The Misadventures of a Frog-faced Wizard

The Missing Digits

I spent the next two months in the Bone Masters hut, administering my growing ointment every other day. On days when I felt particularly weak, out of scientific curiosity rather than friendship, my host would rub the ointment on me to spare me the agony of bending on my own, and to speed up the process of my growth.

It was a slow process nonetheless; he explained that it would do more harm than good to open me up with too much frequency if I had not yet grown enough, nor healed from the previous operation, so there were weeks in which precious little progress was achieved.

During this downtime, the Bone Bender wrote tirelessly in his tomes about the progress he had made on me. Over his shoulder, I was always quick to sneak a peek at what he'd said. He referred to me as "the subject" and never spoke fondly, always keeping a level of professionalism despite our growing familiarity.

Incidentally, as I read over his shoulder, it occurred to me that in order to do so I must have almost been taller than him. The ointment was working. The operations were working. I was getting stronger and taller by the day.

Also during these weeks of reprieve, the Bone Bender gave me free rein of his library (limited though it may have been) so I spent some time studying the art of transmutation. It's just as well that I did. In the first place, it kept me sane to study again while I was too physically weak to travel too far from the place, and secondly, if I was to continue to cure myself after parting with my benefactor I would do well to know more about this field of study. In my previous life, I had taken an interest in divination magic, with a secondary subject of arcane trickery, both of which I studied at university, both of which had made me the prime candidate for the thieves guild, but now that I had been transformed I had been offered an opportunity to begin my studies anew and to revaluate what was important to me. There is nothing more important to me than reversing this curse.

On the third week, three other guests joined us. They did not stay long, and I do not remember by what unearthly means they arrived, but upon their arrival, the Bone Bender explained they were there to oversee the next operation (this was the second). It had become apparent that in reshaping my skeleton to make me appear more human, I had lost a fair bit of blood and that he had called for reinforcements to assure that I not bleed out during the operation and, while we're at it, to bend my flesh, organs, and muscle tissue to better suit the new skeleton he was building for me. These figures were sexless, shapeless and without true form; appearing instead like blackish translucent sheets of undiscernible material that bellowed in a constant but imperceivable wind underneath which one could almost make out horns, hooves, and claws. I know not of what calibre of creature these newcomers were but I see them still in my nightmares sometimes. I do not believe they were of this plane of existence.

A few days after the latest operation these ghostly apparitions vanished, deeming it permissible to leave me in the Bone Bender's company alone, and as they left, my appetite returned. Still too weak to leave the place and hunt for grubs, the Bone Bender provided me with some gruel of his own in a bowl that wasn't much more than the hollowed-out crown of a transmuted skull. It was cold, and the texture wasn't dissimilar to that of vomit, but the flavour wasn't altogether horrible, and it was food. And most importantly, it was food befitting a human. Not nice food, but not bugs! Every putrid step was a step in the right direction.

Later still, I began to loom over the goblin quite significantly, having to arch my head down to make eye contact with him, and it was around this same time that I finally began to master the arcane arts once again. It was basic, I know, but the childlike glee that I felt when I once again was able to hold out my hands and cause prestidigitation to occur was unlike any joy I'd felt in the longest time. I used my newfound skills (or old found skills relearnt I should say) to snuff out candles, reheat and flavour gruel, and create illusory objects to my heart's content. In my previous life, I could have done so much more than this, but in that instant, I felt like a god.

As I grew in strength, in height and in magical aptitude, so too did I grow closer with my latest host. He had begun to warm to me in a manner most unusual. While he had previously only ever exhibited a conditional interest in me based on my physical form, he had begun to make note of things that were not relevant to my affliction. I remember clearly one evening when, over a piping hot bowl of gruel, he asked me for my marital status. I told him I was single before being transformed. He said, "No girlfriend?" I said no. I didn't want to go into it any further than that, fearful of what he might think of me if I'd told him the truth. It's not the kind of thing you talk about over dinner with a new friend, not if you intend to keep them.

Two months after I began my stay with the Bone Master, he came to me elated and told me that my final operation was night. He said I now had one-hundred and ninety-eight bones. I asked which bones I was lacking, and he said it was the bones that make up my remaining fingers on each hand. I looked down at my hands and noticed that he was right, I only had four digits. While I didn't mention it aloud, I decided to myself that I could live with four digits rather than five.

The evening drew on, and the Bone Master was in no rush to begin the final operation, instead conscious that if he were to rush it and ruin it this close to the finish line, all of our hard work would have been for nothing, so he instead set about his studies to prepare himself mentally. As he wrote and read, I looked in the mirror on one of his smaller desks. My head was now human-shaped albeit with bulbous red eyes and lacking a nose or ears. Well, that's not entirely accurate. There's a smallish lump where my nose ought to be, but the Bone Bender cannot bend or create cartilage so this lump just tapers away into a sort of soft palate with two pin-prick nostrils in it. It is a quasi-nose. Anyway, although I was ugly, I was basically the right shape, and measuring myself against the wall I had to conclude I was almost five feet tall at this point. I had a little growing ointment left, and I was only five-six when I was transformed so for all intents and purposes I was basically my old self again. Aside from the addition of the new fingers, there was very little more the Bone Bender could do for me. I decided that evening to do a very heinous thing: to leave in the dead of night before he could stop me. I looked over at him, smiling sleepily at his desk as he put an end to his nightly scribblings. Closing his book, he looked over at me and said "Goodnight, Gandleforth." And he went to bed, earlier than usual but eager to rest well before the big day.

My resolve was strong; though I knew it would hurt him, I had to leave for fear that after the final operation he would insist I stay and discover new feeble reasons to keep me around and study me further. Ultimately, I knew his penchant for the occult and the supernatural would overwhelm his desire to help me and his curiosity for me would be detrimental to my cure. I had to leave for fear that tarrying any longer would keep me from the rest of my cure. So, that night, I took a side satchel from his desk chair and filled it with my equipment. I packed my book, a selection of his books I had found interesting, the remainder of my ointment, a handful of healing potions from the pantry, a bottle of ink and a quill. It felt wrong not only to abandon my kindly benefactor, but to rob from him as I did so; but old habits die hard, and I could hardly juggle all these things as I fled.

I resolved to make it up to the old mage one day, to return if I could, fully restored to my former humanity and to accept my new fingers. I promised to reimburse him for the things I'd taken and to swear an oath of loyalty to him forever for the invaluable help he had given me. Truly, I was grateful to him, but our time together was over and I left with a sad smile, content that this would not be the last time we saw each other. I will return to him one day. I will.

[Authors note: I returned to my homeland to thank the Bone Bender five years later and found the place in a greater state of disrepair than I'd ever remembered it. It was abandoned and overturned. I learned from a woman in a neighbouring village that the goblin known as the Bone Bender had died four years earlier. She said he had a wasting disease in his bones that had initially led him to the study of transmutation, and that he was unable to cure it before it was too late. It's been a further seventeen years since that visit home and I am holding my quill now between four digits.]