“Wrong how?” I ask, though the healer in me already suspects. The visions have been preparing me for this.
“Fractured. Like it can’t decide what it is.” He looks at me with concern. “Stay behind me.”
Normally I’d bristle at the protective command, but something in his tone reveals genuine worry, and it makes me nod my agreement. We enter the cave, his ice magic providingpale blue illumination that throws dancing shadows on the stone walls.
The smell hits first: sickness and fear and something chemically wrong that makes my healer senses scream. Then we hear it. A soft whimpering, not quite human, not quite animal, but caught somewhere in between.
“Lights,” Magnus says softly, and his ice magic flares brighter.
What we find breaks my heart.
Huddled in the back of the cave is a boy, maybe sixteen, with sandy hair and what should be warm brown eyes. But everything else about him is wrong. Horrifically wrong.
One arm is fully human, trembling and pale. The other is locked in partial wolf transformation—grey fur patched and mangy, claws extended but twisted, the joints bent at angles that shouldn’t be possible. His face is the worst part: jaw elongated but not properly reformed, one eye human brown while the other has gone wolf-yellow, teeth too large for his malformed mouth.
“Please,” he manages to choke out, the word mangled by his twisted jaw. “Help... me...”
I’m moving before Magnus can stop me, dropping to my knees beside the boy. My hands already glow as I reach out, but I’m careful not to touch him yet.
“My name is Lyra,” I say gently. “I’m a healer. What’s your name?”
“J-Jace.” Tears stream from his mismatched eyes. “Can’t... can’t change back. Stuck. It hurts...”
“I know, sweetheart. I know.” I look up at Magnus. “I need to examine him.”
Magnus nods but stays close, protective without crowding me. I appreciate his restrain as he’s letting me work while remaining on guard in case of for danger.
I place my glowing hands on Jace gently, and my magic immediately recoils from what it finds. This isn’t trauma-induced partial shift, which can happen during extreme stress. This is something else entirely, something that makes my worst fears real.
“Tell me what happened, Jace,” I say softly while my magic maps the damage.
His story comes in broken fragments, punctuated by whimpers of pain:
A trade caravan traveling the northern route. Attacked at night by things that moved wrong, didn’t think right. Creatures that screamed with voices caught between human and animal. Taken to a place that smelled like metal and chemicals, blue ice and sterile cold. Men in white coats. Needles. Injections that burned like acid through his veins.
“Tried to shift,” Jace gasps. “To escape. But when I tried... got stuck. Can’t go forward. Can’t go back. Others... others were worse...”
My medical assessment confirms my horror:
- A synthetic toxin flooding his system, specifically targeting shifter biology
- Magical pathways jammed open, unable to complete transformation in either direction
- Cellular damage accumulating—the longer he stays trapped, the worse it gets
- Defensive wounds on his human arm, claw marks that match the patterns we found at the wagon
“How did you escape?” Magnus asks gently.
“Guards were... distracted. Something went wrong in the lower labs. Screaming. So much screaming. I ran. Kept running. Found this cave. Been here... three days? Four? Can’t remember...”
I continue my examination, cataloging everything, when my hand brushes a particularly deep wound on his shoulder. The vision slams into me without warning—more violent than any before.
A laboratory carved into blue ice, impossibly cold, lit by harsh artificial light. Rows of cages containing twisted forms of beings caught between shapes, some with bear parts grafted onto wolf bodies, others with wings that won’t properly form, all screaming or whimpering or terrifyingly silent.
A man in a white coat, face gaunt and fevered, eyes burning with the kind of brilliance that’s crossed into madness. His body is wrong too—patches of scales here, fur there, like he’s been experimenting on himself. Dr. Crane, my mind supplies, though I don’t know how I know the name.
Magnus fighting desperately against creatures that shouldn’t exist—Broken, my vision calls them—while I try to reach someone, something. Blood everywhere, that terrible certainty pressing down that this is where he dies, where I fail?—
