Oh em gee, how did I forgot to finish the sequence! Without further ado, the last post of the awesome transformation of Tik the kobold into Tik the wyvern...fish. Fyvern? Wyvish? Whatever he is, by the resplendent  intricatevision! 1000 scaly blessings upon thee who fav the originals!

Korelian belongs to  sovandar, and various references to NPCs and other campaigny bits are courtesy of the original GM,  tereus!

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Reunited at last, Korelian runs a finger along Tik's gills; what… are these, he asks? Has Tik developed… gills? The scaly slits flutter as though waving hello.

"I didn't... really notice. But... I guess I was under the water a really long time... it felt good in the cool water," the sagging wyvern says with a dreamy look, "I can't... really remember everything... I just want it to stop, whatever it is,” he sleepily adds like he doesn’t mean it at all.

Tik’s blue eyes suddenly sharpen. Korelian was reticent, saying nothing. The little mage was… thinking. “What… are you thinking? You’re thinking… tell me,” he ventures with appraising suspicion.

Korel’s face falls slowly, the probing finger sags like the rest of him and lists down the wyvern’s wing like a sigh. “… I’ve …suspected. This is just confirmation, really…” he begins, sucking in a breath as if to brace himself. “…the origin of the problem was inside you, before you ever wore the Helm. When it started its work, a part of you began drawing the power out of it, consuming it, we know that much… but that wasn’t how it was intended to work.” The blue kobold pauses.

“It wasn’t,” echoes the dubious wyvern, grappling. “You mean… there’s something the matter with me…?”

“...there’s other clues, too. I mean… there’s you, and there’s… a certain other.” Felnuvek, the she-wyvern; it was her fragment of soul feeding Tik’s traumatic metamorphosis; she’d tricked the young knight into wearing the helm, and… they’d nearly lost him.

“Merge the two, and… why gills?” Korelian shakes his head at the brute inevitability of it; there had to be something wrong with Tiktaalik. Wyvern soul plus kobold host… “That doesn’t… add up. Adding two and two and getting ten. There’s… another factor here, and it’s got to be in you, somewhere, somehow… and yet…”

The kobold sighs, resigned to the sheer mystery of it all, “I suppose, though, if it was always in you… well. It’s not as bad an imposition as we’d worried at first…” He pauses again. A crack of a grin flickers in the valley of his muzzle. “It’d explain your… oddish appearance as a kobold, I guess.”

“H-hey! I wasn’t… ‘odd’, whaddyou mean ‘odd’. I was… big. I would’ve made a good warrior,” The wyvern recoils in the measured, tepid manner that betrays a deeper wound; years endured of stares and whispers and pointing fingers, consigned to the filthy work of the stables apart from the rest of his Clan for… for looking strange? But here, now, he puffs up with harmless indignation.

Sensing the sting, Korelian tenderly smiles. “Wonderful, then. Look at how many of us were swooning over you…” he chuckles, evidently remembering happy times. “...and this one still is.” Korelian nudges him gently. “One of these days, we’ll get you back into kobold form for a day or two… I’ve got several things I’d like to do with you”, he grins, innocently. Colouring hard, the wyvern draws away, fidgeting with his thumbs.

“…that’d feel …weird,” Tik eventually gulps with unconvincing disinterest. “Like… wearing a straitjacket… kinda. One size too small, maybe…”

“You’ve got appeal in all your forms.” Korel chuckles. “And… some people like that kind of thing,” he cheekily adds, nudging Tik again.

“W...what? Straitjackets?” Tik stammers, bewildered and aghast in equal measures, cupping his thumbs to his mouth like a blushing Knight of chastity.

“It’d just be a bit of fun,” Korelian grins, heart a-flutter. Ever scarcer, these fleeting glimpses of the wide-eyed boy-warrior Tik used to be. Hope flickers yet, audaciously resilient against the buffeting screams of dragonfire that had burned and tainted Tiktaalik’s precious, pure heart. That essential, naïve goodness in him. The grin softens; a quiet, wistful smile. He’s still in there, somewhere… buried under rippling wyvern wing and maw and muscle and… gills. Gills. Heavens above, what was going to happen to him…?

By Io Tik, hang on. Hang on and never let go.