Tobias Hork-Bajir

Up and up I grew. And as I grew, my wings grew with me. It's funny the way morphing works. It's never totally logical. It's never exactly the same twice, either.

And it is always, always gross. Even as I was morphing, I was watching the others undergo changes. It was a scene out of some lunatic's darkest nightmare. Bodies melted. Weird appendages grew suddenly, here and there. Teeth appeared before there was a mouth to hold them. Fur grew like one of those time-lapse videos of mold, just shooting out of the skin. Big humans tottered unsteadily on tiny doglike legs.

If you just happened to wander in and saw the spectacle of four kids and a bird all melting and mutating and squirming as two giant aliens watched, you'd definitely think you were insane. You'd want to see a psychiatrist. After you stopped screaming.

I could feel the changes happening in my own body. Not that they were painful. They weren't. But I could still feel things going on. And I could hear them.

My insides were reorganizing totally. Hork-Bajir have at least two hearts, maybe more. So entire new hearts were forming inside of me. And from the hearts, new arteries and veins had to sprout and spread throughout my body.

I had to go from having a digestive system designed to handle big chunks of raw mouse to a digestive system built for tree bark.

I could hear a gurgling sound as internal organs shifted and stretched and were pushed aside to make room for totally new organs. I could hear a stretching, grinding sound as big, thick, solid bones replaced my hollow bird bones.

And on the outside I saw my wings grow till they were huge. Then, with amazing speed, the feathers melted into hard, leathery skin. There was a snap as the joints in my wings changed direction to bend the way a Hork-Bajir arm bends.

Then out came the blades.

SHWOOP! Blades at my wrists.

SHWOOP! Blades at my elbows.

SHWOOP! The forward-swept horn blades on my snake head.

<Hey, Tobias,> Marco said. <You kept the same feet.>

It was a joke. But it was true, too. There wasn't much difference between my hawk talons and the feet of the Hork-Bajir. Except that they were maybe a hundred times bigger.

Somehow that made me feel good. I liked the look of those big, ripping talons. I liked thinking about what they would do to a Taxxon.