My best friend and I are students of magic. We transformed together into small mammals and went to study under a mentor who lives up a pine tree--a pine marten or a giant squirrel? Using his nest as a base camp, we struggled with quadruped form... but eventually learned to love this arboreal life.

So recently our mentor's allowed us to graduate to a new, more difficult shape: big multicolored birds. Further from human form, but mobile, vocal, and smart--ideal shamanic vehicles.

But my friend's mad at me. He has reason, too. Against all the rules, I seduced him in mammal form: I let myself go into heat, though I'd been trained how to suppress it. In estrus I smelled irresistable to him--and drunk on pheromones, he mounted me.

Now I'm pregnant--and he's furious. Not only did I change our friendship unilaterally, but transforming with a fetus or fertile egg is considered a medical risk: the baby may end up developmentally confused--crippled or a monster. To do this is a major crime among our people--and to lure a friend in like this... well, he feels betrayed. And he's right to. I used him. I like him, and mating with him felt wonderful, but I did use him. I wanted to get pregnant.

I did it for a reason. I felt an intuitive certainty that our child, the child of two gifted shamans, could take prenatal transformations in stride, take for granted what it takes most of us years to learn. And I sensed she was in a hurry to be born.

So now, in bird form, he keeps dive-bombing me--trying to shock me into aborting my egg before it grows into a monster-child.

But his fears are wrong. I've dreamed the future already, and know I'll have a healthy daughter named Krytha, who'll be a shamanic child prodigy--partly from her parentage, but also from being various species right from conception. Krytha is a transformation of my day-name Chris--a way of saying she's both a part of me AND her own person. I'm proud of her already ...and she's not even hatched yet!

So I duck and weave, a pregnant bird, and try to convince myself his falcon-shrieks and slashes are just early birth-pangs, part of the cost I knew I'd have to pay. But worth it. Worth it. To see Krytha, our lovely, shapeshifting daughter...

If I live to lay her egg.

NOTES NEXT MORNING

Krytha =

1. I just read Bones of the Past by Holly Lisle. One character's a child prodigy named Kyrtha, whose parents are both magicians. In my dream it was spelled Krytha not Kyrtha; that echo of Chris, my first name, suggests she was part of me growing.
2. My sister Miriel has dreamed recurrently of a protective, ethereal girl named Krytha; so the name suggests hope that this Krytha too will use her magic well.

The other half doesn't.

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