I clapped my hands together sharply.

  “Alright! I think I’m set. Whenever you’re ready, Mia.”

  A moment passed. And then another.

  “Mia…?”

  One of Jax’s eyes cracked open. After our oral interlude, to turn a phrase, she had laid herself in the grass at my feet to bask in its afterglow—one of the Hammer’s more dash convenient perks. Normally, I would have said only a heathen of unconscionable barbarism would neglect a woman’s pleasure after such a courtesy, but thanks to that one skill, there was simply no need. It took care of my end of things so completely that any additional effort on my part would have been overkill. It was an absolute requirement for any modern mage.

  “Did she bugger off again?”

  I just grunted. “Mia!”

  “Sorry! Sorry,” came her breathless reply. “I was just checking on Arx and Lynnria. They are both confined, blindfolded, and short of temper. Yet unharmed.”

  “Oh.” I frowned. “Well, that’s… not the worst news, I guess. Anything else you can tell me?”

  “Nah~hnnyes! Um… There was some form of sound interference whenever I tried to speak, so I doubt either heard me over it… nor did they much care for it when I tried. I believe Xhinn meant to stop us from scouting ahead in this way. However, I was able to detect a pervading floral scent near Arx, while Lynnria was next to something that smelled of an old stagnant pond.”

  “Hmm.” I scratched at my beard thoughtfully.

  It was not much to go on. I had more or less gathered already that Arx’s situation would have to do with flowers, so that was nothing new. But Lynnria’s clue had mentioned ‘waking waters.’ That could tie in with a stagnant pond in several ways, perhaps by breaking up a dam or unclogging a drainpipe—both of which were far better than my initial assumption. Given the Demon Queen’s proclivities, I had understood it to mean… well. This was the vagina Dungeon. You can fill in the blanks.

  “Okay, we’ll deal with that when we come to it. For now, I’m ready to give this Create Lesser Dolilim thing a shot. I just hope it’s worth the Life Energy expenditure.”

  “It’ll absolutely be worth it!” Mia let out an uncharacteristic squeal of excitement. “Oh! I cannot wait! I’ve existed as a spiritual entity for so long… why, I can’t even remember the last time I took physical form. You will not regret this, my lord.”

  Empty assurances aside, I did not see that I had much choice. Jax needed help to defeat that bear, and there was no way any of us would be getting past those rabbits without some kind of strategy. It might still be possible to fly up and out, but the stark, overhead lighting with no visible source had made me suspicious that what lied above was more illusion than sky. Plus, Xhinn knew my abilities. Giving me such an obvious means of splitting the horns of our dilemma stank of a trap.

  That and I had only just spotted some Words up there. They rarely flared to life and only long enough for me to notice them from the corner of my eye, so it was no wonder it had taken me a while to see them. But Conceal featured prominently.

  Damn it. She might as well have put a giant red button up there labeled, ‘Do Not Press.’ It was not a question of whether I would succumb to the temptation but when.

  Jax propped herself up to her elbows, drawing my attention from the lure above. “Ye been aching fer it long enough, Faen. I suppose ye put in yer dues.”

  “Aching?” Mia chuckled dismissively. “Far from it, dear. I’ve long solved that problem. Though the ability to cuddle afterward would be a welcome change.”

  “Ye ain’t solved shite,” Jax returned, every bit as confident. “Them was dreams. There ain’t naught what can compare with the master in the flesh. I promise ye that.”

  Mia made a sound in her throat. It was not a rebuttal, exactly—more the sound of an adult reacting to a child who has said something precociously foolish.

  “We’ll see…”

  Jax narrowed her eyes. But she seemed to have decided Mia had conceded the argument, because the next moment, she spat to one side, plucked the rabbit monster from where it had been voraciously humping her leg, and changed the subject.

  “Ye sure ye even want this bugger? It’s male, ye know,” she observed, rolling to her feet. She punctuated the comment by flicking the cloven spear between the creature’s legs.

  It came instantly. For such a vicious little monster, its blissful squeals were almost cute—even if the resultant fountain was something I rather wished I could unsee.

  Curious, Jax caught some on her finger and touched it to her tongue. She pulled a face, disappointed. “Weak,” she informed me.

  I might have screamed a bit internally.

  “Yes, well… I doubt that will—cum slut! Jizz guzzler!—be an issue. You were male, as well.”

  “Do nay talk mince! ‘Ye were male…’ fah! Base clay, that were, not I!” Jax snarled hotly. She cupped one of her breasts and gave it a vigorous jiggle. “I be Dolilim! Female through and proud. Why, I would nay e’en know what to do with a—”

  She stopped, as though something had just occurred to her.

  “Say, how long do ye think that spell’ll take to turn this wee critter Dolilim?” she asked, giving the bunny a shake.

  The sudden shift in topic left me reeling, but I shook it off quickly.

  “No idea, Jax. Why?”

  “Well, I were just thinking… I ain’t got the memory of what it were like to have a tadger. I know I had one afore I sloughed it, but… well, look.” She pointed to the rabbit, which had already resumed its efforts to hump the empty air. “Watch at how its hips move.”

  Frowning, she shifted her feet apart and attempted to mimic the thrusting maneuver, but it looked off—less driving herself forward and more like she was grinding in circles against something. It was kind of hot, actually. Especially once her frown naturally gave way, somewhere mid-gyration, into an expression of feminine delight.

  Struggling not to smile, I cleared my throat. “Your point being…?”

  She scowled, finally giving it up. “Just… where do the ‘prentice end and the Dolilim begin? Is it gonna be a sudden pop, Bobs yer uncle? Or… or slow-like… so’s ye can watch? So’s ye can see the change, one to the next?” From the way she was chewing her lip, it was clear which she would have preferred. “Will there be aught left of this critter, still wanting to find a hole all desperate-like? Or will it just be Mia at the end?”

  I waited for Mia to offer her expertise, but given the sheer number of questions Jax had just spread on the table, it was no wonder she had preferred to switch off the mic. So I answered in her stead.

  “That’s… hard to say, Jax.”

  She had raised some interesting philosophical conundrums, even if she seemed less than concerned with their ethical consequences. I was convinced this was fuel for some new kink she wanted to explore, but had yet to zero in on what that might be.

  “This isn’t the same spell I cast on you. From its description, the Vorpal Bunny’s consciousness should be overwritten by Mia’s, but even if I were to cast it without her, it doesn’t grant intelligence. So whatever is left wouldn’t be able to tell you one way or the other.”

  Jax looked up from the set of fuzzy hare balls she had been pondering. “It’d be a monster Dolilim?”

  “Well… mentally. I guess.” I scratched at the edge of my beard. “But until we try it, this is all speculation.”

  She chewed her lip some more, deep in thought, but she finally nodded and offered up the bunny. “Go on, then. Fer signs!”

  I blinked. “You mean science?”

  “Ain’t that what I said?”

  The flywheel in my neck could not quite decide whether it wanted to settle into a vertical or a horizontal, leaving my chin to wag somewhere in between.

  “Right. Well, this one’s for Mia, so maybe next time. Best settle in. It might take me a minute to get the phrasing right.”

  She gave a nod. “Aye, just like me. Can’t expect yer skills to work unless ye got yer tongue fitted in the gash of it, eh?”

  Fitted in the… oh. I gave her a flat look. “We don’t have to make everything into a sexual metaphor, do we?”

  She just grinned.

  “Oy! Fekinell! Wake up.” Prancing around until she had gotten to the front of the cage, she held the bunny aloft. “Look it! We got us an Axeman’s ‘prentice, and now the master’s gonna do ‘im an experimental!”

  Ahnbe’s monster-in-laoi-skin did not move at the sound of her mistress’s voice, beyond cracking a single glowing eye open, nor did she reply. Her attention merely wandered to the state of her still-locked cage for a moment, before grudgingly fixing upon Jax. She wasted no more energy than that.

  I could not tell you why, but I got the sense that, for all her calm, she was positively ravenous… for something. But that was a concern for later. My attention now was on getting this spell right.

  I had been through the process many times before. Whatever tongue had evolved to speak the Words had not been a human one. There were too many clicks and odd twists that made mine feel thick and clumsy, but for all its difficulty, I was becoming used to it. Even a new spell like this one could not send me for a complete loop these days, making me increasingly confident that I had explored at least the more common vistas the Language had in store. I might even have considered myself proficient had I understood a thing I was saying. One day, I would change that.

  But proficient or not, it still took me the predicted dozen or so attempts before for the lengthy incantation took. And the second I did…

  “Brace yourself.”

  “Wha—hoof?! Aaahn!”

  Mia had warned me, but it did not matter. When someone takes a baseball bat to your metaphysical nuts, you just have to let it out.

  To that point, all of my spells had been powered either by a gentle drain on my endurance or through micro-expenditures of my own Life Energy. I knew of a skill that would grant me this world’s equivalent of a mana bar so that I might keep precise track of these things, but even without it, simple math and experience told me that none of my usual abilities ever drew more than a unit or two of the stuff at a time. With 13 Toughness, I could heal someone… maybe eleven or twelve times before succumbing. Half that if I really pushed the spell.

  This bastard drained at least a quarter of my total Life Energy in an instant, leaving me seeing double and sinking to my knees in agony. All for one stinking rabbit!

  But then the spell took effect, and I began to understand why.

  The initial stage was nothing visual. For a moment, I felt as if the air between myself and the creature had solidified into concrete, and a new appendage was ever-so-slowly drilling through it. Though perhaps ‘air’ was the wrong word. It was more akin to reality itself. Then the connection was formed, man to beast, and the little monster gave a squeak of terror as the threat of something as immense as it was inevitable cut through its Lust-addled fog. But it was too late. No amount of struggling could save it from what was to come.

  Smoke poured from my lungs, black and thick as tar, yet tinged with glowing embers, as though the whole of it was a powder box on the verge of igniting. Slowly, to the point of taunting, whatever mass had escaped me wormed its way through the tunnel I had carved until it had surrounded the fanged menace. It seeped into its wounds, bored through the cracks behind its maddened eyes, and oozed between its bared teeth.

  The instant the air cleared, the rabbit seized and died. As quick as that. Like a string had been cut. For the briefest of moments, whatever light had been animating it faded away… until a familiar tinge of red encircled the monster’s eyes where iris met white.

  The rabbit looked up at me. Recognized me. And I recognized it. Her.

  The whole of it pulsed, and in an instant, it had doubled in size. Startled, Jax fumbled her grip, and the thing went spinning to the ground, but before it had gotten halfway, it pulsed again. And again. And again, each time swelling larger. By the time it had landed, it was as big as a man in early adolescence, but it was not done.

  Bones cracked. Fur shifted. Limbs elongated, each at their own pace and according to their own design. The hind legs practically surged outward, energetic and fierce, while the forelimbs took their time to stretch like roots tenderly seeking moisture. Yet the head was the most disturbing. Watching something that was distinctly nonhuman slowly crinkle and crunch inward, seeing its eyes draw together, its muzzle recede and separate into an unmistakable nose and lips, until it was recognizable, not as an animal, but a person, was not a thing I had ever thought to witness outside of a horror film.

  Yet even as the creature’s skull resettled upon its spine, locking it forever into a position evolved for bipedal locomotion, its torso widened and spread. Ribs flattened. Shoulders flared outward. Hips realigned. And with a great snap, its spine went from convex to concave.

  By that point, its fur had spread thin across the open expanse of its body, revealing skin beneath that was every bit as gray as Arx’s. But instead of drawing into the body or falling off, the strands of fur began to migrate upward. First in waves, then in droves, they raced to the top of the creature’s head, where they settled into a pelt just as dense as when the monster had been the size of a loaf of bread. They held there a moment, then exploded outward into a riotous mane of shoulder-length hair.

  I was no longer looking at a beast. It was more akin to a young man—though he retained certain vestiges of his prior existence, and his hands and feet were still twisting into their newly humanoid configurations. Then there was his block and tackle, which was situated far too high. If he were to stand with it like that, his penis would be mounted at his waistline and permanently tilted skyward.

  But I need not have worried. Just as Jax had been hoping for, another pulse came, this time carrying with it a wave of feminizing energy. Skin smoothed and paled until it was as soft as a fine whipped cream. Lips plumped. Eyelashes extended. The jaw narrowed, while his cheeks and brow were refined into a sophisticated mien. And then the boy’s hips widened… and widened more until his spine had to twist into an elegant curve to accommodate it. His thighs filled out next, though only just. Already thick with the corded muscle of their previous existence, they needed but a fine layer of fat to temper the moment where skin met sinew.

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  Breath returned in a rush to the creature’s yet-chimeric body, only to be expelled in a long-repressed scream. The opening notes of it were alike those of a bugling elk, but right at the summit of its crescendo, it was overcome by the familiar tones of a woman crying, not in pain, but in sublime, overwhelming rapture.

  Still panting and moaning, he—though the creature was now male only by the slimmest of technicalities—struggled to his hands and knees, only to collapse forward as weakness overcame him. More waves followed, centered around the monster’s core. His sex was dragged, inch by inch, as though to the beat of an unheard executioner’s march, into its fated alignment. With every pulse, he came, spilling the final remnants of his masculinity to the ground below. And when he could come no more, his scrotum… popped.

  I could not help but jerk with sympathetic horror at the sight. Nor could I hold back the gasp that followed once his cock split open right before my eyes. As a man, there are some things you simply cannot see without being rocked to your foundations. And this was one. Even Jax was moved to fall to her knees beside me. Yet when she looked up, I was not met with fear or revulsion, but with tears of joy.

  “Master,” she breathed, eyes shining. “I’d ne’er have believed… ‘Twere the most beautiful thing I ever saw!”

  I could not think of a thing to say to that. So I took it for… whatever it was and turned my gaze back just as the loose collection of skin, only moments ago a set of male genitalia, pulled into our developing companion’s body and settled into a perfectly healthy set of feminine lips.

  Jax’s fingers rose to meet them in a gesture not unlike Michelangelo’s ‘The Creation of Adam,’ her face that of a mother first welcoming her newborn child to her bosom. And I really did not know what to say to that.

  I guess she seems happy enough…

  On my own end, I was just trying not to dwell on it—or the cramp still twisting my guts into knots. The whole thing just seemed so traumatizing; a visceral, torturous pleasure not unlike the endless torment of the Demon Queen’s essence. No one could ever convince me to do a thing like that to a thinking being.

  Maybe if they begged. In writing. And signed their permission in triplicate.

  But before Jax could get ahead of herself, the newly minted woman shot upright. Her now-gorgeous, cherry-red lips drew back over the shark-like rows of teeth still decorating her jaws as horns began to sprout from her head. But they did not curl so much as branch, one row unto another, until her brow was adorned by a sharpened crown of antlers.

  Then the waves seemed to coalesce into the woman’s chest. And it was a woman’s chest. While we had been distracted by the events between her legs, her rows of rodent-like teats must have faded away, leaving but the two in their expected places. These were wide and puffy, much the same as Lynnria’s most recent additions, however they were not content to remain as they were.

  They pulsed once. A smooth contour took shape over the woman’s pectorals. Twice. A lovely padding pushed them ever so slightly outward.

  And then they stopped.

  Whatever Life I had sacrificed had apparently been spent, leaving a pair of modest yet shapely breasts behind.

  Jax slumped. “Aw…”

  I was still reeling from having my thaumaturgical shit pushed in. Even so, I had to comment on that.

  “Aw?!” I wheezed. “The hell do you mean, ‘aw?’ You’re constantly complaining about lagging behind, and the second you actually win, you’re disappointed?”

  “Well…” She pouted defensively. “I were getting into it be all. She could’a growed at least a little more.”

  “What?” the woman panted finally—with Mia’s voice. It was not a surprising revelation, but it was nice to know at least that much had gone off without a hitch. “What are you two talking about?”

  “Nothing impor—”

  “Ye made a right bawhead of yer paps, mate,” Jax interrupted, colorful as ever. Perhaps she had needed the reminder, but there was now a palpable note of smugness in her voice.

  “What?” Mia said again, looking down. Eyes wide with horror, her hands slapped to her breasts. “What is this?!”

  “Looks like a perfectly normal set of boobs, Mia,” I replied placatingly… for all that instinct told me it was futile.

  Honestly, they were fine. Nicely symmetrical. No unusual lumps or defects. Just enough heft that you could grab one and know what you were holding, yet small enough that she could still get away with not wearing a bra—not that anyone around here ever did. She would impress no one with a shirt on, but naked as she was, I would have to give them a solid seven out of ten. I had to imagine most woman would be thrilled to have a set like that.

  “But they’re not my boobs!” she wailed. “Where are my boobs?!”

  I guess a simple thank you was too much to ask. It was not like anyone had suffered to snatch this body for her…

  With a sigh, I stood upright again and gave my spine a satisfying pop. “You’re the one who designed this spell, Mia. And you know who you modeled it after. That was the whole reason we waited so long to try this.”

  She glared at me. “I defined lesser Dolilim as a type-collection of kind characteristics. Provided Lynnria had breasts, there was no reason for their cup size to be included!”

  She would know better than I… though there was a slight flaw in her logic. Mia’s new chest might have been on the petite side, but it was a far cry from the washboard Lynnria was working with.

  “If that be the way of it, ye buggered more’n just yer paps,” Jax said, casually digging away at her ear. “Doubt ye’ll be grinning with all that shite on yer head, love.”

  Mia’s hands went to her antlers in a panic, only to sag with relief on finding them intact. If anything, they were even more majestic than the set she normally sported. However, I was pretty sure that was not what Jax had been referring to.

  “I think she meant your ears, Mia.”

  “My ears?” Her fingers threaded into the mane of hair at the sides of her head… futilely. “W-where are they? This is impossible. I can hear. How can I not have ears?!”

  I cleared my throat then, averting my eyes, gestured upward.

  Mia’s hands drifted higher.

  I gestured again.

  Still higher. And higher still, until they finally found the black-furred satellite dishes adorning the top of her head. Eyes wide, this time more in shock than horror, she pulled them down and around her antlers until she could actually see their tips.

  “What in blazes?” she breathed.

  “I take it then that the tail was unintentional, as well?” Fekinell observed from her cage. She still had not moved, I noticed, even through the spectacle we had just put on. Nor did she seem particularly aflame with questions.

  Odd. I knew I would have been. She and Mia had not even been properly introduced. Granted, we had not been shy in talking to the formerly disembodied Faen in her presence, but even so, I would have expected at least some curiosity after seeing Jax and me ritualistically summon a person out of a rabbit.

  With a gasp, Mia let her ears fwip back into position, then twisted around so she could see behind her. Sure enough, right at the base of her tailbone, amidst the expanse of bare, milk-white skin and just above a nicely padded derriere, there was a cute tuft of black fur.

  “No! Not my tail! It’s supposed to be thick and luxurious, not… this!”

  Jax chuckled. “Even Lynnria’s got a bigger one than that.”

  “Shut up!” Mia scrabbled over to clutch at my robe pleadingly. “Master! Lord Master, we must fix this! There are yet plenty of those Apprentice creatures left. Perhaps if we catch one, we might—”

  Mid-sentence, her stomach let out a loud squelch, and an unreadable expression crossed her face. However, I did not miss the way her claws had seized upon my thighs. Or how her nostrils were flaring over my crotch.

  “Oh? Volunteering, be ye?” Jax pressed. From the spreading grin on her face, she had noticed those things as well, but had chosen to pretend otherwise. “And what about the Life he just used? How ye gonna replace that?”

  “I—I, uh…” Mia’s tongue moistened her lips distractedly. It seemed whatever else she had meant to reply with had been forgotten in favor of pressing her face to the source of her fixation. She did not even swear. “By the Lord’s breath… this scent. I had almost forgotten.”

  Well, we all knew this was coming. Smiling fondly, I placed a hand on an antler and began running my fingers over their rippled texture. Mia whined with appreciation.

  “I take it the body will do? At least, for now?” I asked.

  She moaned something vaguely in the affirmative.

  I doubted that would hold up in court, but I would take it. “Good. You know, with the rabbit ears and the antlers, you kind of look like a jackalope girl.”

  Of course, ‘kind of’ was doing a lot of work in that sentence. Mia looked more like some eldritch god had possessed a Playboy bunny—pretty close to the literal truth, now that I thought about it—than a simple animal girl. I had expected the spell to have some unintended consequences, but nothing like this.

  Jax sidled closer, eyes alight with curiosity. “Tell me… what do it feel like? Do ye still have that urge to hump aught what moves? Anything lingering-like? Or do ye only swell with emptiness?”

  Mia turned to stare at her with glass-like eyes. “I’ll tell you later—slut! I have a banana!”

  And for the second time in the last hour, my robes were flung to the heavens.

  *

  Mia proved to be an enthusiastic lover. And by enthusiastic, I mean dangerous. And by dangerous, I mean scary as shit.

  But that probably had a lot more to do with the body she was inhabiting than with her natural inclinations. Whatever instinct my other girls had that prevented them from harming me had not been included in Mia’s spell. With them, even the slightest scratch would leave them in tears and begging for forgiveness—even Lynnria, though that had been a recent development. This body seemed to get off on tearing and rending, forcing Jax to hold her down before she cut me to ribbons in her zeal. I had to heal myself twice before she was satisfied.

  However, our coupling seemed to spur a few latent changes within the creature. For one, her hair regained Mia’s characteristic blood-tipped look, if not its customary length. Even her rabbit ears turned red at their ends. And her body ripened just that extra bit, giving her the look of a woman in her prime instead of the scrawny teenager she initially had been. It was not enough to make her the voluptuous goddess that normally wandered the halls of my mind, but Mia seemed far more comfortable than before.

  “I never felt… male,” Mia was explaining now that we were done. Jax simply could not shut up about it and had been pestering the poor woman from almost the moment her howls of pleasure had ceased. “Not in the least. Just… wrong. Profoundly wrong, all over. And then something inside me said to push.”

  She arched her back and twisted her hips, though from her face, it was a poor facsimile of the experience she had just undergone.

  “With every push, I became more myself.” One of her ears flopped to the side, and she glared up at it. “Not enough, obviously. There may be some skill to possessing a body.”

  Jax nodded eagerly. “Aye, the wrongness. I remember. But it took me ages to round the bend. Had to sleep through it, too. Every change.”

  She whined with frustration. “I wished I could’a done it like ye. That were so… mmm~!” Her hands wandered up her body. “And the flavors! Ye can nay imagine!”

  Yeah… this is definitely a new kink.

  Not to say that I disliked turning a rabbit into a hot and horny girl—or what followed—especially now that I knew there was little to no pain involved, but I got the feeling Jax was more interested in the feminizing aspects than the bestial ones. If I were a psychoanalyst, I might have been able to speak to her ongoing love affair with becoming my perfect woman and projecting that onto others as a way of gaining some control over her situation. But that seemed like a fantastic way to start an argument.

  “Right, what about skills, Mia?” I cut in. “Can you do anything that’ll help us out?”

  She sucked in a helpless breath at the question, and this time, I actually got to watch as her bared nipples perked with excitement.

  “I’m glad you asked!” she replied, bounding to her feet… and sending everything else into fits of enticing jiggles. I was just relieved none of these people were overly concerned with where I was staring. Safe places to look were becoming a rarity these days.

  Mia’s new body was not overly tall, though her ears were practically to my eye-line. And, of course, she walked on the balls of her feet, just like the other Dolilim. However, even after the most recent changes, she was not on a par with Jax in the looks department—which was disappointing… but fitting. She was only a lesser Dolilim.

  “Now that I am enrobed, I am free to improvise spells at will, though this body imposes certain limitations. With a Toughness of 4, it will be incredibly easy to destroy if I am not careful with its Life Energy, and I appear locked to constructions appropriate to the Foundation Layer. However, I am confident these restrictions will be eased once we capture something stronger.”

  I nodded along eagerly. Having seen the way Ahnbe and Xhinn could wield magic, I had hoped Mia would be able to do something similar. After all, she was a fragment of the Lady of Power! And responsible for creating our skills. It only made sense that she should be able to cast spells, but I always kept my butt clenched in case the world came at me with yet another hot poker. Those restrictions she had mentioned came dangerously close to yet another searing screw-over… but on reflection, I had to admit they were more than fair.

  “As for natively inherited skills,” she continued, “the body comes with but three. The first—” She gestured to a ring of Words that for no apparent reason encircled her navel. “—is simply called Set. It dispels my scent and slides hostile eyes away so long as I do not move.”

  That sounds a lot like Forgotten in Stillness. But I had to expect these kinds of similarities to crop up from time to time. The Words might have granted incredible flexibility, but there were only so many ways you could approach the concept of camouflage. And straight up invisibility would have been a tad bullshit at our levels. Hmm… I may need to think of some countermeasures to that soon.

  “The second—” This time, she pointed to a spot at the base of her calf where Words had made a glowing anklet of themselves. “—briefly triples my jump and running speed, provided I move in a straight line and begin at a complete stop. It is called Spring.”

  “Bit of a theme ye got going,” Jax observed.

  “Quite. As the third—” Here, she gestured to one side, which drew my gaze to yet another series of Words, this time at her wrist. “—completes the set. And its name…”

  As the Words flared to life, she turned a wolfish grin on me just as an oversized scythe appeared in her grip.

  “…is Reap.”