The Book of Transformations Read Online Free PDF Page A

floundered towards him.
    ‘Ysla,’ he said. ‘Welcome to Ysla.’ She remembered his voice, his particular tones. Cayce stood aside and watched as the gathered people began to analyze her and sketch her. A hubbub fluttered around the room as more people came in to observe this newcomer, this outsider.
    ‘Ye-yes. Of course,’ Lan stuttered, and then her reason for being there struck her in force. As she became utterly self-conscious of being a freakish experiment, the muscles in her legs gave way and she almost collapsed.
    Cayce swept in, took her arm and, with one hand under her shoulder, eased her back onto her feet. He hauled her hessian bag across his shoulder and the crowd parted to let them through.
    Her legs wobbled again as they went up a set of stairs up to the exit. Then suddenly, there at the top, in this world beset by ice, she experienced such warmth, such brightness . . .
    There was not a single cloud in the sky.

T HREE
     
    Days later, and she was on a brilliant white beach stained pink by the rising red sun.
    Pebbles. Wisps of seaweed. A sword half-buried in the sand, the hilt jutting up without function. Further along the beach were bizarre metal lattices towering up into the skies. They bled into the distance, several of them, elegant, rusting and redundant behemoths.
    These were the first images Lan saw, as the mental fog was dispersed by the tidal roar and the pungency of the coast that assaulted her. The sea breeze was cool against her skin: the thought prompted her to glance across herself. Bare feet, khaki breeches, her long-sleeved white shirt – she had no recollection of these items at first, they weren’t hers, they weren’t her , but soon enough the images flashed back.
    It’s all happening so quickly . . .
    Her new body thronged with pain. Muscles seemed to spasm whenever she moved, and even though there weren’t bruises where she expected them, it didn’t diminish the pulses of agony. Cayce had warned her, of course, and she knew exactly what to expect – but the theory and the reality were quite separate. These were the effects of sorcery, even if Cayce would have hated her using the term. She was living a fantasy, a dream, and she couldn’t quite believe it. Cayce had explained that it was something she must grow used to, and from now on she must to learn to lose the years of layered frustrations, drop her self-consciousness around others.
    Because she had undergone a major transformation.
    Lan shaded her eyes from the intensity of the light and pushed herself up, sand clumping to her arms. She still hadn’t become used to this temperature, this balmy, sultry warmth. There were a lot of things she wasn’t used to.
    Further down the shore, two of the indigenous Cephs were handling a boat, steering it onto the shore. Their handling was awkward. Pale-skinned and hairless, the creatures were humanoid save for their arms, which were thick purple and pink tentacles several feet in length. They curled to and fro, each with pulsing suction cups.
    The Cephs hauled nets bulbous with fish, and lugged them up the beach, through sedges and reeds and onto land. Aside from their shaggy breeches, they were utterly bare-skinned, and she still could not quite discern where the human body ended and these marine appendages began, so gradual was their change in morphology. Contrary to what she had first thought – that these were creations of the cultists – Cayce had informed her that they were part of the natural tribes of the Boreal Archipelago. Over the tens of thousands of years of human and rumel military dominance, they had taken sanctuary off and on the coast of Ysla, where they remained living peaceful, simple lives.
    Lan breathed in deeply this clean air, content with watching the Cephs go about their business, their tentacles unfurling majestically around bundles of fish, or massive planks of wood in order to repair their huts.
    The sky was vacant except for the flight antics of