Owlsomnia (Monthly tale - 52)

(Woman into owl)

(AI generated portrait)

I am a dork.

I can’t sleep.

My nights have been tormented by odious nightmares for more than half the months in a year, autumn is now near. Falling foliage marks the death of the seasons and it will mark the bane of myself, but once winter relinquishes her dominion to spring and the tenuous cycle of renewal begins anew I will not be restored. There will be no phoenix redemption for my sealed fate, I am cursed and the curse shall become my life.

That certain knowledge, the constant torturous clarity at the end of my sorry sad tale, torments my dreams into nightmares and sleepless days. A haunted, a bane carried in dark marks under my blue eyes, as a heavy weight at the core of my beating heart.

For months I resisted, living with it, in the hopeful delusion that I would overcome it, be the hero of the story that gets a happy ending despite the odds, but the gradual growing tickle of my plague forced me to outgrow that childish delusion. My flesh will not contain the urge for much longer, the illusion of my standing as a woman exists only on borrowed time.

It will soon be in the past tense.

I can’t sleep.

I can’t sleep and I'm going to explode, blow like a collapsing dam and ruin will be all  that’s left after the disaster.

I am scared of what I will surely become…

As I said, I am a dork, a nerdy girl, a young woman you may know.

Too pale, too thin, too tall, too hairy. With long curly brown hair, long limbs and long fingers and a long face. My chin is… or was, wide, my nose is too big and curved even before the possibility of my avian conclusion materialised.

I’m clumsy, my laugh is annoying.

Of course, I always wear big glasses.

I’m not beautiful, I know that.

Ugly.

Just a nerd, a loser that would have never been interesting to anybody cool.

At least I have a good pair of tits.

Or did have when I was a mammal.

I only have one friend, my best friend, a girl just as dorky as I am, but chubbier and dark skinned in contrast to my pale skin. We are pals, best mates, bound together by our social ostracism and by a life of shared interests.

One of those interests was reading texts from ancient times.

Long lunchtimes and afternoons at the library, reading about lost knowledge, fantasising about it to a fetishistic degree in the foolish hope that it would be the way to escape from the cynicism of our misery and break free of our shells.

We learnt so many whispers that we should never have known. Of goddesses and demons, of horrors and beauty, even of the Mother of Muses herself.

It was the path, the gate and the key.

Until that uneventful day on which we stumbled upon our own damnation.

We found it, oh, twisted luck, we found it.

Some old crumbling papyrus, hiding amongst the dusty pages of a heavy tome of a mundane man’s history. A promise and a warning in the form of a forgotten text with the crest of an owl above the words. I can still remember it vividly the visceral excitement, almost sexual, when shoulder to shoulder with my best friend we found that cursed papyrus.

Our choppy translation left no room for doubt, it was a ritual, a ritual meant for the highest of priestesses to invoke the grace of Pallas herself. The warning was as clear as the promise, the risk, the cost…

Everything you may want in exchange for everything you may be.

If we had been less naive we would have realised then and there that it was a cruel trap set precisely for people like us. We would have seen ourselves as the protagonist of a cautionary tale to be rightfully punished for daring to trespass into realms where they didn’t belong.

But the helpless pair of dorks we were didn’t know any better.

We did the ritual that same week as we decrypted the text if I recall correctly.

Willing following every stop we go to the forest near to town, strip off all our clothes, kneel down and hold each other's arms. We did the pleading and the pledge, we cried her name and she answered.

She answered with the whispering of the wind. Her voice shook the branches of the trees.

My friend asked for success, I asked for love.

What remained of the papyrus crumbled away into dry leaves.

That night, in the depths of the woods, we had sex.

There’s no need to elaborate any further, but after that night in the woods the burden of the sealed ritual cooled our friendship. We moved miles apart from each other despite still living in the same town.

Our bond froze into unbreakable ice.

Life moved on, years passed, not many, but enough for me to rest the memory of that night in a bed of comfortable denial.

Magic doesn’t exist, I told myself I will keep living the lie I made my life into.

The grim end was always present at the back of my mind, in the shadows of my dreams, yet, at the very least, as pitiful as it may be, the promise wasn’t broken, the shell of the eggs were cracked.

I flourished and grew out of my former self, gained confidence in myself even if I was and will always be an annoying dork. I made friends, finished college… it was then that my wish was granted…

I met my love, my partner, my boyfriend.

He was all I had dreamed of while naked on my knees surrounded by the darkness of the forest. We stumbled into each other at the library, where else could it have happened? Our connection was instant, but being an awkward and shy pair our relationship took some months to build and had some slopes to climb.

But it didn’t stop us.

We got to know each other, had wonderful dates, eventually holding hands, kissing…

Sex entered my life for a second time.

Joy clouded my mind. I couldn’t have been more happy, so happy in fact that I tricked myself into believing that it would last forever, as it may have done if it wasn't shackled by a ritual.

I wonder to this day if it was really the magic that brought him into my life… was it real or was it part of the trap? The necessary step to trigger that damning of the flesh?

I wonder and will never know how this story unfolded from his perspective…

What did he think?

What did he see?

What traumas had I irredeemably carved into his psyche?

My poor dear, a collateral victim of my selfishness, it was never meant to be…

We moved in to live together.

During thoseso blissful years I always kept an eye on my friend from a polite distance, she was doing great, just as great as I was.

I was happy for her.

I was glad for her until she came back into my seemingly perfect life like a howling ghost bringing an omen.

With a phone call.

Several actually.

When I saw her on the screen of my buzzing phone it awakened a primal fear in my brain. I ignored it, avoided the inevitable confrontation for as long as I could, that just seems to be my cowardly nature. The phone buzzed without stopping for days, I could have just blocked the number, but I didn’t dare…

It was then that the nightmares began to assault my nights.

Nightmares in which, naked in front of my boyfriend, my whole form was mercilessly and gracelessly squeezed into a small egg shape while I floated mid air, only to drop to the floor to crack and shatter.

Nightmares in which I was nude perching on a tree branch, my voice reduced into hoots as I stared at the city beyond the line of trees from which I have been forever forbidden.

I can’t sleep

I haven’t slept since.

On the verge of a total breakdown, after a single sleepless week driven by anger I finally answer the phone… it happened to be the last phone call my friend will ever make in her human life…

I wonder if I will remember mine…

“Pallas! We belong to Pallas!”

That was the first thing she said.

I exploded in retaliation, yelling, with tears in my eyes to forget that nonsense as if that was an option available to use. My friend turned the phone call into a video call, her phone must have been on the floor, I saw above the camera her figure covered by shadows, she was squatting and contorting, clearly in pain. She leant her face towards the screen, very, very close, showing a horrified eye, her skin soaked with sweat.

“We are bonded! It will happen to you too…! AAaaagh! IT WILL HAPPEN YOUUUUUUUUUUH!”

Her voice broke into howls, I threw the phone away when her bones began to crack, covering my ears with both hands. A while after, when I regained control of my senses and grabbed my phone back, the screen was broken and the call was over.

In a rush I left my apartment and ran all the way to the other side of town, where I knew my friend lived. Climbed the stairs like a runaway monkey, found the door open. The walls were covered by the many diplomas she had earned, a contract from a prestigious firm on the floor… near her discarded clothes…

There were feathers all over the place, in my careless search I stepped on her panties and cracked an egg that was hiding inside the underwear.

I picked up one of the long brownish feathers.

Not only was the door open, but the windows were too.

The wind whispered to my ears, ruffling my hair maliciously as I stood holding the feather…

I couldn’t breathe.

My friend was forever gone from the human world.

My friend had been the first to succumb, Athena gave her what she asked and then came to claim her price… and soon it would be my turn… Later I found out that the feather belonged to a horned owl, a large one, like the one I often began to see gazing at me in the distance.

I resisted, you are reading this, you already know.

I resisted for as long as I could as the urge of the change just grew stronger and stronger. My boyfriend asked many times: What is happening to you?

I never found the courage to answer, not until it was too late.

I became emaciated, surly.

Everything annoyed me, the light, the sun, the breeze on my skin. Turning into some sort of folkloric monster, I cut all my connections to the world, gradually rejecting social life… maybe it wasn’t because of pride or shame, but to ease the pain of my foretold disappearance to those who knew me.

But I couldn’t cut all ties, I couldn’t escape the sight of my owl sister… nor reject my beloved boyfriend, my dear partner…

I’m so sorry…

Instead of leaving me and becoming cold and distant the same as I treated him, he instead got down on one knee and asked for my hand in marriage.

That was what finally made me grudgingly accept that there was no hope for me.

There’s no lesson, no moral to my story, I am a stupid city dwelling woman, a simpleton who gave up her humanity for a flicker of love and my punishment is to end my days as a stupid forest bird.

I ate a mouse in my nightmares… and I enjoyed it…

My doom was nearing.

I couldn’t sleep.

My beloved boyfriend found me in the bathroom, sitting naked and wet on the edge of the bathtub, wearing only my glasses and hugging my legs. He didn’t say much, neither did I. Instead he gently dried my shivering body with a soft towel and helped me dress.

A long yellow summer, the last clothes that would ever cover my shame.

My hair was still moist when we sat together on the living room’s couch, both near each other, both very tense.

“You need help,” he said.

“I can’t be helped,” was my answer.

From there the conversation descended into a heated argument.

He told me how much I have changed, how hard things were, that he loved me, but things couldn’t go on like this any longer. He was right on that point, if only he had known that even more changes were upon me.

An intense headache was assaulting my rationality, beating like apocalyptical drums.

So I confessed.

I told him everything.

About the ritual, about why I had changed, about my tormenting nightmares, about what had happened to my friend… and what was about to happen to me…

“I belong to Athena… I am an owl…”

He laughed and that sound, which was once my whole life, was the straw that broke the back of my will’s camel. An ancient tragedy unfolded, in a savage instant I ripped my dress to shreds, tears filled my eyes as I stood in defiant nudity in front of my speechless boyfriend and my fate.

“Pallas! Pallas, listen to my plea as you did once before!” I cried desperately, raising my arms up to the void. “Judge my unworthy heart again! I asked and you gave and now you want what’s owed, I can't stand this torture anymore, I never stood a chance, so I beg of you! Show me mercy or rob me of everything, but please, please, be it woman or bird… JUST LET ME SLEEP!”

My theatrics were followed by silence.

I lower my arms, tensing up, fully aware of every inch of my human form, my breath, the shivers across my skin, the clenching of my tender buttocks.

“Are you happy now?” my upset boyfriend grunted, he was still sitting on the couch behind me. “I’m calling an ambulance…!”

As if that would be any help.

No, no I wasn’t happy… at least that’s not the word I would use, because right then I began to change…

A universal pressure dropped on top of me and I was crushed into nothing.

A painful bone-snap across my shoulder blades, I breathlessly shout, my mouth open, my head cocked to the side, my arms and body contorted as, very gradually and painfully, my pose was forced into a squat.

I groaned, gurgled.

The first thing to go was my body hair.

Peeled from head to toe like a tree embracing autumn. Completely shaved bald with my fallen hair tingling onto my toes, not even my eyebrows remained. It was incredibly hard to move, I had to fight my own flesh to turn even slightly.

My muscles twisted to the extreme as if they were made of cloth, my bones aching to their core.

“Ahhh! AHHHHHH!”

My cunt was damp and closed tight.

I extended my left arm, witnessing in impotent terror as my wrist arched backwards, bulding up, while my nail detached during the scream. I couldn’t help myself but howl as the flesh began to deform. The middle finger swollen into disfiguration, it's absurd size absorbed the surrounding fingers into a singular lump.

A featherlessly ugly limb.

Bending the lumpy appendage I looked closer at the skin, saw a myriad of tiny small protuberances on the surface. The skin broke and from the protuberances grew tiny hairs.

No, they were feathers, of course.

They quickly gained in length, acquiring a brownish golden tone.

I screamed and cursed and worse, panic clouding my mind as I descended into pure irrational fear. The wing kept forming, my first wing, as I was forced to squat further into a degrading avian position.

“NGUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

I ground my teeth together in frustration, barely able to move.

Around me, in several reflecting items, such as the glass doors of a liquor cabinet, I saw the disfiguration of my face. My eyes, having become pitch black, were growing larger quicker than my skull was reshaping. Down my trembling legs my toenails were split in two from the inside by the dark curved short claws that grew beneath them.

The pain.

The heat.

The utter resentment and irritation at the world.

“UUUUUUUUUUUH! UUUUUUUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHHH!”

I flapped my arms, my other hand was becoming a wing too. In a flash of anger, pushed by instinct, I twisted my neck 180 degrees to confront my beloved. He had remained sitting on the couch, pressed into a corner, pale and shocked, his expression seemed to indicate that he was even more terrified than me.

After all, I must have been a truly disturbing and inhuman sight.

I didn’t care.

“YooouuuUUUUH believe mee nooow?!” I cried angrily. “YOU BELIEVE MEEE HOOOOOOOO! HOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

My bowels grumbled, I felt it and in that impossible posture I was able to see the next indignity I was to suffer. Down there my buttocks spread open, there were more grumbles, squishy sounds, I held my breath, pushed, a plop…

An egg came out of my anus, landed on the floor and rolled under the couch.

I looked forward, putting my half-wings across my chest, hooting my disgrace.

“OOOOOOOOH! HHHHHUUUUUUUUUUU! OOOOOOOOOOH!”

I had just laid an egg from my arse.

My glasses fell off.

Arms shortened, continuing their full conversion into the wings. The itch of my featherly dress spread beyond my upper limbs. Reaching down my back, claiming my groin.

A big tug above my butt as a tail pushed up and emerged.

“HOOO! HUUUU! HOOO!”

While on my back and rear and surrounding my face like a mask my feathers were golden brown, on my front, my chest, my legs, that face, the feathers were of a pristine white.

That face, the face, my face.

I could see it in every reflection, the anguish, the struggle, as the transformative sensation began to claim my lips and my cheeks. My bestial expression disfigured as I howled knowing what was happening next.

My face, I was going to lose my human face.

“OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUH!”

A flattening pressure pressed my skull backwards. Ears shrunk into holes, my lips dry, then harden and sharpen. Growing into a compact mass they push forward, curving, becoming one with my nose.

My howl of despair continued as the white feather engulfed my facade completely, the mask of my fate forever consuming the woman I once was. In every mirror I could see it, my new face for the rest of my life, the owl’s head on top of my shoulders, with my wings at the sides.

A barn owl.

That was the conclusion of my human existence.

“HOOOOOOOK! HOOOOOOOOOT! HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!”

Hooting with primal desire, cursing my misfortune.

White feathers growing between my pale breasts.

Below the featherly pants covering my upper legs, the lower segments of the limbs had been changed just like the rest of me. Bird legs, thin and black, with sharp claws for feet.

The talons of a predator.

I spun and looked back at my boyfriend.

“DUUUU YUUUUU BELIIEEEEE MEEEEEEEEEEEH?!”

He nodded, sobbing.

“Yes…! Yes…! Yes…!”

He mumbled.

I look like a monstrous harpy by now, an owl harpy. Opening my wings I leaped forward and climbed with my claws on top of his legs. I scratched and hurt, he cried, I didn’t stop.

The bird was me.

Leaning down I ripped open his pants with my beak, he was already pretty hard… I wonder why… Flapping wings and squatting down my featherly crotch towards my beloved’s erection.

“FUUUUUCK MEEEEE! FUUUUUUUUUK MEEEEEEEEE! FUUUUUUUK MEEH!”

He didn’t complain.

Neither did he pull away.

He didn’t say no.

He even grabbed my boobs and massaged them as they were engulfed by white feathers. I slam my sex on top of his and ride that penis as if it was the last thing I would ever do… because it indeed was.

At least as a human woman…

Riding cock became easier as I became shorter, the loss of length in my legs and the ungraceful barreled squishing of my torso helped too.

I put my wings on his face.

I wanted to say sorry one last time… but I wasn’t allowed to speak anymore.

Warped with lust, in the gruelling heat of my coat of feathers, that was how my womanly existence was completely erased, hooting hornily like the wild barn owl I am meant to be. I even laid another egg before my sex and butt hole merge into one cloaca around my boyfriend’s dick.

Our orgasms synced, he blasted me full of cum.

I stood up on top of his injured thighs, raised my wings, stretched my neck, howling louder than I have ever in my life as the final stroke of changes sealed my form into that compact bird size.

It was done.

Slowly I closed my wings, fully an owl.

My boyfriend and I look at each other, a brief instant of calm, his cock growing flaccid between his legs, his cum sticking to the feathers in my nethers.

He said my name with a whisper and tried to touch me.

Wind shivers in the distance.

Becoming full panicked I scratch his hand with my talons and raise my wings, flying, flying for the first time around the room, hooting savagely in rejection of my humanity.

The window, the window I have forgotten I left open, I heard a no in the distance as I flew away through the opening.

I flew away to the night sky, not looking back.

The wind shook my feathers and my mind knew calm it never had been so serene, finally free as the city, the town, became small underneath my claws.

Soon I was greeted by my sister, the large horned owl. We landed in a nearby tree, curled up together in a hole in the bark, giving each other the only grace allowed in our punishment.

And so, the nightmare became the dream of my life.

What we were once, the dorky young women, was gradually erased from our minds as the routine of our kind settled into our brains, blurring them together as if they were one.

It was so easy to give in now that there was nothing to fear, nothing to lose…

The sky and the woods are my home.

Sometimes, but less and less often as the seasons passed, I approached the human nests and spied on my ex-boyfriend from a distance, hiding everything behind branches and the leaves except for the glow of my eyes.

I can’t blame him for moving forward… after all it’s what I did…

He met another woman, not so different from me, I saw them going further than he and I were ever allowed to… She didn’t reject him when he offered her the same ring he once offered me…

Marriage, pregnancy…

My best friend and I hatched a few eggs ourselves.

I wonder, I wonder if anybody remembers if we were ever women or if our robbed time as humans was anything other than an illusion to be forgotten as soon as it was over…

I’m certain that the echo of my hoots still sends chills down his spine…

But no, I can’t blame myself.

I haven’t had trouble sleeping once since I flew away.

I can sleep now.

I am an owl.