“It was about as helpful as an answer from Odin,” Alf continued, “technically truthful, but not remotely useful.” I’m not big on theology, but that still sounded weird to me – badmouthing Odin wasn’t something that normally ended well.

  “How would you know?” I asked.

  “Because I’ve bloody well had to-” he snapped, before cutting himself off and trying again. “Because I’m old, and a priest, (Yeah, but not to Odin, I thought) and have spent many years studying these things. Besides,” he said, falling back on the classic excuse of everyone who has failed to come up with a good response fast enough, “we’re talking about your strange hand, not my depths of great wisdom and knowledge.”

  I just rolled my eyes at that. “Don’t I have a right to the same privacy?” They looked unsatisfied, but also a bit uncomfortable, realising they had no way through that argument. It was honestly a bit sad, like I’d taken a toy they wanted to play with. “Look, I get the impression you’re all more interested in my personal history than the mechanical details of my hand,” they all shifted a bit guiltily, “so I’ll be nice and share some, but you’re not getting it all, and I’m not going to accept more digging right now. Fair?” some nodding. “Wonderful.” I gave another, smaller roll of my eyes, with a hint of amused exasperation. It was nice to feel like the most mature in here for once, given their childish curiosity. I empathised completely, but I still found it funny.

  “Right. I lost this hand,” I waved the stump, “about 2 years ago in an exploring accident.” Tove opened her mouth to ask a question, but caught herself just in time to not interrupt. I repaid her tact by answering her unspoken but obvious question. “I stuck it in something that turned out to be a trap, and it got cut off.” There was a round of uncomfortable winces, but they’d asked (kind of), so I decided to turn up the gruesomeness.

  I don’t normally like to even think about my stump, much less look at it, and especially not show other people, but my head was a bit fried right now. I was caught in a state of emotional fight-or-flight – it was a curious combination built from a desire for acceptance, a feeling I owed them some amount of the truth, a slight inclination towards chaos, my lingering sense of semi-hysterical panic, the taste of the tears which had dried on my lips, and my own deep, pervasive self-loathing, which mostly connected back to this very stump.

  It was a cocktail of such volatile emotional instability that I’m convinced if you could make a real drink out of those ingredients, it would explode.

  To show this part of me was an act of self-flagellation; willingly undergoing intense pain by my own hands in a desperate, cyclical search for forgiveness or acceptance or repentance or absolution or something. Who from, and what for, I had no idea.

  Regardless, I was going ahead with it. I unbuttoned my jacket so that it hung loose, took a deep breath, and shucked it off onto the floor. Their winces turned into full-blown physical recoiling, complete with sucking air through teeth. I knew it was mostly from the shock value, but it was still about what I had expected, and what I felt I deserved. To put it nicely, the stump was a mangled ruin of scarred, gouged, roughly-reformed skin and flesh. The damage stretched nearly up to my elbow; an expanse of body horror and shame. Sitting there in my jerkin, bare-armed, the differences between each one could hardly have been more stark.

  On the left was an arm that had become a canvas over the last 2 years, sporting an elaborate tattoo which was nearly a full sleeve. Starting from just below my collarbone, a tangling vine wrapped around my shoulder blade and then down the length of the arm. Branching strands sprouted into flowers or berries, morphed into small snakes, bore gemstones like fruit, or faded into ethereal ribbons of the aurora. The whole plant had grown over time, a labour of love by a friend passionate about tattoos. I’d volunteered as the test subject for her to experiment new techniques on, and the results had been spectacular. Colours other than black were unheard of in tattoos back then, but mine had a palette as vivid as real life. Metals and crystals had been powdered into certain inks, making the shiny things actually shine, catching and shifting in the light. The pinnacle of it was the thin trace of magic she’d used. More than just making it vivid, it made it alive (sort of). Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the whole thing moved. Leaves swayed in non-existent wind, snakes coiled and curled, fruit ripened, branches reshaped themselves, and the aurora flowed like silk, casting its gentle hues all about my arm.

  I’d spent a damn long time in my life sitting and getting poked by needles, but fucking Hel it had been worth it. It was entrancing, especially in the right lighting. Firelight was my favourite – I would sometimes just sit by the fire in camp and stare at my arm, watching the shapes that formed and danced, barely able to believe it was just an image.

  My right arm was also like a work of art, if you consider roadkill to be beautiful. From shoulder down to elbow it was normal, but below the elbow? Absolutely fucked. The skin was uneven and wrinkled, stretched into a thin, raw-looking layer in some parts, gathered into bumpy ridges in other parts, and generally looking like it had been chewed by a creature with sandpaper teeth. From the end of the forearm, extending up about 10 centimetres, ran a series of brutal, jagged slashes which gouged deep into the flesh. They’d scarred into tight lines where the new skin looked like it was kept under tension. If you want another creature to compare it to, picture a lamprey eel with lion’s teeth, and then imagine sticking your arm into that mouth.

  The general paleness of my unburnt skin contrasted deeply unhelpfully with the scars, making sure that all the damage stood out in a nice, obvious way. There was a nearly perfect cutoff which formed a jarring, unsexy clash where I went from moon-pale (look: I’m ginger, I live somewhere mostly cold & dark, and I work a lot underground; not a great combination for getting a tan) to a messy, splotchy wine red. It looked like it had been used as a palette for a painter trying to mix the right shade of slaughterhouse-red, who’d made a lot of attempts and then given up anyway. It was strange how I’d managed to get used to it and still be disgusted by it. I did my best not to look at it, and hidden beneath the sleeve and the prosthetic, it was sometimes easy to forget just how bad it was. Except when I had to wash it, though. Then it looked even worse, the moisture making everything glisten like raw meat while I tried to do my best to scrub the tender parts without scouring or tearing them.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  The very end of the stump also had a few brass pegs sticking out from it at right angles to my arm. These went into grooves on the inside of the hand, providing the physical attachment. Most of the force that kept the hand in place was magic, but it still needed a place to hook on to, and it was these. They weren’t huge by any means, probably only jutting out a centimetre at most, but they were just another piece of unnatural mess.

  I’ve tried to inject some levity into this, but the message I’m ultimately trying to convey is how ferociously awful it is. The scars were as deep mentally as they were physically. It was my body, sure, but it was alien, and given how horrible it was, I was still unsure about whether I wanted to get used to it or not. As nice as it would be not to feel nauseous whenever I took a bath, that would also mean accepting, completely, that this was the unchangeable fact of who I was. I don’t like to think of myself as vain, but ultimately, I just am. Normal teenagers just get to worry about acne. Anyone want to trade?

  “I’m going to put my jacket back on now,” I said, catching a faint look of relief from Alf and Nalfis as I did. Tove had another question. “You said your hand got cut off, right?” I nodded. “Can I ask what all the rest of the damage is from then? It looked a bit… melted.” I shrugged my jacket on, grabbing and re-attaching my hand under my sleeve as I answered. “I had to cauterise it,” I explained. “Only thing I had to hand (no pun intended) was a lantern. Smashed the glass, lamp oil everywhere, set my arm on fire.” I felt the studs in my arm click into place, the two pieces locking together with a by-now familiar sensation as my soul extended into wood and metal once again. I gave my fingers an experimental wiggle to check it was all working, and then started pulling on my gloves as I continued. “And as brilliant as it is to relive it, I hope you wouldn’t mind if I could just get on with this?”

  My tone had gotten quite sharp by now, so at least they’d succeeded in improving my mood, I guess? I was just upset, instead of hysterical. Small wins are still wins. Anyway. “Life was a bit shit for a while, but I got a kick up the arse from a friend, and decided to start working on this.” I gave the arm a wave for emphasis, remembering the phenomenal dressing-down I’d got from Anders back then. If ‘tough love’ had a face, it probably looked a lot like that crotchety, weather-beaten, white-bearded dickhead. I really loved him.

  “It was, um, quite hard.” I didn’t (and won’t) bother going into the specifics. It’s challenging and weird and even if I could explain it so you could understand it, the techniques aren’t really in the world any more, so… sorry.

  “It’s mostly wood because that works better. It was alive once, so it’s happier to accept a soul if that makes sense?” They nodded, at least looking like they were understanding it. Who knows if they were. “There are a bunch of these little glyphs all over,” again I waved the arm, even though I’d put it under a glove, “which sort of convert my soul into the energy for the arm.” There were more nods, but these felt like they were real ones.

  I know that might sound concerning, turning your soul into energy, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. The soul is the basis of all magic (at least that people use, who knows about the gods). If you think about it, a soul is hyper-efficient, self-replenishing, and contains a huge amount of total energy. Enough to power a person for their whole life. Magic is the process of converting some of that potential into new effects. It’s already providing the energy to power your real arms, so this is nothing new in any case. It’s just a fake arm.

  “I’ll skip a bit, but I finished building it, started getting used to it, decided I wanted to get back out into the world, and here I am.” That’s skipping a lot, but I think I deserved at least that much privacy after my nice extensive lore dump. I gave another of my characteristic shrugs as I trailed off and we sat in silence, digesting what I’d said. We were like that for maybe 30 seconds before Nalfis spoke. More accurately, he jabbered.

  “I’m really sorry because I know you said that you didn’t want to get asked loads of questions and you’ve been really kind by sharing your story with us and so brave being here with everything you’ve been through and suffered and honestly it’s all quite inspiring and we have no right to any of this and again I’m so sorry because maybe this is really personal and I’m just prying but-” he finally stopped to take a breath after his rambling, pausing briefly before letting his question tumble out all at once. “Why is it a left hand?”

  The look on his face as he asked his question was almost funny, like he found it really awkward but couldn’t not ask, and I could see similar looks on Tove and Alf’s faces, mixed with gratitude that someone had piped up.

  Now, I had actually left that piece of information out deliberately, but only because it made me look stupid. My cheeks flushed slightly with embarrassment, and I gave my answer mostly towards the floor. “I wanted to make sure my hands matched in size,” I started, “so I asked someone to make a tracing of my left hand that I could copy measurements from.” I caught vague sounds of understanding. “And then I… forgottomirrorit,” I mumbled, staring fixedly at the metal floor.

  “Pardon?” asked Nalfis.

  “I forgot to mirror the tracing, alright?” I snapped, red-faced. “I started building it directly in line with what I’d traced, and by the time I realised my mistake I couldn’t undo it without new parts that we didn’t have, and so now I have two left hands and I’m really stupid, and I’m stuck like this until I can find enough material to build a new one.”

  There was, yet again, an awkward silence. This one was a bit less charged, but it also slightly undermined my emotional tale of struggling to overcome and adapt to a serious injury and complicated, tricksy prosthetic on account of the fact that I’d made my own life harder by being an idiot. Alf eventually coughed, and bless him, moved the conversation on to something else. “We still have those records there,” he pointed out. “Shall we take a look?”

  Everyone gathered around behind me as I arranged the handful of pages on the table. Given that the last time I’d picked one of these up I’d immediately gone on to have a panic attack, I could feel my heartbeat speeding up. I took a few deep breaths to steady myself as I began to read.

  If I’d known what it said, I would have taken more than a few.