Free Mourning Cloak by Rabia Gale Page B

have the better armor but not the experience.
Hurry up, Flutter!
    And then it begins, deep in my belly, that acid churning, that roiling as tissues and nerves and veins are twisted and torn. The cloth wrapping of my bands disintegrates into ash. The metal itself is coated with chromatic salts, but Flutter’s there too. It dissolves into my skin.
    My torso and abdomen are a furnace, a factory of parts and pistons. I
become
the armor, not merely coated in it. Different from Sera’s silvery shell and her fancy weaponry.
    Gates and golems, Dark Masters and Seeings, be consigned to the nine hells. Sera’s my wife.
    She needs my help.
    I bellow as I push off the slab and the sound of it echoes off the rocky walls and reverberates in the valley. My transformation is not complete and my armor cannot fly, but there is power in my roar and strength in my heel driving into rock. The eerie men Sera set to guard me—just a pair of them—spring up on my periphery. My enhanced vision notes them, my hands flick out and catch their electric whips in mid-arc.
    The current jolts into me and the spiders redirect it into the furnace in my belly, my fuel source, the thing that powers my transformation. I pull, without breaking stride, and the eerie men fly into each other behind me. I drop their whips before I hear the smack of flesh meeting flesh.
    I barely touch the ground, moving like a skater on ice. I bound over boulders I’d have to clamber across in my unarmored body.
    My sword leaps into my hand, molds itself to my grip. Sera disdained it as old and obsolete, but she has never known what it felt like to be part of this triumvirate of sword, armor, and me.
    I reach the battlefield, bull past the graceful knife-dance of night walkers and scatter cobble crunchers with every step. I bugle a challenge to the knot of Garguants above. They note me, but before they can swoop and pin me to the ground with claws and beak, I leap high into the air and catch myself on wings and talons. Right into their midst, where their longer reach is not an advantage, the place where Sera didn’t dare come.
    It was never my way to dance at the edges. I close in. I attack. I face the Garguants head on and take them by the throat.
    I throw one down, and latch myself to another. My sword stabs and slashes. Greenish blood spatters my visor. The spiders are on it—translucent and crawling, they wipe the smear clean, absorb the blood as they scuttle back into my body.
    The flesh and blood of my enemies is, literally, fuel and food for me.
    Sera’s right. They need to die, the golems and the Garguants, these mindless defenders of Tau Marai, these ravagers of the southern lands. Once they’re gone, Sera will see I’m on her side. Will listen to me. Will agree the gates need to stay shut.
    This time I don’t hold back. This time I let it go. This time I give myself up to the transformation. I get stronger and faster and more accurate. Bone and muscle and tendon turn to steel and cable and spun glass. Sparks replace brain signals. Light flashes through me and every part of me responds to that blinding, brilliant pace.
    I dismember a Garguant, turn and catch another’s claw on my arm. If I had been bone and flesh, I’d have broken, but I’m not.
    I’m Transformed.
    The Garguant I stand upon dives and twistn="es and s, throwing me off its back. I ram my sword through its exposed underbelly as we fall, then wrench it loose, spinning away. The Garguant’s body smashes to the ground, scatters stone, raises dust. I catch myself on stiffened ankles, but even so my feet drive several inches through rock. I leave indentations as I stagger out from the impact zone. My sword flies out, reflexively, and stabs at an oncoming Garguant. I follow up the thrust with a bone-crushing punch that hurls the Garguant into the canyon wall.
    Numbers fly past my vision and for once, they
make sense.
Great Taurin, I
understand
the equations of velocity and force and angles.
    The