Transforming into an animal was more painful than one could ever imagine.
Perhaps that prospect is why Mother prohibited Éana from her Changing, a ceremony that all prospective druids in the Court of Flowers went through after their first year of training. Though she had finally relented, let her stay and try to make sense of all of the visions, the birds at her window, and the mycelium eating away at the wooden slats in the ceiling when she was young, she never let her daughter see the other apprentices’ ceremonies. They were true elves, though. The Woed, the forest present from the beginning of the world, was their birthright. They reminded Éana always during communes that they had not had to run away from cities (and humans, they scoffed) to feel the grass beneath their feet and understand the cry of the mice as their babies were being snatched away by snakes. Their Changings were simply an extemporaneous extension of this heritage, and throughout her first year, they followed each other like ants in a line into the forest, to a secret place under the full moon where they writhed and Changed into their true forms for the first time. The initiates’ quarters filled with new faces, but Mother never thought Éana was ready.
“Why are you wasting my time?” she said during a tree ring mapping lesson once, snatching Éana’s parchment from her and crossing out the places where her daughter had incorrectly labeled wet years. “You wanted this so badly.”
“I don’t know,” Éana replied helplessly, Elven still heavy and foreign on her tongue. “I don’t know this place like you do.”
Mother scoffed. “Every elf is connected to the Woed from birth, these trees. It is ours. You need to take ownership of that.”
By the end of the second year, Éana had exhausted all of the vellum tomes in the glass-shelved library. She watched more and more of her peers file into the trees. They laughed at her accent, the length of her studies, and her friendship with the mousing cats that stalked the alleys. Sometimes, in the early mornings, she would traipse past the limits of the city and find a quiet space to hear the trees speak the way Mother claimed they could. She tried to imitate the way the elders twisted their branches, cracking them open to find blessings and forewarnings. The branches slipped from her fingers, saying nothing. One snowy winter morning during the third year, she finally managed to get the dead shoots of one birch to split, but all she could interpret was what spilled out – cloudy sap that shouldn’t have reached so far from the trunk. She yelped, dropping the branch, but her hands were already covered in the stuff. She heard a squirrel scitter away from where the branch had fallen. She heaved a sob.
The fifth anniversary of Éana’s arrival in the Woed approached, but Mother was not hinting at her changing in any sort. In fact, she was speaking to Éana even less than she had when she arrived – silver eyes sliding over her in the square. Éana had thrown herself into her studies, had sat in silence on her bed in the early hours of the morning to listen to the water whisper words in the old tongue to every creature in the forest, including Franny, a silver calico who let her scratch her behind the ears when Éana left fish in the right alley. When Ayred, who hadn’t even cracked fifty years, was taken into the woods for his Changing a month after his training began, Éana decided enough was enough.
The night of the full moon, she watched lithe forms dance into the trees. Franny, who had taken to sleeping in scraps of cloth at the end of Éana’s bed, leapt on the windowsill, rubbing her cheeks on Éana’s wrist to mark her as her own. Éana crouched to the cat’s level.
“Do you want to come with me?” she asked in her father tongue.
Franny blinked slowly, then rubbed her cheek against her friend’s.
#
The Old Library, an abandoned tree on the outskirts of the city, held scratches on the tree instead of tomes. These nitches communicated ways to ascertain wisdom from the land itself via communication in Sylvan, a dead language that consisted of the slight skittering of water of rocks, the whispering of wind between the leaves. Éana had discovered a particular ritual among these, simply titled: Migrating Goose Letting the Wind Take it Somewhere New.
“Aha!” she said, having found the pond she was looking for. On its shore was a gaggle of geese, heads curled backwards onto themselves as they slept.
Careful not to disturb them, Éana sat on the shore, her legs pressing against the exposed roots of an old maple. She let her discomfort guide her, hearing the tree creak in its age and the lives surrounding it speak even in the dead of night. She sat for minutes? Hours? Seconds? To try to hear it. Eventually, she felt it all overtake her – becoming a part of the roots, the tree, the geese. She didn’t need to crack the branches open to feel it, no. She was a part of this place, just as she was in Luminosa, just as she’d be in Whitewood Grove ten years from now.
She was Franny by her side, quiet and small and chattering as she eyed the geese. Usually, Éana would hold a hand out to stop her, but it was with the cat’s eyes that she pounced on the nearest gosling, and it was with goose wings that she took flight in a cacophony of sharp calls, and she was above the trees, urgent flapping that took her towards another safe place, a source of light in a clearing. In it, bigger creatures were dancing, laughing, praising around one of their young, and suddenly Éana was in the ancient aspens that surrounded the Changing clearing, watching as Ayred received his blessings from the elders and Mother and took his place in a sigil in the center of the clearing. Éana saw the pain described to her so many times cross his face until he was shrinking, shrinking, and the wind turned her face slightly to the side, and Mother was looking right at her.
#
“Insolent, insolent child,” Mother scoffed when she found Éana returning from the pond. “No respect for the Woed, no respect for your elders.”
“Were you going to let me rot in the initiates’ chamber forever?” Éana said. “I had to see.”
Mother slapped her, and Éana fell to the ground, her cheek hitting the soft, soft grass.
“This only proves to me that you should,” Mother said. “You were not raised here. You have my blood but nothing more.”
Éana righted herself.
“The Woed is not the only place, Mother. There are those that care for nature in the cities. It sought me out. I came here to understand why,” Éana spat. “Isn’t that enough? Isn’t the fact that I found it enough?”
Mother was ice cold. “No, child. You are tainted by your father and the other humans. Letting you stay was a mistake.”
The forest was silent for a second, on the edge of its seat as it listened. Éana crumpled, sobbing as she fell. Franny hissed at Mother. The Woed heard.
She felt pain like never before, but she felt in her bones that it was different than the emotion she saw on Ayred’s face. Rather than pain in her bones hollowing, her eyes bugging, she felt the pain of every nest destroyed by felled trees. Of babies failing to fly. Mother raved and shouted, but she flew, flew until she could sing and flap her wings no more.
Éana collapsed on the edge of the forest, and Franny curled up against her to keep her warm.
Bio:
Carolyn Brotherson is an English student from Kansas with a passion for fantastical stories in all forms. "The Changing" is their first published work. In her spare time, she sings, writes songs, and plays Dungeons & Dragons.