Krystyn grimaced at the sight of the misty, light-shot halo that crowned Andrew’s head as she always did when she witnessed her victims immediately after their transformation. The beautiful nimbus that played about the men she changed gave her the uncomfortable feeling that nature itself was rejecting the justice of what she did. Krystyn thought the manifestation of the halo was the most unseemly part of the spell’s side-effects. By all rights, the men should have been surrounded by a dark black aura that revealed their iniquitous nature. Instead, the luminous aurora gave the men she rejuvenated an innocent appearance that made them appear like sinless cherubs.
Because of the physics of the simple spell, Krystyn was unable to easily counter the aura it produced by modifying the spell’s construction. Since a human body is eighty percent water, a huge volume of water had to be extracted from the body of an adult for it to reduce to the size of an infant’s tiny volume. After all, the water that her enchantment pulled from the victim’s bodies had to go somewhere! Redirecting the water to another place would have involved linking a transportation enchantment to the original spell and might have caused cross-talk between the esoteric energies involved. It was always safer to keep one’s spells simple and separated to minimize the possibility of psychic backlash from a poorly constructed enchantment.
Nevertheless, the inappropriate angelic appearance of Krystyn’s victims displayed immediately after their metamorphosis into babyhood had always irritated her. Babies or no, they were still male, and ipso facto, they were still evil creatures.
