Morphed

The young straggler moped cautiously across the rickety wooden bridge towards what looked like a tavern surrounded by ominous mist. Each step felt like an eternity for what was but a simple movement for most, was starkly difficult for the traveller. Iris had wandered many plains across countless months to reach this place but was still yet to know the meaning behind her journey. Deep within her, she knew that this experience could only hold the answers that she had sought after within her infra consciousness for all these years.

Pushing a strand of loose rusty brown coloured hair behind her ear, she drew ever closer to the candlelit form of the shelter ahead. Her heart beating rapidly in her chest she took multiple deep breaths to remind herself of the deep guttural calling that entranced her into taking this path. Wearily climbing up the lichen covered wooden stairs and pulling open the door to the tavern, she saw in front of her a candlelit room, covered wall to wall with dripping moss which gave the space a cave-like quality. She noticed a pillar in the centre of the room, atop which a golden cage-like apparatus stood atop. It seemed an odd addition to the room, almost too shiny for the little amount of light provided by the various candles scattered about and an odd shape, almost like a flower curled inwards before blooming.

Retrieving a small and shiny yet ancient rod like object from her pocket and wincing as her limbs once again became fatigued by the perils of her pilgrimage, she gently bent to her knees to scan the floor. She felt the familiar sensation of rising energy emerge from her neck down into her shoulders and through her tailbone, coinciding with the strange object that had started her mission to this place. She somehow felt the connection of the Atrada to the tavern and felt the pull of the object as it shifted her inner force through the floorboards and into the depths of the ground, feeling the tendrils of the cage’s root bindings merging with her thoughts. She knew then what she had been brought here to do.

Raising the Altrada to the centre of her chest and closing her eyes, she began to sink into the weight of the cage’s luring vicinity, and felt her shoulders begin to be pulled backward as though attracted to a magnet far away. Iris lifted the Altrada from her chest and rose to her feet, heaving her arm up and pulling the rod along the bars of the cage. She suddenly felt weightless, limitless, for the first time in months since she had found the Altrada on what she thought was another innocent walk through the forest after her daily lessons. All the teachings she had heard about shape shifting had lead to this. She began to gape at the incredulity that it was her who had been chosen by the ancient masters and found her mind becoming curious as to what form she should take. It had been a long and arduous journey to find this place yet she knew that she had been here all along. Shedding layer after layer of the only physical shape that she had known thus far, Iris welcomed existential twists and turns that she had come to dread on the lead up to this moment. Initiated into the utter bliss of indulging in the intricacies of morphing into her new body, she was unaware of the time that passed.

Iris awoke to the morning sun beaming through the window of the tavern. Dew drops dripping from the mossy walls sparked life into her feathers as she spread her speckled white and rusty brown wings. She had always felt at home with barn owls, she thought bemusedly, foggily remembering times of her past form as a child eagerly looking into the eyes of the creatures when they would perch on trees outside her window at night. She emerged out of the cage, which had now unfurle