FSE

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formerly SoFurry search engine

Iridran was trekking deeper and deeper into the thick, oddly electric darkness of the enchanted forest. He ventured onwards on his path until he could feel the magic getting stronger like static on the back of his neck. Everyone knew that in the deepest parts of the Fae Forest existed some of the juiciest, most exotic and valuable creatures to be found in this part of the world. From majestic glowing bucks to winged does, there were many things that would be ripe for the picking for people like Iridran. If not, of course, for the fae themselves.

They really didn’t like outsiders coming into their territory, supposedly because they had some sort of special mystical connection to nature here. Iridran couldn’t care less. He’d ignored multiple warnings from the townsfolk, some even other unscrupulous hunters like himself. He’d even on occasion visited the outermost reaches of the forest on occasion mostly for the sake of reconnaissance.

This time he was determined to get some of the good stuff. It had been years since the fey had been seen and for all he knew they might not even be around anymore. Perhaps they, too, had been hunted to extinction like much of the prized game they so jealously guarded.

The poacher pushed a dark green fern aside and stepped over a knoll of dark roots, noticing that all the foliage was becoming increasingly bioluminescent. He grunted in approval at this confirmation that he was on the right track. He kicked a few more shrubs down and passed through them like a bulldozer. He held his hunting crossbow at the ready and pushed his long black hair out of his shifting eyes.

On the lookout for any desirable exotic creatures, his keen attention still didn’t save him from almost walking head-first into something big and solid. He flinched at almost headbutting the tree he hadn’t seen in the darkness. He carefully palmed it and looked up, gasping as he realised that it wasn’t a tree at all; it was a giant mushroom that rose high up into the forest canopy.

Sprouting along its sides much higher up was glowy fungal stuff that got more and more dense the higher he looked. He then noticed something intriguing; platforms lined the circumference of the stump to form a very rustic spiral staircase that led upwards along the massive fungal stalk.

He mulled it over, wondering what thrills he might just stumble upon. An old fae hideout perhaps, along with its lucrative valuables?

“Risky but…. Whatever.”

He’d already come this far, he could just as well take a quick look upstairs.

He held onto the spongy stump as he climbed upwards, careful not to fall down as he carefully put one boot above the other with each step. It could have been a very magical experience to a man that was more attuned to aesthetics than this rather tasteless and mentally drab one.

Eventually he found himself on a platform that overlooked much of the enchanted forest. He looked at it stretching out for miles, dotted with several more of these large mushrooms rising above the canopy. He smiled as he looked at the multicoloured blobs lighting up the mysterious blackness of the trees.

What bounties of nature could be plundered in all that lay there before him? If he had to guess then the local alchemist would pay quite handsomely for some samples of the local flora in addition to the fauna he was already tracking.

He turned slowly and took a look at the giant mushroom head that was now within touching distance. It formed a sort of roof around the organic platform that he was standing on. There was an opening cut right into the side of the mushroom here and it looked like part of the mushroom had been hollowed out, no doubt to serve as a refuge.

He turned the other way and-

“Woah!”

-found himself face to face with a fae. There she was, right in the flesh that apparently wasn’t so endangered or extinct after all. It most certainly was a she here before him. As he’d always expected, the female faefolk weren’t too bad on the eyes.

Light blue flesh was exposed without shame save for a basic loincloth and some decorations hanging from her gracefully sleek body. They were mostly made of beads and small shiny stones and colourful feathers that must have originated from an enchanted bird of some sort. There were patterns tattooed with luminous white along her sides. The artistic lines that flowed along the contours of her supple frame seemed to lead the eyes in all sorts of directions.

Pointy ears poked shyly out from pitch black hair that surrounded her intensely luminous eyes and fell down in long strands down to her bottom. Her face was certainly rather pretty, even if it was currently glaring angrily at a very unwelcome intruder. It seemed he had interrupted her enjoying the peace and quiet of this special place.

Iridran quickly recovered from the initial shock and started to lift his crossbow but she was quicker and pointed a finger at him that was extended with a long nail- and suddenly he couldn’t move, his body frozen in place.

The fae’s hard and angry expression faded a little into a smirk as she turned away from him, putting an extra sway into her step now that she’d caught a pest in her trap.

“Mirn ge fel te lin?” she asked him as she looked over her shoulder at the poacher.

Iridran couldn’t understand her and wouldn’t have been able to respond even if he could. The fae continued, putting a hand on her hip and turning back to face him.

“Hengt ge filke, sa.”

She gestured towards his crossbow.

“Lin te gate parn~”

With that, she stretched both of her arms out to the sides and stared at iridran intensely with a suddenly rather adversarial look. She brought up her arms slowly and almost seductively, rolling her hips in calculated motions and smoothly rotating her hands back and forth with her wrists in complex rhythms. When her arms were above her head they gradually and slowly changed course and snaked slowly through the air in different directions.

Iridran’s dark eyes darted back and forth, the only part of his body he could still move while the rest was petrified mid crossbow-lift. Her strangely erotic dance formed a mystical and strange connection form between himself and the alluring fae. Though “connection” didn’t quite feel adequate; it was more like he was an animal caught in a trap, at the mercy of his captor.

Then he felt something on his arms start to itch. He strained his eyeballs as far as they could go to see what was happening since this most certainly didn’t feel like just any normal itch.

Indeed it wasn’t.

His eyes widened when he saw that bright red, yellow and black start to cover his arms. Little things that looked like thick hairs were pushing out of his skin like needles and fanning out into proper feathers to cover his body. He tried to scream but was forced to remain silent as he felt the bones in his hands melt and reshape into wings. He was then forced to feel broad flight feathers poke the inside of his shirt as they grew out from the underside of his arms. The crossbow slipped out of his changing hands and clattered onto the mushroom platform with a solid thump.

It was his legs that started to feel uncomfortable next and not being able to see them was simultaneously a blessing and a curse. He felt what must be his toes morphing into claws and pushing against his boots and he gave the fae a pleading look with his eyes as best he could.

I’m sorry! I’ll never come back, I’ll leave you alone forever just let me go!!

He tried to scream or even just think as hard as he could in the faintest hope that she could hear him somehow and have mercy on him. However, the beautiful fae gave no indication that it had worked and she only stared back with that same intensity as always.

She seemed very much unwilling to stop whatever it was that she had planned for him and merely looked down at him with a strange look that he found hard to imagine on a human face. It was something that told him that he was beneath her, that she was absolutely delighted to be ridding him of his human form with this oddly sensual ritual. The whole situation was gritty and confusing and primal in a way that the human’s mind couldn’t quite wrap itself around.

Her dance was getting more intricate and her hands twirled in strange ways. They threaded between one another and occasionally obscured her face while her eyes were still locked to his with an intensity no human could match. It wasn’t just her arms moving; her entire body from calves to hips to shoulders were a part of her art. Everything was flowing with a mystical grace that made her seem more like a force of nature than flesh and blood.

The rumours and legends told by humans only painted a dull and bleak facsimile that did no justice to the real thing in front of him. This only reinforced the sinking feeling Iridran had when he realised that he was now at the complete mercy of this elegant yet wholly unforgiving agent of nature herself.

He could hear his body creak and felt himself start to shrink as he saw the world getting larger around him. What didn’t shrink was the nose in the centre of his vision which got larger and much more orange. The changing man would have winced if he could when his teeth, lips and nostrils fused into a beak. His pectoral muscles swelled and shifted to conform to the winged creature he was becoming instead of the human he once was. A moment later he grew small enough that his pants completely fell down and his loose-sitting shirt blanketed his frame.

His posture shifted and he was forced to lean forward with his knees pulling up to his chest and his feet lengthening upwards and lifting out of his boots. Now he was left to stand on his toes in true avian fashion. Iridran’s beak grew sharp and hooked and his vision grew unfocused for a moment before going completely dark. When it came back he could see the fae with a clarity he hadn’t been able to even imagine before.

Enchanted eyes could now reveal to him the true depth of colour in the world. His irises along with some of the colourful patterns on his red wings were faintly glowing yellow as an indication of the magical nature of his new avian flesh.

His skull flattened and the rest of his body was completely overrun with feathers and mystical patterns and runes that forever marked him as a denizen of the enchanted fae forest. He could feel something push out of the skin right above his spine as it lengthened…..and kept doing so for much longer than he’d have liked due to what it meant; that he was no longer a human man. He’d just grown a tail fan, one decorated with deep inky blacks and softly glowing yellows interleaving dark red plumage.

It had only taken a few minutes for the poacher to be reduced to a creature that was perfectly at home in the enchanted forest. He was a raptor akin to an eagle with brown black wings and blood red claws. The feathers on his chest were white and he had glowing yellow patterns all over his body. His predatory eyes open wide in shock and surprise were the only thing that hinted at his human origin.

The fae woman brought her hands together and yanked them apart- and suddenly Iridran stumbled out of the large human boots he was still standing in as he was unfrozen.

He struggled for a moment to keep his balance in his new form, flapping his wings and moving parts of him that his human mind decided shouldn’t even be there. Once he’d found equilibrium he looked up at the fae and tried to ask her why she had done this. He opened his beak but managed little more than a panicked, warbling screech. The fae laughed and said something in her strange tongue before her dance changed again.

She bent her legs and crouched down gracefully while spreading her arms out wide like wings. Iridran’s own wings involuntarily followed suit like they were held apart by invisible hands. He squawked in surprise at the loss of control of his body and halfheartedly tried to escape, still too awkward in his body to do so.

The fey crouched down further and stared straight into his soul with her intense green eyes, elegantly pushing her hands upwards as far as her wrists would allow. His wings followed suit even though the rest of his body still struggled against the movement. It felt like he was being completely exposed and puppeted like some doll with no way to stop it, no hope to resist whatever strange fae magic she was using.

She half crouched and shifted her weight from side to side like she was an eagle soaring in the wind, forcing him to mimic her motion. Then it wasn’t just his wings; she lifted up her rear and he did the same with his tail, she pushed out her chest and tilted her head to the side and then so did he.

When she started to fly in place he felt control slipping away from him more and more until he once again had almost no say in his motion. She swayed and glided, pushed and pulled and the eagle followed her as a perfect mirror image of her motion as she taught him this dance. Then she took a deep breath, and thrust her body forwards while pulling her arms back and letting out a screech.

He felt a wave of something wild and primal flow into him. It forced him backwards like he’d been physically pushed before the fae pulled back. His avian body followed her motion like he had strings attached. The sensation was terrifying yet absolutely thrilling. It was like pure animal instinct had just washed over him, making him feel untethered and free despite his current predicament.

Before he could recover, the fae started swaying her body and moving her arms like wings in the wind again. Once more she pushed forward with a snarl and that primal magic flowed into the former human, washing over his mind like a warm mental tsunami. He felt the fae magic filling him with energy and spirit and power.

She leaned back and then he pushed back toward her for the first time. The bird instinctively knew what to do; he felt it all rise up from the depths of his altered mind thanks to all the wild magic the fae woman had pumped into it. The human part of him quieted down and something clicked into place. He started bobbing his head from side to side in a challenge before letting out a sharp screech.

The fae smiled, reacting by moving her ‘wings’ in kind within this graceful dance that now had two partners. The changing magical eagle played along and shifted his body fluidly from side to side. He tilted his wings as if he were in flight himself. His tail started to move more and more like a bird of the forest and within moments he was practically an expert.

He flared his tail and leaned forwards. The fae moved back a little in response. She kept up the dance, gliding from side to side and moving her whole body to the rhythm of imagined flight. Then she rolled her shoulders, lowered her head and pushed right back into the eagle and channeled as much of the forest’s energy as possible straight into the enchanted bird with another powerful screech.

His human mind was overwhelmed. It gave one or two weak sputters and hopelessly tried to stop the fae’s onslaught. Moments later, it fully surrendered to the new eagle instincts taking over.

He was so invigorated when so much of the wild and untamed magic pushed into him that he fanned out his tail and let out a loud screech into the forest. A signal to the world of his complete conversion by the fae. The fae smiled proudly and rolled her shoulders back, folding her own ‘wings’ back against her body. The dance had concluded.

The eagle looked at its surroundings and wondered where it was. The fae held out an arm and the eagle contemplated it before it leapt up, flapped its wings and came in for a landing. It perched on her ready-held arm carefully so as not to break any skin. The fae tenderly stroked his chest, admiring her handiwork.

“You’re a pretty one, aren’t you?”

The eagle lifted its wings to thank the fae for the compliment. Without further ado, the fae pushed up her arm and the eagle leapt off to fly into the night. Its now practiced wings let it soar through the air with ease. Despite the darkness of the night, its enchanted eyes could see more than a human would during daytime.

The fae looked at the majestic bird entering nature and the broader ecosystem of the enchanted forest, a new magical critter borne from a pest. She walked over to the pile of discarded clothes before dismissively kicking the rags and the crossbow off the edge of the mushroom platform.

They fell down onto the damp forest floor with a thump where they would eventually be completely forgotten. She took one last look at the eagle swooping down into the canopy before stepping back inside her mushroom. All further thoughts of humans were swept from her mind.