It's only been a few minutes, but it feels like hours. These disgusting rats do nothing to sate my hunger, and my thoughts are racing faster and faster. My emotions are on a roller-coaster, going from blaming my parents for my life to blaming myself for greedily stealing the book.
My despair at realizing I've made my already shitty life even worse, possibly irreversibly so, feels like a physical pain in my chest. "How fucking stupid! I can't even steal from my own parents without everything going wrong!" I closed my eyes, crossed my arms, grabbed my biceps, and dug my nails in to help clear my mind. I started to sing my favorite song in my head to calm myself down. "I just have to read the spell again and find the reversal. I can fix this, and I still have the book to learn other magic. Everything can get better from here."
Just as my heart started to slow down, I smelled the most delicious fruity smell, and my body moved on its own, jumping in the air and forward. I opened my eyes with a start just as I landed on a young girl, knocking her to the ground with a snarl. I felt a wonderfully euphoric feeling as I looked at her skin. With an increasingly sick feeling of dread, I realized I wanted, no, needed to feel her skin in my mouth. I couldn't help it. With tears washing down my already blood-stained face, I grabbed her shoulder, ripping the muscle directly off and shoving it into my mouth. Instantly, my emotions stopped raging, my thoughts cleared, and, more importantly, the girl disappeared. I was sitting in the dirty alleyway, legs straddling a trashcan, eating a plastic trash bag. It was all a hallucination? I didn't know how to feel. I was thankful I wasn't murdering an innocent young girl, and yet I was also confused and distraught at this hallucination.
As I sat hunched over the ancient tome, my eyes scanned the pages, trying to make sense of the complex spells etched on the parchment. I had been studying for days now, not eating and barely sleeping, my entire focus on understanding the intricacies of the blood spell that had changed me for forever.
I've always been fascinated by blood magic, drawn to the power and mystique that surrounds it. My family, the Ainsworths, have been renowned for their blood magic for generations, and I've always dreamed of following in their footsteps. However, this spell was different from any I had ever encountered before. It had promised me the "Likeness of Milim," a powerful Demon-Mage who had been a legend in her time. I long to possess power of her magnitude. She had possessed the power of growth and decay, the ability to gain the power she drained from others. The idea of wielding such immense power was irresistible to me.
Before Demon magic was forbidden, my ancestors had been famed practitioners, powerful and faithful friends of Milim. In the war that followed the banning, the Ainsworths had formed a pact with Milim, giving her their strength, to be returned to our family at a later date via an Inheritance spell. However, the Inheritance spell was now also forbidden, as it was partly Demon magic.
The Inheritance spell is what I should have cast, but something had gone wrong. Terribly wrong. Instead of gaining power, I've been transformed into something else entirely. I can feel the changes coursing through my body, altering me at a fundamental level. My hunger, so far, has vanished, replaced by a strange, almost metallic taste in my mouth. The only food I had tried to eat since the spell had left me retching into the toilet.
I need to understand the spell if I am going to have any hope of reversing it. But it's far more complex than I had ever imagined. Some blood-spells were written in the Stygian Dialect, a language used exclusively by the race of beings who resided in and around the River Styx between Life and Death. I know some of the dialect, but not enough to fully comprehend the spell before me.
Undaunted, I turned to the notes in the book, written in the standard Bloodscript used by all Blood-Mages. I read and re-read the description of the spell, trying to understand where I went wrong. The spell should have bonded me to the Ainsworth Pact, my own family's name, but instead, it had left me feeling lost and alone, a stranger in my own skin.
The description went on to talk about power, about being above all others, but it said nothing of the pain and hallucinations I had experienced. I knew I had been foolish to attempt such a spell without proper training, but I had been too eager, too hungry for power.
Now, I was paying the price. My body was changing, and I didn't know if I could ever go back to being the person I had been before. But I was not one to give up easily. I would continue to study, to learn, to try and understand the spell that had changed me forever.