The Changing by Jeremy Laszlo Read Free Book Online Page B

physical form. twisting and withering its new human appendages and features, the creature became grotesque, misshapen and wretched creature with long boney fingers with a thin film of flesh between them. Its legs had withered and its feet twisted at odd angles, the toes becoming pointier. Its facial features were ruined as its eyes had taken on a milky hue. Seth was distraught. He had found a way to alter the skull without killing the creature and yet the little beast had thwarted all his efforts. Even through this major setback, however, Seth found knowledge.
    With his expanded mental capacity Seth could recall memories in vivid detail, and looking to the ceiling at the remaining bats that still clung there, Seth realized that each of them had changed quite a bit from the time that they had arrived. No mortal eye would have noted the change, but through Seth’s vision of the gods he could see that each of the bats had become noticeably diminished. Each of their auras had shrunk greatly throughout the day, and Seth imagined that at this rate, none of the bats would survive another week. This fact explained the creature’s strange feeding habits. The bats had to sustain both their bodies and their souls, so to speak. As such, they gained nourishment from the animals they fed upon through siphoning off their blood, as well as replenishing their rapidly failing life forces in the process. Without feeding, the creatures would die within days, not of starvation, but their bodies would simply cease to have the spark of life within them as if they had died from old age. Seth made sense of the situation in short order, but also realized that much of the day had passed as the light filtering down from the room above had begun to fade. Fearing the bats would leave when darkness came, Seth returned to his work, starting over with the horribly mutated creature across the room from him.
    Stripping the creature of both its twisted legs and grotesque malformed arms, Seth rendered the monster immobile. Then he repeated the process to remove and re-grow the beast yet another human ribcage and abdomen, and then deciding against facial features for the moment, Seth next decided to test his skull theory. Pouring yet more of his own life force into Sara, Seth removed several small portions equal to that of the bat's aura, keeping each portion separate. Knowing he could not remove the skull pattern from the beast's life force Seth set about doing something he had done hundreds of times, although not in this capacity. It was a simple solution if it worked as Seth intended, and just as he had melded wolf with human, Seth went about extracting only the skull pattern of one portion of Sara’s aura within him, and attempted to meld the pattern with the skull pattern of the bat. Just as he hoped, within seconds the creature's skull became more humanoid. Seth repeated the process several more times and each time he melded more portions of human skull pattern to the bat skull pattern, the more human the beast appeared.
    Again and again Seth repeated the process, nearly eliminating all traces of the bat's previous skull, but for the life of him Seth could not get the two upper canine teeth to cooperate. They had become more proportionate to the rest of the human teeth in the creature’s mouth, but still looked slightly too long and a bit too sharp. No matter how many times Seth repeated the process of combining human with bat, the teeth refused to alter beyond this point. It was a minor detail, barely distinguishable in fact, but Seth wanted Sara to remain perfect when he healed her. However, he supposed this one tiny flaw could be overlooked, and so went about the process of completing the creature’s facial features for a second time. Having an almost perfect human face, Seth then restored to the beast a new pair of arms and legs, completing the transformation. But this time Seth knew he could not let the creature feed.
    Removing both the tunic from