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At last, the day of the new moon had arrived, and Starfall was ready to shed her skin.
Starfall had not been the name she had been given at birth, but neither was the world she lived in the one she had been born into. The Old World had undergone a seismic upheaval the likes of which had never before been seen in the history of civilization, and she had been born just in time to see it before its explosive end.
She stood in the midst of its slowly crumbling skeleton now, on top of a massive skyscraper that now lay dormant and empty, windows shattered and walls chipping and accumulating layers of dust and grime. Where it had once been the home of a sinister megacorporation, it was now the home of small animals, moss, fungus, and vines. Inch by inch, nature reclaimed the monolithic structure, drawing it down into the dust of ages past beneath and smothering its memory in a blanket of brilliant green.
The people that once inhabited this city still lived, but not here. They were elsewhere now, living new lives. They had changed. She had changed too. But not enough.
Underneath the light of a lantern, Starfall laid out her tools. With a piece of chalk from her knapsack, she drew several large, concentric circles and lines, drawing out a complex series of interlocking sigils she had developed over months, if not years, of study and practice. She checked her work, double checked it, triple checked it. Even the smallest error could spell disaster for her plans. When she was satisfied, she returned to her knapsack and placed several polished crystals in key intersecting points within the circle. Several different variations of quartz, to capture the starlight and properly direct its properties. Around the outermost edge she placed her candles, lighting them first with her lantern and then catching one wick off of another in a chain. Then, she blew out the light of her lantern itself, discarded her clothes, and splayed out on the ground within the circle, careful not to knock over any of her adornments or blow out any candles with a gust from her movement. The cold concrete chilled her to the bones, and her long black hair draped over her face, and she had to work for a moment to get herself comfortable as she stared up at the grand vista of the stars.
When she had been younger, the night sky had been a muted thing. She had seen the stars, had been captivated by their beauty, but their light had been choked out by the excess of the Old World. Humanity had made itself a malignant thing, choking out all the beauty and wonder of the world with its own prisons of industry and government and exploitation. The lights were always on, the world always running, and the night sky itself was smeared away, with only a scattering of the closet stars able to shine through the haze. Now, it was all turned off. The cities had been abandoned, the new homes of humanity constructed with far more thought and love and care for its inhabitants and the world around them. The night sky had been returned to its former glory, and even now, after all this time, it still dazzled Starfall like it was the first time she had ever seen it. There was no moon to block out the light of the stars, only the majesty of the glowing tapestry they conjured. The milky way cut across the sky like a streak of glowing, glittery paint, and surrounding it were hues of purples and pinks and blues that the Old World could have never appreciated.
Staring into the captivating miasma of colors and light, she inhaled deeply and let herself become lost in the cosmos above her.
She had spent a long time training for this moment. Her mind had a tendency to jump from subject to subject, always having difficulty focusing on any task at hand. Over time, she had trained herself to be able to shut down those impulses, to use the monotonous rhythm of her breathing to cut herself off from her senses and leave the physicality of her body behind. She inhaled, and then exhaled. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Her thoughts were like a river; normally, they were a torrent, but with each breath, the flow began to calm. The thoughts diminished into a steady flow, and then a murmur, and then a trickle. Soon, it was nothing but her awareness, her breath, and the stars above her. Her senses faded away into the distant background hum of existence. She felt as if she were lifting upwards off of the cold stone of the skyscraper, sliding into the pool of cold colors above her. The pinpricks of light became three dimensional objects, infinitely small but infinitely bright, lazily drifting around her like fireflies in a hot summer night that never quite flickered out, only twinkled as they went about their imperceptible celestial dance. She felt as if she could turn her head around and see more stars behind her. For just a moment, she could feel the cold stone of the rooftop below her again.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Her spirit drifted through the stars, and the river that once carried her thoughts now carried her awareness itself along a current of starlight. These stars were many things; they were, in a physical sense, incomprehensibly large balls of perpetually-reacting plasma some incomprehensibly vast distance away. In another sense, they were fundamental pieces of symbolic meaning itself. They had a will of their own, whether that will existed independently of the perceptions of people or not. Starfall had long since discovered that they were playful things, possessing a curiosity and sense of whimsy that was often difficult to understand, but nonetheless there. They were, after all, an aspect of the mysterious. They represented the unknown, the hidden, the secretive. They represented the future and the past and the veil between the tangible and the intangible. Everything that existed, or could exist, could be found within them, if one knew where to look.
The stars drifted lazily around her now, motes of twinkling light in a shifting sea of cool colors. She reached out for one of them, and her hand was only a faint outline of itself, grasping around a brilliant mote of light that passed through it effortlessly. Something pulled from behind her, holding her back down to her corporeal form, along with the physical reality of her life and the memories it contained within it. She didn’t turn around. It wasn’t time yet. The stars still had so much left to show her.
The colors bloomed like flowers of light. They formed shifting masses, nebulae of ethereal dust that offered her tantalizing secrets. They seemed to whisper to her, to probe their depths and uncover their secrets. They didn’t mean any harm by it, but it was easy to get lost up here if one didn’t have focus. The river of starlight swept her by, taking her forward, and she didn’t look back..
Eventually, one of them loomed ahead of her, uncoiling itself like the shifting form of a serpent. Small motes of emptiness bloomed outwards to resemble watchful eyes, and a snout poked forward as it moved closer to inspect her. They didn’t beckon like the others, but simply waited. She reached out and to touch her incorporeal palm to its snout, and in an instant, the stars pulled away, leaving her in darkness.
She turned around, and came face to face with a mirror. Within the mirror was a form she had never seen before in the physical realm, but one that she had imagined. It was the form that spoke to the innermost parts of her soul, that made her true inner self an externalized physical reality. It wasn’t her, not literally. But it was her in every other way that mattered.
All throughout her life, she had felt wrong within her own skin. The form of a human never suited her, even in the Old World. She didn’t like the feeling of skin, the musk and stickiness of sweat, the cloying heat of a warm-blooded form. She was never met to fit in with the world of humans, certainly not in the Old World. Even now, she longed for something else, something different.
The real her.
It stared back at her now; a long, slender, scaled form, blurred within the mirror but growing sharper with every moment she spent staring at its visage. It was a snake; a tall, lithe, anthropomorphic snake, with a sleek, slender body that trailed off to a long, curling tail below and rounding out in a regal cobra’s hood above. The snake was covered in smooth, pebbly scales of lavender and blue, with lines and patterns of starlight streaked in delicate brush strokes across her body. Her eyes were a soft blue that gazed into hers with their slitted serpentine pupils. She could see longing and euphoria within them that pulled her ever deeper. The snake beckoned forward with a slow wave of its tail, and Starfall reached out with her astral hand to lay her fingers along the glass.
The moment her fingers touched the smooth surface, it shattered in a brilliant cascade of starlight, each fractal pane becoming a nebula of color and light like a supernova from deep space come to greet her. Milliseconds stretched out into slow, sluggish moments as the lights overtook her senses entirely, dissolving her astral body into wisps of shadowy vapor, all thought, all sensory input, all sense of self becoming a cloud of pure potential. In those moments, she felt everything she was, everything that made up her perception of the being formerly known as Starfall, blow away in the cosmic winds of pure energy and potential. Nothing remained but a singular point of awareness balled into a single point in time and space; a vibrating mote of dust that had developed a mystical sense of self-awareness. There was nothing left but an intense sense of longing and emptiness. A soul that had never truly been born, and perhaps never truly would. A reality that never was, but should have been. A tragedy that was all that she was, all that she had ever been, and all that she would be. An existence forever denied by some bitter cosmic injustice.
No…
Just as quickly as her self disintegrated did it snap back into focus, all the weight and density of her being rushing back to her in a white hot gust of motion. She wasn’t nothing, she was everything, every possible future and every possible past version of herself lumped into one incredibly dense point, and she would claw her way back to the reality that she deserved, that she would have. She strained with ever cosmic fiber of her being against the bonds that held her in place. She would right this wrong, she would have what was hers, she would be born into the life she was always meant to have.
With all of her willpower, she strained forward, the essence of her thought becoming a pair of long, slender, clawed hands ripping and tearing at the blinding barrier before her. With a slash of her claws, she ripped a hole into the membrane that imprisoned her, and for a split second she beheld a gaping tear of pure void greedily inhaled her very being itself, before she exploded out into the nothingness beyond, and a whole new universe was born into existence within and without her, and something within her was finally filled with glowing light.
She opened her eyes to pain.
She was back on the stone roof of the skyscraper, staring up into the beautiful but distant stars. She took only a moment to register this before the cloying discomfort set in. Her skin bulged out in mis-shapen clumps and shrieking cramps shot through nearly every muscle and bone in her body. She cried out in pain, but the sound came out wrong. Her tongue felt strange, and as her jaws opened wide she felt the skin of her cheeks tear.
No… Not her skin. Something else around it, stretched tight around her body like a thick layer of dusty plastic wrap.
She lifted a hand up to feel her cheeks, and in the reflected light of the stars she saw the gleam of polished clawtips emerging from the skin of her hands. The skin itself was stretched thin and cracked, and she could see the darker, deeper color of something else bleeding through it.
For a moment, she twisted her hands and investigated this new phenomenon. Flexing her muscles and twisting her limbs was all it took for her skin to rip in some places. Surprisingly, it didn’t hurt. Dried and discarded flaps swung with the motion of her body, and she felt the cool relief of skin exposed to air after being covered tight for far too long.
With one hand, she gripped a flap of dead skin and began to pull it off. She expected it to feel like ripping off a bandaid, but instead it was like removing an article of clothing that was far too tight. It slipped off with ease, the cool touch of air kissing the soft scales that were left behind in its wake.
Shedding her hands was delicate work - There were lots of joints and appendages that the skin got caught on, and she had to go slowly to make sure she got it all off. But once she was done, the rest of her body was simpler. Even as she moved and flexed her body to stretch up off of the ground, her dead human skin tore off in flaps where it couldn’t hold her any longer. With each tear, her body stretched itself out, muscles creaking, groaning, and popping in relief at being able to return to their proper proportions. As she peeled off the skin of her former face, her range of vision widened, and she could feel cool air flowing down around the new curves of her form.
After a few minutes of this, she stood up and spread her limbs out wide, letting the starlight bathe her new, true form. The light gleamed off of her smooth, lavender scales, and her tail twitched for the first time in her life. She had never had one before, but somehow she knew how to use it. Experimentally, she flicked the tip a few times, and coiled it around and through her own legs, then stretching it out. Each moment was a treasure, the realization of a dream that she’d never expected to fulfill.
She lifted her claws and brushed along her neck. It was longer now, and smoother, with a smaller and more angular head. Bunches of skin and muscle that blended into her neck flexed as she stroked over them, and she experimentally moved them. Her muscles, skin, and scales extended, flaring out in a regal hood that stretched up and over the top of her head. It was the first time she had truly felt it, yet it felt as familiar as the feeling of walking. She realized now how truly vulnerable she had felt without it.
In that moment, it was as if all the years she had already lived had only been a dream. Her memories were fuzzy, and while they became more vivid the more she investigated, there was a strange disconnect between the person she had been then and the person she was now. She couldn’t imagine who the human girl who had made these memories had been. She knew it was her, but she could only imagine herself as she was now. Anything else proved impossible.
She supposed she would need a new name. There were those who were expecting her back, and she wanted to return to them, but she couldn’t use the name Starfall anymore. She was… She was…
Lunari.
Yes. Lunari. That was perfect. That was her.
With a smile, Lunari gathered her discarded clothes and spent materials and returned them to the bag. She pulled out a special robe she had created for the conclusion of this ceremony; a long, flowing, silvery-grey shawl that loosely covered her top and a modified pair of shorts that would fit her tail. She had been worried they would be too small, but they fit surprisingly well, and it felt so good to feel her long, slender tail sticking out through the special hole she had designed in the back. She would need to find better, more suitable clothing eventually, but these would do… For now.
When she was ready, Lunari returned into the hollow shell of the Old World to return to the new, and begin her new life as a serpent. There were others like her who had been denied their proper form. Others that could now be truly born into the new life that awaited them. Now that she had saved herself, she could save them too. Together, they could make the future a world worth living in.
A custom story commission for
Cenaxi featuring her snake OC in a spiritual therian transformation sequence. This was a really fun scene to write, and I'm proud of how it turned out!
Starfall had not been the name she had been given at birth, but neither was the world she lived in the one she had been born into. The Old World had undergone a seismic upheaval the likes of which had never before been seen in the history of civilization, and she had been born just in time to see it before its explosive end.
She stood in the midst of its slowly crumbling skeleton now, on top of a massive skyscraper that now lay dormant and empty, windows shattered and walls chipping and accumulating layers of dust and grime. Where it had once been the home of a sinister megacorporation, it was now the home of small animals, moss, fungus, and vines. Inch by inch, nature reclaimed the monolithic structure, drawing it down into the dust of ages past beneath and smothering its memory in a blanket of brilliant green.
The people that once inhabited this city still lived, but not here. They were elsewhere now, living new lives. They had changed. She had changed too. But not enough.
Underneath the light of a lantern, Starfall laid out her tools. With a piece of chalk from her knapsack, she drew several large, concentric circles and lines, drawing out a complex series of interlocking sigils she had developed over months, if not years, of study and practice. She checked her work, double checked it, triple checked it. Even the smallest error could spell disaster for her plans. When she was satisfied, she returned to her knapsack and placed several polished crystals in key intersecting points within the circle. Several different variations of quartz, to capture the starlight and properly direct its properties. Around the outermost edge she placed her candles, lighting them first with her lantern and then catching one wick off of another in a chain. Then, she blew out the light of her lantern itself, discarded her clothes, and splayed out on the ground within the circle, careful not to knock over any of her adornments or blow out any candles with a gust from her movement. The cold concrete chilled her to the bones, and her long black hair draped over her face, and she had to work for a moment to get herself comfortable as she stared up at the grand vista of the stars.
When she had been younger, the night sky had been a muted thing. She had seen the stars, had been captivated by their beauty, but their light had been choked out by the excess of the Old World. Humanity had made itself a malignant thing, choking out all the beauty and wonder of the world with its own prisons of industry and government and exploitation. The lights were always on, the world always running, and the night sky itself was smeared away, with only a scattering of the closet stars able to shine through the haze. Now, it was all turned off. The cities had been abandoned, the new homes of humanity constructed with far more thought and love and care for its inhabitants and the world around them. The night sky had been returned to its former glory, and even now, after all this time, it still dazzled Starfall like it was the first time she had ever seen it. There was no moon to block out the light of the stars, only the majesty of the glowing tapestry they conjured. The milky way cut across the sky like a streak of glowing, glittery paint, and surrounding it were hues of purples and pinks and blues that the Old World could have never appreciated.
Staring into the captivating miasma of colors and light, she inhaled deeply and let herself become lost in the cosmos above her.
She had spent a long time training for this moment. Her mind had a tendency to jump from subject to subject, always having difficulty focusing on any task at hand. Over time, she had trained herself to be able to shut down those impulses, to use the monotonous rhythm of her breathing to cut herself off from her senses and leave the physicality of her body behind. She inhaled, and then exhaled. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Her thoughts were like a river; normally, they were a torrent, but with each breath, the flow began to calm. The thoughts diminished into a steady flow, and then a murmur, and then a trickle. Soon, it was nothing but her awareness, her breath, and the stars above her. Her senses faded away into the distant background hum of existence. She felt as if she were lifting upwards off of the cold stone of the skyscraper, sliding into the pool of cold colors above her. The pinpricks of light became three dimensional objects, infinitely small but infinitely bright, lazily drifting around her like fireflies in a hot summer night that never quite flickered out, only twinkled as they went about their imperceptible celestial dance. She felt as if she could turn her head around and see more stars behind her. For just a moment, she could feel the cold stone of the rooftop below her again.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Her spirit drifted through the stars, and the river that once carried her thoughts now carried her awareness itself along a current of starlight. These stars were many things; they were, in a physical sense, incomprehensibly large balls of perpetually-reacting plasma some incomprehensibly vast distance away. In another sense, they were fundamental pieces of symbolic meaning itself. They had a will of their own, whether that will existed independently of the perceptions of people or not. Starfall had long since discovered that they were playful things, possessing a curiosity and sense of whimsy that was often difficult to understand, but nonetheless there. They were, after all, an aspect of the mysterious. They represented the unknown, the hidden, the secretive. They represented the future and the past and the veil between the tangible and the intangible. Everything that existed, or could exist, could be found within them, if one knew where to look.
The stars drifted lazily around her now, motes of twinkling light in a shifting sea of cool colors. She reached out for one of them, and her hand was only a faint outline of itself, grasping around a brilliant mote of light that passed through it effortlessly. Something pulled from behind her, holding her back down to her corporeal form, along with the physical reality of her life and the memories it contained within it. She didn’t turn around. It wasn’t time yet. The stars still had so much left to show her.
The colors bloomed like flowers of light. They formed shifting masses, nebulae of ethereal dust that offered her tantalizing secrets. They seemed to whisper to her, to probe their depths and uncover their secrets. They didn’t mean any harm by it, but it was easy to get lost up here if one didn’t have focus. The river of starlight swept her by, taking her forward, and she didn’t look back..
Eventually, one of them loomed ahead of her, uncoiling itself like the shifting form of a serpent. Small motes of emptiness bloomed outwards to resemble watchful eyes, and a snout poked forward as it moved closer to inspect her. They didn’t beckon like the others, but simply waited. She reached out and to touch her incorporeal palm to its snout, and in an instant, the stars pulled away, leaving her in darkness.
She turned around, and came face to face with a mirror. Within the mirror was a form she had never seen before in the physical realm, but one that she had imagined. It was the form that spoke to the innermost parts of her soul, that made her true inner self an externalized physical reality. It wasn’t her, not literally. But it was her in every other way that mattered.
All throughout her life, she had felt wrong within her own skin. The form of a human never suited her, even in the Old World. She didn’t like the feeling of skin, the musk and stickiness of sweat, the cloying heat of a warm-blooded form. She was never met to fit in with the world of humans, certainly not in the Old World. Even now, she longed for something else, something different.
The real her.
It stared back at her now; a long, slender, scaled form, blurred within the mirror but growing sharper with every moment she spent staring at its visage. It was a snake; a tall, lithe, anthropomorphic snake, with a sleek, slender body that trailed off to a long, curling tail below and rounding out in a regal cobra’s hood above. The snake was covered in smooth, pebbly scales of lavender and blue, with lines and patterns of starlight streaked in delicate brush strokes across her body. Her eyes were a soft blue that gazed into hers with their slitted serpentine pupils. She could see longing and euphoria within them that pulled her ever deeper. The snake beckoned forward with a slow wave of its tail, and Starfall reached out with her astral hand to lay her fingers along the glass.
The moment her fingers touched the smooth surface, it shattered in a brilliant cascade of starlight, each fractal pane becoming a nebula of color and light like a supernova from deep space come to greet her. Milliseconds stretched out into slow, sluggish moments as the lights overtook her senses entirely, dissolving her astral body into wisps of shadowy vapor, all thought, all sensory input, all sense of self becoming a cloud of pure potential. In those moments, she felt everything she was, everything that made up her perception of the being formerly known as Starfall, blow away in the cosmic winds of pure energy and potential. Nothing remained but a singular point of awareness balled into a single point in time and space; a vibrating mote of dust that had developed a mystical sense of self-awareness. There was nothing left but an intense sense of longing and emptiness. A soul that had never truly been born, and perhaps never truly would. A reality that never was, but should have been. A tragedy that was all that she was, all that she had ever been, and all that she would be. An existence forever denied by some bitter cosmic injustice.
No…
Just as quickly as her self disintegrated did it snap back into focus, all the weight and density of her being rushing back to her in a white hot gust of motion. She wasn’t nothing, she was everything, every possible future and every possible past version of herself lumped into one incredibly dense point, and she would claw her way back to the reality that she deserved, that she would have. She strained with ever cosmic fiber of her being against the bonds that held her in place. She would right this wrong, she would have what was hers, she would be born into the life she was always meant to have.
With all of her willpower, she strained forward, the essence of her thought becoming a pair of long, slender, clawed hands ripping and tearing at the blinding barrier before her. With a slash of her claws, she ripped a hole into the membrane that imprisoned her, and for a split second she beheld a gaping tear of pure void greedily inhaled her very being itself, before she exploded out into the nothingness beyond, and a whole new universe was born into existence within and without her, and something within her was finally filled with glowing light.
She opened her eyes to pain.
She was back on the stone roof of the skyscraper, staring up into the beautiful but distant stars. She took only a moment to register this before the cloying discomfort set in. Her skin bulged out in mis-shapen clumps and shrieking cramps shot through nearly every muscle and bone in her body. She cried out in pain, but the sound came out wrong. Her tongue felt strange, and as her jaws opened wide she felt the skin of her cheeks tear.
No… Not her skin. Something else around it, stretched tight around her body like a thick layer of dusty plastic wrap.
She lifted a hand up to feel her cheeks, and in the reflected light of the stars she saw the gleam of polished clawtips emerging from the skin of her hands. The skin itself was stretched thin and cracked, and she could see the darker, deeper color of something else bleeding through it.
For a moment, she twisted her hands and investigated this new phenomenon. Flexing her muscles and twisting her limbs was all it took for her skin to rip in some places. Surprisingly, it didn’t hurt. Dried and discarded flaps swung with the motion of her body, and she felt the cool relief of skin exposed to air after being covered tight for far too long.
With one hand, she gripped a flap of dead skin and began to pull it off. She expected it to feel like ripping off a bandaid, but instead it was like removing an article of clothing that was far too tight. It slipped off with ease, the cool touch of air kissing the soft scales that were left behind in its wake.
Shedding her hands was delicate work - There were lots of joints and appendages that the skin got caught on, and she had to go slowly to make sure she got it all off. But once she was done, the rest of her body was simpler. Even as she moved and flexed her body to stretch up off of the ground, her dead human skin tore off in flaps where it couldn’t hold her any longer. With each tear, her body stretched itself out, muscles creaking, groaning, and popping in relief at being able to return to their proper proportions. As she peeled off the skin of her former face, her range of vision widened, and she could feel cool air flowing down around the new curves of her form.
After a few minutes of this, she stood up and spread her limbs out wide, letting the starlight bathe her new, true form. The light gleamed off of her smooth, lavender scales, and her tail twitched for the first time in her life. She had never had one before, but somehow she knew how to use it. Experimentally, she flicked the tip a few times, and coiled it around and through her own legs, then stretching it out. Each moment was a treasure, the realization of a dream that she’d never expected to fulfill.
She lifted her claws and brushed along her neck. It was longer now, and smoother, with a smaller and more angular head. Bunches of skin and muscle that blended into her neck flexed as she stroked over them, and she experimentally moved them. Her muscles, skin, and scales extended, flaring out in a regal hood that stretched up and over the top of her head. It was the first time she had truly felt it, yet it felt as familiar as the feeling of walking. She realized now how truly vulnerable she had felt without it.
In that moment, it was as if all the years she had already lived had only been a dream. Her memories were fuzzy, and while they became more vivid the more she investigated, there was a strange disconnect between the person she had been then and the person she was now. She couldn’t imagine who the human girl who had made these memories had been. She knew it was her, but she could only imagine herself as she was now. Anything else proved impossible.
She supposed she would need a new name. There were those who were expecting her back, and she wanted to return to them, but she couldn’t use the name Starfall anymore. She was… She was…
Lunari.
Yes. Lunari. That was perfect. That was her.
With a smile, Lunari gathered her discarded clothes and spent materials and returned them to the bag. She pulled out a special robe she had created for the conclusion of this ceremony; a long, flowing, silvery-grey shawl that loosely covered her top and a modified pair of shorts that would fit her tail. She had been worried they would be too small, but they fit surprisingly well, and it felt so good to feel her long, slender tail sticking out through the special hole she had designed in the back. She would need to find better, more suitable clothing eventually, but these would do… For now.
When she was ready, Lunari returned into the hollow shell of the Old World to return to the new, and begin her new life as a serpent. There were others like her who had been denied their proper form. Others that could now be truly born into the new life that awaited them. Now that she had saved herself, she could save them too. Together, they could make the future a world worth living in.
A custom story commission for
Cenaxi featuring her snake OC in a spiritual therian transformation sequence. This was a really fun scene to write, and I'm proud of how it turned out!
Category Story / Fantasy
Species Snake / Serpent
Size 120 x 120px
File Size 274.5 kB
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