Writely Post.

[iambetadraconis]

Asar-Suti was lounging lazily in the light of the setting sun as he waited for Strahan and Rabastan to turn up; he watched the black ship, and the ragged sails, and the light filtering through them.

"I'm really not ready yet," was the protest from Rabastan. Meaning, "I really don't want to do this at all". He might have the ring but that didn't make him a willing user. Mostly due to his fear that, now that he had it, involuntary shifts could be a problem in the bar. If I don't wear it it won't happen. No one will be in danger.

Strahan, feeling unusually impatient today, was urging Rabastan towards where he felt the Seker would be found. And it was unusual too. He'd seen the change twice and he wanted to see it a third time. Behind him trotted the four wolves: Scrios, Fulaingt, Imreas and Éadóchas; above the hawk Sakti flew. Rabastan had asked why Strahan was bringing his menagerie, only to be told that it would help Rabastan some to have fellow wolves about. Really though, Strahan just wanted a little protection in case Rabastan got it into his head to maul someone.

Asar-Suti turned from where he was sitting on a lawn chair. "Oh, you are bringing your entire train of creatures," he smiled at Strahan. "We are definitely in the majority now. As compared to one single skinny wizard."

His smile turned to Rabastan, making clear he was joking.

Why did everyone have to have a go at him anyways? They'd never treat Rodolphus this way-the man was Rabastan's physical opposite. Tall, sturdy, imposing. When people showed Rodolphus their fear of him it was often well-placed. And when they saw what Rodolphus himself called the runt of the family litter people wondered just what it was about Rabastan that was so frightening. He looked about. It seemed as though Asar-Suti was treating this as though being a werewolf were some private joke only he and his Ihlini henchmen understood.

"I did. I thought it would help to have animal company," he said easily. "For me, for you, for Rabastan Lestrange here." Altruism. That was what he was making it look like. It must have looked as though Strahan was being exceptionally kind to the wizard, which was exactly what the Ihlini overlord wanted people to believe. For now. Later, when it was too late for anyone-especially Rabastan-he would disabuse them all of this notion. By that time he would have firm control over the hapless wizard. Control he would not relinquish without a fight.

"He might feel overwhelmed," Asar-Suti pointed out, standing. "Do you, Rabastan? Would you rather we sent some of these beasts away?"

"No I'm fine," he said, half-heartedly. He suspected that Strahan would protest, and the last thing he wanted was an argument to upset his fragile equilibrium. "They can stay."

Good, he mused. You will make a good servant for me. Strahan made certain that no one overheard his thoughts; he could not risk it. Not here and not now. "They will not be afraid of you; you are only one." Rabastan gave him an odd look. "And they have seen what werewolves of your breed look like as animals; they will not fear you."

Asar-Suti was leading the way. "Rabastan has himself well under control now," he said, "there is no reason for them to fear him. Shall we go all the way to the clearing again, or would you try it on the far shore of the lake this time?" The question was addressed to Rabastan; he was the 'customer' here, and Strahan only helping.

No he doesn't, he wanted to protest. His flashback in front of Wells told him he was not entirely under control. Still, he had ordered some wolfsbane from the bar, to recover whatever control he'd lost from the previous day. Noxious as ever, he drank it down, knowing it was the only thing reliable he could count on in these times. "I ... think ... in the forest, for the time being..."

"Under control, aye, but company is always welcomed, regardless. What we cannot teach him about being a wolf they can." He motions to Imreas, who was standing with her right shoulder pressed to Strahan's left leg, in a lir-like manner. "We are not naturally creatures of the forest; we do not know what it truly means to have been born, to live, and to die as animals of the wild." A little logic usually helped.

Asar-Suti led the way again, cheerfully scampering over logs and through underbrush in a faun-like gait, which was simply because most of the time, he crossed here in faun-shape, with Gil. "Our clearing can't be far any more," he reassured them after quite a while, slipping through a thicket that hid brambles.

If he starts "Tra-la-la"-ing we may have to hurt him...

Of the seven of them, it was Sakti who probably found the going easiest. Not being land-bound she could fly over the treetops and not have to worry about becoming entangled in the bracken that would slow down even an animal that was normally at home in such living conditions. Strahan could tell that the hawk appreciated this, judging from her smugness in the link. The sorcerer looked up at the canopy, knowing that the bird could not see him but glowering all the same. I should turn you into a mole and see if you are still so cheerful about traversing forests.

Rabastan was not as cheerful as the hawk. Not because he was finding his wizarding robes a magnet for just about anything with a point to catch fabric with-though admittedly that was conspiring to sour his temper-but because he was, again, going to turn into a wolf. Voluntarily. Thanks to the ring. The ring he wanted to leave behind in his room so that there would be no way he could change-short of Asar-Suti exerting control over Rabastan's morphogenetic field. So he brought it with him, wearing it on his right middle finger. Better to do it voluntarily than to be forced into the shape he was coming to despise so much.

Asar-Suti kept straight and cheerful as he led the way to the clearing, willing himself to do the undoable and get Rabastan to choose and embrace the wolf before the next full moon - then he and the rest of them, hopefully, would be out of danger. As the clearing opened to them, the first stars appeared in the sky; Asar-Suti turned to Strahan and said, "Would you put your godfire on the rock there again, my dear faithful servant, so we may have light to work by?"

He tweaked a convenient wolf ear that was passing him, playfully, caressing the soft fur.

Asar-Suti would have to be prepared for a good long slog if he intended to help Rabastan embrace his lupine half. He'd been infected for less than a month and already he was feeling a hatred for it that he'd never felt towards anyone or thing save himself. Not because it caused him to swap shapes once a month but because of something that ran much deeper than that. Shifting shape he could learn to live with. The symbology of the animal he couldn't.

"Aye my lord," Strahan said, unaware of Rabastan's current bout of self-beating. A flick of his hand and a decent-sized fire was blazing above the rock, making it look like a miniature Valgaard: the Valgaard it was before the Ihlini took to living there. A time when it was still an active volcano, spewing fire and ash into the air. Once again the gloom of the forest was thrown into sharp contrasts of light and dark, reminding Strahan even more of the home he onced lived in.

"You have the stone, don't you?" Asar-Suti asked Rabastan. "Concentrate on it, perhaps put your other hand around it?"

He did. It was on his right middle finger, glowing in the firelight. Or maybe from the tiny spark that lived inside the amethyst. It didn't matter; all that mattered was that he had it with him. The stone was shown to Asar-Suti, to assure him that Rabastan had it on him. Then he pulled his hand away as though unable to look at it, and fisted it at his side. I don't want to do this but the bar's welfare is important...

The display certainly satisfied Strahan, who was admiring the handiwork of the sorcerer and his god. A decent-sized stone, square in shape and set into silver. He wondered for a moment if the fact that Rabastan was wearing silver at all caused him agony. Certainly the literature said werewolves couldn't stand the touch of silver. But it was only a small amount; would it? If it did, would Rabastan demand another setting for his stone? Gold maybe?

Asar-Suti didn't wonder about that yet; Rabastan was twitchy at the best of time, and if he'd stopped every time, they wouldn't have got anything done yet. "Feel the spark inside it, the energy? It will trigger the change if you touch it directly and call on it - can you do it now?"

You'd be twitchy too if you lived his life. But since nothing was spoken no protest could be levied. He frowned. He was none too happy about using the gift, seeing it as an extension of the curse itself. "I ... feel it... There's pain too. A lot of it."

Strahan opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. He wanted to volunteer the information about the ring, but until Rabastan said where it hurt he couldn't know if the ring was the source or if it was merely the curse of lycanthropy Rabastan was feeling.

"That is probably just your memory of your other shifts," Asar-Suti said. "Touch that spark within and allow yourself to follow you; that will shift your shape." He looked at Strahan, willing him not to interfere, no matter what happened.

Strahan looked positively contemptuous, but did as was bid. He'd watch from the sidelines; this was Rabastan's moment. The wolves however, seemed to sense the change in tension, and were milling about, trying to keep an eye on Rabastan-Scrios moving particularly close, making Rabastan particularly unhappy. Come back here, he told the lavender wolf, who backed off, a plaintive look in his eyes. The rest took up spots about the clearing and Sakti finally managed to descend past the canopy to watch the scene unfold.

He was about to give Scrios' nose a good shove when the wolf suddenly retreated. Being nosed at was not what he wanted to have happen, and that particular nose was getting a little too close to where Rabastan did not want to be sniffed. "No it hurts," he says to counter Asar-Suti's assertion. "I've been hurting a lot lately and I don't know why. Like my whole arm is aching like mad." He indicates the right arm.

The silver did affect him after all.

"Give it to me," Asar-Suti said, holding out his hand.

Give what to the Seker? "What do you want?" he asked. "You want my right arm? I'm afraid I'm a bit fond of it where it is, so I won't be able to give it to you if that's what you want."

Oh that Rabastan! Apparently it was easy to see how he'd become enwrapped with the Death Eaters if he was this witless about mundane things! "The ring Rabastan. Give Asar-Suti the ring."

Asar-Suti opened and closed his hand, imperiously and impatiently, until the thing was in it.

"It is a perfectly normal stone set in perfectly normal silver - oh!" he said, just remembering about werewolves and silver. "Strahan, I think we should reset this stone. Werewolves are allergic to silver. Do you have a gold ring to set it into?"

Only the ring that his lifestone was set into and that he would not part with for anything. Not because the ring the stone itself was set into but rather that he needed it to keep the thing which housed an important part of his lifeforce inside it close to his person. "I am afraid I carry no metals upon me. We shall have to improvise until we get some."

To say that Rabastan seemed relieved was an understatement. The thing that caused him pain [now that he realised it there was a lot of pain centred about his right hand] would not cause him pain tonight. And, if Strahan or the Seker had to return to the bar to retrieve a new metal for him he could delay his shift just that little bit longer. "We-we can do it another night if you need time to make a new ring..."

Stall tactics on the wizard's part...

Asar-Suti looked at the ring on the plat of his palm, and the silver burned away in a wisp of purple smoke. There was just the stone left in the god's hand. Just like that - he was a god, and even though early days at the bar had conditioned his re-incarnate self otherwise, sometimes, he lost patience with doing everything slowly, and procrastinating, and procrastinating again, until the brief mortal life had gone on far beyond where it was meant to be. He took a spool of metal wire from his pocket. "I will set this in mithril," he said. "Elvish true-silver from Námo's and Gorlim's world? Despite the name, it is not silver, and should not burn you when your wolf-shape is imminent. Interesting to see that silver might be able to arrest the shift, even if at great cost." He started haphazardly wrapping the pliable, elastic wire around the stone.

Rabastan watched, wondering what mithril was. It certainly was not something from his world. No one had ever heard of it at all. They only knew the metals all Muggles knew. Then he wondered: what would the god make with that wire? Would he make a bracelet? A pendant? A new ring? The stone, he figured, had to be kept close to the body for it to work. A ring, he figured, would keep it close enough to be useful; a pendant swung and would have to be clutched in one hand in order to be accessable. But as the hand changed the pendant would have to be released and who knew what Rabastan would end up as?

"Are you fashioning a new ring for Rabastan Lestrange?" Strahan asked, just as curious about the metal as Rabastan was. It looked like silver, and yet, somehow it was not. It was something else. Something Asar-Suti called "mithril". An odd name for an odd metal. He had to obtain a sample of it to see what properties it held. After all, he was a man devoted to the study of magic as much as he was to the service to his god, and no-one devoted to magical learning would overlook any chance to learn something new.

He would best ask Ray Stantz, then, as he'd already taken some mithril to be analysed by the top chemists at his university; whatever Asar-Suti knew about the properties of that metal was gleaned form that scientific analysis and then translated into magical terms. And he knew a lot. He burned off the thread of metal with a spark of godfire, then suffused power into the metal. Lots of power; he could have molten mountains with it. And then, the metal shifted, and instead of the haphazard threads all over the stone, there was a ring, and claws that held the stone to it.

Rabastan was decidedly more interested in the transmutation of the metal from netting to ring than Strahan was. The sorcerer had seen and done such things before; he was not all that intrigued by it. Certainly the wizarding world knew about turning one thing into another-transfiguration was taught to all those with magical talent-but this was fascinating. He held out his hand for the ring. He had to see it up close, this new kind of transfiguration.

And Strahan was more enamoured of the metal than its own shapechange from filliments and threads to rings. It was new and different and from another world with magics untapped. He wanted to ask the Seker for a sample but decided that such a request could wait until later. After Rabastan's training session, he could ask for a piece. "Put it on Rabastan Lestrange; see if it is not painful to the touch."

"It should not be," Asar-Suti added, more cautiously. "And if it doesn't hurt you, we could try again?" They were here, after all, for a reason apart from making jewellery.

Rabastan looked positively crestfallen. He'd hoped-and in vain it seemed-to get out of having to undergo training for his wolf-form, but from the looks of things the Seker would have none of it. They came out for a reason and they were going to do what they intended to do. Rabastan might as well just resign himself to the situation at hand; it would mean less stress to deal with. "I ... I'll try again," he said, slipping on the ring, then crouching before both god and man just as he did in front of Wells.

Finally they were getting to the task at hand. Rabastan didn't need a prodding from Strahan to get him to cooperate, which the sorcerer appreciated greatly. If Rabastan's will was weak... No. Right now he would think of the wizard's training. That was the task. He had to keep his mind on this and not on what he would do to the foolish, naive wizard. "If you like, we can change with you," he offered to the wizard.

Asar-Suti nodded. "Yes, if you think that would make control on your own easier?" he offered as well. He would have to learn being wolf-shaped among humans, but not right away.

Yes. Being a wolf amongst men and women-and young children [Merlin that upset him most to think children were in danger because of him]-would come later. Once he'd come to learn the in's and out's of being a transformed werewolf that is, and he had a sinking feeling that he'd never really learn to control it, particularly while in the presence of children. Worry about that later, he told himself as he focussed his mind upon the stone, and through it, upon the wolf that would again switch places with his human body.

Mithril or no mithril it still hurt.

Strahan watched as Rabastan seemed to develop a hunchback while his face stretched outwards into an animal's jaws. Yes, he was changing into a wolf, and that meant that Strahan had only as long as it took Rabastan to change from one shape to the other to decide what animal he wanted to be. Not a lion; Rabastan-the-wolf would be frightened at the sight and be more prone to lashing out. No. Something else instead. Giraffe? No. Too tall. And the forest was too choked with wood, vine and creeper to make such a shape practical. He'd only end up entangled and with a broken limb for his efforts. Think, you witless fool, think! The man has a tail now! Something he saw on the television. A mammal with a long body covered with scales. Not thin but long like a snake and thus with less protrusions to entangle upon the vegetation.

Asar-Suti's eyes goggled as he saw Strahan change into a kind of pine cone with legs and rather impressive claws; he stared at both creatures, but then shifted into familiar fox-shape before anybody asked him what he was doing. It was rude to stare just because the creature was new and picturesque.

That went well, he said, refraining from all comment. How do you feel, Rabastan?

Strahan stood up on his hindlegs to examine the new body. Blinked a little, noting the relatively poor vision of the animal. Decided that maybe he could use what he'd learned from the Seker to give the creature-a pangolin-better eyes to see with. So he did, and even though it was still as dark to the new eyes as it was to his human ones despite the flame of godfire he could make sense of it all. Yes it was long and scaly, like a snake. But not a snake at all; it had legs. With claws. And a long, thin snout from which extended a long, thin tongue. Most curious. One would wonder why he'd picked this animal, but one look at its armament of scales and it would become obvious to the onlooker. Rabastan could try to bite the pangolin but he'd only end up breaking a scale or two in the process.

Rabastan? he asked, having for a moment forgotten his name. I am? Yes I am. He was regaining his memories again, though they were still fuzzy about the edges. Not unlike the border that framed everything in his vision; a border that was disturbed by even the slightest movements. Hurt, a little. Change still hurts...

You know who you are, and you can answer me sensibly - good! the slightly purple fox said. We're getting the hang of this, aren't we? Shall we explore some more? We might take it slower, though, thanks to the pinecone lizard, or whatever it is Strahan has turned himself into.

One drawback to being a pangolin is that you cannot give anyone a dirty look. That was what Strahan found out, anyways. He tried to glare at Asar-Suti and found he could not. Instead he sighed. "I think we shall," he said, noting that, as usual, he could speak aloud in this body. "And give Rabastan Lestrange the opportunity he needs to adapt to his body."

Oh sure. Strahan had to go and show off the fact that he retained human speech in animal form. He looked at the strange animal that was now Strahan's new body, and noted that it didn't look as though it could go very fast. It seemed that, on even turf the wolf would outstrip the creature, but it was built something like an elongated Muggle tank, and could push through the undergrowth better than a wolf could. The going would be evened out. We can, he said, ears flattened against his head, which was carried as low as his tail. He could not be any unhappier. We can ... explore the forest...

Asar-Suti remembered a page in a book. Manis temminckii, I think the creature is called, he said. It has other names, too. Let's see how well a manis temminckii can run, shall we? he suggested, then turned and loped off in almost mocking fox fashion.

Strahan lowered himself down to the ground and shuffled off as fast as his clawed feet would let him, the four wolves trotting beside their master while the hawk took to the skies again. A fox should not be that difficult to keep up with, being far smaller than the pangolin was.

That left Rabastan behind, looking in the direction he thought the bar to be in. He could stay, let the others think he was straggling, but they'd soon notice he wasn't with them and would come back for him. That thought made him even more unhappy, and so, tail and head still hanging low, he trotted after fox and scaly creature.

To explore the forest away from the human inhabitants of Milliways...