Searing pain shot through my body as Silaqui began to mutter her spell. One by one, runes from around the room began to glow and lift off the wall, before slowly circling my body and making a small sound, like the fluttering wings of a hummingbird. My nerves were alight, genuinely as if someone had lit my body on fire, a fire that would never extinguish, but as I tried to writhe in pain, I found my body no longer listened to my commands. I was trapped in myself, merely a passenger on the ride for this journey through the mouth of hell. I thought of the pain I felt in the alley, when the Siphoner had fallen on top of me from three stories, and how even the pain from that moment wasn’t even comparable to that which I faced now. But even still, my mind was resolute in its conviction.

  Next came the sound of cracking bones and splitting skin, as my physical shape began to violently morph to new dimensions. Each break was a personal, intimate suffering, and time seemed to slow to welcome all of them; each morphing of skin was a thousand tiny cuts, like a woodsman taking their time sawing down a mighty Sequoia. My eyes followed the runes as they circled me, the only distraction from the pain. I tried to identify what the runes might mean, or their common language analogue, but the agony was stronger than I, and pulled me away from making any meaningful connections. And so instead, I turned to my memories to anchor myself.

  I thought of my mother, having come home from work one day, too tired to play with me. She had gone straight to bed, and so I tried to make her something to eat as a surprise, but set off the fire alarm when I burned the eggs I was trying to make. She shot up from bed and ran over, accidentally burning her hands on the hot pan before she managed to quell my mistake. I remembered how she slapped me, how she scolded me for almost getting us in trouble with the landlord over fire hazard issues. I remember her going to sleep, and me crying for hours about how terrible I was for not being able to do anything right. I remember her waking up and apologizing to me about it, saying her reaction wasn’t okay, and I remember accepting the apology, but knowing she had been right in the first place, and that she had nothing to apologize for.

  Suddenly, the pain didn’t hurt so bad anymore. I could hear my body rippling as it morphed and changed into its new form, and I could see the light of the runes entering me, transforming me into something entirely new, but I was now miles away, in a land of my own making. It was a familiar land to me, one I retreated to often when things went sour, or I was in need of reprieve. In fact, in some way, shape, or form, I came here every day. I came here when I was working, my body on autopilot as I reflected on how Aera had every right to treat me so poorly. I came here during classes, writing the PowerPoint slides down verbatim, and remembering my mother’s sunken eyes and final words. In this world, I was free to dwell in abject misery as I deserved, while my body made the connections it needed to make and traded faces to do so.

  I floated in physical torment, far away, and thought of all of the people in the world who probably deserved this miracle that Silaqui was performing more than I did. I thought of how miserable some people were, and how their misery was more deserving than my own. I didn’t even know what that meant, “deserving,” but all I knew was that I had my whole life handed to me; I had a mother that gave me a home, a grandfather who gave me a home when my mother couldn’t any longer, I was able to go to college and live in New York, and now my impossible dream was being made possible through the most magical of circumstances. My parents would be ashamed of me if they knew how selfish I had been, sending the only person who ever needed me home to her abusive family just because she scared me a little bit. The “curse” my mother laid on me wasn’t the curse: I was. With this power, if only one time, I wanted to help people. With this power, I wanted to take the pain and sorrow from people who suffered like I suffered. In the words of Nirvana, I wanted to eat their cancer.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  And then the pain stopped, and my attention returned to the room around me. Silaqui looked down at me, a shocked expression on her face.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, looking up into her fiery eyes. She blinked back at me, unanswering. I sat up, aware that I once again had control of my body. I looked down at myself, and saw small, dainty feet connected to long, slender, shapely legs. The color of the skin seemed off, a strange grey color, and the runes that floated all around me before now adorned my form, but the shape was straight from a dream; I looked down more, and saw slender, effeminate hips, with nothing where a phallus used to be, and not a single hair to be found. I felt a tear drip down my face; I must’ve died during the procedure, and went to heaven, as this was as surreal and heavenly a sight as I had ever beheld. I looked at my hands; slender, piano-player fingers on dainty hands, connected to toned and beautiful arms, wrists tender and soft. I looked at my torso; genderless and lean, not even nipples remaining to betray what once was. I covered my face in my hands and began to sob quietly. Silaqui was right: I had made a clean break from what once was.

  “There there, it’s… shit, it’s okay,” said Silaqui, who had awkwardly begun rubbing my back. “It’ll take several months, but I’m sure I can figure out some way to reverse at least a few of these changes.”

  I looked up at her, with what I imagined to be a look of horror and confusion, and made an effort to stand up. To my surprise, despite my limbs and body looking so frail, I felt stronger than I ever had as a human, and hoisted myself with a grace and ease that had been unknown to me all my life.

  “Reverse?.. Please, don't. This is… I can't describe it. I don't have words… This is perfect.”

  “Yeah, you might not say that when you see your face…” said Silaqui nervously, as she gave me a robe of my own to put on and led me out of the room. She grabbed a cosmetics mirror and gingerly handed it to me. As I opened it and examined my face, I began to understand her hesitance; I looked more like an Elf than I did any Faerie, with androgynous yet striking facial features and pointed ears, but I looked unlike any Elf I had ever seen in my life. They had complexions of the moon, sun, or trees, but mine was different, more of ash. My hair was raven black, its waves ending at my jawline, and there were runic markings along my face and neck. And then there were my eyes, a piercing red that seemed to almost bleed from the pages of my irises. I looked over myself for a long while, for the first time realizing that returning to my old life would require far more than a simple explanation.

  I let out a little laugh as I looked at myself. “Wow, this is scary… But it's light-years better than what I was. I… I want to stay like this. I don't want to change or reverse anything.” I looked Silaqui straight in the eyes, with what I hoped was a determined expression on my face. She took her hood off, and smiled at me, a gentle smile, before she hugged me, for the first time since I had ever known her.

  “You did a good job. Go home and rest, I’ll fill out the paperwork that says I transmogrified you, so your school and work know.” I looked at her with a quizzical expression. “What,” she slyly smiled back at me, “did you think you were just going to leave your entire old life behind?”