Tundra

We set the exorcism spell to trigger within a couple of minutes of my ingesting the fungus. It was bizarre being on the other side, after I had cupped handfuls of infected substance and shoved them into my mouth. Everything glowed in the same eerie colours as the northern lights. Messages relayed through the whispering grass, bringing word to the spirits I could see on my peripheral vision that I had arrived.

As soon as I transformed, I remembered what Eiron had told me about the masquerade of the wild. The masquerade is everything to the ancient druids. It involves songbirds and frogs, wolves and owls; all manner of camouflaged creatures that come out of the cracks in the forest when nighttime’s curtain descends. The masquerade is survival. It is the most basic negotiation of power which is transmuted into every complex hierarchy. To it every set of wings and feet and claws and eyes and hands owes its birth, and so do I. The masquerade is what drives us all. The masquerade is hunger. The masquerade is thirst. The masquerade is everything.

The masquerade was life and death in that moment, and I was part of it. I was running. I felt the mud squelching between my toes, and, looking down, appreciated the soft, purplish brown camouflage of my skin as my feet raced, stamping the seconds into the earth. I was lean, the way I remembered being, but I was also muscular and my body had never been aware of movement as it learned to know it then. I could have outrun any sprinter on the planet, and that was without even mentioning my other features.

As a man of magic, perhaps I was in-tune enough with the astral planes to inherit some of the bestial aspects the druids normally affected. The first time I saw my glassy, orb-like eyes, I stared into them as if the rest of my body lay curled in the dust. Hackley held up the mirror spell, and I saw that not a feather was out of place. The smooth craters around my disc-like irises, formed by plumage lying flat in circles, gave each a hollow look. These depressions were so round that they became the hemispheres of my face. The beak that protruded between them was as hooked as the claws tucked up under my feet, where my feathers were the shade of a syrupy sunset.

I struck myself as some kind of chimera, with antlers like a stag’s, claws like a magical griffon’s, far too large to belong to an ordinary bird, and a shrewd expression. For all my animal features, however, I was still less of an oddity than the Mossen Grove druids my comrades had described to me. I was more than just part human. Wings folded sleekly along my otherwise featherless back, and I was streamlined in my new form. If I looked strange, however, it was nothing beside how strange everybody else looked.

At some point, I became aware that I was staring up at Eiron, only he was not the Eiron I had known before. Where I had previously seen solid skin tone, I perceived a myriad of colours I hadn’t even known existed. Leering from about ten feet away, the Seafarer was less a distinct shape and more an assortment of earth and copper coloured rainbows.

Things also sounded different. Everything was much sharper and more nuanced, but mostly, there were more sounds than I had ever heard at one time. What I had thought of as background noise turned out to be a rich tapestry of bird song –which I was astounded to find I understood– and the competitive racing of separate winds, as well as a detailed map composed of tell-tale rustles and slithering sounds giving away the locations of mice, rats and grubs. It was the aural equivalent of looking at the world through a magnifying glass.

‘Astonishing. Purely astonishing,’ I said, and was surprised to hear my animal voice speaking perfectly coherent words. Little was I to know that I had just had my first and most important lesson in survival.