Proceeding with its advance, the Drounge waited for this to happen. It did not. Instead, the effects of the free-flowing, penetrating balm continued to spread. A strange feeling came over the Drounge, quite unlike anything it had ever felt before. It was as if its whole body had been caught up in something as wonderful as it was unexpected, though it possessed no more referents for wonderful than it did for pleasurable. It was changing.
For the first time in millennia, the Drounge stopped.
The singular tingling sensation now dominated every corner of its being, penetrating to the farthest reaches of self, replacing eternal agony and perpetual discomfort with—something else. This was not a small thing; not an incident, not an insignificant transient episode. Its very shape was changing, twisting and buckling with neoteric forces it did not understand. Could not understand, because it had no experience of them.
With a last convulsive, wrenching sensation of dislocation, the unforeseen metamorphosis achieved final resolution. The Drounge stood as before, inviolate and untouched. Only, something was different. It took even the Drounge a moment to realize what that was.
It was no longer in pain.
The absence of agony was so extraordinary a sensation that the Drounge was momentarily paralyzed. It was all gone, all of it—all the suffering, all the disease and decay, all the everlasting affliction that had combined to comprise its physical and mental existence. In its place was something the Drounge could not put a name to: a calmness and tranquillity that were shocking in their unfamiliarity. And something else. For not only had it changed internally, its appearance was radically altered as well. With a new inner individuality had come a new shell, a fresh and unspoiled outer self, courtesy of the tingling unguent that had affected a transformation far beyond what even its wielder could have envisioned.