THIS IS A SAMPLE. The full file can be found on my Google Drive, here.

This is a gift for the wonderful dragoness,  Dragoness Faye. In a way it is also a gift to myself - there are a lot of emotions that came forth while writing this, many that I tend to repress or shy away from. As is the way, it is far easier for me to be kinder to a friend than to myself. So when she told me of an idea she had about a sudden transformation while on an otherwise normal walk home, I was thrilled to be able to see that come to life, with thoughts and emotions that I believe we both share. Her friendship is, itself, a gift.

While this is personal in the description of the draconic transformation, I feel that there are many elements that others will connect with.

The song that initiates the transformation is the hardstyle anthem "Orange Heart" by Headhunterz. You can see the official music video here.

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The road feels longer today.

You follow the curve of the road home at the pace your body knows by heart, your steps falling into rhythm with the low rush of passing cars. Pavement, railing, bus stop, crossing, shopfront. Every part of the route is so familiar that it asks almost nothing of you. You could walk it half-asleep, and perhaps that is the problem. The day still clings to you in that dull way that comes from repetition more than fatigue. The same hours, the same motions, the same muted return home. It leaves a question that never quite forms fully, something that hovers at the edge of your thoughts without ever resolving into words. Is this all your life is going to be?

You reach into your pocket for your earbuds and slip them in. At least some music can help you escape. The sounds of the street soften at once. Engines and footsteps are still there, but they fall back from the center of your attention. You unlock your phone, tap your playlist, and let the music wash over you.

“There’s a dragon inside, you can no longer hide.”

A small laugh escapes you. Right. That would certainly make the walk home more interesting.

Even so, the line lands oddly, leaving an ache in your heart. Before you can think about that too hard, the next lyric follows.

“With a burning desire, rise up from the fire.”

The warmth begins in your hands.

At first you assume it is nothing. Cold weather, poor circulation, some harmless quirk of your body. You flex your fingers as you walk, expecting the sensation to fade, but instead it deepens. A low ache settles under your skin, as if something inside your hands is being shifted with deliberate care. When you brush your thumb across your fingertips, every point of contact feels unnaturally vivid.

You glance down and your breath catches. Your hand is changing.

The flesh is turning a brighter pink, deeper and richer than skin has any right to be. Your fingers lengthen, then draw together with a slow, sick pressure that makes you flinch. Bone and tendon reshape themselves under the surface until the familiar pattern of your hand is gone. Four fingers condense into three thick digits and a thumb, each tipped with a dark claw that catches the fading light.

You nearly stumble in surprise. A pulse of fear hits hard enough to make your stomach turn. This is impossible. Hallucinations do not feel like this. Panic attacks do not leave claws where fingernails should be.

“Reach up for the sky till we see the Orange Sun.”

You can’t stop here, like this, gawping at your shifting hand in the middle of the street! People are walking past; cars are rolling by! With your heart hammering, you shove the changed hand into your pocket and force yourself onward.

The warmth is already moving up your wrist. The sleeve of your hoodie drags across skin that no longer feels like skin, and the contact is so strange that you almost jerk your arm away from your own clothing. You can feel the change spreading beneath the fabric in a steady tide. Pink scales, or something like scales, are pressing into existence under the cotton.

Then, the same heat flares in your feet.

You suck in a breath as pressure gathers inside your shoes. Your toes push forward, crowded suddenly in a shape the leather was never made to hold. You keep moving because stopping would mean looking, and looking would make it real in a way you are not ready to face. Even so, your stride shifts beneath you. Your balance changes. The roll of each step feels wrong for a human foot and strangely easy for whatever your body is becoming. Ahead, the intersection is thick with evening pedestrians. If you can just reach home before this gets worse, maybe you can shut the door, lock it, and figure out what is happening in private.

“Burning heart, tear me apart.”

The chorus surges, and your body answers it.

Your hand tightens inside your pocket. Soft pads swell across your palm and fingertips, sensitive enough that the seam of the fabric feels almost intimate. The claws press against the lining. The shape is monstrous and elegant all at once, and that should horrify you. It does horrify you. Yet beneath the fear there is a flicker of something else, something deeply unsettling because it feels so immediate. A kind of recognition, as though your body has fallen into a pattern it always knew.

The pressure in your feet becomes unbearable. You stagger toward the edge of the pavement and kick off one shoe, then the other, fumbling with hands that no longer work the way they should. Your socks split open as your toes push through them. The sight of your bare feet steals your breath away.

They are no longer feet. They are paws.

Pink scales cover the upper surface in a glossy layer, and much like your shifted hands, white pads cushion the underside. Dark talons curve from each toe. They look delicate at first glance, but the moment your weight settles over them you feel the strength in them, the spring, the way your balance adjusts as if this shape has always belonged to you. You look up in wild alarm, cringing at the eyes now upon you.

A woman walks past pushing a pram, her eyes lingering on your feet before looking at you with a puzzled frown and quickening her pace. A little further ahead, someone nudges their friend and points in your direction, their voices dropping as they try to make sense of what they’re seeing. A car rolls by at a crawl, the driver turning their head to watch you for a moment longer than they should.

The streetlights cast everything in a clear, steady glow, leaving you exposed in a way that sends a pulse of urgency through your chest.
No, this can’t be happening to you. You urge your paws - feet! - to move faster, their altered form finding the pavement with growing certainty even as your heart races. A few more glances follow you as you move, and each one presses you onward, carrying you further down the road with a rising need to be anywhere else but here.
“Raising me up, up to the Orange Sun.”

The vocals drop away into an instrumental swell, and without words to occupy your mind the next sensation becomes impossible to miss. Pressure gathers at the base of your spine, drawing an instinctive blush to your cheeks. It starts as a deep ache, then hardens into something fuller, heavier, a force pushing outward from within. You go rigid for half a step. Then instinct drives you forward again. You have to keep moving. You have to get home.

Your hips shift around the growing strain, changing the line of your walk. Your lower back throbs. You reach behind you with shaking fingers and feel a firm length pressing against the seat of your trousers.

The realization hits so suddenly that your vision blurs. You touch it again, needing to be wrong and finding that you are not. Something solid is growing from your spine, twitching faintly under your hand as if aware of being noticed.

A tail. You… you’re growing a tail!

The pressure becomes too much to ignore. With clumsy, desperate movements, you tug the back of your waistband down just enough to give it room. Relief rushes through you so quickly that you almost stumble. Your tail slips free, extending behind you in a smooth motion as it continues to grow.

The base is thick and strong, causing your hips to widen and your gait to change to accommodate your new appendage. The length tapers as it stretches farther behind you with every step. Smooth pink scales settle across its surface, and along the top, white diamond markings rise one after another in a clean line. At the tip, a soft cyan tuft unfurls and sways in the evening air. You feel all of it. Not just its weight or motion, but the tail itself, entirely present in your awareness. It moves with its own balance, its own grace, and your body answers it without thought.

Your mind cannot keep pace. Terror still has hold of you, but it is no longer alone. Mixed with it is astonishment, and threaded through that astonishment is a fragile, impossible feeling that comes close to wonder.

A stray thought causes you to blush - perhaps it’s okay to be seen like this? To just strip down and let this sensation wash over you fully, to hell with what anyone else thinks. You then blink and shake the thought from your head, pressing on with more urgency. You’re transforming! No one would understand! You barely understand. You just have to get home.

You press your tail close to your leg with one trembling hand and hurry on, trying to hide it as best you can. The effort is ridiculous. You know that. Still, it gives you something to do other than give in to panic. Home is less than fifteen minutes away. If you can pass by the large intersection ahead of you, then the worst of the potential onlookers should be behind you.

As the lyrics return, the pleasurable warmth rises with them.

“And you can no longer hide from the dragon inside.”

The pressure builds at the base of your skull, then spreads upward, a steady presence reshaping the contours of your head with the same slow certainty that has already claimed your hands, your feet, and - your breath catches again - your tail.

Your nose and jaw push forward in a gradual, painless elongation, shifting your perspective as the world subtly reframes around you. Teeth press and settle into sharper points, a faint ache accompanying their refinement. Your tongue feels suddenly too long, then exactly right. Every breath carries more scent than it should, layers of air separating into damp pavement, exhaust, rain on brick, hot oil from a takeaway shop farther down the road.

The warmth spreads out to your ears as they lengthen and shift, taking on the same pink scales as the rest of your emerging form. Sound opens around you in startling detail. Tires hiss against the street. A bicycle chain clicks as it passes. Somewhere behind you, a plastic bag catches wind and skitters along the curb. The music still plays in your ears, but the world has become louder than it.

You are moving faster now, a quick, uneven gait that feels less like walking than a frantic trot. Your new paws strike the pavement in a rhythm your body seems to understand more readily with every second. Fear drives you on, but it is no longer the only force at work. Beneath it, something deeper is waking.

A tingling starts at the top of your head, followed by a pressure that makes you wince. Two hard points push up from just above your ears. The sensation is unmistakably bony, smooth and deliberate, and within seconds black horns curve backward from your skull in an elegant sweep to frame your new ears. You throw a hand toward your hood by reflex, desperate to cover them, but your altered claws catch in the fabric and fumble uselessly. Your hood slips only halfway up before your new horns and ears make the effort pointless.

Then another sensation unfurls just above your brow, finer and stranger than the rest. Two slender filaments emerge there, delicate compared to the horns. They curve outward and upward with a beauteous grace, twitching as they meet the air. The moment they fully extend, a new awareness flickers across your senses. Something invisible hums all around you. It is faint in the road, stronger near the hedges, stranger around the streetlights, and strongest of all inside your own body, where it burns bright and wild. Magic. The word arrives without argument. Your new antennae feel the mystical force around you the way skin feels heat.

Moving ever closer to home, the change to your hair comes as a cool rush over your scalp. What was once ordinary becomes a long, flowing mane that spills down your neck and shoulders in a bright cyan cascade. When you reach back to touch it, the strands are impossibly soft beneath your claws. They move with a life of their own, caught within the magic surrounding you and stirring with each step. The sensation sends a shiver through you that has nothing to do with fear. For one quiet moment, even amid the panic, you are simply struck by how beautiful it is. Your body is feeling more and more comfortable - it’s only the suddenness that is frightening. This is just… you.

The major intersection is close now. The traffic lights ahead glow red, and clusters of people gather at the crossing while cars idle in rows. The worst place to be; the very worst. You lower your head and push forward anyway, trying to hide your face, your horns, your mane, the impossible line of your tail pressed awkwardly against your leg. The music swells again.

“Feel it beat beneath your skin.”

Heat traces the length of your spine, joining the crown of your head to the tip of your tail in one bright line underneath your clothes. The heat spreads outwards, warming your shoulders and hips, and you blush as you feel the bones shifting, widening, giving you the distinct flanks of a quadruped creature. The feeling should repel you. Instead, it settles somewhere deep, where fear cannot fully smother it. It feels right in a way you do not know how to explain.

That frightens you more than the claws did.

"Come together and begin celebrating."

You reach the crossing just as the light stays red. There is no slipping past unnoticed now. People stand on every side of you in coats and scarves, carrying shopping bags, checking phones, talking to one another in low voices that falter as your presence registers. You feel their glances before you meet them. Confusion first. Then alarm. Then the sharp electric edge of attention.

A child points. Someone takes one cautious step back. Another person stares openly, eyes fixed on your horns. Ducking your head, you try to hide your changing face, but your new muzzle only obstructs your view while your long cyan mane spills out from under your hood, a vibrant splash of color against the dull grey of the air. A new sensation prickles on your forehead resolving into the shape of a single, perfect white diamond. It feels like a crown, a declaration, and a part of you wants to show it to the world. Maybe showing it wouldn’t be that bad? Why should you have to hide who you are?

You can smell the change in the air, the quick rise of human fear. It should send you spiraling. Instead, with the song lifting toward its peak, something inside you finally gives way.

“It’s our time to awake and come alive undivided.”

The words settle into you with astonishing calm.

You have been fighting every second of this, fleeing it, trying to hide it, treating it like a disaster to survive. Yet your body has not been breaking. It has been becoming. Every change that terrified you has also answered some aching absence you could never name. The claws, the tail, the horns, the strange widening of your senses, the grace in your stride, the color, the warmth, the simple impossible truth of yourself. None of it feels alien now. Sudden, yes. Overwhelming, certainly. But wrong? No. For the first time since the transformation began, you let yourself stop resisting.

With that, the panic loosens all at once.

What fills its place is not triumph exactly, and not relief alone. It is something gentler and deeper. Recognition. The kind that hurts at first because it reveals how long you have been living at a distance from yourself. You draw a fuller breath, and the evening air pours into your chest like a blessing.

Your body responds immediately. The remaining changes rush forward with new confidence. Your neck lengthens. Your torso expands and reshapes beneath the strain of your clothes. The hoodie and shirt that have clung stubbornly until now pull tight across your shoulders and back. A heavy pressure builds between your shoulder blades, immense and insistent. You know with complete certainty what is coming, and the knowledge no longer frightens you.

Your claws hook into the back of your hoodie and pull. The fabric gives with a sharp, ripping sound that seems to cut through the stunned silence around you. Your shirt tears with it, opening your back and chest to the evening air. Coolness skims over fresh scales as they settle into place, soft pastel pink and smooth as polished stone. The change is moving too quickly now for clothes to contain. Pressure builds through your hips and thighs, deeper and stronger than before, and your trousers draw tight all at once. The seams strain as your body lengthens and reshapes beneath them. You feel the pull of fabric against widening flanks, the tightening across your haunches, and then the material splits with a rough tearing crack. You almost drown out the sound with your own breath as more of your true shape forces its way free. Cloth gives way in ragged lines down your legs and around the base of your tail, falling back in shredded pieces beside your shoes, your bag, and the last scattered pieces of the life you were carrying home.

The need to drop is overwhelming now. You stop resisting it. You let yourself fold forward, and the moment your forepaws strike the asphalt something deep inside you settles. Your body knows what to do. It knows the angle of your spine, the placement of your limbs, the way your weight should pour forward into four points instead of two. You sink fully to all fours and feel the rest of the change answer at once, your back arching, your shoulders and hips aligning, your whole body straining for a breathless instant before it gives in and becomes what it was always trying to be.

The crowd recoils with a collective gasp. Some people back away. Others raise their phones with shaking hands. Their reactions feel distant now, as though they belong to another place, another life. You are aware of them, but they no longer define the moment. What matters is the sensation moving through you as your final shape settles. Pink scales gleam softly over your flanks and limbs. White diamond markings trail from your brow down the line of your spine and along your tail. Your cyan mane spills over your shoulders in a bright, luminous curtain. Dots of darker pink appear along your hips and shoulders and wrists. Strength gathers in every part of you with such simple certainty that tears sting unexpectedly at your new eyes.

Then the pressure in your back crests.

Heat floods outward from your shoulder blades, deep and powerful. Bone extends. Muscle forms around it in a rush that makes your whole body tremble. You brace instinctively, claws scraping faintly against the pavement as two great structures force their way free. When your wings unfurl at last, they do so with a force that stirs the air around the crossing.

A cry rises from the onlookers. You barely hear it.

Your wings stretch wider, membranes catching the evening light in soft shades of pink that deepen into cyan and teal along the edges. They are immense, beautiful, and wholly yours. You flex them once and feel the shape of the air bending to your will.

The final chorus of the song winds down. As the last notes fade, your earbuds slip loose and fall to the pavement below. You look at them for a moment among the scattered clothes and half-open bag, and a strange tenderness passes through you. That person was real. That life was real. You are not mocking it by leaving it behind. You are simply no longer confined to it.

When you lift your head, the world seems sharper and wider than it has ever been. The air tastes cleaner; the sky is richer with color. The fear on the surrounding faces no longer reaches you as a threat. Some are frightened. Some are stunned. A few are staring with something close to wonder. You understand all of it, and none of it can outweigh the truth unfolding in your own chest.

You are beautiful. You are powerful. You are a dragoness.

The thought arrives without vanity. It is calming, steady, and full of the same recognition that settled into you at the crossing. You are not monstrous. You are not broken. You are not a mistake happening in public. You are a dragoness, pink-scaled and bright-maned, trembling on the edge of a life you had never dared imagine for yourself.

Then, a roar sounds in the distance.

It rolls across the evening air, deep and resonant, followed by the high, piercing cry of some strong avian voice. You lift your head at once, every sharpened sense turning skyward. Against the wash of orange and violet on the horizon, two figures move across the fading light. One is a green dragoness, her scales flashing like emeralds when she catches the sun. Beside her flies a black-feathered gryphoness, her wings beating in a strong, measured rhythm.

Something in you answers at once.

You have never seen them before, and yet the pull that rises in you is undeniable. Kinship floods through your chest with enough force to make your throat tighten. For so long you moved through the world with the sneaking suspicion that something essential was missing, that everyone else had been handed a shape for living that you somehow lacked. Now, watching those two figures wheel through the evening sky, you understand. The emptiness was simply an ache of a self waiting to be found.

You look once over your shoulder at the crossing, at the people who will tell this story for the rest of their lives, at the abandoned clothes and the dropped phone and the scraps of an existence that no longer fits. There is sadness in the glance, but it is gentle. It carries gratitude for the person who made it this far, who kept walking, who endured enough to reach this moment. Then you face forward and spread your wings.

The first downbeat lifts dust and loose paper from the pavement. The second takes your weight. The third sends you skyward.

For an instant the ground falls away and your heart leaps with it, and then flying ceases to be a hope and becomes a fact. Air rushes beneath your wings in living currents. Your body knows what to do. You climb through the evening light with a cry that rings clear and joyous across the road below. The city opens under you, smaller with every beat of your wings, while the sky ahead burns gold and rose and deepening violet.

The green dragoness turns in the distance. The gryphoness circles with her. They have seen you and are waiting.

You fly toward them with your whole heart open.

Whatever comes next will be new. It will be difficult in ways you cannot yet imagine. It will ask courage of you. But it will be yours, and you will meet it in your own shape at last. The fear that ruled the beginning of the evening has given way to something stronger and kinder. You are no longer hurrying home to hide. You are rising toward a horizon wide enough to hold you.

You are a dragoness, and you are finally free.