You might think that because I could so easily step into our home, it was just as easy to access. You would be wrong. We had first spotted the crack in the wall between two buildings almost 5 years ago. Me and Katie were on the way back from a successful mission of food, ahh… acquisition, arms full and pockets stuffed with the fruits of our bour.

  If not for Katies keen eyes, we might not have spotted it, a small gap in between two rge buildings, probably some houses. The street was dark, more buildings covering the celling, and not many people walked it, so it was likely no one had ever seen the gap before. Curious, we made sure we were alone, and squeezed our way through. Children that we were at the time, it was easy to push through, finding a cramped alleyway, leading a few meters onward before taking a sharp left.

  Now, I was stepping through that same corridor. In the time since that fateful day, we had both grown, making it harder and harder to enter through the gap. But now that I had shrunk so much, it had been almost as easy to enter as it had been so many years ago. Smiling as I remembered that first discovery, I cautiously moved along the alley, turning the corner and spotting the other small gap between the walls.

  Stepping through, we had found one of the most beautiful pces we had ever seen. Growing up as we had, among cramped streets, cobbled stones and thatch being far more common than grass and trees, we had seldom seen greenery. Sure, we knew that there was a forest on the other side of the walls, but we had never been able to leave and actually set our eyes on it.

  In that moment however, it felt like we had stepped into another world. Coating the smooth stone floor was a yer of soft, lush moss, and grass, spotted with small flowers. Lining the walls were vines and leaves, spanning almost the whole length of the room. I say room, it was almost like the opposite, the gap between buildings, the pce people had just built around, and seemingly, in all the years the space had been left alone, seeds of all kinds had made their way in, valiantly deciding to ignore an environment build entirely to keep them out, and made their own home.

  The whole pce was almost 50 meters along in any direction, with a series of wooden beams serving as the celling, probably put there by a construction worker who didn’t want to deal with the gap in the otherwise fully developed city. To this day we still had no idea how it had been overlooked.

  We were dumbstruck. It felt like something we weren’t supposed to see, a pce untouched by the people and buildings around it. There was a fairly sized gap in the celling, letting dappled light into the scene, giving the pce a calm and tranquil presence. There was even something that looked like a tree, growing out of one of the corners, bathing in the light from above.

  It wasn’t even a question after that. We moved in. Compared to where we were staying at the time, wherever no one would find us until morning, it was like we had won the lottery.

  I stepped into that same space now, feeling a strange sense of calm come over me at the familiar sights of the pnts and the tree. Not much had changed since we moved in. There were a pile of bnkets we used when the nights got cold or stormy, bunched up beneath the tree. Small knickknacks y around, treasures from Katie and I’s various adventures together.

  Oddly, she wasn’t there. Usually on a day like today, where we had no need to go out and get food or money, she was holed up under one of the rge vines, reading a book or listening to the radio. It was a small box, but somehow, probably by some kind of magic, it could py someone’s voice from hundreds of metres away. They were incredibly rare, it was a miracle we had managed to find one, just lying around like it was, waiting to be taken.

  But returning to the problem at hand, Katie was nowhere to be found. I checked around the whole room, even in the little gap under one of the walls where we sometimes hid from lightning when we were younger and now stored our more valuable possessions.

  Nothing.

  Getting a bit worried, I guessed that she might have gone out looking for me after she woke up and found me gone. Although I had been out for an entire night before, in fact so had she, but we usually let each other know in advance. Worried as such, I began to turn back towards the entrance when a voice from behind me spoke.

  “Stop right there!”

  I tensed as I realised, I recognised the voice. It was Katie’s, low and dangerous, as it always was whenever she was serious, or expecting a fight.

  Raising my hands, I slowly turned around and saw her, knife out and pointed at me. Jumping back a bit, I let out a sharp breath.

  “Goddess above! Kaite Put that away!”

  The anger on her face shifted into confusion and suspicion at my words. Not dropping her knife she demanded, “Who are you? How did you get into this pce?” her voice stayed steady, but I could see her deep brown eyes darting around, trying to figure out where I could have snuck in from.

  “It’s me! Its Onyx!” I pleaded. If she didn’t believe me, I wouldn’t know what to do, Katie was everything to me, the cornerstone of my mind, as the tower was the anchor for the city, she was the anchor for myself.

  Her face betraying her confusion, she tentatively lowered her bde slightly and asked, bewildered “What?”

  I nodded quickly and emphatically, hoping that she was seemingly willing to consider it, I continued, “Yeah… something happened when I was at the tower st night, I touched a weird staff thing and I ending up like this”, I gestured helplessly at the rest of my body, trying to get her to understand and believe what had happened.

  “What… how?”, she muttered, staring at me before her gaze hardened and she pulled her bde up again “How can I know it’s you? For all I know you’re some random girl that wandered in off the street.”

  Silently, I felt something stir within me at being referred to as a “girl” I pushed that aside for a moment, although I felt my cheeks warming, and began again.

  “I can prove it! Remember the first time we met, and I cimed I could steal 50 gold from a noble, so we both tried and ended I up getting caught?”. It was one of the first things that cemented our friendship, after I had gotten caught, Katie had devised a hairbrained scheme to get me free, getting the guards attention by setting a barrel on fire and sneaking me out when they went to go put it out.

  Her eyes widened slightly as she obviously repyed that moment. She could never express to me why she had decided to help, especially by doing something I came to view as way out of character for her. The best response I had gotten out of her was that “something told her it was worth it”.

  I had stopped to reminisce for a moment, before I remembered the stakes I was currently engaged in, looking up to see Katie looking at me with hopeful eyes.

  “Onyx?” was all she had to say.

  I gave her a small nod, and her shoulders dropped, the knife falling to the ground as she ran forwards and wrapped her arms around me.

  “Oh, thank goddess you’re alright!” her muffled voice came, and I noticed where previously her head would have been below mine, I had to almost look up to see her eyes. “Thank Tanvil! We were so worried, when you didn’t come home st night I wasn’t too worried, but when you still weren’t here this morning, I got so worried and thought someone might have finally gotten to you-” she rambled.

  Breathing a sigh of relief that she believed me, I quickly pulled apart a bit to talk.

  “Yeah, I’m okay, just a bit confused and worried”.

  She nodded, and then sounding a bit uncertain she responded, “Do you know why you’ve, umm, changed?”

  Fiddling with my longer hair a bit, I responded by shaking my head, “Not… really? I touched this random sceptre at the top of the big tower in the middle of the city and fainted, next thing I knew I was waking up like this!”

  “Why were you even at the top of the tower in the first pce?” She questioned, “you didn’t even tell me where you were going!”

  Wincing, I responded ruefully, “Uhhh, yeah, about that, I got a tip from one of the guys we recently did some work for, maybe 4 or 5 jobs ago? Anyway, he showed me a way into the spire, and since the st few months have been hard, I felt like I needed something to take my mind off things.”

  Shaking her head in exasperation I could just barely see a small smile forming on Katies lips. “Well, the important thing is that you’re okay, it’s not weird being in a girl’s body? I suppose you’re still a boy on the inside, eh?”

  The smile quickly disappeared from my face as I responded quietly, “Yeah, I suppose…”. Something about that destroyed any exhiration from Katie’s acceptance in an instant. I was still stuck being a stupid guy on the inside and even this seemingly magical change couldn’t fix that. I guess I was going to have to find a way to turn back.

  Katie mirrored my thoughts a moment ter by asking, “Is there any way for you to turn back? You know, get your real body back”. Again I couldn’t help but feel some deep sadness at hearing that, reminding me that this wasn’t really me, it was just a fake thing that I would have to get rid of at some point. That’s what I should do. That’s what the right thing to do was.

  But then why did it feel so good???

  At that moment I felt comfortable in my body than I had in years. I realised looking back that ever since puberty there had been an ever-present cloud of something hanging over me. When hair started growing all over me, my voice started to get deeper and other things just felt wrong.

  I shuddered at the memory of sleepless nights filled with crying and quiet sobbing. I had assumed that what everyone else had said was true, that someday I would grow to enjoy everything that had happened, that I would grow into a man. But that revetion had never happened, instead I had learned to just not think about my body too much, just try to ignore it and the feelings of dread that it induced in me.

  As my mood continued to drop and Katie rambled on about how we might be able to turn me back, I felt something tingle in my palms, a wave of chills fell over my body, but oddly enough I didn’t feel cold, just kind of weird. I came out of my revery to see Katie staring in confusion at my right hand, wound up with a strand of hair, that I could now see was frozen.

  Exciming, I tried to pull my hand away, but found it was too tied up in the now very solid portion of hair, and ended up accidentally ripping part of the bunch of hair out. I let out a cry of pain and reached up with my other hand to massage the point it had come out.

  “What on earth just happened?!” I pleaded with Katie, who looked just as bewildered as I felt.

  It had felt like the opposite of pins and needles, spreading from my forearm to my hand clutching the strands, a sort of energy seemed to exude from the spot on my hand now, slowly fading as whatever had just happened cooled off.

  She her eyes flicked from my worried face and to the frozen strands of hair clutched in my hand, then back to my face again. “Looks like you didn’t just have your body change…” she muttered

  “Wha…?” I let out, confused. It was almost like me touching my hair had frozen it? But that would be impossible, unless… “Was that…”, I whispered before pausing and looking at Katie.

  “Did I just…?”

  Her mouth opened and closed for a moment before slowly saying, “I think it was. But how? Magic’s been gone for years, why would you suddenly- unless the sceptre did something to you that…”, she trailed off, clearly in thought.

  She got like this sometimes, a problem would present itself and she couldn’t help but become obsessed with it, not being able to think of anything else until it was solved. I was simir in some ways, except that my solutions invariably resulted in someone getting hurt, something being set on fire, or both.

  While she pondered, I decided I needed to sit down for a moment. Moving over to the tree in the corner, I sat down and examined the frozen hair still clutched in my hand. The ice that covered it had these small runes engraved in it, probably in a nguage that I didn’t understand, but reinforced the idea that what had happened was indeed magic.

  As I sat and rexed for the first time since entering the grove, I noticed something else. Like usual, I had in the back of my mind the location of the tower, but unlike before, something about it felt more real. Frowning, I closed my eyes and focused. It was hard to clear my head, like it usually was, but I found that sitting there, was a small tug, pulling me in the direction of the tower. It was almost like I could feel where the tower was, but why? Maybe I was actually feeling the sceptre? Since that was what seemed to have caused all of this to start that seemed more likely.

  I tried mentally pulling back on the hook, like it was a tug of war, and found my hands tingling again. Opening my eyes I found the grass around my hands had started to frost over, just like my hair had before.

  Something about what had happened st night when I touched the sceptre had… what? Given me the power to freeze things? Why?

  While I was sat there confused, I could feel the precision of the tug fading, not that I couldn’t feel it, I just couldn’t pinpoint a direction. Weird.

  As I shook my hands to warm them a bit from resting on ice for a bit, I looked up to see Katie walking over to join me.

  As she sat down, I noticed her sitting much closer than she usually did, out hips almost touching, leaning into me and pcing her head on my shoulder in a way that she definitely hadn’t don’t before.

  I froze upon her head hitting my shoulder and started to panic slightly. I remember we used to sit really close when we were young, before puberty had made it kind of weird and we had started sleeping on different sides of the tree. But now, that all seemed to have vanished. Why had she suddenly decided to sit so close to me? Maybe it was something to do with how I looked right now? Why did that send flutters of something through me???

  Realising she had been talking while I had been stuck in my head, I asked her to repeat herself.

  Rolling her eyes and pointing to the patches of frost, she asked, “Is that just going to happen all the time now?”.

  Shaking my head slightly and letting out a breath I didn’t realise I was holding, I expined, “I think it only happens when I focus on it, like, just then, I was trying to make it happen again”.

  “Huh, I wonder why it happened to your hair though. What were you thinking about when that happened?”

  Shifting uncomfortably, I spoke hesitantly, not really wanting to talk about my feelings on possibly turning back, “Umm, I was just feeling a bit overwhelmed from everything happening I guess”.

  She looked at me with narrowed eyes for a moment, clearly not buying that that was the whole story, but decided not to press it, instead saying, “Maybe it’s linked to your emotions? Like if you feel something strongly then it’s triggered?”.

  I shrugged, “Maybe. We don’t even know what ‘it’ is yet”.

  “Fair”, she conceded, but then asked “Is there anything else weird you’ve noticed since st night? Other than the whole freezing things bit”.

  Thinking for a moment, I told her about the weird thing with maybe being able to feel where the sceptre was and got a bemused look back. Neither of us had ever heard of magic giving you a vague idea of where a random object was.

  Sighing, I shuffled a bit away from her and id down in the grass, closing my eyes and forcing my brain to quiet for a moment.

  I felt like everything was happening all at once. I had been given a starkly different body to what I was used to, one that gave me weird feelings that I really, really, didn’t want to think about right now, and made Katie treat me very differently. I had proceeded to run amok through the streets, had to convince Katie of my identity and then found that I had somehow developed a sort of magic that let me freeze things. It was all getting a bit much.

  And it wasn’t even midday.

  “Hey Katie?” I asked quietly, “I think I’m gonna have a nap, I need to have a break from everything right now.”

  “That sounds good Onyx, I’ll go grab something for us to eat for dinner, sleep well”.

  I could hear the smile in her voice as I heard her get up, and make towards the exit.

  Rolling over, I once again marvelled how easy it was to rex in my current body, how comfortable it made me, and fell asleep.

  PayishVibes