Merchant Crab

Balthazar did not know why the mage had been carrying a small piece of dark, rough bark in his satchel. Maybe it was a valuable material. Or perhaps he had a carpentry hobby.

It didn’t really matter that much at that moment anyway.

What mattered was that the piece of strange wood held between the tips of his pincers was quickly vanishing, swiftly being siphoned up his claw, arm, and all around his shell. It felt a little itchy.

The hissing sound of the charged ice between Reagan’s hands made the crab’s bristles stand as his eyestalks twisted backwards ahead of the rest of his body, bracing to face the unavoidable impact.

After an endless couple of seconds, the cryomancer released the ice spike from his grasp, the pointy icicle whistling through the air like an arrow of frost, aimed straight at Balthazar’s center of mass.

But by the time the spike reached him and the crab had turned, eyes squinting as he prepared to feel his chitin crack and be pierced, there was a quick fizzle sound and then… nothing.

The misty cloud of icy crystals in the air left by the ice spike’s trail dispersed, leaving the mage and the merchant facing each other again. The human’s eyes widened as he saw his unscathed target, and the crab’s jaw dropped as he saw himself.

There, in the middle of that poorly lit and damp crypt chamber, stood no longer a gray crab sporting a well polished shell of chitin, but instead a strange-looking Balthazar made of dark wood, like a life-size sculpture of a giant crustacean that absorbed the faint light shining on him like a black hole.

The baffled merchant looked at himself, examining his own shell, running the tip of his pincer over its now very rough wooden surface, struggling to see its details even from so up close, due to how dark it was, like the charred bark of a burnt tree.