>>5929442The difficult part done, and spirit shaped, the flesh proves much more willing. You watch as Zith-Zi grows subtly taller, a little leaner, while at the same time Nicolette Testa experiences the inverse: shrinking slightly, diminishing in height. Their facial features warp and change as their own voices rise in song, carried away by the ancient music; when it stops both are distinctly still the same women they were before, but also somehow DIFFERENT. IN the manner of elves their symmetry and proportions are ‘perfected’, made more even and hale-looking in every aspect. Neither is green, though both are subtly between human and goblin proportions, with the large eyes and large, pointed ears of a goblin. Their teeth are not the jagged fangs of a goblin when they gasp, but neither is it the dentition of humanity—it is something in-between as well, most prominent in the front teeth and canines.
You look across the dance to Costella, and to your relief she is unchanged. She smiles back at you with open relief, so you can only assume the same is true of you, also: that you have sustained your own sense of separate self, and remained as you were, unaffected by the Rite on any deep level.
If this were the only affect of the ritual, you would have stopped then and there, in absolute triumph...
>>5929433>The second 20 is for... This...But it is not. In the midst of the four of you, you see a fifth shape taking form—hazy, smoky, a vague and half-humanoid silhouette of greenish smog. At first you are confused, having never seen such a thing in your previous performances or observances of the Rite. You take it for goblinoid impurity—the leftover residue of whatever uncanny character it is that makes goblins so inherent ‘unmagical’ or ‘soulless’… But it is not just that. Squinting at it through the distortions produces by the ritual, you recognize with dawning horror that the formless thing which has emerged from the ritual is not merely magically-resistant null-matter. No, rather it is that same demonic taint which once afflicted and limited Izirina’s own spirit! But… How, and why? From WHERE?
A horned head forms from the smoke, and a mouth opens wider and wider in a silent scream—the scream of giving birth, or being born—as the demonic entity struggles to congeal itself into something cogent and whole. As ego takes shape from the blackened, Hellish ectoplasm, it attempts to escape… But the three you still dance, and it is caught in the whorl, bounced back into the centre.
“What is that?!” Costella gasps.
“I don’t know,” you admit.
“It came from Zi!” notes Testa.
“That was… INSIDE me?” Zith-Zi asks, sounding both disgusted and fascinated.
