“Good morning, Beryl!”

I woke up to Alice’s smiling face next to me, but instantly I knew something was wrong. When did she get so big…?

As I tried standing up, my legs fell out under me, and I collapsed back under the covers. I looked down to investigate and screamed.

“No, this can’t be real! Why… Why am I a fox?!”

Instead of having two arms and legs, my four short legs were covered in pitch-black fox fur, all ending with four furry paws as my feet. Alice hadn’t gotten bigger—I had gotten smaller!

“Ara ara,” Viela said in a sultry voice. “I knew this would happen to a human who soul bonded with a foxy. Sorry to hide that from you, Beryl~.”

Wh-What? Since when did Viela say ‘ara ara?!’ Wait, what happened to the cave? And Freya—

Titania knelt down in front of me. “Yeah, I think that new look kinda suits you, Beryl!”

“Damn it, not you too!”

This can’t be happening! This… This is a nightmare!

I turned to run as fast as my new fox legs would carry me—until something squeezed hard against my sides.

“Where do you think you’re going, little foxy~?” Alice giggled.

As she lifted me up, I struggled to escape… but I struggled in vain. Her grip around my smaller fox body was just too strong.

“Wh-What are you doing?!” I shouted.

Alice hugged me against her chest, tickling my furry underside. “Foxy foxy, foxy foxy~.”

“Alice wait, no! No!”

“Beryl, you’ll always be my foxy foxy~!”

“NOOOO!”

***

A thick coat of sweat clung to my body when I woke up—for real this time. Or was it? My head was all fuzzy, like my mind was still trapped somewhere else.

Alice stirred when I tried to look down at myself. She was still sound asleep with her mouth half-open, hugging my human body… at least, as ‘human’ as my body was with that pair of fox ears and tail I felt attached to me. Then again, was I still dreaming? Wait, this wet sensation…!

Oh, that was just Alice drooling on my shoulder again.

It’s nice to be back in reality…

***

After we all finally got up and ate a light breakfast of leftover raptor meat, I returned to my ‘soul sensing meditation’ training back inside the inner cave room. Viela said that she had something she needed to take care of, leaving me to practice by myself after offering a few words of encouragement.

For some reason, it felt like she had already given up on this instead…

As I sat down crossing my legs on my bedroll, a whirlwind of worrying thoughts threatened to distract me. I tried focusing on my breathing and honing the awareness of my own soul, and yet, my wandering mind couldn’t help but wonder.

For all I knew, there was absolutely no guarantee that I could master this in the span of just a few weeks. I couldn’t give up on my other goals because of this, either! If shifting back to my original human form was out of the question, maybe I could disguise my foxy features. Yeah, my long cloak could totally hide my fluffy tail, and my fox ears just barely fit under the cloak’s hood!

On second thought… even if that worked to blend in with the capital city humans, could I keep wearing my cloak at the Academy? There was a huge risk I would be discovered eventually, one way or another!

Ugh, and I still hadn’t figured out how to control my anti-magic Divine Gift, either. That Gift… John had called it—

Oh, shit. That bastard…!

If my Gift was called Mirror of Soul, was it literally a kind of magical mirror around my soul?! Of course that would make my soul harder to sense!

Was this whole meditation effort really doomed from the start? Did Viela know that and give up because she knew this was impossible for me, and… she just needed some time to figure out how to break the bad news to me?

I fell back onto my bedroll, defeated. Maybe I was going to be stuck as a fox girl for life. At any rate, I wasn’t getting anything done while frustrated like this…

Sighing, I gathered my stuff and headed back to the cave entrance where the others were still gathered. Titania was nowhere to be found, apparently having headed out to gather more firewood for tonight. Alice was happily grooming a snow leopard cub with her hair brush. Freya stared at her with surprising calm, even smiling while she watched the young witch gently work her brush over its fur. Viela was… the fox spirit was actually kneeling down at a smaller campfire over Alice’s cauldron.

When I was about to ask what she was up to, I felt a pair of eyes watching me.

I looked down to see Freya’s other cub staring up at me, close enough that I could reach out and grab her. Her?

For whatever reason, even though I still couldn’t tell the two cubs apart by appearance… I just knew this cub’s name was Arwen. She was the same young cat-sized snow leopard I had held and carried while hiking a couple days ago.

I found myself picking Arwen up and setting her on my lap, stroking her thick coat of snowy fur. Instead of purring, Arwen kept staring intently at me. As I continued petting her, I noticed some kind of glimmer forming within her grey eyes. It was almost like she was trying to communicate with me in a way I could have never understood before. Her consciousness resonated toward me with an incoherent stream of images and emotions, all of them slowly condensing into one concept, one whimsical question that formed in my mind:

‘Fox?’

This cub, did she just…!

In that heated moment, I damn near lost it. “Oh, yeah?” I challenged, lifting Arwen up. “You want to try saying that again?!”

The cub mewed at me like she was giggling. ‘Fox! Fox!’

“You think you’re so funny, don’t you!”

Suddenly, I was painfully aware of how silent the rest of the cave had become—and how everyone else was staring at us.

“Uh, this is just… I mean…”

Freya shattered the silence when she burst out laughing. “Bahahaha! That was a good one, Arwen!”

Alice shook with excitement and crawled toward me. “B-Beryl, you can… you can talk to the kitties!?”

I set Arwen down and buried my head in my hands. “I don’t even know anymore.”

That lingering question in the back of my mind surged to the front, and I couldn’t ignore it any longer:

What’s happening to me?

“Viela, is this all pointless?” I asked. “Is ‘shifting’ and soul magic impossible for me?”

“No, I’m sure you can do it eventually,” the fox spirit answered. “But… if I’m being honest, I have no idea how long that might be.”

I knew it. “There’s another option, isn’t there? Something you didn’t want to mention to me?”

Her gaze fell to the cave floor, and she said nothing for a moment before nodding. “Yes. I didn’t want it to come to this, yet I feel responsible for your situation. So… there is one last resort.”

Viela motioned for me to approach. When I got a closer look, I saw a swirling kaleidoscope of every color imaginable bubbling inside Alice’s small cauldron.

“I carry most of the ingredients with me,” Viela said. She grabbed a ladle and started pouring the strange mixture into a bottle, waiting until it had cooled enough before lifting it. “We call this Soul Seeker Elixir. It’s an extremely potent magical brew that sends your consciousness to the astral plane. Since you have a basic awareness of your own soul now, you can take this to get the benefit of months spent meditating on soul perception.”

My heart skipped a beat. This was it: the last shortcut.

“If I drink that, I’ll be able to sense my soul and figure out how to shift?” I asked. “And how to control my Gift?”

Viela wore a somber expression, nodding again. “There’s no guarantee of course, but this is the best way I can think of to help you. You should know that this isn’t without risk. Soul Seeker Elixir effectively separates the soul from the body for a time, even though it’s brewed with enough sedatives so you won’t feel the fear of death. It’s dangerous to consume more than once a year, but even the first time isn’t entirely safe. I’ve heard of some who have taken this and… never fully made it back from the other side.”

A shiver ran down my spine. I felt Alice grabbing my hand with a worried look spread across her face.

“Beryl, you don’t have to do this!” Alice said. “We can figure this out! Even if you… stay like this for a while.”

Everything that happened in my dream this morning came flashing across my mind. That might have been just a dream—or a nightmare, really—but I wasn’t about to let anything like that happen for real.

I’m not here to be anyone’s pet! So at this point, it might as well be all or nothing!

“I’ll do it,” I said, grabbing the bottle from Viela’s hand.

I held it up to my face, staring at the shimmering liquid rainbow inside. This definitely looked more than a little suspicious, but I wasn’t about to turn back now. I started drinking the strange mixture as fast as I could without spilling any. For all its colors, the Elixir only had a slight tangy flavor with a hint of a metallic aftertaste, so it was fairly easy to chug down.

I had been kind of expecting to mentally blast off to the moon the moment I finished, yet I didn’t feel any different at first.

Alice turned to Viela. “Are you sure you didn’t make too much?” she asked. “You gave her the right amount for a human, right?”

Another shiver went down my spine when I watched Viela’s eyes widen with… with… huh?

All at once, my head swam with a thousand impossible thoughts and my bones felt as light as feathers. As every color in sight began blending together, I felt an overwhelming fatigue compel me to lay down on my bedroll.

My mind was everywhere and nowhere. I saw Viela’s face staring down at me, but her features were all a blurry mess of shifting colors. She was trying to tell me something, desperately, frantically. Except none of her words made any sense, like she was speaking a foreign language. What was she… who was she?

Who am… I?

My eyes were open, yet I was seeing something else, somewhere else. All the cloudy, shifting lights faded to darkness—and my consciousness sank deeper, and deeper, and deeper… to the other side.