projection

Get up? she cried. You broke my arm!

So fix it, he said. He wasn't even looking at her.

Fix it? Fix it? How in the hells—

Only then had he finally explained to her that she was no longer mortal. That her body was a convenience, a projection of her will.

You should have told me that to begin with, she said, holding back tears of anger.

Ah, he said, in that bored but benevolent voice. It did not occur to me.

***

Her hands felt strange. Feeling...felt strange. She looked at her palms. They were bloody. Bloody. She willed the wounds closed, but nothing happened. Her body was no longer an extension of her sense of self. Once again, as it had been long ago, it was just...a body. Flesh and bone. She could feel the blood pumping through her veins, the heaving gasps forcing air into lungs that had needed none for millennia. The world spun around her.

***

STONE AND BLOOD