Chapter Text
Kithri looks away, at the end.
She’s seen a lot of death- most of it by her own hand- and she’s intimately familiar with the way daemons crumble away into nothingness. Often enough they fade out from under Cade’s paws, or between his teeth; everyone underestimates the tenacity of a raccoon in a fight. When things go well, though, neither she nor Cade are ever seen. She watches until her mark’s daemon disappears to be sure that her knives or her poison or her trap has done its job, and then they slip away again, into the dark.
She means to watch him until the last. In the end, though, she can’t bear the idea of seeing him begin to crumble to dust. At the very last moment she turns her gaze away, and so the last thing her dimming eyes see is the dull gray sky.
When she opens her eyes again, the sky above is blue.
The first thing she does, pure instinct faster than thought, is reach for Cade. Her fingers touch feathers instead of fur, which is odd; he’d had a chickadee form he liked when she was a child, but that was the better part of a century ago.
“I’m here,” he says, and an unfamiliar beak pecks lightly at her fingertips. Relief washes through her at the sound of his voice, even though she has no idea what’s going on. “You might want to sit up,” he continues. “People are starting to stare, and sooner or later some distracted wagon driver is going to run us over.”
She sits up, and in the act of it everything that is very, very wrong becomes apparent.
She has no idea where they are, to start with the most easily comprehensible change. She’s apparently been lying in a wide street bordered by imposing stone buildings that is definitely not anywhere in Mileth, or even anywhere she recognizes, though it’s obviously some kind of city. Cade, though her heart would know him anywhere, is equally unrecognizable to her eyes, in the form of a large, vividly-colored bird with a long tail and a curved red beak. And she-
Well.
Her body is not her body anymore. She takes stock, and decides that the people who are starting to stare- and she’s getting more than a few curious glances, they really need to get out of the street- probably assume they’re looking at a male human.
“Where do you think the clothes came from?” she murmurs to Cade. They’re decent enough, and made to fit a human-sized body, not garments she’s ever owned. Not the clothes she...died in. Thought she’d died in. Possibly didn’t die in, after all, though what the hell happened to her instead is still up for debate.
“That’s what you’re curious about? The clothes?” says Cade, cocking his head at her. He seems to still be male, which is interesting.
“The rest is all a bit much,” she tells him. “Give me a minute.”
Making sure they don’t get run over is probably a good priority. She pulls herself to her feet, Cade fluttering warily around her, and makes for an alley she can see that will at least get them out of the public eye. It goes well enough for the first few steps, but as soon as she actually thinks about how her center of gravity is off and her perspective is wrong, limbs too long, eyes too far from the ground, she trips over her own feet and barely manages to catch herself against the wall of one of the buildings. Cade fluttering around her ankles isn’t much help. Maybe he’s as unaccustomed to his new body as she is, or maybe he’s just frightened enough to want to stick close. She thinks of his dark, intelligent, terrified eyes, of how she couldn’t bear to watch at the last, and she bends down- balance be damned- and gathers him in her arms to hug him close.
He’s harder to hug in this form. After a minute he scrambles up to perch on her shoulder, talons pricking through the thin shirt this body is wearing.
“Do you remember anything? Before we woke up?” she asks him. He ruffles his feathers in what might be a bird-shrug; it occurs to her that she’ll have to learn his new body as well as her own.
“I think...someone was there?” he offers, sounding unsure.
“Someone spoke to us, I think,” she agrees. There’s a wry, echoing voice somewhere deep in her memory, but when she strains to remember the words they slip away from her like a fading dream. She sighs, and Cade preens her hair gently with his beak.
“Hey, what’s my hair like?” she asks him, suddenly arrested by the idea that she has no idea what she currently looks like.
“Dark and kind of floppy.” He tugs a strand down over her forehead, just barely long enough that she can see it. Then he lets it go to curl around sideways and peer directly into her face, close enough that she goes a little cross-eyed and laughs at him. “Brown eyes,” he informs her, and flaps back up to balance on her shoulder again.
“I want a mirror,” she mutters. She has the uneasy sense that there’s more to this transformation than just her mind dropped into an alien body. Something deep inside of her feels different, different in a horribly unsettling way that she can’t quite put her finger on. Changing a body is one thing- she knows that there are spells for that, even if they’ve never been of personal interest to her- but she thinks she might be a different person now in more ways than just the physical, and she can’t quite wrap her mind around what that means.
Hell, maybe it’s not even her mind anymore.
She reaches up and touches a finger to Cade’s rainbow feathers. There’s the proof, after all, that something about her soul has been altered. He’s no assassin’s daemon, not in this form.
“Put mirror on the list,” he says, leaning into her touch a little. “While you’re at it, we could also use some money. And probably new identities, at least until we figure out what’s going on.”
She pats down the pockets of the clothes she’s dressed in and comes up with a grand total of one coin. It’s not any kind of legal tender she’s aware of, though perhaps it will prove to be common currency in this unfamiliar city. Either way, it doesn’t look like it’s worth much- it’s made of worn tin, with the figure of a mask crudely stamped on either side. She spins idly it in her fingers while she thinks. She doesn’t dare try pickpocketing, not until she has some time to practice moving this gangling new body around. She does seem to be a boy with a male daemon, though, and if this city is anything like the civilization she knows, there will be people who think of that as...exotic. It ought to be enough to get a meal out of, maybe even a place to stay the night, if she can find the right part of town. And as for a name...
She considers the street sign on the alley for a moment, then indicates it to Cade with a nod.
“I’ll take that for a temporary name,” she says. “What about you?”
He flaps over to perch on the sign- just at the edge of their range- and pecks thoughtfully at the cluster of thorny vines that have twined themselves all the way up the pole.
“This’ll do for now,” he says.
When they introduce themselves later that evening, it’s as Alokas Lane and his daemon, Briar. Somehow, they never get around to changing it.