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"No, don't bother - I have a spell of alteration that can permanently change
the coloration of pretty much anything. I used to save a fortune using it.
Black robes are more expensive than gray or brown," I said, gesturing briefly.
In a moment, the belt darkened to match the ebon hue of my gloves and boots.
Arella smiled and held out her hand, summoning Swift-wing with a mental call.
Swift-wing awoke from his perch on the mantle, and fluttered over to her
outstretched hand. She then turned back to me, and grinned wickedly as she
looked me up and down. "Well, one thing's for sure - once you clean up the
mess outside, you'll have plenty of firewood stored," she said, and kissed me
with a giggle before she cast her Spell of Returning and vanished.
I chuckled, then turned back to the mirror to look at myself again. Arella was
right, this did look better. It was a small change, but it was the right
change. Dressed like this, the woman in the mirror now looked like a "dark"
version of the Mountain Healers - powerful, beautiful, impressive, and deadly.
Then suddenly, I stopped and stared.
It wasn't just "the woman in the mirror" - this was my body, now.
And I still didn't want it.
Certainly, over the last four and a half decades I had gotten used to seeing
what I now looked like in the mirror, and only rarely did I catch my
reflection in the mirror or in a pane of glass in the windows and glance
behind me, looking for the strange woman I saw reflected there. I knew who I
really was, and I remembered (more or less) what I used to look like. I was
Eddas Ayar, a muscular, bearded Hyperborean male, about four cubits tall, and
about fourteen stone in weight.
And the woman in the mirror wasn't me.
Oh, she was beautiful to look at, to be sure. Her high cheekbones, ebon hair
and eyes, and her aquiline, half-elven features gave her a sensual, deadly
beauty. But it wasn't me in the mirror, it was someone else. Yorindar's Raven,
perhaps, but not me.
I ran my fingers over myself, feeling my face and body again, trying to
reassure myself that the body was indeed mine. Arella sometimes laughed at me
when I felt like this - I was glad she wasn't here right now. I didn't want to
have to hear her tell me for perhaps the thousandth time that this was my body
and I'd have to get used to it. I simply couldn't. There were times I wasn't
bothered by it, because I didn't think about it. Then there were other times,
like now, when I hated it.
I tried not to look at the face of the woman in the mirror as I opened the
closet and again slid the mirror back inside it. Arella didn't like it when I
hid my mirror like this. She said I had to look at myself, and be reminded of
the change to be able to get used to it. When she saw my mirror was put away,
she always opened the closet and slid it back out again. Perhaps she was right
- but after over four decades, I had learned that the best way for me to be
able to deal with my feelings when I felt like this was to simply put my
mirror away, so the strange, half-elven woman in the mirror would stop staring
at me with those alien, ebon-irised eyes of hers. I was certain Arella would
visit again in a few days, gently scold me, and drag the mirror back out
again, as she always did. Even so, it was better than smashing it to pieces
and screaming, which is what I felt like doing right now.
It took hours to finish picking up all the smashed flinders of the benches
outside my tower and store them in the storage barn Darian and I had built
ages ago, even using my spell of telekinesis to quickly lift and move many
pieces at once. Arella had been right - forty benches smashed to flinders did
make for a substantial amount of firewood, and I chuckled as I climbed the
stairs back to the top of my tower. Many of the pieces were small, and ideal
for starting fires or for use in making a quick, hot cookfire. Though it had
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taken quite awhile to clean up the mess my rage had made, it now seemed I'd
have enough firewood to last easily over a year.
I sat down at my table, lost in thought. It was several minutes before I
noticed a long, black feather laying there atop the table. One of
Swift-wing's, surely, dropped while he flew across the room to Arella. Even
so, I knew what it meant. I picked up the feather, stroking it with a finger
for a moment, then looked upwards, beyond the ceiling. "Now, Yorindar, or
merely soon?"
There was no answer, of course, but I didn't really expect there to be one. I
reached behind my head, slipping the feather beneath the magic silver-ring I
used as a hair-band, sliding it next to the one I had from forty-five years
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