his body and crashed down the mountainside, dragging debris and snow in their path, as he twisted in the throes of transformation, his form collapsing into something smaller.

The mountain resisted, ice clawing at him as he shrank, striving to reclaim him, but the transformation tore through him too swiftly, violently breaking him down. In the grotesque process that was shapeshifting magic, his body twisted into the semblance of a beast. He was becoming a predator of many legs, distorted and diminished — a horrid creature caught between worlds, neither man nor beast, stretching from the unnatural into the uncanny. Scales erupted over his elongating limbs and spine, arching at distressing angles as his body reformed into a crude, disfigured likeness of a lizard-kin. The stone artefact clung to him still

With his size, his presence diminished as well. Life flickered weakly within him, a candle guttering in the wind. He had been broken before the shift, his strength drained in the futile struggle to save his companions and retrieve the golem, blind to the orich’s trap. What should have been a grand metamorphosis turned into a grotesque mockery of itself — a stunted, misshapen creature no larger than a patherren, something that could do little more than scramble for survival. His dark, bulbous eyes rolled erratically in their large sockets, pupils expanding and contracting, reflecting a mind that was no longer whole. He was incomplete, vulnerable, and fundamentally wrong.

The lizardkind creature emerged from beneath the ice, scuttling down the slope on pure instinct. Midnight observed him intently. Despite all that was so utterly wrong, she recognised something deeper within the twisted body, something more than the mere veneer of bestial nature. Unlike the novices of Emery Thurm, who draped themselves in the mimicry of animalism but held none of its truth, the wizard had undergone a profound, intrinsic transformation — he had shed his humanity. It was in his movements. They were honed, not conjured but carved from the crucible of raw wilderness survival. It was as though his mind had fully succumbed, leaving behind only the instincts passed down by his familiar bond — a haunting, hollow echo of what had once been a mind of sharp wisdom and intricate strategy. What remained was a fragment, a reduced consciousness bound to the form of a beast.