Dead Magic

Prologue


Its torso formed first, the initial cluster of ethereal material expanding into a roughly triangular lump. There was a pause after this, during which the light radiating from it grew momentarily bright. The limbs started to form. Like two puffy balloons, arms inflated from either shoulder before stretching away and down, thinning out as they branched at the ends into five fingered hands. The process was repeated with the legs, large balloons of ethereal flesh that stretched and thinned down to branch into toes. By now the head had started slowly to form, rising and stretching up out of the torso like a bubble rising out of a pale, oily concoction. It rose some inches above the shoulders before the place where the neck should have been started to thin out. Something that seemed abstractly like a nose pushed outwards and with a shudder that went through the entire thing, three gashes opened where the face should be.

It was alive now, a rough clay-doll figure made of light and soft, malleable, ethereal flesh. Its chest heaved and a long rattling breath painfully filled its new body, which began to tremble and shiver. It continued to tremble, and the tremors became violent so that for a moment it seemed that the whole painstaking process would collapse inward. The surface of the flesh began to bubble and ripple like hot oil. Its next few breaths became, if possible, more ragged and uneven than before. Slowly the rough shape began to slim inward, its new flesh refining into the proper outlines and in some places filling out into the right volume. Details began to form, the ragged tear of a mouth became neat and teeth formed inside while the edges pouted back to form lips. Like two small bubbles, eyeballs inflated within the empty sockets and flashed green as they pigmented. Eyelids covered them and lashes layered over, nails hardened on the ends of now fully formed fingers and toes, eyebrows grew and the newly shaped eyes blinked. Hair snaked out from the rapidly humanizing scalp and darkened.

Finally, the whole body seemed to stiffen as if bones and muscles were forming beneife the surface and a bellybutton appeared over the abdomen. Muscles formed rippling across the surface and the skin developed texture. The figure drifted slowly to the ground below and fell silently to its knees, visibly exhausted by its exertions. The glowing light that it had radiated withdrew from the surrounding night into its eyes, which glowed like twin fires as it sat up, and in its mouth in which some missing appendage was still forming. It raised its head to the sky, an eerie Jack-O-Lantern in the gloom, and opened its jaws wide in an improbable yawn. The end of a long ribbon of light escaped from between rows of sharp, sharp teeth and began to solidify into muscle up to the very tip, which split.

Twin barbs flickered at the moon.