The shaman raised the needle and placed the tip against the centre of his palm. It touched fur. Then skin. And then it sank in. There was no puncture. No resistance or stain. No cut. The flesh took the artefact like water accepting a blade. The needle slid inward. It vanished until only the final fragment held between the shaman’s fingers remained.
The borman’s shoulders locked. A low rumble passed through him, thick and wordless, but he did not pull back.
Yu watched the crystal fragment between the shaman’s fingers. Dark veins unfurled within its core. Not the red of blood; but lines of scorched amber emerging against the clear shaft.
Without a word, the shaman withdrew the needle.
Yu exhaled sharply. He had not realised he had been holding his breath.
The borman stood silent, save for the subtle violence of his movements: paw clenching and unclenching, shoulders rolling, jaw tensing and releasing as if chewing a taste he could not identify.
Meanwhile, the Shaman raised the needle, holding it delicately between her fingers. Within its crystalline length, the dark swirl had deepened into motion; a shifting storm of colour and motion. A thread of something restless. Not stolen. Offered.
Beneath the shaman’s cloak, something shifted too. Not fabric, not flesh, but the very shape of her body. Her shoulders slipped back, realigned and broadened. Her chest expanded in the space of a single breath. Then the petal-scales around her collar stirred. They rippled and unfurled. In layers of perfect symmetry, they peeled back from her neck to her shoulders, baring the base of the shaman’s throat, where her collarbone would lie, if she were of humanoid origin. Yu could not see what hid there. He was too short and stood to her side, where her coat, shoulder and raised arm blocked his view, as she now lowered the needle to the base of her throat. All he witnessed was the slow descent of her hand. Then the needle was gone. Her shoulders realigned and the scales folded back into place. It must have sunk into her too, Yu thought.
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