Day 23

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck...” I woke up with a blistering headache, I looked down at my arm, the snake still attached at my wrist, but there was discoloration running up my arm still, stopping at the belt snugly wrapped around my arm, worried, I immediately loosen it, the feeling of pins and needles crawling up and down my arm. I pried the withered corpse of the snake off my wrist and tossed it the side, my left arm aching. I looked down at the Manaphage to see it had changed again, it was now semi-operable as a hand, I could open and close it like a mitten. I flexed it open and close and noticed that the discoloration in my arm would change colors as I flexed my hand like it was a part of the Manaphage.

I was curious about what had happened and tapped at the color-changing veins, feeling how hard they had gotten, like they were an extension of the Manaphage. Worried, I tried moving my new hand(?) around, testing its flexibility, the veins stretched and shrunk with the rest of my arm, dissuading my worry. I reached for the hand with my right hand, and right before I touched it, it started warming up, and before I could think, I grabbed at my left hand, and immediately regretted it, feeling what felt like a bolt of lighting travel from my left hand into my right. “Shit!” I shouted in pain, waving my right hand in the air in a futile attempt to get rid of the pain.

I got up after that, and grabbed the body of the bastard snake, and started back through the forest, the night sky looming over me, the Manaphage shining brightly as always, guiding me back to the clearing with the rock and hole. Glancing at it, I did not notice any changes to it, and kept walking, wanting to get back home. As I walked I felt my stomach rumble more and more, as I realized I was starving, I don't know how long I had been asleep, but it must have been at least eight hours, Maybe more, I grabbed some more jerky, finding I barely had any left. I was going to have to turn a lot of the bird-beast meat into more jerky, as I was now almost out of the rattipedes' jerky remains.

I got back to camp, the moon was almost hidden behind the treeline, and checked my fire pit, it was cold, and I grabbed a hunk of the frozen bird-beast meat, and absorbed the moisture in it as I tried heating it up in my left hand. It didn't seem to be working, I could only absorb or cast a spell in sequence, then I smelled burning and pulled the meat away, only to find that it had been burned only where I had grabbed it, like a brand on the meat. The rest of the meat had dried too, but was still ice cold, and hard as a rock, not wanting to wait for it to slowly heat up in a fire, I put it to the side, and was about to start the fire, when I remembered the meat I had buried, and quickly dug out the carapace clam shelled around the meat, also cold to the touch. I must have been out for a long time if even the shell was cold. Cracking it open, I found the meat inside to be ice cold, almost frozen solid.

I started a fire, chewing on my now burned slow-cooked meat, and sat there, thinking about the dream, and if it meant anything, now that I was awake, I clearly recognized the forest, and the river, and realized that the dam was where the waterfall was in my mindscape, had something happened, I was clearly able to use magic still, but when I really tried to get a deeper sense of it, I felt like I was getting lost in my own head, sighing as I waited for the fire to get big enough I wouldn't have to worry about it going out anytime soon, and I crawled into my cold sleeping bag and started meditating, then falling asleep.