"Crunch, crunch."
At least the fish tasted good.
That was something.
I sat by the riverbank, hunched over my meal, tearing into it with far more enthusiasm than I ever would have as a human. Blood, scales, bones—I didn't care. Hunger had burned away any hesitation days ago.
I wasn't in a coma.
I figured that out the hard way.
Three days.
Three days of lying there, barely moving, convinced that if I just waited long enough I'd wake up in a hospital bed with a pissed-off nurse and an even more pissed-off Shaw standing over me. Instead, I got weaker. Hungrier. The kind of hunger that didn't just sit in your stomach, but clawed its way through your entire body.
If this was a coma, it was a shitty one.
Because I was pretty sure starvation didn't feel this real.
I swallowed another chunk of fish and leaned back slightly, breathing out through my nose. The worst of the hunger had faded, replaced by something quieter but still present.
Manageable.
For now.
"I don't even know how I caught you," I muttered, glancing down at what remained of the fish.
I really didn't.
One moment I had been lying there, too weak to care, and the next something in my brain just… clicked. Instinct took over. I had dragged myself into the river without really thinking about it.
Honestly, I should have drowned.
My wings were fucking heavy. Waterlogged, awkward, and completely useless. I still couldn't figure out how to use them properly, and trying to swim with them had been like dragging two soaked blankets behind me.
But somehow, I hadn't drowned.
Somehow, I had managed to swim.
And somehow, I had come back up with a fish in my mouth.
I snorted softly. "Yeah. Sure. That makes sense."
Nothing about this made sense.
I finished the last of the fish and licked my teeth clean out of habit, then immediately paused.
"…Okay, that's new."
I shook my head and pushed myself to my feet, or at least, what passed for standing now.
"Alright," I muttered. "Now we find civilization."
I started moving along the riverbank, sticking close to the water. It was the only real landmark I had, and logic said that if I followed it long enough, I'd find something. A town. A road. Hell, even a campsite would be a win.
I moved on all fours.
That was still something I wasn't thrilled about.
Somehow, I could swim now. Not well, not gracefully, but enough to survive. Walking on two legs, though? Completely fucked. The moment I tried, I lost balance and ate dirt.
So, all fours it was.
"Yeah, this is fine," I muttered under my breath. "Totally normal."
My voice was still mine. That was one of the few things that hadn't changed.
Everything else?
Yeah. Not so much.
I caught my reflection in the river as I moved and slowed slightly, studying it again. I had done this more than once over the past few weeks, and it still didn't feel real.
My eyes were wrong.
Light gold, with tiny specks of silver drifting through them like they had a life of their own. Still cat eyes, though. Vertical pupils. Sharp. Focused.
I didn't know all the differences between what they had been and what they were now, but I knew two things for sure.
I could see incredibly well at night.
And daylight was a bitch.
I had made the mistake of looking directly at the sun once.
Once.
"Yeah, not doing that again," I muttered.
My hearing was sharper too. I could pick up the river's movement in detail now, the subtle shift of water against stone, the faint buzzing of insects, the occasional distant call of a bird.
But there was nothing else.
No voices. No signs of people.
Just wilderness.
I kept moving.
On all fours, I was… big. Bigger than I had fully processed at first. Judging by how I moved compared to the environment around me, I was easily pushing ten feet in length. My wingspan had to be around fifteen feet, maybe more when fully extended.
My fur was completely black, but I had noticed something strange over the past few nights.
In the shadows, or under low light, it wasn't just black.
It shifted.
A faint, almost unnatural dark violet shimmer moved across it, like light bending wrong.
"Yeah, that's not creepy at all," I muttered.
And then there were the wings.
I glanced back slightly, catching a partial view of them as they shifted with my movement. Large. Dark. Powerful-looking.
Completely useless.
The first time I had tried to use them had been… humiliating.
I had jumped, flapped like an idiot, and immediately faceplanted.
"Yeah," I muttered, "real graceful."
At least no one had been around to see it.
That thought lingered longer than I liked.
Because eventually, someone would be.
And I had no idea how that was going to go.
I walked for what felt like hours before the terrain began to change. The river curved, and ahead of me, the ground rose sharply into a cliff.
I slowed as I approached it, staring up at the edge.
"Well," I said quietly, "that's convenient."
If I wanted to keep following the river, I could go around.
If I wanted to test something I had been avoiding…
I looked up again.
"…or I could stop being a coward."
The words sat there for a moment.
Then I moved.
Climbing had become surprisingly easy. My claws dug into rock and dirt with ease, my body adapting to the motion like it had been doing it my entire life. Within minutes, I was at the top.
The drop on the other side was… significant.
I stepped closer to the edge and looked down.
"Okay," I muttered, "I can do this."
My wings shifted slightly behind me, reacting to my tension.
"It's only… what, five hundred feet?" I continued. "That might kill me. Probably. No big deal."
I exhaled slowly.
"It's just like learning to fly my Thunderbird," I said, trying to convince myself. "There will be bumps. Hopefully I won't crash."
I paused.
"…Except this time I can't eject."
That thought did not help.
I had been in this body for three weeks now. Three weeks of trial and error. I had figured out how to walk, run, climb. Hell, I could scale trees and even cliff faces without too much trouble.
But flying?
Nothing.
Until now.
I stared out over the open air.
Then I took a step back.
"Fuck it."
I ran.
The ground disappeared beneath me as I launched off the cliff, wings snapping open on instinct.
For one horrible second, I dropped.
Then something caught.
Air.
My wings adjusted without me fully understanding how, angling, shifting, catching the wind.
And suddenly—
I wasn't falling.
I was flying.
"Holy shit!" I yelled, my voice ripping out of me as I surged forward.
The ground rushed beneath me, distant and unreal. The river twisted like a silver ribbon through the forest below. The mountains stretched endlessly in every direction.
I could feel the wind against my face, rushing past me, lifting me.
It was incredible.
I laughed, sharp and wild. "This is insane!"
I tilted slightly, and my body responded. Not perfectly, not smoothly, but enough. I climbed higher, pushing into the open air, the clouds just within reach.
For the first time since waking up here, something felt right.
Then reality caught up.
"Okay…" I said slowly. "Now how the fuck do I land?"
That was a problem.
The ground was coming up faster than I liked.
I angled my wings, trying to slow myself, but the motion was clumsy, uneven.
"Easy, easy,"
I hit the ground hard.
Pain exploded through my body as I plowed forward, carving a trench through dirt and loose stone before finally coming to a stop.
For a moment, I just lay there.
Then I groaned and pushed myself up, shaking dirt from my fur.
"…Not graceful," I muttered.
I looked back at the trench I had just made. About three meters long, maybe more.
"…But progress."
I glanced up at the sky, wings twitching slightly behind me.
A slow grin spread across my face.
"Yeah," I said quietly. "I can work with that."