A Dream, A Nightmare, A Transformation, part three

He made it back to the compound with ten minutes to spare, then spent five minutes dithering before he walked back through the wards. The magus in the gatehouse glanced at him as he went past, scribbled something on a ledger, and went back to looking at his phone. 

It was finished. The heart of the fallen god was fully absorbed, his original self transformed beyond anything he could have hoped to achieve by devouring the essences of others. He would never be truly human again. 

Possibly he should have regretted that, but he couldn't find any trace of loss or guilt in himself. He'd known what he was doing -- and what he was risking -- when he first moved to devour the resurrected Heart. Even absorbed, it had been... uncontrollable. He could reason with it, bargain with it, ask for its help, call it up to burn out a vampire elder and its nest of progeny, but he couldn't simply assume its power and use it as his own the way he did with everything else. 

Not until now. 

In one way, it was a relief. The nameless god who had been Vengeance and Reconciliation was finally at rest, and its power was fully under his control. He no longer needed to fear its imperatives giving him, giving them, away. In another, it was... a sacrifice. A small death. He could never go back to being what he'd been before the Incident at Pettibone. 

He wouldn't miss his humanity; he'd never felt all that human to begin with. Some of that, he knew, was teenage melodrama; and some was just the inevitable result of being the talented working-class kid at the school for the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful. Some of it might even have come from accidentally absorbing the essence of the speartongue in his youth, and growing up with the knowledge of that second self. 

"Chris?" asked Grundus. 

Chris stopped, turned. He was halfway across the campus, in the open space between the buildings, on his way to... the gym, apparently, he thought. He shook his head and tried to focus. "Grundus."

"I wasn't sure it was you, at first," said the older wolf. "Were you... were you actually smiling?"

Chris offered his most unsettling grin. "I do that sometimes."

"Not around me, you don't." Grundus took a step back. "If rumors are true, you've had a long day. Maybe you should sleep?"

Chris started to argue, stopped, blinked, and then said, "Perhaps you're right, Uncle. Running through the hills helped, but..." He yawned, and then found that it took an effort of will not to yawn again. "I should sleep now."

"Uncle, is it?" Grundus grumbled. "All right, come on. I'll see you back to your room."