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Wanting to get back to my return hike as soon as I could, before I forgot anything more about the route, I knelt by the edge of the stream and leaned forward to drink directly from it on all fours. I was quite thirsty indeed, pulling up great swallows of water and drinking until I felt swollen. Perhaps I over-drank; it was refreshing, and I knew I had a long hike ahead of me again today...
I blinked, frowned, and slowly lifted my mouth away from the water as I finally noticed something I had been too distracted by thirst to see before. Something odd, in my reflection... reaching up, I touched my right ear tentatively with my fingertips. It flicked reflexively away, and I let out a strangled yelp of surprise. My ears had changed, somehow! Sitting bolt upright by the side of the stream, I grabbed them firmly in my hands and winced at the pain as I tugged at them. Long, with flexible roots that flicked them back and forth seemingly with a mind of their own, and covered in short but dense hair, they were plainly no longer human ears; some sort of animal's perhaps. But how? And why?
I shakily got to my feet; my heart beginning to beat faster and faster as terror once again rose in my throat. "I have to get out of here!" I screamed, trying to drive away the silence, and hurried back towards the trail at a near-run. It was all I could do to keep myself from panicking totally, now; the setting had been bad enough already, but now that incomprehensible things were happening to my body itself I didn't know how long I could stay sane under these conditions.
I nearly passed the spot, just barely managing to notice the familiarity before I missed it. This was the trail, where I had taken the detour to get a drink. But... I turned and searched frantically, feeling sanity slipping away even farther. The signpost I had put up mere minutes ago was gone, the grass undisturbed... the branch itself, back on the tree I had ripped it from! I screamed again, inarticulately this time. It was too much for me, the pounding of my heart threatening to overwhelm my awareness and thought. I had to run, it was the only escape. I couldn't fight the urge, any more than I could fight the urge to breathe.
So I ran. I can't really tell how long or how far I ran, my mind was fleeing as much as my body was, but it must have been a long time; when I finally regained some modicum of rational thought the morning had progressed nearly on to noon. I had exhausted myself again, my muscles burning with fatigue and my lungs panting for as the cooling air as fast as they could heave, but despite it all I realized that I was laughing. I felt good. I forced myself to stop it, and to just sit quietly under the tree I had collapsed next to while my racing heart caught up with me and slowed back down to a more normal rhythm.
As I sat, slowly allowing thoughts to resurface again, I let my fingers tentatively return to my ears to further explore their new shape and texture, to reassure me that the cause of my mental breakdown had been real. They were larger than my normal ears, erect and mobile, and stuck out from the sides of my head like a pair of radar dishes. They were hairy inside and out, the inner surface's hair being finer and softer than the coarser outer surface. I could feel my own fingers touching them, confirming that they were in fact my real ears and not some elaborate prosthesis, and even more strangely I found that I could control their twitching consciously to some degree. It was a most unusual sensation, having appendages that I'd never had before, and now that I was aware of them it was impossible to ignore. I twitched my ears this way and that with every sound, flicking them as if exploring a missing tooth with one's tongue.
I didn't have somewhere to even start considering the possible explanations for this, so I decided not to try to think about that for now; better to focus solely on the at least partially-comprehensible problem of finding my way back to the elevator doors that had brought me here. If it was hard before, I realized with a sinking sensation, it was going to be nearly impossible now; there was no way I was going to be able to remember the details of the path I had taken in my wild dash. I was just going to have to continue onward, heading vaguely west for lack of a better direction to try, and hope that some sort of landmark or other interesting feature would show up. There was no time to lose; if nothing else, I was even hungrier than before. I'd have to find food soon.
Bracing myself against the tree I had come to rest against, I wearily pushed myself back up to my feet. The soreness was rapidly fading from my muscles, faster than I had feared, but I was still pretty shaky and uncertain on my feet. I had lost my shoes at some point, too, I realized abruptly as I felt the grass on my feet, and I groaned at the thought of how sore my feet were going to be after this was all over. I reached down to rub one of them in anticipation.
I stopped, frozen with one hand on my raised foot, and stared. Then I sighed. "I thought the ground felt odd," I muttered as I let go and slowly lowered the cloven hoof that had replaced my toes back to the grass. The skin above it was covered in a fine coat of short hair, of a texture similar to that on my new ears, but from the ankle up my legs seemed otherwise unchanged. I shifted my weight gingerly back and forth from foot to foot, or rather from hoof to hoof; my Achilles tendons kept wanting to tighten, raising me up to stand on my toes. I could force my heels back to the ground again, but it felt oddly uncomfortable to do so; the naturally tendency seemed to be to stand like some sort of ballerina. Sighing again, I let go of the tree and took a couple of tentative steps to check my balance. It seemed to have adapted automatically to my new gait.
I could only shrug and proceed, tip-toeing resolutely off through the woods in an easterly direction. There wasn't much more I could do, and I had burned the panic out of me already.
I continued onward for several hours, the streamers of light filtering through the foliage slowly steeping their angle through vertical and then slanting back into afternoon. I didn't bother with signposts any more, even if I could count on them to remain standing I was already lost; there was no place for me to find my way _back_ to. Instead, I developed a new ritual to mark off time as I walked; self-examination. There wasn't anything I could do to change what was happening to my body, at least nothing I could think of, but at least I could try to keep track of it. However, just like the forest, nothing seemed to change when I was looking at it; I had an animal's ears and feet, but nothing else. I was almost frustrated, in some strange way, wanting some visible sign of change to indicate whether I was going to get better or worse as time passed. "At least no news is good news," I whispered to myself. And these hooves were pretty comfortable to walk on, I reflected after due consideration; my feet were no longer sore or sweaty at all, like they had been in my shoes.
My hearing had been done a world of good too, it seemed. The forest still seemed unnaturally silent without the sounds of birds or insects in the background, but I had found that the sounds of wind and water came through to me much more clearly. What's more, I could locate with unerring precision exactly where it came from; brooks were child's play to find now, and with their frequent spacing it looked as if I was unlikely to go thirsty again any time soon. Now if only I could find some food...
(((to be con.)))
Kiki_kittygirl · Sun Oct 16, 2005 @ 05:16pm · 1 Comments |
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