Gearshift

Gearshift

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Gearshift’s life almost ended not long after it began. He was born sicklier than most Stormchildren, with a body not equipped to handle so much raw Lightning magic. Slowly, his body was calcifying from the inside out, and he would have been turned into nothing more than a living battery — alive, yes, and breathing, but without the capability to move, or to speak, or even to think.

Desperate to save him from this fate, Anasa and Heitor took him to the best healers in the land. When the clan’s healers encouraged them to let their hatchling go, they went further out. When those healers said the same, they went even further. And when their son was on his last limbs, they went to their very last resort. They went to Cadfael.

Well, left to his own devices, Cadfael would have preferred this grandchild of Screechfang and Skytail be left to perish. But since Anasa, the very symbol of hypocrisy and false glamour in Cadfael’s eyes, was humble enough to beg him, he obliged. And Cadfael saw only one solution. If the problem is that the hatchling’s body is too weak, get rid of the body. He fashioned an entirely new, robotic body for Gearshift, modeled after the recently-resurfaced Sandsurges, and went through the experimental and highly risky process of transferring Gearshift’s consciousness and magic into the new shell. And to everyone’s relief, it worked. Gearshift lived — in an entirely new body, in a body not even shaped like his own. But he was alive, and he was finally able to get his own magic under control.

Growing up, Gearshift has heard this story constantly from everyone around him — from his parents, relieved he is alive, from Cadfael, bragging about this medical marvel he pulled off, from engineers and inventors, gasping and drooling over the intricacies of Cadfael’s work, from the healers of the clan, shocked that such a bold and risky endeavor paid off. Now, Gearshift only wishes to grow beyond his origins. He tries to ignore that his body is not organic, and live his life like a normal dragon would.

But the truth is that Gearshift isn’t a normal dragon. He lost that privilege the moment Anasa said “please”. Gearshift tries to use his intense Lightning magic, the same magic that once condemned him and later saved him, for good, by doing small favors for his clanmates like charging their technology. There isn’t much more than that that he is capable of doing. The same robotic shell that saved him also traps him, and keeps him from using the full range of his abilities, so that he might not damage the thing which is both his prison and his freedom. Cadfael managed to transfer him from a mortal body to a robotic shell once — to be quite honest, he isn’t completely sure he could manage the same again, without destroying Gearshift’s very consciousness.

Perhaps it was because Cadfael wished to avoid taking that kind of risk that he installed the chip in Gearshift which will tie them to each other forever.

And perhaps it is because Gearshift knows what Cadfael wishes to do to his family that he ripped it out.

Sometimes, when Gearshift is left to his own devices for too long, he begins to daydream about the life he could have had. And whenever that happens, he can be found curled up in the corner, clutching his chest. Cadfael’s largest act of kindness towards Gearshift was installing his pearl into his heart drive, so that Gearshift will never be separated from the very essence of his soul.