WALPURGIA ✔️

Chapter 9 - Changing species

   ☽

The night before we departed for Strasbourg, I started feeling weird.

It wasn't the same overwhelming feeling from when the goddess took over my body, but different.

Did I dare say stronger? I wasn't sure how to describe it, no matter how hard I tried to place it. Tingly, stingy, cold? Something I couldn't shake off – that was for sure. No matter how many times I pulled on my spells, the cold stayed.

I snuggled closer to Baldwin, and he wrapped his arm around me.

Baldwin lowered the book and looked over to me. "What worries you?", he reached out for me. "Nothing. I was just thinking", I pressed my hand against his, and he intertwined them. "I think it's a headache. The house needs a dire aeration." "That it does", he kissed my hair and bid me goodnight. 

The stingy cold travelled up from my legs to my hips. I shivered. Baldwin wrapped his blanket around me.

I forced myself to ignore it and pressed myself against the comforting cold of Baldwin's body.

  ☽  

My eyes shot open in the middle of my sleep though.

Confused at how rested I was, I looked around. I really was still in our bedroom. I wasn't dreaming.

Everything was unusually sharp and crisp for such dark hours. I could make out the pattern on the hideous ceiling, something I had never paid much attention to.

My eyes easily traced every curve, every pattern in the dark - I could even make out the colours. 

I calmly laid there, listened to the even breathing, and closed my eyes. It calmed me down.

Baldwin breathed out.

Confused, I listened more. The breathing I heard didn't fit with his. A different rhythm.

It wasn't his breathing, I quickly registered. Nor mine. It was the warmblood's underneath us. 

I heard a weak heartbeat.

Heartbeat?

I held my breath, placed my hand over my heart. Nothing, at first. Then, it beat once.

It was my weak heartbeat I heard.

I jumped up.

Nothing was blurry as I did that – instead, I caught every second, every motion, until I was still again.

"You started turning an hour ago. Silently and painlessly", Baldwin caressed my back. "How do you feel?", he carefully asked.

Different.

Different summarized it perfectly.

No spells visible to me anymore, no beautiful auras to look at. No humming coming from the spells, no radiation of power. No connections I had seen as a weaver, but the pattern of the dresser good ten metres from me.

Every little outline was crystal clear and sharp to me, imperfections I hadn't seen until now were proudly over shining everything in the room.

I breathed in and my breath stocked – I could smell what blood Baldwin had last eaten, smelled the wax he had used for his letters. His scent revealed more than I initially had caught: scents of rust, of metal – blood. Underneath the forest scent laid the one of a fighter.