Inhuman Relations #3
When you come around, you sit up cautiously, surprised that your body does not hurt after your fall, and recollect your memories. You are in the midst of a deep forest, isolated within a small clearing, which is dotted with petite snowdrops, their heads hanging solemnly like mourners at a funeral procession. There is a stump a few feet away, covered with thick moss that appears like it has not been disturbed in decades, testament to the remote corner of the world that you must have been dragged too. Kidnapped? Yes...kidnapped, you must have been kidnapped --- it was the only explanation. Rubbing the back of your hand across your eyes, you wrinkle your nose to ward off a sneeze and glance back. Your heart jumps in your ribcage as that man from the archery grounds now casually sits upon the gnarled wood, pointed chin contemplatively resting in the curve of his paler palm. If he could be said to be sitting that is; his lower half has all but disappeared and a curl of periwinkle smoke takes the place of the legs you had so clearly seen previously.
"You are most fortunate," the torso of the man says, looking you from head to toe with the appreciation of a seasoned better appraising a horse at the race track.
"Fortunate?" You answer bitterly, struggling to your feet. "What the hell have you done to me? Where are we??"
"It's not what I've done to you but what I am going to do to you," he smirks. "Please enjoy your new form and, subsequently, your new life."
"Now look here, you have no idea what ---"
Your words are cut off abruptly when a pained gargle swallows your breath. You bring your hands swiftly to your throat, widening your eyes in terror as the skin bulges and twists grotesquely. Staggering backwards, you spin in a circle --- somewhere, anywhere, there must be an escape! --- but the ring of trees seem to close in like hunters around a kill, a fierce throbbing behind your eyes forcing you to drop to the ground, writhing and releasing a high pitched, keening cry. The sound terrifies you --- it was not human!
You are not human.
With your skull cracking and bones realigning, you look down at your 'hands' through a haze of pain, watching them sprout a short coat of brown hair, the nails becoming hard and encasing the very tip of every finger and both thumbs like a miniature, monstrous hoof. Against your will, your body swells to meet the needs of an unfamiliar shape, clothes splitting at the seams and falling in useless shreds alongside your ruined pair of shoes, burst open with the growth of your...hooves. Bar the rapidly spreading growth of hair, you are completely nude, shamefully naked. There is something wrong with your neck and it lengthens and arches; you fear, until the shape settles with a sigh of firming bones, that this is the creature's chosen method of doing away with you --- snapping your neck like a twig.
The final changes come in a swift series of sharp jabs, like a bright light flashing behind closed eyes. Your face shoots out obscenely, the cracking of bones like branches snapping under a storm's footsteps, and your legs settle with a subtle rearranging of muscles into a 'double-jointed' position, devilishly difficult to rationalise into motion. Upon the back of your head, a pair of curved ears twitch and you snort heavily, flaring your large nostrils in a mixture of breathy disbelief and all too human shock. As if to add insult to injury, a black tail shoots from the base of your spine, swishing back and forth as if it had always been there, and, most unnervingly, your chest raises two mounds of flesh that are surely nothing a male ought to carry.
Grasping these fleshy mounds with your now paw-like hands, you shake your head vigorously --- this isn't happening! How could it be? You're not female --- you're a... Afraid to know the truth, you look little by little down your rounded contours, soft as a male should not be, seeing nothing about your crotch that can define you as the man you once were. You leap into the air and shriek, stomping a hoof down into the grass with enough force to send a small tremor up to the old tree stump. No! It was all wrong, all wrong! Him...that creature. He sits there staring at you so calmly, as if he not only understood everything that was going on but was the one who orchestrated it, playing you more easily than a musician draws music from a flute.
Written by Amethyst Mare on 11 June 2012
