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  6 hours later

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  “Caw caw......KNAVE.... caw caw...... SCOUNDREL....... caw caw.” a swear bird proclaimed profusely outside the window of the treatment wing I was currently working my brain triple time in.

  The pain had passed, I had full fine motor control over my body once again. Best of all, the discomfort that was in my fourth cog was also no longer there, just different. 'Not now' I told myself. First things first: time to find out what in the rust is going on.

  “My Lady Cerys, how nice it is to make your acquaintance, I was never informed of your arrival, nor this business about being wed together.” I stated with the feigned and trained ‘normalcy’ of a practiced noble. Her crimson eye lash moved upward on her nearly quartz colored face, her green eyes sparkling a tad with red flashes at the mention of the relationship we now apparently shared.

  “It’s good to see you out of that terrible cast, young lord Erec, as for your question, it is as you say, we have been arranged.” As she finished that sentence, she pushed a hot flame colored locke of hair behind her ear, clearly working off the stress of both the situation at hand and her own famed but temperamental element. “There would have been word sent to you before my arrival, but you were clearly being murdered for a slight, committed or imagined by that guild woman.”

  “It is as you say, my lady, if it weren’t for your kind words, I would have been here for far longer in that insufferably restrictive cast” I picked up my hot adrenaline beverage, took a sip while rapidly attempting to fix my train of thought and come up with a plan of action going forward, showing nothing of the magi-assisted storm rolling around in my supremely hard noggin.

  As I set down my steaming hot steel thermos, I thought of what to say next, but when I looked into her intelligent emerald eyes, all I saw was amusement and interest. “You’ve been through the scrap thrower, so to speak, so I would like you to take all the time you need to catch up to the present you, starting with checking what is going on with your fourth cog.” She punctuated that last point by picking up my concoction of hard stimulants in an unassuming, plain thermos and took a sip before I could warn her.

  She grimaced, looked at me like a rusted cog just appeared above my head, put the mortal poison down and looked at me expectantly. “Apologies, my Lady, but that was never meant to be consumed by anyone but me” I then shrugged slightly and looked into my mind palace without further ado.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  What I saw truly surprised me. I almost lost the lucid walk and returned to the realm of the conscious right then and there.

  My fourth cog, instead of being a silvery, metallic piece of reflective metal, was currently glowing with latent currents of pure electricity. I looked closer. For whatever reason, it seems I overwent a mutation of magical elements by either nearly or fully dying for a period of time, which is just a guestimate of already known information and my own intuition. I then rotated the energy around my ethereal fingers and was pleasantly surprised by the level of control I had over the newly mis-adventured gain.

  As I moved back to the real world through the veil of my subconscious, I was pleasantly surprised by her Ladyship Cerys being right up in my face, watching me intently. As she noticed me being conscious and aware of her shenanigans, she cleared her throat and sat back down into her chair. “Well, young Lord Erec, what say you?”

  I fought the urge to grin at her open display of interest and just told it to her straight. “I can now manipulate electricity on top of my already potent metal attunement.” I then shifted my weight, in order to show her I was ready for her critique, which none came.

  First was surprise, next was astonishment, later became excitement, then appeared skepticism, lastly unbridled interest shot through her intensely green eyes, embers dancing in them furiously. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” her eyes widened even further “Then that means you actually died and underwent primal elemental metamorphosis at that fourth cog.” She now shifted her weight in a way to say she was super excited “You do realize just how rare such an instance of such a happening is, on top of surviving such an ordeal, do you not?” She got closer, “young master Erec, you just hit a golden cog while digging for a good place to die, do you understand?” She then realized how close she was once again, and reacted similarly to last time.

  Once back at her seat, she pondered me for a good while as I drank from my own gold blessed panacea of a type of poison. Suddenly she asked me “Young master Erec, please, try to manipulate your new energy, even a small finger to finger movement should be enough for me to fully believe you” I just tipped my now regenerated eye brow, then raised my hand.

  It was blinding, the electromagnetic discharge that danced around my fingertips. Thumb to pinky, pinky to ring, ring to middle, middle to index, index to orbiting my hand, then my head. At the same time, I summoned a metal scalpel from across the room and put away my trusty cure all beverage far to the other corner of the room, not wanting to risk it. I then put the energy node into the scalpel and it instantly melted into slag, slightly burning my hand that was holding it, which I quickly moved off my hand and just kept in the air. Since the scalpel wasn’t magi-steel, it simply reacted that way, if it were indeed a magically infused durasteel-ceramic compound, it would have lasted much longer.

  All the while, Lady Cerys watched in awe. “I’ve always said you were skilled with magic.” She smiled, “I love being right, but this is unprecedented, you’ve had, what, less than thirty minutes with this element?” She leaned in “incredible.” A gentle smile filled with excitement bloomed on her pinkish lips.

  I smiled, her enthusiasm was infectious, “I live to serve, my Lady” I then gave her my spark of magic that was orbiting around me all this while.

  She looked at me with shock, then awe. “Truly, have you so much control over such an element that you can control damage transference?" She then reached over and touched the floating sprite of magnetized electric magic and gasped, surprised that she did not indeed have to quickly retract her hand due to the magic going haywire.

  She looked at me with more respect than anyone ever had, probably not a high bar, mind you, but that still counts for something, right?