A noise, like feet dragging across a puddled floor, opens my eyes. Nothing is in focus. Colors and shapes swimming before me, unable to take their authentic form. The noise draws closer. I lie still, my hands curled up around my knees, but my skin feels different. It is no longer colorless and harsh, riddled with caverns and crevasses. It is smooth and wet against my clawless fingers.
Something reaches over me, creeping across the floor, ready to consume me.
My eyes place the pieces together as the darkness makes its final move. I open my mouth and turn my body to it, lunging at its exposed throat. With fangless jaws, I sink my teeth into its flesh. It screams in pain as blood fills my mouth.Though my weapons are no more, the power has not left me. It screams in pain as its blood fills my mouth. As I chew, it breaks my hold. A sharpness enters me and I must retreat. Falling, I grasped the place where the pain lives on my body.
It is the man of magic, white hair matted and golden eyes hazed.
I watch as he tries not to fall. He looks at me as I watch his body collapse to the sunlit ground. His eyes seal shut, but he is not dead. The air still comes and goes, though drawn and uneven, raising his chest up from the floor., though drawn and uneven.
Holding on to my shoulder, I turn my head bravely. Red falls from my filth ridden skin, long streams of red I have never seen escape from me before. The wound throbs and grows hot, but everywhere else I am cold. I look down upon myself. There are toes like the ones I have seen on man, individually wrapped in a light pinkish hue underneath the grime. I follow my legs, traveling up to curved hips and rounded breasts against my chest. The cord that once dangled from my stomach has disappeared. There is nothing but a hole where it once was.
A loud crash and the shuffling of feet avert my gaze to the doorway.
Two figures climb down into the only home place I have ever known to be. As they stepped into view, I recognized one to be a man, but the other was something else. Its hair is long and curled into blackened waves against its curved and caring face. When it looks at me, I can see its bright eyes soften with compassion and fear. I want to run but cannot. I cannot not bear to leave while her eyes are upon me.
A mother.
My legs force themselves to work as I stand, unsupported. Only a few steps carry me before I fall to my knees. The man scurries past me to the white-haired one, still lifeless on the ground. The mother bends down, and takes my face in her hands. They are as warm and comforting, as the red is every time I kill.
“It is over,” she says. “You are free.”
Chaos bubbles inside me. But there is something else that comes to meet it, like water washing over the tongues of flames. It is neither pain, nor hunger. It is there, breaking the growing need to hurt and disfigure the mother’s face.
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