Magus Star Rising

The Yharria

He sat in the vestibule of a Turning Brothel, its angled, stone interior lit by a single, wavering oilglobe. Blinking in surprise, he looked around slowly, staring at his hands and legs as if they belonged to someone else. The cool wood of the carved, high-back chair that held him pressed against his flesh.

How had he gotten here?

Shadows not his own crawled and flickered over the walls. Hanging tapestries rippled, blown by an icy wind that touched the back of his neck and sent shivers needling throughout his body. He grasped the chair harder and licked his lips. A Turning Brothel... Selina?

A moaning sob drifted through the doorway, rising and falling with a chant-like ululation. He jerked and practically jumped to his feet. That sound... it beckoned him, drawing him with some powerful calling. He turned to follow it, crossing the threshold into the brothel itself to be enveloped by a pale darkness where phantom shapes flitted and scuttled.

The hallway curved like an Old Terran snake, undulating into impossible angles. The scents of blood, sweat, and burning oil hung thickly in the air. Soft whispers drifted in and out of hearing, murmuring, gasping. Clouded faces appeared and disappeared like ghosts in the surrounding gloom.

Yet he felt no fear for himself. Only for Selina.

He found her in one of the oilglobe-lit Turning chambers, surrounded by a Diviner and two of her acolytes. All were naked except for body paint and tattoos. Incense choked the air.

The Diviner stood like a statue. With arms outstretched over her head, she recited the Turning incantation in a low droning monotone while her acolytes, possessed by the power of the rite, writhed and babbled on the dirt floor.

Six crested hennits, their feathered necks cut, their wings outstretched in a mockery of Old Terran crucifixion, hung upside-down from the ceiling over a stone altar. Like hungry mouths, goblets of gold and gem-encrusted silver caught the birds’ dripping blood.

Pre-Contact magic and sacrifice ruled supreme here, the air turned heavy with their ancient power.

Selina screamed, a sound that turned his blood to ice. He rushed into the room, ignoring the cries of the Diviner. But strong hands grabbed him and whirled him around. The Diviner was gone. Another woman stood in her place, holding a child in her arms. Both were covered with sores, their thin bodies scoured by some pestilence.

With a stifled sob, he pushed the woman and her child away and knelt by the side of the woven mat where Selina lay. He shuddered, shrinking back in revulsion. The metamorphosis had already taken her over. Selina’s hands sprouted ragged claws, her once lush hair fell out in mats, her body convulsed with each violent surge of erupting tissue and bone, her voice became animal garblings. And her eyes...

It had all gone horribly wrong. Under the right conditions, the ancient rite of Turning was supposed to be so simple. But Selina hadn’t just Turned; she hadn’t just slipped back to her primeval, archetypal beginnings to begin a newer, simpler, more basic life. She had become a beast, beyond primitive.

The thing that had been Selina leaped from the mat, shrieking, her talons reaching for his throat. Her ravaged face was no longer of the woman he loved. As the creature fell upon him, fangs ripping at the hand he raised defensively, another face stared at him out of those bestial eyes...

“NO!”

He sat up in bed, staring straight ahead. His arms, crossed at the wrists, stretched outward in front of his face as if to ward off some hidden menace. His heart pounded wildly.

The constant tick-tick-tick of the ceiling fan was the only sound in his bedroom as the blades moved swaths of warm air against his sweat-soaked body. Outside, in the street, an elevated oilglobe cast a pale luminescence through the half-closed window slats. The shadows of his dream now danced on his own bedroom walls.

He turned, sat on the edge of the bed, and put his head in his hands. He was trembling. A dream, only a stroking dream. By the Third God, he thought. Not again!

Slowly, he looked at his left hand, now throbbing with phantom pain. Bite scars ran like wood grain through his skin, the nerve endings ravaged where they had been torn by... by...

Stumbling out of bed, Simon Weller just made it to the bathroom before he threw up.