Comic commission for

Story by the amazing:

Bitter winds assault your senses as you battle through the raging storm. As if mother nature herself was seeking your downfall, the more you try to fight through the snow, the harder it becomes to continue your struggle to survive. The cold bites at your flesh through the thick fur-lined winter jacket and heavy trousers. The penetrating cold only worsens as you try to drag your aching legs through the snow, hoping and praying for salvation. Despite your desperate attempts to survive, you knew you’d brought this upon yourself. Understanding the illegality of your actions, you continued to kill defenseless seals for blubber and hide. But you got greedy. You just couldn’t help yourself when that seal tried to escape, and you thought you’d be able to make it back to base in time. But then the blizzard hit, and you lost your quarry. Did you deserve this? Was this punishment for your actions? Just when you begin to feel tired and drowsy, just when you think you’ll draw your last breath; through the screaming storm you glimpse an opening to a cave! With safe refuge from the deadly weather so close at hand, you are given one last burst of adrenaline to force you forwards, until finally the storm is behind you.

You fall upon your hands and knees to finally take a breath of clear air, the thick black winter gloves protecting your skin from touching the ice below. Smooth ice? After catching your breath, your rise from your knees and glimpse at your surroundings. Surrounding you is a beautifully carved chasm, hewn of pure blue ice which seemed to capture the light coming from outside. Portions of the ceiling were rough and natural, but the walls appeared to have strange carvings. Who engraved these, a civilization long forgotten, perhaps? The smooth floor leads forward to a series of large frozen pillars, and a strange statue carved from almost crystal-clear ice sat at the end of this grand room. You can see the statue depicts some sort of arctic deity, taking the form of a large bear clambering upon a rock. For a moment you see something buried within the statue, something that glimmers in the light. A sapphire!

With a color that was as beautiful and clear as the summer sky, you can see the marvelous gemstone buried at the heart of this statue. Without even taking a single second to consider the motivation that had driven you to this place, you reach forwards and press your hand to the ice and realize that the sculpture doesn’t feel cold at all. It feels hot! So hot in fact, you can feel the heat through your glove. You try to pull your hand away from the statue, but a cold blue light encircles your hand, seemingly emanating from within the statue. Searing heat shoots into your body, and a singular cry of pain leaves your chapped lips. Strange voices enter your mind and sound as if they were whispering from within the confines your skull. They were chanting in a strange language, which sounds as if it were being spoken in reverse. The voices draw your eyes up towards the head of the statue. The eyes of the bear were glowing with the same cold blue light. You can feel them looking inside you, into your heart. The heart! the gemstone!


You look back into the ice, and no longer see a gemstone within. Had it been empty all along? You try and pull your hand back, and even use your other arm to assist in your efforts. Finally, after failing so many times, you succeed and the bizarre invisible grip upon your hand vanishes. But the blue light lingers around your hands, and the searing heat you feel within your hands moves into your body and begins to center around your stomach. Pain wracks your guts, and you cry out in pain. Gritting your teeth, you can feel your insides churning, and stranger still, you begin to feel your coat tightening around your frame. Even your trousers and pants, your shoes and gloves begin to feel smaller than normal, as if you were becoming fatter. The heat that’d once centered in your stomach begins to shoot through your body, until every inch of your flesh feels as if it’s on fire! Just when you think you’re unable to handle any more; you begin to feel the bones in your body stretching. Your face begins to crack and pop as your nose widens and stretches forwards. Your teeth strain in your mouth as your canines begin to push out from your gums. Your hands snap and pop, and the swelling flesh beneath your gloves begins to break free. Suddenly, your legs give way and you fall to your knees, crying out in agony at the bizarre metamorphosis that was assaulting your body.

With your bare hands pressed against the ice, you realize it feels quite nice against your exposed skin. It relieves the heat that burns within you, if only for a moment. That’s when you catch sight of your fingers upon your right hand, the hand you’d initially pressed against the statue. The blue glow had disappeared, but your fingers had begun to fuse together! You could feel the bones inside your hand morphing and shifting, your nails forming into claws as your former human hand took on the shape of a flipper. You cry out in confusion at the sensation of growth emanating from your skull, as your face stretches forwards even further. You hear your cries of terror suddenly shift in tone, sounding deeper and more bestial than before. You can feel the vibration from your throat as you loose the barking call of a beast.

Through the tears of terror and pain, you catch a glimpse of your clothes tearing apart. As if an invisible flame was burning at your apparel, the clothing beings to rapidly burn away. Tiny fragments of fabric rise into the air as your clothing is reduced to ash, revealing more of your pale skin. Now with your flesh exposed, you can see how it’s changing color. Your once peachy flesh had begun to blotch and discolor, turning a mottled grey with a slight blue tint. Tingling sensations ravage your skin as tiny oily hairs began to push their way out of your stretching skin, consuming the mottled flesh with a new coat of fur.

Moans of pain, fear and confusion leave your drooling maw as it stretches forwards, until you can see your rapidly growing grey muzzle obscuring the lowest portion of your peripheral vision. You cannot help but cry out for help, desperately pleading to somebody, anybody. But nobody answers you, and you are left with the echoes of your own bestial voice for comfort. Hair from your once thick beard falls away in clumps as fur rapidly spreads across your body. Your arms begin to pull inwards, the bones that constitute your once humanoid limbs feel as if they’re becoming shorter. This only draws your face further toward the ground, toward the ice. Finally breaking free of your trousers, your legs begin to fuse together, the flesh seemingly melding into one solid mass. It felt as if somebody had slathered a form of strong adhesive between them. Stranger yet, you can feel a twisting sensation as your organs shift to accommodate this change in anatomy.

It was only as you begin to see whiskers growing from your cheeks. Only as your fingers begin to disappear into strange flipper like structures. Only as feet begin to fuse at the heel, and form into something new, something designed for swimming; did you realize what you were becoming!

You attempt to appease the strange forces that’ve done this to you, only for their silence to indicate that this was a fate you’d brought upon yourself, a form wrought by your greed. You didn’t want this, you didn’t want to be an animal. You cry out again, only to hear the barking cries of a harp seal. They were noises only a seal could make, and they belonged to you. As your skull shifts forwards, you try to keep your thoughts focused on resisting the change. But no matter how hard you try, you can feel your memories fading. Your legs disappear into a fat fleshy mass, developing a smooth streamlined shape as you belly began to weigh you down. The last of the strength in your shifting flipper-like arms fads, and you can feel your sense of self starting to wane. You try to tell yourself that you were sorry for what you’d done. You try to vocalize it, but only the barks of a seal leave your stretching muzzle. Like the seals you killed to feed your greed, your greed had fed your transformation into a seal.

Finally, the last of your strength leaves you, and your heavy body comes crashing down against the ice. Cracks appear in the clear frozen water, opening a gate to the new world below you, a world that you’d be perfectly adapted to. You close your eyes as you wince from the impact, now only feeling the strangely pleasant sensations of your final changes.

Suddenly, it doesn’t seem so bad. The idea of swimming through the cold waters seem like heaven, they seem as if they’d be perfect for your heavy bloated seal body. You can’t remember where you’d come from, who you were before. What you were, even! Only that you were destined for the cold waters below, that it’s where you belong. You can feel the last of your human hairs falling away, your once bushy beard and long hair was now a thing of the past. Your human features vanish as your new flippers pull against your body and slap against the furred blubbery sides of your streamlined form. You can feel your new hind flippers twitching, your muzzle stretching forwards even further.

Finally, you open your mottled grey eyelids, and the once human irises had been replaced with the large black eyes of a seal. The pupils so large, and the irises so black that not a single inch of sclera could be seen. The last pieces of your clothes vanish, showing off the last patches of human skin that were quickly consumed but blubber and fur. You let out a happy bark, before looking around in abject confusion at your environment.

Why were you here? You needed to be in the sea! That’s where the fish were, the food! Food! You feel the urge to dive, and just as luck would have it, the ice beneath you breaks away. The cold-water washes over your streamlined body, as you dive beneath the temple. With happy smile on your muzzle, you beat against the water with your flippers, using your strong muscles to propel your streamlined body through the water. You were hungry after whatever that ordeal was. You needed to eat, to fish! And so, you’d live out the rest of your days as a seal. A fitting punishment for somebody who’d taken so much from the ocean. Now, you had to give it back.