B34C22 - Wings as Human

<Yes, it can,> I said. <I can do it. Now please, shut up. I need to focus.>

I began to demorph. My talons became pudgy and grew into toes. My feathers melted together like wax under a blowtorch.

My face flattened, my beak softened into lips. My sensitive human tongue could feel the five insects inside my mouth.

Don't open your mouth, I reminded myself. But that was only my secondary worry. That part was easy.

The hard part was keeping my wings.

I fell. Down and down through the night. Down and down toward the bright Yeerk pool below. Down toward the still-oblivious sentries who could burn me out of the air.

I fell, more and more human. But my wings, my osprey wings, I kept.

Morphing is never logical or rational. Things don't happen in a neat, predictable sequence. No one can ever be sure how it will happen. But I could, with some part of my mind I couldn't even feel, some part of my brain with which I could not even communicate, shape the way the morphing happened.

Ax says I have a talent. A gift. It wasn't my doing, and I don't know where it came from or why I have it. But, as I fell and demorphed and fell, my human body, my short, pudgy human body had wings that grew and grew and spread wider than osprey wings can spread.

I couldn't flap them or even turn the edges or control a single feather, but I could hold them stiff, and as I fell, I fell . . . slowly.

<You're doing it!> Aldrea cried. <Impossible!>