Page 90 of To Trap a Soul

She lifted her hand away with a frown. “What? I only speak the truth. With her ability to animal shift, she spends more time digging in the dirt as a mouse than cleaning like the rest of us.” Karlann rolled her eyes. “Though she ‘claims’ she’s using her nose to search for useful herbs.”

Lindi paused just after she settled the hot pot down, and her gaze slid to the woman. “Animal shift? She can turn into an animal?” A shaky laugh slipped from her. “You’re playing with me. No such thing could be possible.”

“Of course I’m not playing. It really is a primary skill, as rare as it is.” Then Karlann waved to the strips of bark in a ceramic pot. “She’s the one who helps us seek out ingredients that are magical conduits that even humans can utilise. Some humansdon’t even realise they’re already using them! If it wasn’t for her, we couldn’t have been able to share such information with other sectors who don’t have an animal-shifter.”

Seers and scryers allowed all the Anzúli to speak to each other from across the seas through various mediums, such as mirrors, waters, flames, and crystals.

Lindi lifted a hand to her lips and drummed them with her fingertips. “Shapeshifting... I never considered...”

“Neither had I,”Weldir stated through the bond, his voice distant as always.“But this is something you should explore.”

Lindi didn’t jump, but she did startle after so much silence from him. It’d been a year – upon her arrival here at the temple, in fact – since she last heard from him.

The walls were too thin for her to speak with him freely, and being caught muttering to herself as though she wasn’t sane was unwise. So, they never conversed to preserve the lie that she had no connection to the being who gifted her magic.

She turned to Karlann and raised her arms in supplication. “If you’re so ready to get rid of my presence in your precious laboratory, can you introduce me to Furir, then? I’d like to meet her.”

A smile slowly curled Lindi’s lips. It must have appeared menacing because Karlann’s eyes narrowed into suspicious slits. The woman then laughed, used to Lindi’s oddness and playfulness, both often wrapped into one unique bundle.

July 7th, 1717

As black glittering sand encompassed her entire body, Lindi grunted a scream through grinding teeth. Eyes clenched shut and hands balled into fists near her midsection, she put all her might, all her determination, into her magic.

Heat clung to her clammy skin from the muggy atmosphere, but she didn’t dare wipe her soaked temple against her shoulder. She hated how hot and heavy these thin white robes could be, and how unbreathable they were, but she always persevered.

When she couldn’t hold onto the magic any longer, her body gave out before her will.

With a rain of black mist falling around her, Lindi collapsed into the mud and ruined her clothes within an instant.

“No!” Furir roared, her high-pitched voice somehow shifting to a baritone. An ugly baritone. “You mustfeelthe fur. You must become the animal. Think mouth changing to snout, hands shifting to paws.”

“I can’t,” Lindi rasped through pants, shaking her head as she stared at her hands in the squelching earth. “I just don’t have theability.”

A set of stained white robes and boot-clad feet stopped in front of her, and Lindi looked up to the towering, thin woman before her. For someone who was six inches shorter than Lindi’s five foot seven, she shouldn’t seem so large. But with her hands on her small hips and peering down her large nose at Lindi, Furir looked like a giant.

Her three yellow eyes, unsteady and cold as always, sneered down at Lindi. “Get up and try again.”

“What is the point in pushing this?” Lindi made it to her wobbly and lethargic legs without Furir ever offering out a hand in assistance. “We’ve been at this all day.”

“You begged to learn to animal shift, so you must train.”

“It’s been three years!” Lindi shouted, her nose bunching as she scowled down at the blonde woman.

Her three eyes glared back at her. She was young, not a single wrinkle upon her sun-kissed face, but she had the personality of a commanding elder. She also had the mind of an unhinged madperson.

She was truly a beast.

“It’s because you don’t think like an animal. You hold onto your humanity, like it makes you superior!” Then Furir waved her hands in the air with a screech of uncontrolled rage. “You all do! This is why animal shifting is such a difficult skill to learn. Impossible, even, unlike the other skills.” She smacked against her large bosom, hitting her own chest right where her heart was. “You are born with the ability to sniff the earth, to see beyond what normal eyes can’t, to touch what no one else can. From the moment I was born, the shift felt freeing. It felt righteous. I spent most of my youth as a creature because it’s better.”

“I can’t change what I am!” Lindi yelled back. “I amtrying.I don’t look down on your teachings or your ways, but you’re right: I’m human.”

Furir snorted a laugh while lifting her nose to snub Lindi. “A human you are not. You reek ofother, no matter how much you deny it. I can smell it on you from a distance.” Then she tapped at her own temple with two fingers hard enough to shove at her own head. “No, your humanity is in here. Your mind. You must let it go if you wish to be free. Perhaps it’s just not possible for you, but your will is as much a barricade as your magical capabilities.”

Lindi lifted her arms in a wide shrug, wishing the hot sun would go away and the rain would return. She was tired of overheating outside with Furir and wanted the woman to imagine what it was like to not beher. She didn’t seem to feel the heat or the cold – not even when the ground was blanketed in a thick layer of snow.

No. She was merciless in any temperature and every season. Rain or shine, windy or calm, it didn’t matter to her.

“Then what would you have me do?” Lindi asked beseechingly. “You make me train, yet we both know that this endeavour has long run its course.”

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