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15
EMRYS
The magic flares so suddenly I can’t fucking stop it, pull it back. A howl rips from my throat as my body twists and bows on the ground, my bones cracking and my joints breaking. It fucking hurts. It’s beyond any word, any description I can think of, beyond the pain of torture, the anguish beyond that of being buried alive.
I can’t control it. My body is changing, stretching, breaking apart and reforming, my back screaming agony, my face on fire, my skin itching as if an army of fire ants is burrowing under my skin.
Looks like… Fuck, I’m shifting. Black scales are emerging from my skin, though my limbs look… all wrong, fucking hell, I’m gonna puke my guts out just by looking. I don’t know why the hell this is happening, I don’t…
My howl of pain turns into a roar. My vision shifts to red and black—red marking the living beings, black the dead things. I drag a hand in the grass and it leaves deep grooves. Talons gleam, scales shimmer. Smoke blows out of my nostrils.
Muscles ripple in my back and as I move, they expand into—wings, wings unfolding, and I beat them down, and again, and I’m rising.
Into the sky.
This is a nightmare.
Or is it real?
I fly up, over the stadium, beating wings that seem to rip the muscles of my back apart, every beat tearing a new roar out of my chest. The clouds beckon and I soar higher—only to brush against demonblood, a shield that encloses the Academy like a glass globe. Hissing, I fly lower, just above the tree tops, branches hitting my legs.
My hind legs.
My mind is bending, close to breaking. This shape can’t be me. This beast isn’t me.
And yet it is.
How does Jason do it? He’s braver than I am, to wake up every morning with the possibility of turning into this.
My tail swishes in the air, and I find that, as I move it right and left, it helps stabilize my flight, a rudder of sorts. I huff a laugh born of fucking terror and it comes out as flame and smoke, red and black swirling in my vision. I circle the stadium, uncertainty keeping me there. What the fuck do I do now?
The urge to kill is tickling my mind, as is the urge to fly away, to find a rocky place to hide. But I can still think, my human mind trapped inside the beast. I heard that the longer you stay in beast form, the more you lose your humanity.
And I have no idea how to shift back.
As I circle, muscles burning in my back with every beat of my new wings, I see a wolf running on the ground below, running away from the stadium. There’s something familiar about him.
His magic feels familiar.
And then I see more creatures heading the same way. There’s a golden bird with the body of a lion—a griffin, I realize. And a huge black panther loping through the trees like a shadow.
I turn to follow them. As if by common agreement, they’re all heading toward the lake—more space there to land, to stop and regroup, I realize.
But not only that. Someone is waiting for us on the shore. A woman with long black hair, wearing a long black dress. At least it all looks black to me, her face and body burning red underneath it all.
Ophelia, I think, this is Ophelia. She’s calling us down.
The griffin circles over the shore, his wings as wide as mine, only feathered, his beak glinting gold. The panther has already curled up in front of her. The wolf crouches down, ruby tongue lolling. As the griffin takes a few steps toward her, his feline gait similar to the panther’s but with his wings spread wide, I dive down. It’s all supposed to be instinctive right? A majestic dragon descending and landing gracefully on the rocky shore.
Instinctive and majestic my ass. I crash-land, sending a shower of pebbles and earth toward the others. I spin as I dig my claws into the soft, unstable soil, splashing into the shallows of the lake, my wings dragging behind me.
Fuck.
Huffing plumes of smoke, I finally stop my disastrous spin and heave myself out of the lake. As a dragon, I’m much bulkier than as a demon—as if my muscle mass has inflated and stretched—but I’m still pure muscle, and though some of these muscles are new and I’m still learning how to work them—hello, wings and tail—I’m doing better already.
I still drag my legs a little, unused to being a quadruped—and what about the wings? Does that make me a sextoped? Or maybe they aren’t considered legs. Probably.
Still, good word, I mentally pat myself on the back. Sextoped. It’s probably wrong but it sounds like sex, so who cares? Good enough.
