Chapter Text
The first time Callum cast aspiro by virtue of his own arcanum, it was living triumph. A culmination of all the thought and fear and inadequacy that had chased him through the week, and the realisation of what his deathly dream had taught him. The magic of the Sky was around him and within him and everywhere, and as he cast his spell it settled like a spark into his heart. He felt it every breath thereafter, every second, with every gust on the cliffside and glimpse of the blue-above shivering through him like another kind of life.
It settled into his blood like the air did, it coursed through his bones and flesh and sinew – the Sky was a part of him and he was a part of the Sky, the understanding of it sinking deeper and deeper with every minute that passed. By the time he’d said farewell to his brother, the arcanum was as viscerally-rooted in him as his own skeleton, a precious and irrevocable part of him; a channel that opened him up to the vast and boundless magic of the Sky.
He and Rayla and Zym walked to the Breach, and if he noticed the ache in his back, he thought nothing of it. After all, hadn’t he spent hours today convalescent upon hard stone? It was only to be expected.
---
The second time Callum cast aspiro from his own breath and magic, it was amidst heat and urgency and the dread of a rising sun. The magic surged in him as he spoke and wrote and breathed, the feeling of it effervescent and electric at once, crackling in his blood and bubbling through every inch of him. It ached. It burned, too, but wasn’t that just the heat of the Breach? He worried more about directing the wind gust from his lips, and watching Zym’s wings catch the air like twin sails, and seeing how great a shadow a young dragon could cast.
And when they were safely across, and he and Rayla threw their arms around each other from the pure relief of it, her arms around his shoulders were startlingly painful. Like pressure against a livid bruise. But the adrenaline of their success was enough to forestall the flinch, and she noticed nothing.
But when they drew apart, Zym cheerful and victorious between them, the ache at his shoulders didn’t leave. As though Rayla’s touch had wakened it, or perhaps awakened him to it, and it became insistent enough that he paid it notice he hadn’t earlier.
“You alright?” Rayla asked, as she showed him along the canyon-paths into Xadia, as he twisted his hands behind his back to pat cautiously at his shoulders.
They hurt to the touch. Sharp and raw, like the worst bruises he’d ever had. Like blistering skin. “…My back is kinda sore,” he admitted, with a light frown. “Maybe I bruised it, or something.”
She blinked at him with a glimmer of concern. “…Well, hopefully that’s just from sleeping funny on a cave floor,” she offered. “Or maybe you hit yourself during your dramatic collapse earlier.”
He eyed her, fingers lingering on the fabric over his shoulders. “Dramatic collapse?” he repeated, uncomprehending.
Rayla averted her eyes. “When you…unchained the dragon,” she elaborated, and didn’t say when you used dark magic, and he knew at her expression that she hadn’t quite forgiven him for that.
“…Maybe,” he agreed, uncomfortable, and thought of the way the power of it had swept through him, heady and dark and burning. How empty he’d felt afterwards: hollowed-out and aching, like an empty husk.
Sky magic didn’t feel like that. His second aspiro had ached too, but not like the hollowness of the dark. Not like everything beneath his skin had been scooped out. More like…the magic had put too much back in. As if there was too large a force for too small a space, and his skin couldn’t quite hold it. He wondered, for a fretful moment, if the power of the Sky was too vast for him. If even the barest spark of it that was his arcanum was stifled in his too-human flesh.
Rayla watched him, unusually sombre, for a few more seconds. Then she reached out to pull his hand from his shoulder, and tugged him onwards by the fingers. “Come on, stop messing with it,” she said, deliberately light-hearted. “If you’ve hit your back you won’t do it any favours by picking at it.”
“I’m not exactly picking at it,” he complained at her, but allowed himself to be pulled unresisting further into the Xadian borderlands, where the canyon-tunnels widened out into the bright glow of red rock beneath the sun, where that same sun gleamed upon something gold and glittering and huge-
“Welcome to Xadia!” Rayla said, and when she saw him staring, turned to follow his gaze. Like him, she saw the immense shining form of the Archdragon, stopped short, stared with perhaps more horror and less awe than he did. “Oh no,” she breathed, utterly dismayed. “It’s him. It’s Sol Regem.”
And then they were entirely too busy figuring out how to bypass a dragon to worry about his back.
(The third aspiro, wielded against Sol Regem, might well have burned, and might well have seared; but there was no room around their desperate attempts to escape for him to notice it. If he was aware of the pain, it was in a very distant way, far-removed from the more immediate issue of their survival. They passed into Xadia, and neither commented on the spell that had saved them.)
---
Later, when they were together and more-or-less unharmed past the gauntlet of a former-King, there was a little more space to breathe. A little more space to feel the Sky brimming up against his skin, to feel the breath almost too-deep in his lungs, like there was too much of it, like the air was filling him up like a balloon and he’d burst any second-
He only noticed that he’d fallen when Rayla caught him, his scarf still a vibrant streak of red about her neck. “Callum!” she exclaimed, alarmed, as she insinuated herself under one of his arms to hold him up. She put her arm around his shoulders to complete the support – and at the slightest pressure against his back, he cried out in pain. She released him as though burned, and then barely managed to catch him before he crumpled fully to the ground. “Callum,” she repeated, when all he did was breathe in quick shallow bursts, rather than answer. “What’s wrong? Is it your back?”
He was too-full of air, too-full of magic. He’d burst. He couldn’t breathe, but he had to. Near to hyperventilating, he sucked in more and more and more of the Sky with every second, and felt it brimming in his flesh, swelling his lungs, and it hurt. “No,” he managed, after another several conspicuous gasps. “I mean – yes – but not-“ He had to break off for another half minute, torn to pieces between the feeling that he couldn’t breathe and the utterly paradoxical sensation of his lungs filled past their capacity. The primal panic of breathlessness was a far more immediate thing than the searing pain on his back though, and so much harder to resist. “Can’t breathe,” he said to her, when he found enough space between suffocating and bursting to speak.
He barely had the presence of mind to see the worry written all over her as she ran her eyes over him as if to inspect him for signs of damage. “Haven’t you suffocated enough for one day?” she asked him, with some asperity, as if it could disguise the fear in her eyes. “I hope you’re not planning on making a habit of this.” Gently, she pressed fingers against a point on his wrist, perhaps to feel the hummingbird pace of his heart.
Callum tried to laugh, and the requisite loss of breath left him spluttering for long painful moments. “Sorry,” he said, once he had found some equilibrium again, and then descended once more into gasping, sucking in air as if there was none left in the Sky. But there was. There was so much breath, too much, too much to hold-
“Dumb prince,” she muttered to him, worried but achingly fond. She supported him upright, so that he was sitting up, and held him there, a hand on each of his shoulders, carefully away from his back. “Callum. Look at me,” she said, with such sudden command that his frantic breath stilled for a second, just to look at her. He stared at her as she stared back at him, and clung to the eye contact like a lifeline in the tide of breathless panic. “…Good.” She nodded very slightly, and he abruptly realised that he wasn’t gasping so desperately now. The breathlessness was a constant pressure, though, and as he noticed it he started wheezing again – Rayla shook him, and the surprise of it stilled him again. “Just breathe,” she told him, in a way that was by now terribly familiar.
Hadn’t he heard it, drowning in the dream-state? Hadn’t he heard her? Hadn’t he heard the words from her lips, before he heard them from his mother’s? “…Trying,” he managed, still caught in the eye contact like a ship to its anchor.
“I know,” she said gently. “Just…try to breathe more slowly. Deeper, I guess.”
He tried. It was hard when the gasps kept bursting into his attempts at deep, steadying breaths. Harder when the pressure of breathlessness increased, even as the pressure of too-much-air decreased. The former was harder to bear than the latter – suffocation was death, but pain was only pain.
…But, by the sharp and tearing ache in his chest, he was reminded that some pains did lead to death. His lungs felt too-full. Like they really would burst.
He breathed through the panic, and did not suffocate, and did not rupture.
When his breathing was into more of a normal rhythm, and he seemed calmer, Rayla relaxed a little and lowered her hands from their urgent place on his shoulders. He managed to keep himself upright, and appreciated it more than he could say when she took and squeezed one of his hands. “Is it the dark magic again?” she asked him, after a moment, and he had breath enough to speak.
He closed his eyes, just briefly, and felt the Sky brimming beneath his skin. “No,” he said, shaking his head, vehement. “It’s not – it’s the Sky magic.” In the new sense of calm, Zym finally found space to insinuate himself between them, settling his front paws into Callum’s lap and looking up at him with wide worried eyes. He lowered his other hand to the dragonling’s mane, and felt a little calmer at the contact.
He could feel the Sky beneath his fingers. It was in Zym, too, but…settled, in a way it wasn’t with him. It belonged.
“The Sky magic?” Rayla repeated, after a second, clearly startled. “But – why? It’s Primal magic – it’s…natural.”
Water was natural, too. But it could still drown you.
He shook his head, almost more to clear the thought than as a response to her. “It’s too much,” he said, and then shuddered at expressing it. “It’s like – I’m filling up with Sky magic, and – and there’s no way out for it, and I’m just…” He raised the hand from Zym’s mane to wave frustratedly in the air. His voice trembled worse than his fingers. “It feels like I’m going to explode. I – I don’t think humans are made for Primal magic, Rayla.” His heart sped again, this time in a different fear, and she stared back at him with a furrowed brow. “I – I think I’ve really messed up.”
Having spoken the words onto the air, they felt too real. What if he’d messed with something he shouldn’t? What if – what if the dark magic was only the first thing he shouldn’t have touched, what if humans just weren’t meant to use Primal magic, what if he’d bitten off more than he could chew and – what if it killed him?
This moment he lingered in, caught between breathlessness and bursting…he couldn’t keep it up, surely. Either he’d suffocate or he’d explode, and it was all his fault. His fault for grasping at something he was never meant to hold.
“Try casting a spell,” she said, after a moment, and the words were such a shock against his thoughts that they practically gave him whiplash.
“What?” he demanded, breathing picking up again, even as he tried to calm it down. “I say I’m full of too much magic, and your solution is more magic?”
She stared back at him, unrepentant. “Spells use magic, right?” she pointed out. “Maybe casting a spell or two will let off the pressure.”
Callum blinked. “That’s….” He frowned. “That’s actually a pretty good idea.”
Rayla rolled her eyes at him. “Don’t sound so surprised.” She huffed. “Just cast your spell, alright?”
He considered her, and then considered the spell he hadn’t tried casting since the Primal Stone broke. The most powerful spell he knew. He nodded, slowly, and exhaled like it could relieve the pressure in him, and shuffled away. His fingers parted from hers, and still sitting, he raised them to draw in the air, the opposite direction from her. “Fulminis,” he said, with the breath he had, and the magic…changed.
It had been building in him, swelling in him, as aimless and merciless as water straining at a dam. There had been too much of it to sit in his blood, too much to fit in his lungs, and it had hurt. Too much breath, too much air, with nowhere to go.
The spell awakened it. That aimless, ruthless pressure went hot and bright and fast, like the sear of a lightning-flash against unprepared eyes, and the unleashed magic screamed through him with terrible purpose. It shrieked from his fingers, incandescent and sparking, and cracked through the Sky to shatter the quiet like glass. And then – in that moment-
His hands flinched back from the dissipating rune as if from fire, and flew to his own shoulders. He gasped with pain, and hunched forwards the better to reach it, to feel something roiling beneath his skin, the lingering magic burning there like it had burned out of his fingers. Like it had unleashed itself upon some other conduit than a spell.
“Callum?” Rayla spoke, worried, when all he did was pat frantically at the searing pain on his back. “…Did it work?”
Was he imagining it? Was it just that his back was sore and swollen and the skin felt huge with the pain of it? Was it just his imagination?
“Callum,” she pressed, a second later, impatient enough that his head jerked over to look at her.
“Huh?” He took a frantic second to think. “I mean – yeah, kinda? But-“ The pressure that had built in him had released, in a way. He could feel it building again already, but – not all of that magic had gone into the spell. For a second – for a second, it had felt like – and now his back felt – but surely he was just imagining things.
…Well, there was one way to find out.
“Could you, um, feel here for a second?” he requested, awkwardly, fingers still hovering over the pain on his back. “But – carefully.”
Her eyes flickered between his hands and his eyes, wary, but she leaned forwards, reaching out. He moved his hand to let hers pat gingerly at the spot over his shoulder-blade, and-
Any hope he’d had of it just being his imagination was soundly dashed the second her hand shot away again, eyes flying wide-open with shock. “What is that?” she demanded, in a strangled voice, nearly squashing Zym’s tail with how quickly she retreated.
He deflated. “I don’t know,” he admitted, a new fear beating in his chest. “It’s…I think it’s why my back is hurting.”
“There’s something on your back,” she told him, stridently, as if he hadn’t just figured that out for himself. “Is it – some sort of, I don’t know – did you break your shoulder, or something?”
For a second he entertained the brief and bloody image of a spur of broken bone jutting through his skin, and shuddered. “I think I’d have noticed that, Rayla.”
Her eyes moved from him to do a cautious sweep of their surroundings, and she exhaled. “We’ll need to take a look at it,” she said. “But…maybe we should try to find a good place to camp, first. If you’re injured…”
He grimaced. They had very little in the way of supplies, which had been okay up to now, but none of them had got hurt up to now either. “Yeah.”
“Can you walk?” she asked, quick and practical, and he considered himself.
He felt…okay. His back hurt badly enough now that it seared through him in bursts of pain that…pulsed, almost, like he could feel his heartbeat in the swelling over his shoulder-blades. But the pressure of too-much-magic and too-much-air was, for the most part, gone. He felt quite sure it’d be coming back, but….
“Yeah,” he answered, eventually, and rose to his feet.
She rose with him, and gave him a quick look-over before nodding. “Alright.” She said. “Let’s go.”
---
It took a while to find somewhere suitable to stop. The dry, dusty canyons of the borderlands began to give way to red rock studded with greenery, little waterfalls coursing down the vast cliffsides. In the distance, he could see the edges of a vast forest, but by mutual decision they made no attempt to reach it that day.
Instead, they settled for a sheltered little hollow in the rock, close enough to a river that he could hear the water burbling someway off towards the forest. By that time, though, the pain of the something on Callum’s back had magnified considerably, and he was gasping and wincing every time he moved. Every step felt like it jolted the searing, swollen agony that was building there, enough to send shocks of pain through much of his body. The fabric of his clothing over the skin felt too-rough, abrasive, and the whole area burned.
When at last Rayla ordered him to sit down and get his shirt off, he was almost too relieved at the prospect of – of stopping that abrasion, finding out what was on his back – to be embarrassed.
Almost.
With Rayla’s help, he peeled off his jacket, gingerly enough to not pull unduly at the now very pronounced distension of his upper back. Then his shirt went too – and with only the thin undershirt in the way, it was evidently concerning enough to look at that Rayla cursed quietly. And then, feeling increasingly chilly and increasingly exposed, Callum divested himself of his undershirt, and understood the severity of whatever was going on by how utterly silent Rayla went.
“…What does it look like?” he asked her, once the fear of not-knowing had surpassed the fear of knowing, and the silence had stretched too long. “Rayla?” he prompted, anxiously, when she didn’t reply.
Very gently, she reached out and touched her fingers to the inflamed skin on his upper back. He flinched and jumped a little at the touch, her fingers almost startlingly cold on the burn of it. “….There’s something sort of…pushing up underneath your skin,” she said, after a moment, with the barest tremble in her voice. “In two places. Here,” Her fingers drifted, touching skin that wasn’t quite so painful, and then over to something that seared. “And here. Kind of….a little to the up and middle of your shoulder-blades, stretching down to here, on both sides.” Her fingers moved again, carefully light, and trailed a line down to maybe the middle of his torso. “It…looks pretty symmetrical.”
When she stopped talking, the silence resumed. He wasn’t at all sure what to say, and had to fight off the fear that gripped at his throat and made him feel increasingly breathless, increasingly – oh, but no, that was the…Sky-magic-thing, wasn’t it? He shivered, feeling the magic building in him closer and closer to that strange crisis point he’d reached earlier, not quite yet enough to hurt yet, but enough to make him want to gulp in air like he was drowning. And that was a thought, wasn’t it. “My back got worse when I used fulminis,” he admitted, a little hoarsely. “It was – almost like I could feel something moving. On my back.” He shuddered all over at the revulsion of the sense-memory.
She hesitated. “I’m…going to try pressing on it a little, alright? See if I can get any clues about what it is.”
He gritted his teeth, and nodded, bracing himself. “…Okay,” he said, grimly. “Do it.”
He exhaled roughly through his nose, stifling a cry, as she palpated one of the unnatural masses under his skin. It was unbelievably painful. It was beyond anything he’d ever felt. He closed his eyes and tried to focus on what she was saying, when she began to speak. “It’s…solid,” she informed him, voice a little choked. “Not just…bloody swelling or soft tissue or anything. I’m pretty sure there’s bone in there.” She prodded a little harder at one point, near the top end of a shoulder blade, where the distension was worst. “And there’s something at the top here, on both sides. Something sort of…a little pointy, poking at your skin.” She paused. “On the left, actually, there’s two little pointy spots.”
He shuddered, half with horror and half with pain. “What is it?” he asked at last, desperate, even though he knew she hadn’t any more idea than he did.
“…I don’t know,” she confessed, quiet, and drew her fingers away. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
He’d known that would be the answer. But it didn’t make it any easier to hear.
---
She located the nearby river, and brought him to its edge to make him drink. Then, carefully, she slathered cool-wet river silt against the hot agony of his back. It helped, a little, but not enough.
It was at least warm enough in the Xadian borderlands that it wasn’t too cold to go shirtless for such a long time, but when he’d tried to put a shirt back on, the pressure against the growing things under his skin was too much to bear. And they were growing. Rayla said she could practically see it, hour to hour, stretching his skin out until red-raw lines were drawn upwards to the peaks of the swelling. It felt like his skin was tearing every time he so much as moved a muscle, and she admitted that she wouldn’t be surprised if it really did start tearing soon.
Callum had thought, after that spell earlier, that the horror of his back was related in some way to the Sky Magic. It made him dread the way that the energy built up in his blood, the way his lungs started feeling too-full again, too full to breathe. He lingered on the edge of the suffocation, gasping frantically again, until Rayla clutched at his hand and said “Just cast another spell, Callum. It helped last time.”
“Last time,” he huffed, light-headed and fearful, “It made my back worse. Don’t want-“ He paused to gasp in six more frantic breaths. “Don’t want to get worse again.”
She shifted, uncertainly. “It…might not be because of that,” she said, though she didn’t sound especially convinced by even her own words. “It could be something else.”
He snorted amidst the feeling of his lungs straining, straining almost as much as the distended skin of his back. Tearing and stretching and- “Like what?”
“…Dark magic?” she suggested, though only half-heartedly. “That’s actually unnatural.”
“I think I’d have-“ He gulped air. “I’d have noticed if – Lord Viren – or Claudia – turned into – hunchbacks, Rayla.“
She watched him gasp, increasingly anxious, and finally snapped “Callum, you can’t breathe. Even if it does make your back worse – you have to cast something!”
He didn’t answer, and remained steadfast in his avoidance for about another minute of gasping for breath around straining lungs before he got light-headed and faint enough to agree with her. Torn two-ways by fear, he raised a finger and drew aspiro. He barely had enough breath to whisper it, but it was enough. The terrible over-pressure of breath and magic gusted out of him, potentiated into the purpose of the spell, rushing through his body and – and out of three channels. One, his mouth, breathing the spell, and the other two-
The pain leapt and tore and burned.
Something gave way.
He wasn’t aware of much more than screaming, the seconds after he cast the spell, but when he regained some measure of awareness….the pressure of the magic was quiescent again, and…the pressure in his back had lessened too, if only a little. There was something warm dripping down his spine.
“…Okay, you’re right, it’s definitely the Sky magic doing it,” Rayla said, voice tight, and he realised that she’d been squeezing one of his hands the whole time.
“…My back,” he started, a little numbly, and tried to use his other hand to reach behind, to feel… “I’m – am I bleeding?”
She hesitated, nodded, and then dropped his hand to go have a better look. “The poking-bits have…” She swallowed, looking a little green, and turned aside for a few seconds to suppress a gag. “Well, they’ve gone through your skin, now. They’re…pointy. Whatever’s under your skin is bigger, too.”
He closed his eyes, and drew his fingers away from his back bloodied at the tips. “…Right.” It was so red.
Rayla had to take several more deep calming breaths before she could investigate further. “At least we’re next to a river,” she said, determinedly, and ushered him to the water again. “Let’s get this cleaned up.”
True to her words, she cleaned the blood from his back, of which there was quite a lot, draining from the blood-swollen tissues around the distension. With some of the pressure relieved, it…actually hurt a fair bit less, but it was still awful. And then, with the bleeding stopping, and his back clean, Rayla made her assessment of what had poked through his skin.
“There’s four. I think?” she said, poking at each of them in turn. “Small. Black and sharp. They look like claws.” She hesitated, and poked at the swelling behind the claw-things. “I think they’re on…I don’t know, fingers? Two on each side. And something underneath.” She frowned, and prodded something a little more purposefully. He felt something under his skin move aside from the pressure, and he shuddered. “…Definitely something underneath these.” She concluded.
He was silent for a while, processing that. “So, what,” he said, finally. “Am I growing a couple of weird clawed extra arms, or something?”
“Arms,” she muttered, almost scornful, and leaned away to shuffle around to his side again. “Honestly, Callum, if it wasn’t for the claws – and for them being all the way up on your shoulders-“ She stopped.
He eyed her, curiosity piqued, despite the ongoing pain. “What?”
Rayla frowned. “Sky elves,” she said, without preamble. “Skywing elves. Some of them have wings, you know.”
He stilled, and it felt like his heart stilled too.
“…But they have their wings lower down – sort of mid-back, underneath their shoulders and arms. And they don’t have claws on them.” She exhaled. “And they’re born with them, anyway, so – it’s not like-“ She waved her hands towards his back, very expressively.
Callum stared at her, his gut uncertain whether it was twisting or fluttering. “…I wasn’t born with an arcanum,” he reminded her. “But I got one anyway.”
She sighed, looking as uncertain as he’d ever seen her. “I get your point,” she said. “And I suppose it would make more sense for you to be growing wings because of Sky magic than – than some weird clawed arms. But it’s – it’s not normal, Callum. I don’t know what’s happening to you.” She sounded almost hopeless, at that. Afraid.
Unthinkingly, he clutched at her hand again. Squeezed it to reassure her, for once. “…Well, whatever it is, we’ll probably find out soon,” he said, uncertain how he quite felt about that. “It’s been, what, half a day since I got my arcanum? It’s going fast.”
She glanced at him, side-long. “Magic speeds it up,” she noted, and he went still again at the implication.
“…You want to make it go even faster?” He said, aghast.
She shrugged. “Not want, but…it’s probably an option.” Her eyes slid over his shoulders again. “Where those claws came through…it’s healing quickly. Magic-fast, even. If you keep waiting until you need to cast a spell again…you’ll probably just keep tearing your back open.”
He shifted uncertainly. “I don’t know, Rayla. Maybe it’d be faster to just…cast a load of spells and get it over with – whatever it is, but…” He shuddered at the mere thought of it. How much would it hurt, to have his skin roil and tear and peel away as the things on his back grew and grew and tore their way out of his skin all at once?
Rayla watched him, anxious but sympathetic, and squeezed his hand back. “…Let’s just go to sleep, then,” she said, finally, glancing up at the growing gloom of the evening. “See how it looks in the morning.”
He exhaled, and nodded. “Yeah, okay.”
---
He slept on his front, with his shirts and jacket draped over him like blankets. Zym curled up beside him, pressed to his side, and wormed his way underneath Callum’s arm until he deigned to hold it around the little dragonling. He wondered if Zym was missing Ez. He wondered what Ez would think of the somethings growing beneath his skin. He wondered a lot of things, thoughts whirling and spinning around themselves, until he finally managed to slip asleep.
It didn’t last. He might have expected pain to wake him, but instead, it was the magic. He woke breathless and gasping, some hours into the night, chest tight and lungs swollen as the magic built in him to the point of pain again. He stumbled upright, dislodging Zym and waking Rayla, who sat straight up and rubbed her eyes, blinking blearily at him.
“Callum?” she asked, groggily, eyes settling onto his shoulders. “Y’alright?”
“Breath,” he explained, his whole upper back straining as he moved, and he turned aside to draw the zig-zagging shape of fulminis.
Just as before, the aimless magic in his body shifted and awakened and moved. Unlike before, barely any of it left his fingers. The lightning-bolt that emerged was thin and sparking and did not travel very far at all, spilling only the barest stink of ozone into the air, and instead – instead, all of that electric energy surged into his back as though to a lightning-rod, and it writhed.
He cried out with pain, Zym squeaking in fright and Rayla shuffling over to grip his hand, and familiar hot-wet spilled down his back again. Something had torn, again, more than yesterday, much more-
Callum reached back, to feel, to find out what had come through – and nearly vomited at the feeling of finding something small and limp and blood-wet and firm hanging out of the skin there. It was warm. Warm like a limb. Warm like a living thing – but wet and tacky and too-soft, like the thin weeping skin under a blister. On the end of the horrible hanging thing was something small and sharp. The claw.
So…the ‘fingers’, that the claws were apparently on. One on that side, and….he checked…two had torn free on the right hand side. The second on the left was still under his skin. And…wait.
Was that a third? He checked the other side, found something much like it in the distended shape of his skin, and felt his breath stutter with horror.
“That’s horrible,” Rayla told him, looking pale and a little green, as his fingers trailed blood over his upper back. There was so much pain now that it felt almost like he’d passed through it, to some numb other-side where nothing felt right and his thoughts were strange and scrambled.
“Mmhm,” he agreed, a little vacantly, moving one of the clawed-things between his fingers. It felt like a finger, slim and bony, even if the skin was all wrong and it was covered in blood and had torn its way out of his flesh-
“We need to clean you up again,” Rayla said decisively, as if she were grasping at the action to keep herself calm, and moved to herd him over to the water again. He could hardly see anything around them, given the time of night, but the moon was past half-full and cast just about enough light to see by.
“…Wait,” he said, after a moment, and her fingers stilled on his arm. He breathed, not-quite-awake and not-quite-coherent, uncertain if he just hadn’t woken up properly, or if the pain had just…disconnected him from a proper feeling of consciousness. “You were right. I should just…get this over with. It’s not going to stop. So…I should just…” He squeezed his eyes shut.
Cautiously, she took his hand, and pulled him to his feet. “Are you sure?”
“No,” he admitted. “But I don’t want to keep waking up and – having to cast a spell and tear myself open again. Once these….whatever, once they’re out, it should be better. Right?”
“…Well, in theory, you won’t have anything trying to break out of your skin anymore,” she said, dubious, and a little wary. “So, I guess?”
He sighed. “This is going to suck.”
“It’ll also be pretty bloody, I think.” She nodded, looking as though she were trying not to think about it too hard. “So let’s get you to the water for this anyway.”
Once they were there, and Rayla had washed some of the blood off to see the new developments with his back, she reported on the state of things and confirmed his uneasy sense-impression of what he’d felt through his skin.
“It’s grown in the night,” she said, of the distension as a whole. “One of the clawed…fingers…is still under your skin. And…” She shivered, close enough to his side that it made the fabric of her sleeve brush against his shoulder. “And, I think there’s…three. Fingers, I mean, on each one. The third ones are still…inside your back.” Her eyes squeezed briefly shut, as if to forcefully expel the image from her mind as well as her eyes.
“…Thought I felt something like that,” he said, quiet and pale, mind too numb with shock and pain to offer much more than delirious dread. He had felt something that felt disturbingly like another digit, underneath the right-hand two that had torn out.
Rayla looked side-long at him, hesitating. “…Honestly, Callum? It might hurt less if – if we cut it, instead of letting your skin rip open.” Zym, who seemed to understand them quite well, quailed at the words, crooning and shrinking back.
He blinked, startled, not having thought of that. “With one of your swords, you mean?” He asked, and reached to the side to pat Zym on the head. After a second, he drew the little dragon into his lap. He wasn’t a human kid, maybe, but this was still kind of more gore than he was comfortable with Zym seeing. If he was in his lap…he at least wouldn’t see it.
At his words, though she seemed distinctly sickened at the notion, Rayla nodded.
It was probably a bad sign that he found the idea a relief. The clean cut of a blade seemed so much more merciful than skin strained to tearing. “Good idea,” he said, and wondered at how swiftly his life had gone weird, to make the prospect of having his back cut open seem a blessing.
Still, she hesitated, hand on the hilt of one of the weapons hung at the small of her back. “…Now?” she asked, unhappily. “Or when you cast the spell?”
He considered it. “During the spell,” he decided, reluctantly. “That way we can get it all done at once.” Nausea rose in his throat, and he carefully swallowed it away.
Rayla shuddered. “…Alright,” she said, visibly steeling herself, and he heard the shnk of her blade assembling as she moved behind him. A couple of weeks ago, he’d have done nearly anything to keep her blades away from him, and now he was inviting them. The world was mad. “Go ahead,” she said, and lowered the tip of the blade against his skin, cold and keen, just below the protruding left digit. He braced himself, and raised a hand.
Fulminis was somewhat easier to deal with, since he didn’t need to do any gusty exhaling for it, so he drew its rune crackling in the air. This time, when he spoke it, there was no well of expanding magic pooling and stretching him out from within – instead, it coursed in from the Sky, that inner-spark of the arcanum opening and welcoming it in. A little of it went to its proper place, coursing along his arm, but only a thin crackle and a few sparks emerged. The rest…
It surged to his back, and at once, the flesh beneath his skin swelled and grew and roiled, pressing and stretching and expanding into a searing, tearing pain. And then-
The sword was sharp. Incredibly so. There was barely any resistance at all as it parted his skin and the thin layers of flesh below it – it was so sharp and clean a cut that for a second, it almost didn’t hurt. He gritted his teeth and hissed and gasped, but even then – even then, there was such a relief to it. He could feel the horrible straining pressure easing even as the magic of the spell coursed in and in and in, even as the somethings under his skin grew, and grew, and finally-
Where Rayla had made the cut on the left, something spilled loose. Something heavy and fleshy and soft, limp and bloody, dropped out of the open wound and thumped wetly against his back. He heard Rayla gag, and felt nausea surge in his own throat at the mere feeling of it, but – she stayed her course, and moved her blade over to the right to repeat the cut.
The energy of the spell ebbed, even as the cut widened and the incredible relief repeated for the other thing, the wet meaty limbs spilling down along his back in a trail of blood and gore. He clenched his fingers in Zym’s mane, stomach roiling. Voice hoarse, he asked “Is it all out?”
She gagged again, but answered anyway. “Think so,” she said, shakily, and moved to the side to wash her hands and blade in the water. “Feel for yourself.”
He wasn’t really sure he wanted to. Even the sensation of the things, wet and warm down his back, was viscerally disgusting, and his throat already felt fluttery with nausea. Still, though, he couldn’t quite restrain the morbid curiosity, and moved one hand from Zym’s back to feel around at his own.
His hand landed on something warm and wet and sticky. The skin was…thin, too thin, like something malformed and underdeveloped, and it was growing out of his body but he couldn’t feel it, couldn’t feel his touch on it, it might as well have been – have been something else, something not-him, something alien, something parasitic, growing out of him-
He lurched forward and vomited, managing to avoid Zym entirely. The dragonling scurried out of his lap in a hurry, yipping with alarm, and stared at the puddle of sick with wide-eyed consternation. Then he looked over Callum’s shoulder and shrank back.
“It wasn’t much nicer to watch it, believe me,” Rayla told him, dryly, as she came over to gently bring him over by the water, steering him with careful fingers at his arms. It was too dark to see easily, but he thought her face looked pale. “Come on. Let’s clean you up. Wash your mouth out.”
He was entirely too shaken to make any sort of comeback, and just nodded, leaning forwards to slip his hands into the water and wash the blood off and then cup some water from further up-river to his mouth. He washed out and spat it to the side, even as Rayla gently set to work cleaning the blood off his back and the things with water and a few wet river-leaves. He still had open wounds, of course, and she muttered a little worriedly about getting river-water in them, but…in the end, it wasn’t as though they had anything to boil water in.
Finally, his back was apparently clean enough, and she patted him on his clammy-wet shoulder. “That’ll do it for tonight,” she said, tiredly. “Wish I could bandage you, but…”
“No bandages?” he guessed, and she nodded.
“No bandages,” she agreed. “You are healing already, though. It’s already scabbing around the…” Her voice went odd. “…limbs,” she decided, eventually.
“…So that’s definitely what they are?” he ventured, brow furrowed. He reached over his shoulder and found, indeed, that the cuts she’d made and the tears around the protrusion of the things were already near-firm with hard coagulation, even though she’d just been at him with water. It was astonishingly painless, compared to how it had been not fifteen minutes ago.
“Can’t you feel them?” she asked, after a moment. Tentatively, she reached out, and he could guess that she picked up one of the limbs by the lessening of the sensation of weight, pulling at his shoulders.
He shook his head, unsettled. “I can’t feel them at all.”
Rayla grimaced, and then, not looking terribly pleased about it, gently manoeuvred the thing down and around to his side, so that he could actually see it. He twisted to stare at it, morbidly fascinated, the nausea lessened now that he’d already vomited.
“That’s gross,” he noted, almost fascinated now, and made a face as he reached out to touch it. It was warm, and that was even more disgusting, somehow.
She let it fall into his hand, and he inspected it. There was a joint at the end, like a wrist joint, with something that wasn’t really a hand hanging there limply. There were, at any rate, three digits, all of which clawed. The first digit was half the length of the second, which itself was half the length of the third. All of them had as many joints as a normal finger would, but the proportions were all wrong – stretched-out and heinously alien, not even close to human. With a raw, shocked sort of apathy, he took the shortest in his fingers and bent it, pressing the sharp point of the claw against his thumb.
“…Is there an elbow joint?” he asked, though he was already checking. In short order he felt along the limb and found it, and hummed pensively at the discovery. Oddly, the discovery of the joints made him feel a little better about it. The limbs were disgusting, and he couldn’t feel them, and he hadn’t asked for them, and it wasn’t even slightly normal to grow two extra limbs on his back – but, at the very least, they had an almost soothing structural similarity to his arms. An elbow and a wrist and a hand each. It was a paltry thing to be comforted by, but it was something.
“You really can’t feel them?” Rayla checked, again, fingers reaching tentatively out to poke at the limb in his hand. He could guess what she felt, when she touched it, by how it felt on his own hands: warm and somehow tacky, even with all the blood washed away. The skin didn’t feel right. It wasn’t like normal skin – it was….thin. Delicate, in an alarming way that made him feel he could rip it with the slightest pressure. Like he would rip it, if he weren’t very very careful. “They look…sore.”
“It’s just my back that hurts, around them,” Callum said, making a face at the two alien fingers on one of his new limbs. His new, limp, utterly insensate limbs. “I can’t feel any of this. It’s like-“ he swallowed against the taste of acid, against the shape of the thoughts that had horrified him earlier. “It’s like it’s – not even me. Just…something growing out of me.”
Rayla shuddered at that too – and for a long moment, he was suddenly, overwhelmingly grateful that she was here with him. Here to help him, here to empathise with the visceral horror of what was happening to him, just…here.
“Maybe that’ll change,” she said, softly, and he wasn’t actually sure whether he agreed or not.
If he never felt anything from them – if they stayed these disgusting, insensate things hanging from his body…that would almost be easier to deal with. At least then he could…look into getting them cut off, or something. But if he could feel them – if they really did become a part of him, these things that were on his back but shouldn’t be – that was somehow a whole lot scarier. What would that even mean? “…I don’t even know what they are,” he said, a little plaintively. “I don’t even know why they’re growing. No one else grows weird gross extra limbs from their backs like this.”
“No one else gets a sparkly new arcanum years and years after they’re born, either,” she pointed out, and he huffed, reminded of what she’d said before.
“So, what? Are they arms? Useless featherless wings? Something else?” he questioned, looking down at the disturbing tiny hand-joint thing she was still gingerly holding. Three-fingered, it looked nothing like a proper human hand – not even an elf hand – and the proportions were all wrong.
“If it’s an arm, it’s not like any I’ve ever seen.” She answered, after a moment, peering along the wrinkly too-thin skin, as if she were looking for something. “As for wings…I don’t know. I’ve never seen a Skywing without feathers, but…I’ve never seen the wings of a baby, either. Pretty sure they’re not born with feathers, so...”
“Too early to tell?” he suggested, and she shrugged helplessly at him. He sighed, and inspected the limb as best he could by moonlight. “Well, I guess it does look kind of…baby-skin-ish,” he concluded. “Like newborn baby-skin, I mean – all red-looking and wrinkly and gross.”
“…Well, they’re developing fast,” she said, dubious, and withdrew her fingers from the senseless skin. “Maybe they’ll look less gross and sore-looking and wrinkly by morning.”
Callum wondered, for a brief and distant moment, as if he should maybe be a little bit put-off by her using those descriptors, even though she was mostly just quoting him. After all, these new…things…were ostensibly part of his body, so shouldn’t he feel defensive about their appearance?
But he didn’t. All he felt was a sincere echo of her own sentiments and her own disgust as he looked at the limp thing in his hand. It didn’t feel like a part of him. It didn’t feel like a part of him at all.
His gut twisted, and he shivered. “Maybe,” he said, a little tightly, and dropped the limb. It dropped back down, sagging against his back with the other one. A small, insistent part of him was screaming to get them off, in an instinctive revulsion he couldn’t quite manage to displace. He swallowed against the nausea again, and tried to put the thoughts aside.
Rayla looked at him, for a long moment that he spent mostly trying to wrestle his gut into some semblance of good behaviour. He’d really like it if his stomach would stop roiling at every reminder of the things that had burst out of his upper back. “…If you think you can, it’d be a good idea to try to get to sleep,” she offered, eventually. “It’s still the middle of the night – and we have a long way to go.”
He frowned….but nodded, reluctantly. “I don’t know if I can,” he admitted, and thought the reasoning needed little explanation. “But I’ll try, I guess.”
As if encouraged by the words, Zym took that opportunity to butt his head under Callum’s hand, crooning a little when the motion automatically earned him some scritches around the horns. The little dragonling looked up at him in a way that suggested he was entirely ready for some nap-time, preferably with a large warm cuddle-buddy.
Zym hadn’t been this touch-hungry before, he didn’t think. Not when Ezran was here. Still…
Callum smiled, gentle affection replacing the churning in his gut, and reached out to hoist Zym into his arms as he stood. The new limbs swayed and slapped a little against his back as he moved, but he tried not to think about that.
“If nothing else, Zym definitely needs sleep,” he said, and tucked the dark blue dragon-wings neatly under his arms. Zym craned his neck backwards, trying to look at him, and then broke into a sharp-toothed yawn. In the contagious way of yawns, he was returning it a second later, abruptly more tired by all the pain and stress than he’d realised.
“Looks like Zym isn’t the only one,” Rayla observed, lips twitching, and then ushered him gently over to where they’d been sleeping.
Laying down took some arrangement, this time. He had to avoid laying on the new limbs, and somehow manoeuvre them into a comfortable position despite not being able to feel or move them. They were a strange, warm, foreign weight against his back. Eventually, Rayla took pity on him and tucked them inwards on his back, draping his jacket over him.
As a finishing touch, she picked up Zym, picked up his arm, and then planted the dragonling beneath it. Said dragonling chirped happily, and shoved his snout into Callum’s armpit. “Sleep,” she ordered him, or perhaps ordered them both, and slipped with a smile on her lips to lay just a little way beside him.
As unsettling as everything had been…it had been exhausting, too. He’d thought he’d stay up a long time, thinking about it all, but instead…
Instead, he closed his eyes, and fell asleep almost instantly.