"Behold, the Chosen One!" announced the chief. She was remarkably tall, with bright orange and yellow fur. She stood underneath a silvery tree with no leaves.

Jess spun around and froze. She tried to scream but nothing came out.

The chief started to talk. For the next half hour the only thing she could hear were her own panicked thoughts.

...

Hours passed. It was the mid-afternoon. Jessica and Snowpelt were walking through the woods.

Jessica looked at her own reflection in a frozen puddle. She wiggled her pointy ears and bared her sharp claws.

God, I'm hideous! Out of all the monsters she was surrounded with she was by far the ugliest. Her village was never really known for its dye-making so the most colorful thing she'd seen was the sky. But to her it was as if her eyes, her fur, her paws, her uncannily human-like hair were all those colours and then some. It made her eyes tingle and spasm, her mind jump and recoil.

How could something like this even survive? In the wilderness there was nothing but white snow for miles around. She recalled Carter telling her just how skittish the deer were, how they'd take off at the slightest impression of movement. How these wolves hadn't starved to death years ago was beyond her.

She wanted to jump into the nearest lake and swim swim swim like a rabid salmon to wash those eye-searing colours out. And if that didn't work she'd rub herself against jagged rocks until she had no fur left, the cold be damned!

"Hey", said Snowpelt.

"I guess I'm one of you now." she deadpanned.

"Looks like you are." said Snowpelt, sadly.

She felt bad for Jess. Torn away from her old life, and forced to shoulder an enormous responsibility for people she'd been raised to think of as demons for years. Nobody deserved her fate. Yet someone had to do it. For everyone's sake.

Even if Jess learned how to return to her human form, the paranoid superstitious townsfolk would think she was a ghost at best, or replaced by a shapeshifting demon at worst. But there had to be something she could do to cheer her up. Anything. So Snowpelt thought of a list of things human children might be interested in.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

After a brief pause, Snowpelt said, "On the bright side, you look like this because you can do magic! Don't you want to learn how to fly and shoot lightning bolts from your eyes?"

"I want to be human again." Jess said, walking up a low incline.

Finally, Snowpelt had an idea. "You want the long explanation or the short one?"

Jess glanced away. Her expression soured. "Tell me how to turn back."

"Yes, I was just about to teach you that. But it's going to take time-"

Jess's ears perked up. "Show me the ropes. I want to learn it as soon as I can."

"It's in the long one." Snowpelt said.

"I don't have anything else I need to do at the moment, so go ahead." answered Jess.

"Okay. So in the beginning... actually, let me ask you - how did the world start off?"

Jess gave a confused expression. "I learned God was bored and wanted company, so she made the world and all its people. But for some reason she didn't make it perfect and the world started to fall apart. Soon the rest of the world was replaced by this wilderness full of demons and the winter never went away."

"And why's that true?" Snowpelt said.

"I don't know. That's just what they say at church. Nobody said anything else."

"Exactly. The only reason you have to believe it is because everyone else does." Snowpelt said. "Our version goes like this."

Snowpelt cleared her throat. "While God was making the world there wasn't much difference between humans and animals so if you said you were a human you could be one, and the same went if you said you were a wolf. Then God realized what she'd done wrong so she made sure all the animals stayed animals and all the humans stayed human by taking away the gift of speech from animals. But like always she messed up again and soon enough no-one could speak or transform anymore."

"Uh-huh" Jess nodded.

"So she made a bowl from the sky which she made by cutting open the heavens and turning the highest part of the dome of the firmament upside down. Then she took two handfuls of dirt from the moon and mixed it all the speech she'd taken in that bowl. Then she threw it at the humans and from that dirt sprouted the Holy Tree. You know what happened next." Snowpelt said.

"Yep." Jess said. "Our ancestors ate the Fruit of Knowledge."

"And so did ours. That's why we can talk." Snowpelt sad.

"Anyway, God threw the dirt so hard the whole world started falling apart. So she took a single village and a single nearby wolf pack. Then they put them into this whole new one that was just forest. She knew we were going to fight each other and it was gonna get worse and worse and in time we'd make each others' lives hell. So she gave your people and ours a cutting from the first Holy Tree so its magic would make sure neither of us would wipe out the other. Not long after the Vanishing we received a prophecy."

"Why you and not us?" Jess said.

"Long story. I'm not completely sure." Snowpelt said.

"It's a bit of a long story already." Jess said.

"Just bear with me." said Snowpelt. "The reason your backwoods, middle-of-nowhere town was chosen was because it was close to the original Holy Tree. (And by close I mean within around ten or twenty kilometers) If you eat the Fruit of Knowledge from it you'll get the power to turn into anything!"

Jess paused. Silence hung in the air.

"Why didn't you tell me this earlier?" Jess said, exasperated.