The Power of Ten, Book Three : The Human Race

Dusk was coming. Blue-black skin was rising all over Sama as the Hag Curse, empowered by her slaughtering one of her Aunties, writhed and whelmed and prepared to make unto her a new and wonderful Hag to go and bedevil the world with.

Yeah, no.

She wasn’t afraid, and beyond that, she had no need to be afraid.

She was a Null. Even if she WANTED the Hag Curse to win this fight, it couldn’t. It would just rip her apart trying to infuse her power, failing, until she mutated into proto-slime as its power to affect her was exhausted. If she was still alive at that point, it wouldn’t be called living.

Since she didn’t want it to win this fight, it was totally hosed.

That first breath of the shadow called dusk, creeping up on the world at a thousand miles an hour, hissed past, and the Hag Curse began to boil in the air around her. Evil writhed in the air, drawing in magic for miles around, and spiritually sensitive creatures for some distance were going to know that something ominous was happening here.

Normally...

The boulders she had arranged weren’t menhirs, but they’d do the job for now. They only had to last one night, after all, and the last thing she needed was to drag in werewolves, Hags, Fey, Aberrants, wandering Fiends or Celestials or even a stray Paladin or something while this was happening.

She didn’t have a Null of 31, which would absolutely defy the Hag Curse and could effectively kick it right off of her... but she didn’t need to. She needed to break this thing, suck the power out of it, and only let it change her in the direction her Curseline let it, leaving her Human... but oh, what a freaking potentially powerful Human she was going to be...

Thus, when it began, she knew that she had already won... she only had to endure until morning.

Still, there was no denying that the whole process hurt like a sonuvabitch.

The Curse was like a living thing, going after all her memories, invading her physically, taking her strength and conditioning and skill and completely destroying and subverting it, trying to make it useless. It didn’t matter how strong or fast or tough...

Oh, yes, it did matter how tough she was.

She refused it, denying it with everything. Her Matrix, the raw magic, was doing nothing but reinforcing her resistance to the Curse, locked inside her, glittering like a diamond whose only purpose was bolstering her body’s absolute resistance to the changes the Curse was trying to make to her. Her Null seethed, and like the slipperiest of diamonds, her body sloughed off the invading tendrils that got into everything, everywhere. They could not be avoided, nor dodged, only resisted, endured, tolerated, and outlasted.

Her Ki was swirling through her mind and soul now, tearing through the illusions and delusions it was heaping up on her, trying to twist her memories, pour sin into her soul, infect her with new drives, new instincts, with rage and hate and fear, greed and gluttony and lust, with wicked dreams of power and pride that she was entitled to, because she was obviously bigger, better, stronger than ordinary people, and it had the power for her, the power to accomplish all that she desired...

She already had that power. She already knew the path to get what she desired. Ki swirled and shredded in Null waves, tearing the false promises, warped scenarios, and fake memories away. She ripped into the connections to the Hag Akasha, refusing the racial memories the Curse desperately wanted to download into her. The sins and evils wrought by Hagdom were great and foul enough that even Fiends would respect them, their traffic in souls damned and innocent was known throughout the planes, and the deeds those souls had done that were foul enough to be reborn as Hags were all enough to earn them that dark status... and the fate of being horrors whose only purpose was to be a foil for heroes to kill.

There was no great evil in her past life for the Curse to dig out, bring out, and bury her with. Instead, when it went grasping for that, there was a feeling, an awesome sensation of outrage and wrath, of fury against all that the Curse represented, and it writhed and twisted as its attempt to smite her with the sins of her previous existence were turned into the Evil that had slain her shredding that attempt from within.

Evil turning upon itself was as true as the Rantha Curse.

She laughed at it, and resisted. That was what Nulls did... they endured, they resisted, and they won in the end.

She would win in the end. This was only pain, only tempering, only tricks and traps and minor annoyances to see through and overcome, prepare her for what was coming.

It stabbed at the core of her identity, the copied memories and identity she had been instilled with at birth... by its very own power, and which it found only grew brighter, tighter as it assailed them, hardened and strengthened by its own power.

It was part of the Rantha Curseline, after all. That core identity was what it was actually transforming her into, although the identity was already there and was now being reinforced.

She knew that identity was also fake in its own way... and yet equally real, for it was now part of the Curseline, a living thing, a core and a foundation for her to build upon and become her own person... and at the same time something she could return to without any loss of identity or persona.

She was and would always be Samantha Piotrowski. But to protect her family, she would be Sama Rantha, and feel neither guilt nor weakness in embracing that name.

It was hers as much as it belonged to anyone, after all!

Trapped by the twisting of its own Curse, the power of it pulsed in her blood and nerves like barbs, washing through her genetic code in agonizing draws of energy that were totally different from what the greater Curse intended...

Focused through the Rantha configuration of memories, racial evolutions boiled through her system. Instead of the absolute transformation of a Hag, the equivalent of layers of mutations and evolutions along multiple Racial Levels happened, manifesting one after another, her flesh twisting, bones growing, organs shifting and transforming as her blood boiled with power, a furnace lighting off in every cell and engine.

So much evolutionary advancement so fast should have blown apart her genetic structure like a bomb, but the pattern of devolvement, balance, and moderation was already part of her Rantha memories, and it was swirling through her. Just like the Curse warped and twisted a human girl into a monstrous Hag, a templated form that Hags of that type started as, she was being re-worked into the base physical form of a Rantha Hag...

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Time was shifting past. Highmoon had come and gone, Darkmoon was stealing past, and Dawn was coming. The false light was in the east.

Steam was coming off her skin as muscles and organs pulsed inside her, gaining and losing mass in surges of mutation, evolution, and consolidation. Bones crunched, broke, reformed in waves of readjustment, and were matched in agony by the tendons, sinews, and ligaments with them snapping, reforming, fraying, reweaving, every time stronger and more elastic than before.

Her skin split, sealed, bubbled and ruptured, clawed itself back together. Spikes shot out of bones and joints, melted away from within and were withdrawn. Horns in multiple configurations sprouted out to unrealistic lengths, were reduced to gel and were drawn back within. Tusks and fangs jutted out as her face transformed multiple times to configurations not human, her ears went through changes from massive serrated fans to totally absent, and pinions blew into existence on her back, feathered in white, black, reptilian scales, and black fur.

Fur and scales burst into existence all over her skin before burning away, carapaces gleamed and melted like ice, all in multiple colors and styles. Her limbs went through dozens of configurations, from serpentine to animalistic to proto-humanoid, always returning to their base form, unshakeable in the end, as if every change and shift in the number of fingers and toes and position of the ankle only made her core form stronger and stronger.

No screams, no cries, although doubtless such things would have been in constantly changing voices and styles as well. Eyes rupturing and emptying, bursting and reforming from insectile, reptilian, avian, piscine, burning, glowing... all returning to their origin.

The Haze above was slowly cycling over the pulses and releases of power, reacting even if the spiritual aspect of the power being released wasn’t truly escaping the boulders around her.

Of course, there were eyes elsewhere being drawn to this unusual phenomenon, especially if there was no accompanying sense of magic or presence accompanying it. Shadows moved, closing on the center of this effect, and what darkness might be found there.

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DAWN!

It was faint sunlight only, filtered through the clouds, the length of the world, the trees rustling around in the morning wind that sprang up and surged across the clearing she was in with magical vigor. The shadow of night was done...

Darkness screamed about her, burned away, every last tendril and touch of the Curse ripped from her, wailing at its defeat, at its oblivion. It desperately held onto her as The Light of the King of Suns wrought its doom, now that the Hag Curse had been revealed, and it quavered in defeat...

And she let it do so.

With a defeated, trembling writhing of loss, it settled upon the skin of the side of her face, neck, and shoulder, blue-black bands that looked somewhere between scars and bruises, things that would shift over time, a living Tattoo of Curse magic, its link to the greater Hag Curse destroyed forever, and only able to tie to the echo that remained... a Rantha Curse.

Her Curseline lived!

Sama let out a long, low breath, spewing out a mouthful of dark bile, the last remnants of what the Curse had tried to turn her into, and failed at. It hissed and smoked as it hit the savaged grass, and she slowly got to her feet.

She felt horrible, and wonderful at the same time. Everything seemed off-centered, imbalanced, disjointed, yet wonderfully precise all the same.

She was taller, heavier... a height and a weight that matched the artificial memories she had. While she still had all her old motor reflexes, they were adapted and transformed to match who she had turned into... or back into, if the coding of the Rantha Curse was her true self.

She swirled her hair as she turned around... it was a lot thicker than it had been, stiffer and fuller, responding to her Vajra more nimbly... It wasn’t truly dead, more actually like extruded skin, and so her Vajra held more power over it.

She’d had healthy brown hair, and now she was pretty much the definition of a golden blonde.

Her eyes settled on the creatures covering the arc of the circle behind her, even as she noted that her clothes had pretty much been shredded, to her utter lack of surprise, and true to her expectations, despite having virtually aged at least four years, she had less of a chest than most men did.

Meh. Saved her money on bras.

The thing at the center of the gathered watchers was a man-shaped creature of wood, wicked thorns jutting out of his barklike skin, long nose cruelly hooked, fingers more like spikes, a beard of old moss, and feet festooned with wriggling roots.

A Woodwose, one of the sinister forest spirits of the Fey.

Her lips spread in a wide smile. Her eight canines seemed to gleam.

On the boulders and ground were scattered a half-dozen gnomish, twisted fey, with outsized iron boots, maliciously distorted faces... and crimson red hats, all of them clutching axes, cleavers, or choppers made for creatures at least three times their size, which they were holding with ease.

“Well, well, well,” she began in Fey, lifting up Tremble, which had never left her hand for the entire night.