of whether anything else could feel the distortion; it was a question of whether anything nearby could recognise that the distortion meant food. All the Wild Power in the world wouldn't help her spot an attack coming, and though she knew her eyes would seem jewelled and endlessly complex to Chag, she felt no benefit from them. The sky remained a chaotic muddle of sparkling colours, its patterns far too intricate for her to follow.
"Can you... Can you really hold that long enough for a rescue?" Breathless, barely more than a whisper, Chag's tone held no scepticism.
She stretched her arms, probing the form, feeling awkward as the sheer bulk of her musculature got in its own way. Powerful though she was like this, her limbs felt like tree-trunks, ponderous and heavy. It didn't feel like her body at all, and the disconnect set a nagging knot of unease somewhere at the bottom of her brain. It would turn to fatigue all too quickly, and she had quite enough fatigue already.
Grimacing, she let herself fall back into herself. The loss of the dragon's height brought her eyes level with Chag's, though the change in her mass left her feeling as if her feet didn’t quite touch the ground. Having the weight off was a relief, but a bittersweet one. How else would they stand a chance of rescuing Rel?
The awe faded slightly from Chag's face, a second blow, and he stepped forward to squeeze her arm, the sympathy on his face genuine but still stinging. Pevan broke eye contact, scowling to cover up a more honest emotion. When Chag released her arm, he left behind a suddenly-cold patch of skin, and she found herself rubbing the spot as he turned away.
And vanished. A blur of motion where he'd been drew her eye, but too late for her to see what had happened. Her gut froze. Something flew at her head, and she threw herself sideways. The soft ground rucked up under her foot and tripped her, then caught her almost softly enough not to hurt.
It took all her self-control to clamp her panic under iron and hold still. She willed herself blank, flattening out her name and identity, praying she wasn't too late to avoid notice from whatever was out there. She didn't think about what would happen if she escaped this crisis. There were no answers to that, and it could only make her more fearful.
She eased her eyes open, letting out a long, slow breath as she did so. The scene was unchanged; white, fluffy ground, glittering sky overhead, no Chag. The only new element was a massive dragonfly, easily eight inches long, hovering over her face. Her throat went tight again, a tight rod of tension all the way down into her chest, and she realised she couldn't tell how close it was. Could it tell what or who she was?
Wildren in their own Realm rarely appeared as recognisable First-Ream creatures. Their internal structures were far too complex for a First-Realm mind to fit into any familiar pattern. Still, Pevan gave the dragonfly a wide berth as she eased herself up to sitting.
As she did so, she realised she'd misjudged its size, tricked by perspective. It hadn't been hovering right in front of her face, but several feet above - it hadn't moved, that she could tell, but when she reached sitting she found it still a little above head-height, peering down at her with globed, metallic eyes the size of clenched fists. Its long, narrow tail segment, ribbed in black and gold, must have been two feet long by itself, and was as thick as her wrist.
Mesmerised by the millionfold glints off the creature's eyes, she found it hard to turn her head far enough to speak safely past it. She couldn't keep fear from making her voice quaver. "Ch-Chag?"
The dragonfly veered wildly, moving almost too quickly to track, and reflex sent Pevan ducking back to the ground, under the chilly down-draft of its wings. It had to have a wingspan the better part of her height. In jerky, wild leaps, it fought its way back to hover near her for a moment, then plowed itself almost head-first into the ground.
A muffled curse in Chag's lazy southern accent emerged from the point of contact. The surface clearly wasn't ideal for the layout of a dragonfly's legs. Given how hard it was to stand or walk as an ordinary fly, that was really no surprise. At least the dragonfly was less repugnant, though as it levered itself into an awkward standing position, it put her a little in mind of a swan standing in bafflement on a frozen pond.
"Sorry, I-" Chag cut off as his words drove a black chasm into the ground in front of him. Pevan jumped, adrenaline racing through her like a storm-surge, but there were no aftershocks. Just a voice so laden with Wild Power that it left a trench two feet wide and four deep in the hillock where Chag rested. He reared up to speak towards the sky, all six legs stretching well out of shape, and said again, "This is going to take some getting used to."
He'd spoken with no particular ire or even irritation, but again, his voice pummelled the Realmspace with a torrent of dark, twisting chaos. Could the dragonfly form really be that powerful? Chag got on better as an insect than she did, but this was more than even the dragon form had ever provided. Maybe it took less effort to maintain.
As carefully as she could, she edged an extra foot away from him and rearranged herself into a crouch, ready to dodge if he spoke incautiously. It probably wouldn't do any good, but it might quell the paranoid itch crawling across her back. Quietly, she said, "Don't burn all your power at once."
"I'm not, that's the thing." Surprise akin to mild fear in his tone, but the air shook nevertheless. "I can't believe the power I'm feeling. You've got to try this, seriously."
Again, Pevan scanned the sky. Whether or not there were any hostile Wildren up there, things were definitely getting more animated. Second Realmspace reacted poorly to this kind of strain. "We're going to have to move fast once I get into the form." By contrast with Chag's, Pevan's words were barely visible, a flutter of blue snowflakes that blew away on an intangible wind.
"That's not going to be a problem." The accent might have been different, but the tone in Chag's voice was a dead match for Rel's the first time he'd tried being a dragon. The Realm seemed to tremble at his words, the wild, intoxicated excitement in them. Pevan narrowed her eyes, jaw clenched, studying the dragonfly for any hint of Chag's next move.
Glistening and ephemeral, his wings flickered once, then settled back in line with his body. They looked almost too fragile to believe, and yet she couldn't shake the conviction that if she ran her finger along their trailing edges it would be sliced clean off. The air sat uneasily around the fly's form, rippling at the distortion that Chag inflicted just by existing.
He had to be a beacon for any Wildren nearby. Even if he could be persuaded to drop out of the form now, it might well be too late to escape notice. And if the dragonfly truly did have that much power, then they weren't likely to find anything better. A shiver ran through Pevan as she closed her eyes, letting her mind sink slowly toward the semi-conscious state that would allow her to change form.
She savoured the moment as bodily sensation evaporated. The straight, bony arms and legs she left behind had nothing exotic to them. They were functional, but boring. Even when her arms were wings, her body was an awkward weight that dragged at them uncomfortably unless she burned logic to keep normal physics at bay.
One by one, she counted off features that, though unmistakably hers, would not be missed. Square shoulders, that Rel had teased her about so much, and the fragile, pathetic hands she'd never managed to make feel strong. Mousy, plain hair. Wide jaw. Things she'd never normally let herself acknowledge, like the vertical lines where her hips should be. What did Chag see in her? She cut off that thought as it arose. It could only poison her concentration.
In the darkness behind her eyelids, she pictured dragonflies. They weren't a common sight in Federas, but she'd seen several on trips South the previous summer, running messages. She could feel Chag's stillness, his patient anticipation, like the first hint of a coming sneeze, somewhere between her mind and her face. The shape of him sawed through into her awareness, and she added it to her conceptual stew.
The trick was not to become a dragonfly. At that, her identity would rebel. The trick was to make something that had all the elements she needed - power, stealt
h, grace - but was still her. It was like art; she was expressing herself, not transforming. She added the dragon to the mix, and the mountain of lore and myth that it carried with it. Repugnant though it was, the fly form the Separatists had created went in there too. She tried to focus on its jewelled, intricate beauty, its speed and agility, rather than the invertebrate reality.
Dragon. Fly. Pevan. Even with the images held tightly at the front of her mind, it was hard to map the hunched body and head of the thing onto herself. So much of the creature was tail or wing. It hardly seemed to have enough brain-space to be able to think at all. She folded her awareness into itself, tying it into ever-tighter knots, screwing it up until it fit into the space she had to work with.
A sense of lightness, like the faint difference in sensitivity between her left and dominant right hands, announced the completion of the physical transformation. Light bloomed in her now-lidless eyes, but for a moment the image that pushed its way in was jumbled beyond recognition. The awkward feeling that she had too many limbs wasn't helped by the fact that her wings registered as spare arms until she stretched them.
Then the Wild Power of the form welled up, and her mind almost shattered. Her
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