A Shifting World Part 1? For ArrowQuivershaft By Draconicon
Nathan stood on the heights in the north of Greece, staring down at the vast swathes of fading green on the hills below. Once, they had been vibrant with natural life, growing back in after decades of damage from the old wars. Once, he had guided men and women through them, showing the history and natural beauty of the world. But now…
Now, he looked down on bulldozers slowly assembling a massive billboard. He already knew what it would say: ‘Coming Soon, A New Resort for Your Convenience!’ or something along those lines. The natural beauty would be spoiled with more industry, more fake-naturist work, soon to follow with other ‘conveniences’ that ‘unfortunately’ needed more land, eating up more and more of the old, restored bits of the mountains that he had learned to love over the half-decade or so that he’d been a ranger in them.
He doubted that it would see more than a few years before everything that he knew by heart was gone. People had a way of just burning through it.
No, not people, he thought, watching as the bulldozers were shut down and the people climbed out of them for their break. Companies, industries, but not people. People are just…victims. Just like the rest of us.
Nathan tried to remember that even as he reached up to his cheek and felt the scars that lingered on his face. Some had come from beasts that didn’t know any better, while others had come from industry enforcers that thought that they knew better. Back then, the fights they started had ended up hurting them in court.
Now that they owned the land, though…well, he imagined that the fights would go the other way if they started again.
He sighed, letting his hand fall to his side as he shook his head.
The wind blew through his hair and over his shoulders. It always did up here, as if the world refused to stay still the way that it did in the lowlands. On the heights, the wind always blew, carrying with it freshness and change - the good kind - and carrying with it a sense that the world would be okay.
Usually, it was something that calmed his soul. Today, it felt like it would never be enough.
Nathan shook his head. On some level, some practical level, he wanted to let go of all the grief that he felt for the lands that would soon be despoiled. That part of him, the part that knew where this was going to go, wanted to give up and move on. It wanted to pretend that this hadn’t mattered as much as it did, that it wouldn’t be that hard to move on and make a new life for himself. It wanted to dismiss all this as ‘just another job’ so that he could move on without feeling like he was getting his heart ripped out.
The rest of him, the part of him that wanted to be a ranger, that wanted to be in the natural world and learn about it and show it off to the world so that maybe they could see what he saw, hurt too much to just let it go.
“It isn’t fair,” he muttered, clenching and unclenching his fists. “They shouldn’t be able to just…get away with this.”
But there was nothing that he could say or do that would stop them, or even slow them down. They were in charge, now, and their authority meant that he couldn’t do a damn thing to protect the mountains or the rest of the preserve.
It.
Wasn’t.
Fair.
He shook his head, looking back at the unspoiled parts of the mountains. They still had life, but for how long?
“I wish the world had never come to this,” Nathan said, shaking his head. “I wish that we’d learned magic, not science. That we had lived with the land, not above it. That we - that we never let industry get this kind of hold.”
The winds picked up. He couldn’t even hear himself as they blew down from the highest peak and over the back of his neck. The icy touch sent shivers down his spine, running all the way through him like knives, prickling and unpleasant. He shook his head.
“I wish I lived in a different world.”
His words had scarcely left his mouth before the wind cut off. For one, two, three seconds, there was nothing. No wind, no buffeting gales, no chill from the great heights. There was only silence, stillness, and a sense of something holding its breath. Nathan felt a prickle at the back of his neck as if he had done something wrong, but it was too late to do anything about it.
Then the wind picked up again, and this time, it blew him off his feet. He stumbled sideways -
And the world cracked.
The sign was there/not-there. There were steel beams/solid trees. There were bulldozers/there was nothing.
There.
Not-there.
Here.
Not-here.
The double-image slammed together, cracking each time he blinked his eyes. Every time the image shattered again, more of the bulldozers, the signs, and the empty spaces faded away, replaced by the lushness of the mountains and the forests and - and even an eagle that hadn’t been there before, flying overhead and making its way into the distance.
“What -”
His air was stolen from his lungs as the cold wind blew him through whatever the world had become. He fell through it, the shatterpoints increasing, the bulldozers and even the distant city at the bottom of the mountain disappearing as if they had never been. He stretched out his arm and -
And he saw two shapes.
One flesh, one feathered.
One pale, one dark.
One blunted, one clawed.
“What -”
Again, the air was stolen from him as the world cracked. The shatterpoints in his vision disappeared, and when they left, so did everything that he remembered. No longer was there a city at the bottom of the mountain. No longer were there bulldozers putting up warnings of greater desolation. Instead…
Instead, he stood on an untouched mountain, one that loomed over a world that was greater and wider than he remembered. The sea - there was no sea. There was only a stretch of land, of forest and field and not a settlement to be seen as far as the eye could see. His breath caught in his throat at the sight of a world that had not existed for hundreds of years before he was born, and the sheer beauty of it overwhelmed him. He fell to his knees, unable to believe what he saw -
And then he felt it. The creeping, the shifting, the itching and the cracking and the -
Nathan lifted his hand and stared. It was no longer the human limb that he was used to seeing, but not quite what he had seen in the shatterpoint. His skin was darkening along the forearm, flesh turning to scales, nearly pitch-black as it rose up from beneath the skin and then slowly slid out to take its place. He could almost hear the soft click, click, click of the transformation as the different scales joined with each other and took their place on top of his skin.
He reached out with his other hand, rubbing his fingers along them. They were smooth but slightly pebbly, domed upward, and his fingers dipped and bounced along the spots where they joined with the other scales. His fingers were already curling longer, the nails turning into something longer, curved and sharp. He recognized the shape: talons.
“What…how…I…I…”
Nathan groaned as his head sudden pulsed. It felt…too tight, too small for the thoughts rushing through.
Nathan, park ranger and guide, human, in his late twenties.
Natau, Asari hawk, ranger and warrior, protector, same age.
One.
The other.
Both?
No.
He slumped down, falling to all fours as his arms ached, the scales spreading all along his hands. As the talons started to creep in, making his fingers into weapons, the transformation spread up his arms. He stared as feathers started to creep out from his flesh, like tiny little pins at first that slowly flowered into dark gray feathers. The scales stopped at the elbow as the feather covered him further up his arms. And his sleeves -
My clothes…
His coat and pants were gone, replaced with clothes he’d never seen, never owned - no, had always had and owned, just gotten larger and -
Two memories.
Two names.
Two selves.
Nathan had never seen the leather armor that he now wore, but Natau had worn it for years, nearly a decade now. It was - it was what he had always had, his protection, the same sort of armor that all the rangers of this area wore.
I was never -
I was always -
A ranger -
The thoughts percolated in the back of his head as he watched the feathers creep further and further up. Even under the armor, he could feel them growing in, spreading along his shoulders, down his chest, everywhere that he had once been human -
Crick.
Crack.
And his spine was changing, too. He could feel a difference, not just in the way that his spine was shrinking, but how all his bones felt…different. His arms felt lighter than he had ever felt them in his life, almost like they were too light, too insubstantial. He felt like he could move faster than ever before, like he could leave any other man in the dust, and -
Crick.
Crick.
His back -
My wings.
Natau had wings.
Nathan slumped forward, his clawed fingers leaving furrows in the dirt as he felt the crack and split along his armor. No, the armor had always been split - it was just catching up to what it was supposed to be. His back arched, humped, and flattened out as the wings did what they were supposed to do: they rose out of his back, spreading, fanning, getting longer and wider with each passing second.
He could barely breathe. The impossible-ness of the last minute had almost rendered him catatonic. He couldn’t think, could barely understand what was happening -
This is me.
This is you.
This is us.
Nathan and Natau. They were - are - the same person in different places. Nathan had left his world behind and come here and -
Stretch, pull, crack.
Stretch, pull, crick.
His wings were getting bigger and bigger, spreading out like a massive feathery tent on either side of him. He wheezed as he looked up, staring at the three different shades of gray that ran out from his back and down his sides. They were…huge, and he had no doubt that he would be able to fly with them.
What even was he? What kind of creature walked on two legs and had wings and -
Asari, of course.
The faint annoyance and barely-there sarcasm was so himself that it stopped him dead in his tracks. If he had had any doubts that Natau was another him, that laid the doubt to rest. This…this was him. Only he could respond like that to a question that seemed that obvious to him.
The wings finally edged to halt, looming over him like two great clouds of feathers. They arched over a foot and a half higher than his own head, and -
He was shorter. It took him a moment to realize that, but he was significantly shorter than he had been before. Going from somewhere…somewhere…
He couldn’t even remember how tall he had been, but more than five feet, he knew that much, and now it felt like he was barely four feet tall. So much shorter, so much…so much smaller and -
And he wasn’t done yet.
He rolled onto his side and promptly regretted it as he half-pinned a wing under him. He kept turning, forcing himself to sit up as he looked down at his boots - or rather, where his boots had been. His feet had changed as much as his hands, turning into talons that even now were lengthening outward. Each clawed digit splayed out against the ground, and he could already feel a knowing/not-knowing difference between how he had walked before and how he would have to walk now. There was a memory of each step being a sort of splaying movement, his talons spreading out and having to teach himself not to grip every last thing that he came across, and…and it was going to be a lot.
And then…
Then it happened.
“Nnngh!”
Nathan/Natau grimaced as his beak started to come in. He reached up with the new-clawed hands and held his face as his lips and nose and jaws started to melt and harden at the same time. They pushed forward, curving, bending, becoming the slightly bent beak of a hawk and -
Oh, it did not feel normal. It felt so wrong as his face turned and bent and the rest of his skull followed suit in the background. Everything was changing all at once, making his face feel like it was being hammered and pulled and twisted all at once. It never became agony, but it was a constant source of discomfort as it was pulled and reshaped and pulled again.
Gradually, his beak darkened, becoming the hardest, most out-thrust part of his face, and the discomfort eased. He slumped back, his wings spreading around a rock behind him, and despite that ache, he didn’t move. There was too much else going on for him to care about that.
His head throbbed. He remembered Nathan - was Nathan - but at the same time, he was Natau. He was an Asari hawk, a ranger that wandered the mountains and served -
I served -
I serve Faenya.
He lived in a village not far from here, a place named Hashinshinra, and he had people in his life. Not many, not a lot, but enough to keep him from feeling alone. He had a life here. Natau had lived a life and still had more of it to live and had a purpose and -
Nathan’s head spun round and round as he fumbled with one hand to get to his feet. He eventually got his legs under him, and after some practice, he was able to get his balance with his new wings and the new talons. It felt odd with all the new anatomy; even with all the memories of Natau, he had never done this himself, and it felt like he could fall over at any moment. Lean too far back, and the weight of his wings would drag him off his feet. Lean too far forward, and his talons would sink into the ground. Walk the wrong way, and his talons would grip the ground and send him falling face-first into the earth.
And the beak…
He rubbed his face again, having to remind himself not to fumble too much with his clawed digits. Those, too, were going to take forever to learn how to use right, considering that the most basic touch was no longer possible. Poking something would be more likely to impale it than prod it, and he would end up scratching most people with a normal gesture. How was he supposed to hold his hands?
For that matter, how was he supposed to speak? His jaw was even more blocky and solid than it had been as a human, and even though he had memories of speaking well, he couldn’t help but feel like his beak would be clicking and clacking with every word. He’d have to learn how to soften how he moved his mouth to get his words across and not leave himself with a perpetual jaw-ache from the constant impacts.
And that was just the start of it. There were so many new things, so many bits and pieces, that he didn’t even have the chance to ask himself the biggest question of all:
How had this happened, and was there any way back?
The End
Summary: A young man disgusted with the way that the world has gone makes a wish at the wrong place and the wrong time. He ends up being shifted over and transformed to a different version of himself, including new memories…but where is he now? And where are all the people he used to know?
Tags: M/solo, No Sex, No Genitals, Transformation, World Shift, World Hopping, Human, Hawk, Asari, Wings, Species Shift,
A young man disgusted with the way that the world has gone makes a wish at the wrong place and the wrong time. He ends up being shifted over and transformed to a different version of himself, including new memories…but where is he now? And where are all the people he used to know?
