Change shape
Your spine cramps and a feeling of tearing fires along it, like stitches being ripped from thin fabric: it jerks back on itself with a sudden give, dog-legging, and you fall to the flagstones. Thin spears of sensation pierce you above your pelvis as the bones compress, and the long lines of your legs jutter and hump to spined slats, tissue flowing like liquid down the length from your neck.
The tines of your ribs unfold in a long corset down your abdomen, and multiply in sleek lumps that swarm across your belly and force your thighs and calves together as bone unravels: a white cast made of just-parted links that spills to the balls of your feet, tugging a thick skein of half-formed hide behind it. The surface of you hardens into long lines of bevelled diamonds, separated by deep cracks that itch.
The thin bones of your toes and insteps snap together with a sound of dice, and the marrow burns away as they slick with the flooding keratin from the nail beds.
Your skull fragments sharply into ragged pieces of bone, held together slack by the thin skin of your scalp; you think of eggshells when a palm is slammed down on their points. The bone grates as it spreads and flattens and reforms in a blunted triangle laced with ducts, your eyes beading small as oil does in a hot skillet. Your chin falls away into the straightness of your neck, and then your upper and lower lip round and swell out from your face, following the lines of bone to shape a flared muzzle even as your nose is taped down with dry strings of tendon.
You breathe through flared slots, your tongue fissuring painlessly down the tip and your arms falling away to stumps, and then nothing. Hair floats down around you, settling in wordless kisses. A short rear for you to open your mouth, and stretch down thick white fangs that fall back in taut pink arches to your gums; in a second, they drip with clear fluid at the tips.
A rattlesnake. You rear at the guard, a hiss boiling back deep in the tube of you. A lifetime that passes in seconds: this is what it is to be reincarnated, the god of all snakes and things that writhe.
As he levels his sword at you, keeping his off side shielded behind a counter, crouching just low enough to spring if it is needed, you worm round soft and swift beneath the warm oven and take him in the ankle as he swings at shadows.
As he follows the brief, brilliant curve of human agony- staring, arcing back on himself at the waist, falling, convulsing- you are already gliding away.
What now?
Written by ouroboros666 on 18 July 2016
The end (for now)