“This should be the site they were camping at,” Messenger Darting-Flight peeped as they arrived at their destination, the swift’s gaze flicking around the odd mess of tools and materials. “It was in a much better state when I was here to collect their report two days ago. Something must have happened, Ink-Talon is never this careless.” It fluttered down to the ground and began rooting through one of the piles. “The notes and records are still here. Maybe those will have an answer for where the two of them went? Or should we keep following your nose, Silver-Tail?”
“No need, because they’re still here.” Seeker Silver-Tail put its nose to the ground and confirmed the scents, quickly finding a hollow at the roots of a nearby tree where they seemed to be sheltering. Moving to investigate, the black-furred fox immediately saw the glint of eyes peering out of the darkness. Eyes that didn’t look on it with familiarity, but with fear, anger, and confusion. “Apologies if we startled-” It could not even finish expressing the sentiment before Scholar Ink-Talon awkwardly stumbled out of the darkness, squawking a command to someone behind it as it flapped its wings and threw itself at the fox.
“Go! I’ll distract it!” the crow cawed, only to be immediately knocked over and pinned by the fox’s forepaw in one swift motion. Its movements had all the effectiveness and precision of one of its kit hunting crickets on its first trip outside the den.
“Scholar! Control yourself!” The fox barked. “We are not feral, and you are not in danger!”
“Wait, you’re… like us?” Forager Keen-Ear chittered as it emerged from the hollow, the squirrel’s slow, deliberate gait betraying uncharacteristic clumsiness in much the same way Ink-Talon’s frantic movements did, not to mention a fair bit of physical discomfort.
“Something is wrong,” Darting-Flight flicked its tail feathers silently, communicating the message out of view of the crow and squirrel. “They do not seem to be mentally or physically sound.”
“Ink-Talon, please stop struggling,” Silver-Tail huffed, struggling to split its attention three ways to think about any of this.
“That’s not my name! Get off!” the crow screeched before biting into Silver-Tail’s leg with its beak, forcing the fox to leap back with a surprised yelp.
“Friend! Stop!” Keen-Ear squeaked, placing a forepaw on the crow’s wing to placate it. “They don’t mean us any harm.” Ink-Talon slumped over, collapsing from apparent exhaustion.
“At least one of you is lucid,” the Seeker whined as it licked its wound. Ink-Talon’s bite had actually drawn blood.
“I’m not entirely sure I am,” Keen-Ear said, staring at its own paws. “Do you know what happened to us?” It didn’t just mean the two of them, seeming to include Silver-Tail and Darting-Flight in this happening as well. “One moment we were [Our Species], the next we’re… animals. I hoped it was just a bad dream, that I’d go to sleep and wake up back in my bed, but-”
“Not ‘were!’ We still are [Our Species]!” Ink-Talon cawed angrily, finally managing to stand back up. “Don’t you dare give in to this!”
“I’m not giving in to anything! You’re getting caught up in semantics!”
The two began to argue, much of what they were talking about shrouded in some bizarre context that Silver-Tail could not even begin to unravel. Whatever small amount of sense the squirrel was speaking was instantly rebuffed by the far more delirious bird, and the pair seemed to be in a stalemate. Silver-Tail tuned them out and motioned to its nearby companion.
“Messenger Darting-Flight, you need to gather up all of the Scholar’s records and deliver them along with details of what happened here. I will keep them safe and try to get them back to the village.”
“Will you be okay alone?” Darting-Flight nervously glanced between Silver-Tail and the other pair. “Neither of them are behaving rationally.” It hopped around to the fox’s front, gesturing at the visible blood on its leg with a wing. “You’ve already been injured, as well.”
“I will be fine. They are far more of a danger to themselves than me in this state.” The fox’s ears drooped as it eyed the pair with a mix of pity and concern. The possibility of whatever had happened to them being contagious or caused by a nearby danger could not be discounted, and the small wound on its foreleg throbbed as the thought crossed its mind. But they themselves were not a threat. Just unwell. “Informing the Coordinator is more important than avoiding small risks.”
“Understood, I will make sure the Physician is prepared for them as well.” Darting-Flight spread its wings and prepared for takeoff before pausing and looking back. “Be safe, Seeker.”
“Fly true, Messenger.” As the swift zoomed off above the trees, Silver-Tail turned back to the arguing pair, only to find the fight having already ended and the two sorrowfully commiserating instead. Keen-Ear sat beside a crestfallen Ink-Talon, awkwardly wrapping a foreleg around the crow. The fox clearly Understood it to be an expression of comfort and consolation, but it was an unusual one for these two. A poor fit for either of their body shapes.
“I can’t do it.” Ink-Talon’s squawks had devolved into some odd mix of a croak and a gurgle. “I can’t move how I want. I can’t think how I want. I can’t speak how I want.” It slumped over on its side, barely able to remain conscious. “But I’m still me, right? I know I’m me. I have to be. If I’m not, then-”
“Stop it.” Keen-Ear interrupted the crow with a desperate, barely audible squeak. “You have to stop overthinking it. We’re going to be okay. We found help. We can survive this.” It was immediately obvious that despite its encouragement, the squirrel did not believe what it was expressing. It was trying to convince itself as much as its partner, and it was not doing a good job.
“Are you ready to converse now?” the Seeker asked, carefully approaching the pair. It needed to intervene before their mental states deteriorated ever further.
“I am, I think,” the squirrel answered, “but my friend isn’t. Too tired.”
“Understood. We can let it rest for a while, and then I can carry it back.” Silver-Tail sat down in front of them, wracking its brain as it tried to figure out how best to approach this. In the end, it just had to sigh and hope that the Forager wouldn’t react poorly to having its mental state questioned. “Before anything else, I need to know. What happened to the two of you? How much do you remember?”
Keen-Ear stared blankly for a moment, as if confused by the question.
“Do you not know? You’re like us, right? [Our Former Species]?”
“No.” The Seeker was caught off-guard by the question, just as much as Keen-Ear was caught off-guard by the answer. This was far more severe than it had initially assumed, and it immediately regretted sending Darting-Flight back so soon. It did its best to hide its fear and confusion, expressing its next question with only a calm tilt of the head and an inquisitive whine. “Start from the beginning. Just who, and what, do you believe yourself to be?”
----------------------------------------
The previous evening…
He awoke to sensory overload. Even with his eyes closed, he was assaulted by unfamiliar scents, sounds, and sensations with absurd detail and intensity. The scents, rather than mixing into a single amalgam of various smells, were each clearly distinguishable, while the pained cries of an extremely distressed bird rang in his ears with the intensity of a fire alarm, somehow communicating the exact location of the poor animal. He needed to shut it out. Focus on one thing. Ground himself, or else start to panic.
Touch. Just focus on touch. Taking an inventory of his senses was a tried and true grounding technique and the first thing he attempted. However, he immediately got the sense that things were wrong. Very wrong. But he hoped he could handle wrong, so long as he took it one thing at a time. The sounds and scents faded into the background as the world gave way to practiced mindfulness.
Breathe in, breathe out. What do you feel? He was lying on his side, cushioned by thick grasses. The contours of his body, however, were bizarre. His arms and legs were outstretched, but felt disproportionately short compared to his torso. And that was to say nothing of what felt like a long, heavy extension of his spine, curving outwards.
No pain. No broken bones. No numbness. But I’m... misshapen? With a… tail? His heart began to race. Fast. Faster than the human heart could beat. It could only mean one thing, and that only made it worse. Rather than accept the clear truth he’d already put together, he withdrew again. He decided to start from square one with a different sense.
Focus. Breathe. Just listen. Pick one sound and listen. The most immediate and obvious sound was the rapid thrumming of an inhuman heart in his ears, so he latched onto the only other thing he could hear: the panicked cries of a bird. It was more than just distressed and angry, like injured or trapped wild animals he’d encountered before. No, these were cries of confusion, terror, despair, and denial. So much emotion and meaning wrapped up in what were obviously the sounds of an animal. It was almost as if…
“No no no no no! This isn’t real! This isn’t happening! Wake up wake up wake up!” Like tuning into a radio station, the unintelligible caws and screeches suddenly became crystal clear. Not audibly, the sounds were the same as they had been, but he understood them. They formed sentences and expressed emotions to him, despite not containing any actual language he recognized. “I’m not an animal! Not a bird! I’m me! Just let me wake up!”
Once more, panic nearly overtook the man as the reality he’d been avoiding washed over him, but this time something else kept him grounded. He was not alone. Someone else was here, experiencing the exact same impossible thing. Someone who was lost in the terror and disbelief he had only narrowly avoided because their presence had drawn him out of it. Knowing nothing else, one thing became clear: He needed to help them, because he refused to entertain the idea of going through this alone. Not for him, nor for anyone else.
So he finally opened his eyes.
He was prepared for his sense of sight to be wildly different in this body. But what greeted him was still bizarre and almost impossible to parse. It was only when he tried closing one eye that he got a better grasp on what he was seeing. His eyes were on the sides of his head, facing outward more than they faced forward. Rather than looking straight ahead with both eyes, he could see most of his surroundings at once, with even the peripheries of his vision coming in crisp and clear. Even grasping that, it was nearly as overwhelming as all of his other senses combined, but after a moment the strain of it all seemed to fade. Even the gray, furry muzzle taking up a sliver in the center of his view felt unobtrusive, as if it didn’t exist if he didn’t focus on it. A sudden rush of movement through the grass to his left caught his eye, and his attention snapped to it reflexively.
Am I wired to notice movement and pay less attention to stationary things? He wondered, though the source of that movement reminded him that now wasn’t the time for experimentation. The other person, who seemed to be a crow of some sort, was thrashing about in the dirt a short distance away. The first thing to do was stand up, and he immediately noticed that rather than ending up on his hands and knees in the middle of the process, he was standing on all fours.
This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
He took his first steps forward, trying to push past the bizarre clashing of his human muscle memory and quadrupedal body. He was less than successful, however, immediately stumbling as he moved limbs in the wrong order. The first idea that came to mind was pretending to crawl. That did the trick. One paw at a time, alternating sides between front and hind limbs. The gait and posture were natural, so it was far less strenuous than crawling on his former hands and knees would have been, but it was still slow. He’d need to figure out that sort of scampering movement small animals did if he wanted to move any faster.
Having made it past the grass, he could see more of where they were, along with the crow in their entirety. They were situated in a forest clearing of some sort. It certainly seemed huge, but given the apparent size of the trees, which stretched upwards like skyscrapers, he could only assume that their small size was the reason for that. The crow was a fair bit larger than he was, but not enough to make approaching him particularly daunting. By this point their cries had died down to the avian equivalent of sobs and incoherent muttering, so he just needed to figure out how to grab their attention.
“Hey-“ he squeaked, his “voice” catching in his throat as he heard what he sounded like for the first time. Small, rather cute in any other context, and very, very vulnerable. But it was what he had to work with right now, so he shoved that thought away, trying not to think about it. “Hey, can you hear me?” His chittering didn’t seem to phase the bird, however, and he remembered that he didn’t understand what the bird was saying until he tried to focus on the sounds. He needed to give them something more concrete to pay attention to. So he pounced, leaping at them with outstretched limbs.
“No! Let me go! Change me back!” The crow’s cries once again filled the air as he tried to wrap his forelegs around them in an impromptu embrace. Thankfully the crow was even less adept at moving their body than he was, and their attempts at struggling failed to dislodge him.
“Calm down. It’s okay. You’re going to be okay,” he said, his words forming out of an odd, cooing purr. He was lying, of course. None of this was okay, and he had no reason to believe that that would change any time soon, but he needed that lie as much as the bird did. “Stay calm and talk to me. Just make any sounds you can, I think we can understand each other.”
After a long and awkward silence, the crow finally spoke, softly cawing and clicking to create their words. “You’re a squirrel,” they stated flatly, still clearly lost.
“Oh.” The squirrel turned his head to confirm this, finally seeing the enormous fluffy tail that had been residing in the blind spot behind his head all this time. “I suppose I am.” He turned back to the crow, who just stared at him in disbelief. “But I’m also like you. Formerly human.”
“We’re not ’formerly’ human,” The bird snapped, finally managing to shake off the squirrel and pull themselves up onto their talons, towering over him as their eyes stared into his with a sudden clarity and conviction. “We are human! I won’t have my personhood dictated by any of this… mystical nonsense!”
“No arguments there.” The squirrel nodded. “Glad to see you’ve pulled yourself out of that spiral, friend.”
The crow just stood there for a moment, all of that determination and anger quickly fading. “…What now?” They asked, looking around the clearing as fear began to creep back into their voice.
“Survival.” The squirrel looked up at the sky, which had begun to take on a lovely orange tint over the last few minutes. “If all that time I wasted as a scout in my teens taught me anything, it’s what your priorities are when you’re lost in the woods. We find shelter, we find food and water, and we find help.”
“Help?” The crow scoffed. “Who is going to help us like this?”
“Perhaps nobody, but making ourselves impossible to find isn’t going to do us any good on the off-chance that…” Something caught the squirrel’s attention as he spoke. Not a sight or sound, but a smell, suddenly highlighted by a shift in the evening breeze. It was a pair of smells, to be precise, clearly distinct from the scents of the two of them and the ambient odors of dirt and grass. They clung to his fur and seemed to leave a clear trail to follow, one clearly pointing out into the woods as he sniffed the air around him. “I think I’ve got a direction for us to go in. Can you walk?”
“…Maybe?” The crow took an awkward couple of steps forward, visibly cringing as they paid attention to the way the joints in their legs were oriented for the first time. “It feels like I'm walking backwards, but it doesn’t hurt. I think I can manage.” They flashed the squirrel an odd open-beaked expression that read as an uneasy attempt at a smile. “Sorry that our introductions started out so poorly.” They paused for a moment, that sentence having come out rather strange. “My name is-“ Another pause, this time with a distinct twinge of panic. “I’m… myself.”
A cold realization crept over both the squirrel and the crow. Their names were gone, replaced by the same translated meanings that had replaced all of their communication. Even within their own thoughts.
They were simply themselves, and that was all they could say.
----------------------------------------
Of all the complications of the crow’s new state of being, none were more distressing than the effects it had on his thoughts. For the most part, he mentally felt like himself. This body was still as foreign as it should be, despite him starting to adjust to moving it. His emotions and inclinations didn’t clash with his memory of himself, either. He wasn’t obsessing over shiny things or compelled to peck at the ground or whatever a real crow’s instincts would tell it to do. It was one of the few pieces of solace he could draw from the situation. He’d read about enough malicious transformations in tabletop games and fantasy novels to recognize that the greater horror was losing one’s mind to that of the animal, not one’s body.
But he wasn’t one-hundred percent the same. The way he understood language was different. It was obviously a boon in this situation. Neither he nor the squirrel could vocalize the way humans could, but they understood each other all the same. Chirps, squawks, squeaks, caws, gestures with wings and paws, and even more nuanced body language like posture. All of it came across clear as day as if they’d spoken with their old voices or expressed with their old faces.
This understanding, however, came at a cost. To communicate in meaning rather than sound meant that many words and phrases simply ceased to exist, even in their own thoughts. What used to be metaphors were instead “translated” literally, or otherwise mangled into less succinct similes, and many proper nouns were replaced with their definitions instead. This included their names.
For the crow, any attempt to express or think his name simply produced “me,” “myself,” or “my name,” while the squirrel expressed similar difficulties, so much so that it was distressing to even try. As it turns out, neither of them had bothered to learn the definitions of their names in their native languages, the crow’s parents having simply picked a nice sounding biblical name for him that he’d never bothered to investigate. They eventually worked out some basics like the fact that they were both men who had been passing through the same stretch of backwater highway before waking up here, but that was all they could manage without taking the time to really dig into how this worked.
He knew that this was a small price to pay to avoid being isolated by an inability to easily communicate, but the loss of his name ate at him. He even recalled his own memories differently, with text and even people’s voices being interpreted through the same filter of meaning as everything else, the sounds of his and others’ names having been reduced to an inexpressible onomatopoeia. And if his memories could be altered, even in such a small way, how could he be sure that nothing else was?
“Good to keep going, Friend?” A small squeak from the squirrel brought him back to the present. He’d apparently gotten so lost in thought that he’d stopped walking.
“Yeah, sorry,” he nodded, fluffing up his feathers in an apparent bid to shed some anxiety, a reflex he wasn’t exactly happy to learn he had. “Just got distracted. Let’s keep moving.”
“Got it. Just don’t be afraid to let me know if we’re pushing it, okay?”
They’d hadn’t been walking long. It was impossible to tell time precisely, but the sun had just set enough for the entire forest to be blanketed in the final purple hues of twilight. He’d never had to wonder how well a crow could see in the dark before. The answer? Not well. The best he could do was follow the bobbing tail of the squirrel in front of him, its brownish grays standing out a bit against the darkness in front of them.
“Can you see where we’re going?” The crow asked. “My eyes aren’t any better at night than they used to be, how about a squirrel’s?”
“Only marginally better than a human’s, I’m afraid,” the squirrel answered. “But I can smell where we’re going. It’s really strong, we’re practically on top of it.”
“Let’s just hope that whatever it is, it’s worth finding. I don’t really fancy sleeping out in the open now that I’m small enough to snack on.”
“Hold up, I think we’re here,” The squirrel said, night haven truly fallen and plunged the forest into darkness. “Let me feel around for a moment… Huh?”
“What is it?”
“There’s… stuff on the ground here.” Wooden clattering and light metallic clinking filled the still air at the squirrel rooted though assorted objects. “I think they might be tools?”
“Tools? A human was here?” The crow immediately perked up. “Then we’re close to civilization!”
“Not… human tools.” The squirrel replied, his voice uneasy. “I can’t see them, but these paws can suss out the shapes of things really well. They’re sized for us, and our scents are all over them.”
“What is that supposed to mean? We were here long enough to craft tools and just… forgot everything?” A much simpler and more likely answer immediately occurred to the crow, but he quickly dismissed it. Contemplating it would complicate things.
“Maybe we…” The squirrel trailed off, clearly grappling with his own theories. “I don’t know,” he lied. It was easy to tell when he didn’t mean what he said when his underlying emotions and intentions were as clear as the actual words. “But it looks like we can camp here. There’s a hollow beneath the tree roots, and our scents are inside.” A soft pattering noise came from ahead as he scurried into the hole he’d found. “Follow my voice! There’s just enough room for you.”
“You’d better be right. I don’t think I know how to back out of a tight space.” The crow gingerly stepped forward until his beak bumped up against the bark of the tree, and then poked around until he found the top of the opening. He crouched down as best he could and tried to shuffle in. “Okay, this is definitely not something these legs are made for.”
“Need help?”
“No, I just need to…” The crow shifted from the initial crouch he’d attempted to a wider, somewhat more uncomfortable stance, enabling him to waddle his way in. “There, that was awkward- Oh!” Both creatures chirped as the crow’s beak poked the squirrel in the forehead. “Sorry!”
“No worries, let me move over.” The squirrel shifted to the left, giving the crow room to squeeze in next to him and turn around. “You’re… really warm.” He squirmed a little bit, the crow being large enough to eclipse his whole body while pressed up against him.
“Same goes for you, fluffy,” The crow croaked. “It was getting chilly anyway.” He sighed, his feathers once more fluffing up reflexively. “But honestly, I’m just scared. I know we barely know each other, but you’re all I’ve got right now. You’ve been far kinder to me than I’ve been to you. It’s impossible not to be direct speaking like this, so I just want you to know that I appreciate it.”
“I don’t know if I’m as altruistic as you think I am,” the squirrel chittered softly. “When I first woke up here, in this body, I wanted nothing more than to run off into the woods and escape, as stupid as that sounds. It was hearing your voice that pulled me out of it. I just didn’t want to be alone, and felt guilty that I'd considered leaving you alone. That doesn’t make me kind.”
“Then I guess that makes us two similar people.” The crow paused for a moment before cawing with attempted laughter. “God, I just wanted to make a comparison to peas in pods and it came out like that. We’re doomed.”
“Well, at least we’re doomed together.” The squirrel sighed, shifting in an attempt to get comfortable, though the direct contact made the crow keenly aware that they weren’t quite able to.
“Are you hurt?” The crow asked.
“Just… sore in places that don’t make sense,” the squirrel answered, needing to pause to give his answer some thought. “Nothing lines up with the way I’m used to picturing my body, so I can’t tell if I’m just moving wrong, if I was injured before waking up, or if I’m just coming down with a squirrel cold or something trivial like that.”
“Well, getting enough sleep is important for animals as much as people, as far as I know. Maybe you’ll feel better in the morning?”
“Yeah, I hope. Sleep well, Friend.”
“I’ll try.” The crow closed his eyes and tried to let himself drift off. Unfortunately, sleep never came.
Every movement, every sound, every sensation in that body seemed to jolt him awake the moment he felt himself drifting off. This wasn’t normal anxiety, he knew anxiety. This was alertness. Hypervigilance. Something deep within him screamed that he was in danger. That sleep was the wrong move to make. And as far as he knew, that was true. A fox, or a badger, or a weasel, or any number of predators could make easy work of the two of them.
I’ll keep watch until I pass out, then. The crow trained his eyes and ears on the hole in front of him, the inky-black abyss of night giving him neither signs of danger nor safety. He ached with exhaustion, and his thoughts became foggy even as they continued to wander, but he wouldn’t sleep. He couldn’t sleep. His body refused. As the night dragged on, one, single truth became apparent.
Something inside of him was broken, and he did not know what it was.