Nada's Escape

33- Shapeshifter.

I toss and turn in a whirl of white sheets. My body stretches and shrinks in ways beyond the scope of physical mass. I am in incredible pain, but I'm also mostly unconscious. On that brink of pain and absent thought I think I hear his voice, scratchy and hoarse.

He tells me what the pills I'd taken really were. Experimental. Could allow the user to shapeshift. They didn't contain enough to magic to maintain it for long though. I wake up periodically and moan to the dark. I feel my bones splitting and my organs calcifying into bundles of frayed nerves.

Your body is halfway between the two forms, he tells me. Your bones are trying to be child-sized and adult-sized all at once. The sparks of lingering magic from those pills are confusing your mind and every cell in your body that you're somebody else. Days pass and people touch the little boy's body- my body- for fever. They force pills down my throat. The next time they come I have my own legs and face. More pills. It goes on forever, my own body appearing and disappearing with the whirl of a magicians cape.

I moan at my nurse, "Will it never end?" I can't hear his answer but I hear the other voice. It will be over soon. Just sleep out the last side effects and you'll be better than before. Tomorrow, he thinks. I think that tomorrow is a long way away.

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I wake in the night and the room is dim and bright at the same time. Darcell sits slumped over a book with a flashlight. I roll to see the wall behind me, shin bones splintering. A tiny window glows gold way above me. The glow is flickering, moving about; one of the Huntsmen's fire flies? Yes, I realise as the tiny glowing thing enters the room. My neck aches watching it flutter down to me. I hold out my hand, forearm full of molten pain, and the butterfly lands.

I blink. Yes. Not a firefly but a butterfly, big and perfect as an orchid after rain, wrought of the finest metallic thread. The wings drift down; one gold, one silver, balancing. Drops of colour cling between threads, glimmering mysteriously in soft the glow of its wings. Giant gems the blue of an iceberg bulge from the strange, insect face. I catch my breath in wonder, almost forgetting the pain in my limbs.

"You're awake!" I see Darcell in my peripheral rise and dart towards the butterfly. His voice rises in annoyance, "What's that doing in here?"

I pull my arm away from him protectively, despite the pain lashing down my back. His tone lacks the wonder I feel. I pull the butterfly close, gazing at its tiny legs feeling their way around my palm. Then it flutters back into the air. I catch Darcell's swatting hand and watch it make its way back out the window. I wish it didn't have to leave. I succumb to my bodies pain-filled entreaties, falling back onto the covers.

"I haven't seen a feyfly free before. They don't really do well in the wild." Darcell wants conversation but I'm drained, too focused on my chorus of feeling to speak. So I roll away, begging for sleep to take me again.

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A strange black figure stands in the Huntsmen's meadow. The outline of it is weird, like a bishop in chess and it nags at the back of my mind like a logo without its caption. In the ethereal twilight dream-light I can't see what it's made of. Is it a statue?

It ripples and I flinch. Folds of fabric part before two massive hands and the chess bishop illusion is broken. It is a cloaked figure, face wrapped in shadow, musical voice emanating from every direction.

"Magic." On one hand its fingers snap and a flame flashes into view, hovering like an excited, obedient rat. "Humanity." The figure's other hand traces a wall on the air. I wait for something flashy to appear there but the voice, deep and female despite the figure's large hands, continues.