Weekly Writing – August 31 2024

Finding out which animal you could transform into was a matter of glorious destiny. Of royal bloodline, all its strength and nobility made manifest in flesh and claw.
Or so he’d been told while three brothers had reached their glorious destinies before him. Lion and bear and golden eagle, brilliant symbols of power and pedigree roaring through the castle corridors or circling over its parapets.
So he’d been told even while he took longer than any of them to discover his animal. Fourth-born afterthought, royal only begrudgingly by blood, small and frail and pitied by the tight smiles even the servants offered him.
His brothers had been conscious enough of their coming changes, their first grand transformation, to arrange festivals and dances and declarations to the farthest corners of the land. So of course his would come on him quietly instead, a cold thrill in the night, like waking feverish from a dream. Writhing in his bedclothes, trying to decide if he was dying or if this was really happening, and then the bedclothes were a mound, a burrow over him, and his arms and legs were no longer flailing for a grip on the mattress or his self as he had known it, because he no longer had them. Only a cool, sinuous length of muscle warming in the hollow of his bed, in the body heat his other body had left behind.
Only a serpent’s tongue, flicking curious tastes from the air. Shame rippled across the glossy armour of his scales – a belly-crawler, a creature of lies, omen of humiliation and untruth. This was the shape that had always been waiting in his so-called royal blood and soul, while his brothers roared or screamed bravery or steadfastness or freedom from their truest throats.
He would always be under their feet, in their talons. Below their love or notice. He had known it, but now, his own flesh and blood told him he’d been right. He stretched his jaws for what couldn’t be a sob of despair, not in that shape, and knew, as his third brother claimed to always have known how to fly, that the fangs unfurling from his skull were filled to the tips with venom.
That it was potent. That it would kill any creature he could creep up on, even a lion or bear. He could destroy anything that he could strike in the heel.
He knew, too, how to stretch back into his ordinary human form, arms and legs now tangled awkwardly in his bedclothes. No one had to know what he had discovered in his blood that night.
Not until he wanted them to. He curled his arms and legs to himself, tight as an egg, and spent the rest of the night imagining how a snake could move unseen through the castle.