Free Living with Your Past Selves (Spell Weaver) by Bill Hiatt Page B

breathing, and began to sing, letting the sound surround me and the magic flow through me. (The singing was not strictly speaking necessary, but I had learned that song made any of my magic workings stronger, and I needed to feel confident in my first shift of this lifetime.)
    It took me a few minutes to achieve the right state of mind, but once I did that, I simultaneously felt a momentary, almost electrical jolt throughout my body and heard Stan gasp. I glanced over at the mirror and saw two Stans side by side, though one was wearing baggy clothes that were clearly too big for him.
    “Wow!” I said and realized that the voice still sounded like mine.
    And that was the biggest problem with shifting into another human form, at least if the purpose were to impersonate that person, as Uther had when he took on the shape of Gorlois to lay with Gorlois’s wife, Ygraine. (Not that I had any such thing in mind, at least outside the realm of fantasy!) Changing was easy enough with a little practice. Changing in such a way that I could fool other people who knew my subject well required a high level of exactitude, which in turn required an almost excruciatingly intense focus. Other forms of magic I tried, from shifting someone’s mood a bit to shifting the weather, seemed like child’s play by comparison. The first time I had Stan’s body right, but not the voice. The second attempt I didn’t get Stan’s curly black hair; I kept my straight dark brown hair instead. The third time the eye color was wrong, a darker brown than it should have been. It took days of practicing concentration before I could do a shift that Stan pronounced satisfactory. To put the transformation to a real test, I changed into some of Stan’s clothes, went downstairs, and fooled his mom. So far, so good.
    Next came variations. Could I be basically Stan, but deliberately get one or more characteristics to vary, as the pwca had been able to do? I tried taller Stan, buffer Stan, and several other alternate forms, and each one worked. Once I had the basic pattern of a person down, making custom alterations came naturally.
    While I was at it, I realized that I could cheat on workouts really easily by just shifting my own body into a more muscular condition. That didn’t seem right to me, but in any case I couldn’t maintain a shift indefinitely, so I still needed to keep my real body in shape. However, adding muscle mass temporarily might be a good gimmick in battle, at least if I were fighting someone much stronger than my natural form. In just a few days, I felt that my combat readiness had improved substantially.
    But these successes brought me right back to the need to practice non-human forms. In some ways shifting into an animal form would be easier, unless I had to imitate a specific animal for some reason, like someone’s pet dog, for instance. Then I would need the same precision I would for a human impersonation. Just being a dog, though, as long as I got all the parts in the right places, shouldn’t be hard. Actually, the shift itself was less trouble than basic logistics, like what to do with my clothes before and after a shift. The first time I tried a dog, Stan and I were on a quiet stretch of beach. When we were sure no one was around, I shifted into a rather handsome German shepherd, if I do say so myself. I frolicked in the waves for a while, as some dogs like to do, and fetched a stick for Stan a few times. Stan praised my movements as being very dog-like, at which point it seemed like a good idea to become myself again, but then the reality of the situation hit me: how could I shift back to my normal self without being stark naked on the beach? Even though nobody was around, someone could always appear unexpectedly. I had to shift my German shepherd vocal cords back to a close enough approximation of my own to be able to explain the problem to Stan. He laughed himself silly, but then he laid a beach towel over me so I could change