Several moments passed and she just stood there, looking idly around. Unlike last time, the blood didn’t have an immediate effect on her. She still felt it, idly worming its way through her skin, but it wasn’t as sharply uncomfortable as the first treatment.
Aran, eyes glued to her, asked hopefully, “Alright?”
“Seems so?” she responded with a splay of her hand. “Nothing’s hurting, at least, which is a vast improvement over yesterday. Ursilla, will this take longer to notice?”
“Perhaps so.” Ursilla lifted her shoulders in an elegant shrug. “So far, you have not reacted as the other two adults I changed. I believe this alteration will not be painful, but do expect it to be confusing. Nothing about the transformation of an adult into a Fae is easy, after all.”
“Confusing how?” Sevana demanded.
Ursilla gave another shrug. “We shall see.”
“And for that matter,” Sevana hadn’t been able to follow up on this before, but she had all of the time in the world now, “these other two people that you changed. Tell me about them.”
Ursilla took a seat on the chair, silently indicating that this would take a while. Sevana went for a chair as well (better sit before her senses took a strange turn), with Aran copying his behavior from the day before and sitting with his back resting against her legs. Sevana would have protested—he could sit on his bed—but she had a feeling he had deliberately done it to tweak Ursilla’s nose. The constipated look on Ursilla’s face, at least, indicated she didn’t like his position whatsoever. For that reason alone, Sevana decided that she wouldn’t utter a peep, even if her legs fell asleep.
“In both cases, they were human men that were loved by the Unda.” Ursilla settled back, focusing on Sevana as she related the tale. “I was very young when I attempted it the first time. It was with my first husband, and we did not do such a rushed job as we’re doing now, but something more gradual. It took me ten years to change him. I kept him with me for nearly three hundred years before a bad storm took him. The second change was for my niece’s husband. She, too, fell in love with a human man and asked me to change him. I did so, not quite as gradually, as they were in a different clan and traveling was hard during those days. That time we took a year to do the change. It was harder for him, but he persevered through it. We unfortunately lost them both not a decade later. That was when the Kesly Isle volcanoes first started to erupt.”
Sevana grimaced in sympathy. So this was eighty or so years ago. “Why, if this was so recent a change, isn’t this knowledge more widespread?”
Ursilla shook her head, mouth in a flat line. “We did not share the information. For one thing, we do not wish to encourage this trend. If humans discovered that we can do this, they’ll want the power and long life of the Unda and the Fae. That is not always wise. Those who seek power rarely use it wisely.”
That…yeah, Sevana could agree whole-heartedly with that. She’d seen that very thing play out often. “But that’s why Rane knew immediately that you could help me. Why didn’t she mention this before?”
“She did not wish to until I agreed to help. Once she explained who you were, and the circumstances, I did not have any objections.” Ursilla considered her thoughtfully. “And I see now, having met you, that you do not hunger for power. You are a wise choice.”
Coming from this woman, Sevana would take those words as high praise.
“But what of the changes those two other men went through?” Aran had a notebook out, jotting down notes as Ursilla spoke. “What can we expect?”
“I can only use my past experiences as a base template,” Ursilla warned him, although she looked approvingly on the notebook in his lap. Glad someone was finally writing all of this down? Or perhaps pleased that he was taking her words so seriously. “Her magic will make things different, if not outright difficult. But the previous two times, we learned to still do things gradually, as much as we could. Focusing on only one section of the body was not wise. Better to take turns, to spread it out, to let the body adjust more or less in balance with itself. We did see strange symptoms. The senses especially did not always respond well and were either hypervigilant or shut down entirely until the transformation was complete.”
Sevana took note of that, although hopefully it wouldn’t happen to her. “Was that the only strange symptom?”
“No, at one point my niece’s husband experienced heart and liver failure.” Ursilla paused, as if that hadn’t made Sevana’s heart and liver twinge in sympathetic response. “That’s how we learned to not focus on just one part of the body. But he did survive without problems.”
Sevana rubbed at the bridge of her nose. Great dark magic, but this wasn’t going to be ideal, was it? “So if it took you a year last time, why do you think it can be done in six weeks this time?”
“I do not think it can be done. I think it must be done. Your magical core will fight us every step of the way, and you’re partially turned already. If we don’t complete the transformation quickly, then your magical core will likely erupt with conflicting energy.”
Sevana stared at her, like a woman waiting for the punchline of a bad joke. “But you said it might take as long as three months?”
“Well.” Ursilla calmly smoothed the braid laying over her shoulder. “There might be complications.”
Complications. Riiiight.
The changes came on gradually, so gradually that Sevana didn’t realize anything was off until she had half-consumed breakfast. She paused in eating some creamy soup made with clams to stare at the boots waiting for her next to the door. They were pretty, a dark royal purple that laced halfway up her shins, and clearly more to Rane’s taste than Sevana’s. She’d only worn them once so far and was contemplating going out again today to get her hands on the transportation problem. If her head and body weren’t going to contort into a ball of pain today, she didn’t want to just sit around like a wilting damsel in distress.
But the sight of the boots stopped her.
Aran, ever alert and observant, paused with a glass halfway to his mouth. “What’s wrong?”
“Purple,” Sevana said slowly, “tastes strange.”
He blinked at her, trying to decipher that. “Come again?”
“Purple tastes strange,” she repeated, more sure of it now. “Green tastes fuzzy, but cool. Black tastes sticky.”
A pinched expression on his face, he carefully replaced the glass on the table. “Your senses are confusing themselves. Just taste and sight?”
“So far.” Taking another look at the table, her head cocked. “I take it back. I can see scents. It’s like…” a strange thought occurred to her and she paused. No. Surely not. But the idea hooked strongly into her brain and, experimenter that she was, Sevana had to prove it one way or another. She tentatively poked at the tendril wafting over the soup pot and then nearly choked. “So. Touching scents is also now a thing. Feels…light and fuzzy, like thin strands of cotton.”
Rubbing at his forehead, Aran regarded her steadily. “You’re making my brain hurt just listening to you.”
‘Confusing’ just might be the biggest understatement to leave Ursilla’s mouth yet. Sevana had heard of illnesses where the senses got mixed up and the mind got the signals crossed. But actually tasting colors or touching smells was so incredibly strange that she didn’t know whether to be fascinated or disturbed. In the end, fascination won out. “Aran, I’m going out for a walk after this. This is too fascinating; I must experiment.”
“Of course,” he grumbled half to himself, “because if my senses were suddenly hijacked by their counterparts, the natural thing to do is explore. Not call Ursilla.”
Prosaically, she added, “I want to take a look at the transportation system.”
“You want to take a look at the transportation system while your senses are being dodgy and unhelpful,” he repeated doubtfully.
Mock-sweetly, she returned, “Well, I can always stay here and let you entertain me as I slowly
go stir crazy.”
Wincing, Aran immediately caved. “By all means, let’s go poke at the faulty transportation systems.”
Sevana cackled. The last time she’d been cooped up for weeks inside of Big, no one had come through the experience with their sanity wholly intact. Aran and Master were the only ones who’d truly survived, and even Master swore that next time she was seriously hurt, he’d put her in a self-sustaining spell and let her sleep until she woke up, fully restored.
For some reason, Aran’s patience with her outlasted everyone else’s. He made no secret that he was very fond of her, and Sevana would be flattered by that if she didn’t suspect his survival instincts were faulty. Perhaps he was dropped on his head frequently as a child? Something had to explain it.
They finished breakfast, put on boots, and Sevana moved carefully, accommodating the lingering aches in her muscles and the tension in her lower back as she headed outside of the door. Hopefully moving about would loosen things up as her muscles warmed. The Unda town lay out like a vast labyrinth of interconnected sea caves, coral walls and buildings, and carved stone rising from the ocean floor like a graceful wave suspended in the water. Specific routes were protected by large walkways, air bubbles that stayed permanently fixated for anyone who chose to walk about on two legs and their landlubber guests. If she chose to leave this area, Sevana would have to tap into an Unda to create an air bubble for them and act as tour guide, which would happen eventually. Still, she’d been given directions to the main transportation engine and it wasn’t far, perhaps three streets over, and mostly under the air dome, so for now at least she didn’t need a guide.
They received more than a few curious looks from the people they passed until something about Sevana would trigger their memories and they’d recall who she was. Then she received more than a few respectful bows, and once she spied a familiar face through a doorway, a child that she had brought in only four days ago. The boy waved with a grin, and she waved back, pleased that he was so openly delighted about his new home.
As they walked, she really explored with her senses her new surroundings. Synesthesia was a very unique experience and she looked around her eagerly, seeing what the world looked like through different senses. The world under the ocean waves was one of bold colors, beautifully arranged, like an undersea garden. Especially here, in the residential district of the city, people cultivated a wide variety of soft corals and feather duster worms, often lining their beds with sea urchins. It made for a beautiful palette of bold golds, deep reds, feathery lavenders, and stark whites, mixed in with the earthen tones of the sea urchins. To Sevana, whose sense of taste was quite strong at the moment, it was like taking her tongue on a stroll through a banquet. Sometimes she’d pause and stare at something a little longer, either to figure out why the taste was familiar—the thin, light green sea anemones that stood tall like grass tasted oddly like cucumber—but sometimes because it tasted so lovely that she wanted to give it a few more figurative licks. Tasting the colors, poking at the scents wafting around her, made her feel like she was in a different dimension altogether. For a moment, Sevana could ignore the uncertainties plaguing her and bask in the discovery of a world askew from the one she knew.
Aran paced alongside her, both amused and disturbed by what she reported, although eventually he saw the humor in it and smiled along with her. Sevana watched him out of the corner of her eye as they walked, her mind caught on a question. Really, it was a question that she should have asked long before this one: What had sparked this flawless devotion? No matter what happened, how irritable she became, how dangerous the situation turned, the one constant in her life since the Fae tracker had stepped into it was Aran. Sevana could not be more sure of her own shadow than she was of him.
The loyalty and affection were obvious enough, but the motivation escaped her utterly. What was it about her that had drawn Aran so strongly to her side? Why was he attracted when she repelled most others? It made no sense whatsoever.
It wasn’t a complaint—far from it. Sevana might not understand him, but the thought of him leaving gave her chills. Her world had undergone a paradigm shift without her conscious decision to incorporate Aran into it. The idea of going forward without his companionship was unbearable. Last night, waking to find him still next to her, willing to give her any comfort to ease her through the nauseating pain, had made that very clear to her. But now that she had this knowledge, what was she supposed to do with it?
Emotions were so incredibly difficult. Sevana wished that she could outsource it, somehow scoop them all into a bowl and present them to Aran and demand: ‘Just what is this because it’s very strange and I think it’s your fault?’
They rounded the bend before she could decide to ask or not and saw the main engine house for the transportation tubes. It was and wasn’t as Sevana expected: a large sea cave that had been adapted over, the front part of it immersed in the air bubble, although clearly most of the area past wasn’t. The three starfish stuck to the air barrier made that amply clear. Three tubes formed of smooth rock sat with the opening facing the street, a flat circular set of benches resting inert inside each tube, awaiting passengers. Sevana hazarded a guess that it would mean someone would have to apply a protective coating around the seats for their passengers to safely pass through the tubes until the light caught the angle just so and she realized that there was in fact a round shell sitting under the benches, and signs that a top part rested on the other side. So the tops were just off for now? That made more sense. A simple air bubble would not be protective enough for high speed travel down the tubes.
An Unda in human form wandered out, a book in his hands that he absently checked through, but on spying them he stopped dead. “Are you perhaps Artifactor Sevana Warren?”
“I am,” she confirmed, stepping forward and giving him a respectful nod of the head. He looked mid-thirties, but the Unda did not age, much like the Fae. He could be hundreds of years old and this deceptive look of smooth skin and stout body not actually an indication of his age. “This is Arandur.”
He ducked his head in a lower bow than she’d given him. “Pleasure. I’m Loman, head engineer. I’ve got one assistant engineer here with me today, Pol, but he’s checking something in the back. I’ll introduce you later.”
“Just you two?”
“We sent our other two technicians out along the lines,” Loman explained. “We ran a short test last night, and we’re double-checking the results this morning.”
That sounded promising. Sevana loved data. “Start with the problem itself. All Rane told me was that the tubes were having trouble, they only worked intermittently, and for the most part people had stopped using them.”
Loman’s expression went pinched and vexed. “You agreed to help with such little information? Bless you, then, as I’ve explained the problem more in-depth than that to our queen. The problem, Artifactor, is that we don’t know what the problem is. Our transportation tubes are a complex highway that connects with five other clans. We go as far as the northern section of Belen, and we’re the most southern clan that it sees. For many generations, the system has worked fine. A few hiccups here or there, but we always found the problem and resolved it. Then, strangely, about twenty years ago we started experiencing trouble. The clan past the Kesly Isles was the first to experience it. The tubes ran fine as far as we could tell, but the passengers would get stuck partway. They’d just stop dead; we mounted more than one rescue party before we were forced to shut them down.”
Sevana’s mind raced with possibilities. “And then?”
“And then the trouble started on our side as well,” he continued, grimacing. “People were getting stuck partway. Then it took an unexpected turn, where sometimes they would shoot off into connecting tunnels, even though the system wasn’t opened to that. They’d wind up deities-knows-where and it was quite the hassle getting them back again. I ran several tests myself, but aside from identifying two different tunnels that wer
e proven to be problematic—although I don’t know how—we couldn’t determine the reason. I shut it down myself. Short distances seem to be fine, but if we go past the reef barrier—” he turned to gesture towards the distant horizon, an area just off the coast of Sa Kao “—then we have trouble more than half the time.”
“Can I see your engine?”
“Of course.” Loman promptly turned and led the way inside.
The engine inside didn’t look like something that a human engineer would create. It didn’t have gears, or large blocks of metal, or anything along those lines. Iron in water rusted quickly, and Sevana hadn’t expected the Unda to use anything machine-related. What did meet her eyes was something altogether different. Ancient pressure valves lined the walls, each one directly connected with a hard-pressure lever and a screen of glass that showed a very complicated graph of intersecting lines in different colors. Sevana couldn’t begin to read the writing on that glass, and not just because it was cramped and tiny, but in a language so old she couldn’t even identify it.
But she didn’t actually need to read it to be able to determine the basics. Each tube directly connected to a single destination, and the glass outlined the tubes it took to reach that particular place. This system kept water entirely out, the tubes meant only to hold air. The lever activated seals on the tubes, building up the air pressure necessary in order to propel the pod inside forward. It was a simple, very workable concept.
“How many destinations from this point?” she inquired of Loman.
“Eighteen,” he answered respectfully, mouth turning up slightly in a pleased expression. He apparently realized she didn’t need a basic explanation.
“I realize that the two of you know what’s going on, but someone explain it to me,” Aran requested dryly. “I’m not trained in this.”
“System’s not that complex,” Sevana assured him with an airy wave at the damp walls. “It goes like this: Each lever that you see connects to a different set of tubes, and a different destination. When the lever is engaged, all of the air inside the tube is suctioned out, creating a vacuum, which gives it enough pressure to propel the pod inside forward. That energy is maintained until the pod arrives, then someone on the other end releases the pressure to end the vacuum inside the tube and the passengers can exit. The problem is that something’s gone wrong in the past few decades; there’s no longer sustainable pressure, hence why some of the tubes that are connected are sucking in unwary passengers. Or they just get stuck midway.”
The Fae Artifactor Page 7