She has been living a lie for almost seventeen years. No wonder her body didn’t… doesn’t make sense to her.

The thoughts are distressing, so she decides to think about food instead. Chicken, roasted with sweet onions, garlic, and rosemary; baked potatoes sprinkled with salt, herbs, and cheese; savory vegetable stew. Sweet cakes dripping with honey and custard tarts hot from the oven. Apple cider, delicious whether chilled or warm. Her stomach growls its longings, and her mouth waters.

All she has are slightly squashed berries, some stale bread, and tepid water. No one would call that a feast. She deflates and hugs herself in the hollow, deciding that her need for sleep is far greater than her need for food. Just as she is on the cusp of unconsciousness, the pain hits again.

She grits her teeth, determined to be braver tonight. Biting down on an orange scarf helps to drown her screams. The pain is doing its best to splinter her like wood under an axe. The moment of agony stretches halfway to forever, and just when she thinks the pain is gone, it returns.

Croi doesn’t know how long the pain continues—minutes may have been screamed into hours—but when it ends, she is draped over the roots of an obliging tree. Sitting up hurts, breathing hurts. Existing hurts.

The human city has old human women who linger in the streets or in the doorways of their homes, their joints swollen by age. Croi is not old, but her bones have already become unfriendly. She leans against the tree for a while, waiting for the pain to ease. It doesn’t. A twig digging into the small of her back becomes unendurable, so she stands up and realizes that she will no longer fit into the tree hollow. She has grown again. Hunger quakes her insides, so she eats her berries and bread and curls up by the roots of the tree. The forest is singing itself night melodies, and she lets them lull her to sleep.

The dream finds Croi fleeing from a murder of trees. They are determined to spill her blood, and she… She has four feet? Croi stops running abruptly when she realizes that in addition to four feet, she also has a tail and a large bulky body. She is currently a centaur.

“Are you the descendant of the Forever King?” The question is as familiar as the voice speaking it.

Croi turns around with some difficulty to see the blurry form of her nocturnal visitor, Irial. “Why are you in my dream again?”

“Again?” He walks closer to her, and his incredibly beautiful face appears before her. “It’s you? Weren’t you a brownie last time? You… remember me?”

“It turns out that you are very difficult to forget,” Croi tells him, feeling her heart beat faster. It’s not him that fascinates her. To be honest, anyone who has a face like his would make her heart race. Her tail moves in accordance with her thoughts. Croi freezes at the feeling of a tail. She tries to move it again, but it refuses to obey her mental commands.