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This also chronicles the events that happen after my books (Birds' Domain AND Wings of Midnight). I am posting it here so that my friends can read it, and also because I need some way to print it out. Unfortunately, Word is broken on my computer. gonk

Jared asked me why I don’t ever transform. I replied harshly, by saying that it was a secret of the Court, and that he was prying. I regretted telling him that, because it made him feel guilty, when he was, in fact, not to blame at all. It was one single event that had caused me to never shift, ever, unless I was forced to.

It was the day after my fifth birthday. There was an important meeting being held in the Grove, important enough for my enigmatic mother to return for the first time since I was born, along with her brother Martin. I remember being dressed up in traditional Lekrin clothing (which was a simple black short-sleeved dress without any decoration or extra colors), sitting on my grandmother’s lap, and thinking of how odd it was that I was permitted to be there. Generally, my grandfather had disliked my presence at Court meetings. He had often said that I was too immature, and that I caused disruptions. This was apparently a very important meeting, though, because otherwise my mother wouldn't have been there. I had never before seen so many creatures gathered in the Court at one time. As the granddaughter of the Songbird, I had been obliged to attend. I had not listened at all during the meeting, instead choosing to attempt to catch the eye of my best friend Merle, who had been there as well. I knew better than to disturb any of the adults. They had always listened at the meetings, for whatever reason. As a child, I had never bothered to listen, because none of the information seemed to concern me. Then, on that day, to the utmost surprise of the entire congregation, my grandfather stood up from his throne and walked along the aisle to where my family was sitting.

My grandfather had always frightened me, as he had frightened my mother, and my grandmother before her. I was scared of the sword that he had in its scabbard at his waist, which was always there. I had heard tales of the fearsome battles that he had won so many years before my birth, and they had awed me and given me a fearful sort of respect for him. I grew nervous upon seeing the sword, which was right at my eye-level. When he approached my grandmother and ordered her to stand, she gave me to my mother before standing and inclining her head respectfully. Even at the young age of five, I noticed that he treated my grandmother differently than the other birds, and much more differently than his wife, the Cardinal. I had not known the reason why until I was twelve.

“Can Teal transform yet?” he asked my grandmother harshly, staring into her bright blue eyes without a shred of compassion. Now all eyes were on our family, wondering what the King of the Birds wanted from us.

“Not yet, sir,” she replied in the quiet, respectful voice that she used when she spoke with her king. “She is still very young.”

He gave a bark of sarcastic laughter, which had nearly scared me witless. I clung to my mother’s skirt for protection. “You keep using that excuse year after year,” he spat, now fixing his gaze on me, “but Martin and Nolina could both transform by the time they were two, and Abner could shift only hours after his birth. Teal is now five years old, and your feeble protests that ‘she’s too young’ are wearing thinner and thinner every year. I’m getting sick of it, actually.”

My grandmother argued, “Sir, Teal is a very frail child. Besides, to compare her development to that of a human child’s is somewhat unreasonable; she is a Lekrin, and-”

“Oh, so I’m being unreasonable?” he breathed with a touch of menace in his voice. The hall grew silent. Nobody dared to make a sound. “Besides, who says she’s a Lekrin? Her father sure as hell wasn’t.”

Before now, I had never, not once in my life, heard anyone speak of my father. I knew that it was the normal thing to have a father; after all, both of my good friends had one. I had never asked my mother why I didn’t have a dad. To me, my great-uncles were everything that a father was supposed to be: mentors, teachers, and protectors. Now, though, my grandfather’s mention of my real father made me wonder if there was something that I was missing.

The assembly gasped and began to mutter at the mention of my father. This made me even more apprehensive. I was saddened by the look on my mother’s face. It was the expression of a young woman attempting to maintain her dignity in front of a crowd of people. I was so young, but even then, I realized that something was wrong.

“Teal has no father.” my mother stated firmly, making her opinion clear to everyone except me. “She and Count Lysander may share the same blood, but he is not her father in any way.”

My grandfather turned to his daughter, glowering at her. “You’re a disgusting, seditious girl, Chelsea, and you would do well to remember that you married Count Lysander the day before he died. Even in death, he is your husband, and you dishonor him and slander his name by denouncing him.”

“He is no husband of mine!” she proclaimed with heart-wrenching acrimony. She herself did not realize just how insane she sounded. “He dishonored me from the day he first set foot in this court!”

For her mutinous words, her father smacked her across her right cheek. “You will say no more, Chelsea Hawkins! Do not forget that without Count Lysander, you would be nothing more than a court servant. We have yet to find out what bird your husband was, and we need Teal to show us. Usually parents and children are similar in nature. Until Teal learns to shift, we will be left in the dark.”

“I have told you before,” my mother whispered, fearful of being struck again. “He was a… a condor.”

“A condor? With black wings?” My grandfather gave another alarmingly pitiless laugh. “Honestly, Chelsea, do you think I’m stupid? Condors have brown feathers, and I’m sure that anyone with the ability to shift into a condor would have brown hair. His hair was black, and whenever he showed his wings, they were black as well.”

“But Father,” she said, “it explains why he would never go hunting with you. He would, as a condor, prefer carrion, and that would have been a source of embarrassment to him among hunting birds like you. Also, although he kept his wings when he was in his human form, they never twitched or instinctively flapped at all. That’s because condors circle through the sky without flapping their wings.”

My grandmother hushed her daughter, saying, “Chelsea. That is enough.”

“Teal must shift,” my grandfather said. “Without the proof that she holds, there will be no way to tell what sort of bird Count Lysander really was. Regardless of how fast she ages, she has to shift soon. I must name an heir before the full moon. If Teal is deemed worthy of being an heir, then she will be some sort of noble bird. There are other options to the throne, though: there’s Abner, Merle, and Gregory, for a start. The most regal of all the birds is the one destined to be king. We have no more time to sit around and be idle, Chelsea. If your daughter has not yet transformed, then it comes to this.”

He grabbed my arm, and I began to scream bloody murder. My mother, grandmother, and uncles all stood up, to pull me away if I was going to be harmed. However, my grandfather held onto me and grabbed the back of my neck like he was going to choke me. I then felt sharp talons digging into my flesh, and heard the beating of large wings behind me. He had transformed into a terrifyingly large hawk, and he was trying to get me to transform as well by using pain.

I sobbed, “Please, Grandfather! Stop!” My vision felt like it was on fire. I continued to plead to him, not realizing that a change was coming over my body. My neck had shortened somewhat and my legs had shrunk. My arms became a baby bird’s wings, and my hair color changed from cornsilk blond to the purest shade of white imaginable. I had grown tiny, puffy feathers all over, and where the tears had been touching my face, my skin turned black. I was probably the ugliest baby bird alive. Most little birds were somewhat cute, but I was not. I was just a disappointment.

Nevertheless, my grandfather changed back from his intimidating hawk form, and picked me up off the ground by one wing, laughing. “This is about as ironic as it gets,” he said. “The daughter of Count Lysander is a swan? I can’t believe it. I thought she’d at least be something more...” He broke off, thinking through about a hundred words to describe what I was not. Ferocious. Masculine. Hunting-obsessed. I walked around on his palm, watching everyone in the hall stare at me. I tried to cry out, but I realized that I could not, and that hurt more than my painful transformation. “This proves nothing about her father’s heritage,” my grandfather continued. “Suppose we say that he is a condor, all right? So, the daughter of a peahen and a condor is a SWAN? It just makes no sense! For all we know, she may not even be Count Lysander’s son.” He turned to my family and smirked, watching them react angrily. “After all, he was only married to Chelsea for less than twenty-four hours before he died. Let’s just slit the girl’s throat now, before she grows into some promiscuous little slut like her mother.”

“NO!” my mother screamed, desperate for her father to spare his granddaughter. “Lysander is her father, I swear it! I have never looked for affection from any other man! I promise, Father, I have never once disobeyed you; I have stayed true to him, because Teal is his blood.”

I could no longer keep myself in bird form. I was too young to maintain a bird’s shape for very long. When I transformed back into a human, I was in my grandfather’s arms, and he was stroking my short, blond hair, murmuring, “Shhh. It’s all right, Teal. Now, you have proven yourself and surpassed your mother in the Court.” I was wailing, because I had been forced into a painful transformation, and also because I had no idea what was going on. Refusing to look at anyone from my family, he gave me to his wife, the Cardinal, saying, “Lina. Can you please take her back to her house? Make sure she gets some rest.”

“Of course,” she said. I knew the Cardinal somewhat well; she was my cousin Abner’s grandmother. Therefore I trusted her as she carried me back to my family’s home outside the grove. She was a woman who was beautiful even as a fifty-year-old human. Of course, she had a much different kind of beauty than my Lekrin grandmother, who still looked like she was in her teens.

“Madam Cardinal,” I said, sniffing heavily and wiping tears from my eyes as she set me down on my bed, “what was my family talking about in the Court? Why don’t I have a daddy?”

She gave a great sigh and bent down to speak to me at eye-level. “I shouldn’t be the one to tell you. Ask your mother when she comes home. But first, you must try to go to sleep.”

“Why am I a swan?” I whined. “My mommy’s not a swan. I don’t know about my daddy, though. And my uncles are all different sorts of birds. Madam Cardinal, I don’t want to be a swan. It hurts a lot.” With the recollection of the past hour’s events, I began crying again.

She shushed me and whispered, “You are a lucky girl, Tealiona. Your grandfather, the King of the Birds, has made you one of the options for his next heir. If luck is yours, you may rule over the birds someday, which is an honor that your mother could never have dreamed of for you. If you continue to grow and transform, then you could someday be a beautiful swan queen.”

“I thought Abner was going to get the throne.”

“Perhaps. It all depends on who my husband chooses as the most deserving. You know, your friends Merle and Gregory both have chances for becoming king. Anyway, I have to return to the meeting. Please, Teal, try to get some sleep. Otherwise you’ll be exhausted all day. Transforming takes a toll on the body, and you were clearly not ready for it.” She left my bedroom, and I felt so alone that I began to cry again.

When my mother arrived back home, I was wide awake and sobbing my eyes out. She hugged me and comforted me for a long time, but she did not explain anything that day. I tried hard not to cry, but every time I thought of myself as a swan, it didn’t help me feel any better. Merle, who had known for his whole life that he was a falcon, tried to comfort me, but he just didn’t understand that I was an anomaly: a girl growing up in the Grove of Dreamers who wanted nothing more than to be fully human. I didn’t care about raising my family to higher social positions. I was young and naïve, and I had no need for social positions.

I rarely transformed after that moment. Most of the humans in the Court transformed at least once a day, even the ones that claimed to dislike shifting. However, I did it about once a week, usually so I could go swimming in the Grove’s pool. I never transformed just to show off my beauty, which became unparalleled among the humans.

Until I was almost thirteen, my best friends were Merle, Crow, and my cousin Abner. We were the Four Heirs: the swan, the falcon, the crow, and the hawk. We put up with my grandfather’s weekly coaching on how to be the best ruler possible. The number-one goal of the King of the Birds, he told us frequently, was to find the group of magical conduits called Homeroom #102. He had mentioned a sort of prophecy, and that these people came from the future. Somehow, this duty was shrugged aside and labeled as unimportant. What he expected was for us to fight amongst ourselves for the title of future king. We did nothing of the sort. The four of us were friends. Together we lamented over the difficulty of sword training, laughed at my great-uncle Eaglet’s jokes, and even slept at each other’s houses very frequently. They knew all about Lekrin culture, and I learned what it meant to have friends.

When we grew older, my grandmother fixed her transporting device that had broken before I was born. To my grandfather, this meant a new opportunity to find Homeroom #102. To us, it meant that we could all go on frequent trips to the human world. It took us some months to get used to the customs of the human world, but after that, we visited almost every day. Merle and Crow enjoyed urban scenes, while Abner and I preferred to go to the countryside. Often, we would all go as a foursome to places like Dublin, where we would all be satisfied. Merle was good at finding odd jobs that needed to be done, and so he would earn money for all of us to spend. We would also go to curio shops and sell little trinkets from the Grove: small silver coins, butterfly wing collections, and other things like that. We had eventually built up a small stash of dollars, euros, and pounds that we spent whenever we were all free. By the time we were all fifteen, each of us had gone on at least one date with an Earth person (Abner, who tended to be popular, had been on four before my fifteenth birthday). For us, life was a never-ending party.

Until the mercenary raid, that is.

There had been a dispute between my grandfather and another old mercenary troop that had once fought against the Avion Mercenaries. The leader of the other mercenary troop had discovered the Grove of Dreamers, and there had been a battle. The Four Heirs had been trained by the King of Birds himself, and so the five of us had been the vanguard. One of them had gotten past Merle. I had watched as Merle had been stabbed in the stomach by an advancing swordsman. He had died an honorable death. But then, a bit over two days later, he had woken up as if from a long sleep. He had not been buried, but his burial shroud had been over him. I had been crying in his vault when I had heard a noise, and then I had realized that he wasn’t dead. I had greeted him with a hug, but he had ignored me and said, "I must talk to our king. Many events have transpired." Since that moment, he had been very antisocial and secluded. Only once did I try to talk to him about it, but all he had said was “You can never understand the suffering that occurs there.” He also spoke to me about a girl named Mia that he had befriended, and how she was one of the members of Homeroom 102. Death had changed Merle. He became more sullen and lazy, and he refused to take any trips to Earth, not even to Seattle, where Mia was from. This had confused me. I had thought that his number-one wish was to see her. However, when I asked him about it, he replied, “It’ll never be the same between us. Never.”

"You idiot!" I had screamed at him in frustration. "What if you never see her again?! If you refuse to go, then I will go in your place!"

"Don't you dare!" he had yelled back. "Mia has enough on her plate without unexpected visits from... shifter mages!"

He used this term because he knew that it angered me. As a half-Lekrin, I had inherited a strong hatred for mages, and I detested being labeled as one. I had only ever met a few mages that I liked, and I considered my friends and family as "half-birds". I could not argue with him further, so I ran out of his bedroom, crying bitterly, thinking only of the amazing times that we had so recently spent together, and how they were just gone.

A month later, winter had hit the Grove, and it had hit us hard. Temperatures became so cold that nobody wanted to go outside at all. I saw very little of Abner and Crow. I was afraid to shift, because I was not able to make sound when I was a swan, and I was scared that my feathers would blend in with the snow, and I would freeze. Although the Court nobles hated seeing my friends and I show any sign that we had been to Earth, they became jealous when Abner, Crow and I began wearing thick down parkas everywhere we went. Merle was never outside, and I saw very little of him. My family wanted me to migrate south for the first time in history, but I told them that I would not. The south of Étoile was where my father had lived, and I would not go to his home. Although his land was rightfully mine, I refused to visit because of everything that he had done to torture my mother.

In the middle of winter, the Four Heirs received frightening news on the coldest night of the year. My grandfather, the King of the Birds, was dying from a bird disease from the North. All of us (yes, even Merle) arrived in the royal bedchamber as he was taking his last breaths. He asked the four of us who was best suited for the throne. Merle shrugged and took a step away from the dying man. Death was such a touchy subject for him. Abner told him that he did not feel that he was ready for such pressure. I told him to name Crow as the next king, and that I would take the role of crown princess. He did as we had suggested, and he died ten minutes later.

"Wait," Merle had said. "Does anyone have a sprig of lavender?"

This had shocked everyone in the room, because it had been the most that we had heard Merle speak for weeks.

"If a person is holding lavender once they die, then it keeps their soul safe from corruption after death," Merle explained. "These are troubled times in the magic world. I fear that our late Bird King's spirit may be put to use for evil purposes."

Nobody asked how he had known this, but he had taken his words to be true, and so we buried the late Jencaiah Hawkins with a sprig of lavender in one hand and his mercenary sword in the other.

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