The rumor on the wind hadn't troubled her. The news of strange ones from above the sky, echoing in the crevices and murmuring in the leaves, changed nothing in the glade. The water flowed as clearly and the sun shone as brightly.
    She stood, enjoying the wind and sun, shaking her limbs and leaves in the freedom of being. Outside the glade came a sound, drawing her. Form-shifting to be a legged creature, she scampered to edge of her domain. Nibbling grasses, she waited.
    An upright-legged animal pulled from the thicket. Carrying a pawful, eating berries as it walked. Kneeling by the pool, it cupped water, drinking as if parched.
    She watched, something new to study, to be, as it — a male entity — lay back in the grass, rested, dropping fruit onto his reddened tongue.
    The stranger removed the coverings swathing his skin.Laying aside his casings, he tested the pool with a lower appendage, entering a piece at a time.
    She approached, curious of the alterations the new environment would make. The sunlight glimmered from the flesh but his form persisted unchanged. She divined the creature's mechanics.
    The structure was difficult to achieve and maintain. She — defying the urge to revert to accustomed, therefore simpler, state — became.
    The creature… The human, she had the words now, broke the surface. Wiping water from his face, he fastened oddly dark eyes upon her.
    “Look at you. I heard rumors and here you are.” He clambered from the pool, altering form slightly as he stared. “Got a name?”
    Whispering unfamiliar shapes of speech, she said, “In a name, lays a prison. Fix my form, fix my fate.”
    She recognized the smell of him, a rutting male, no different from the smaller creatures and flying types attracted to her scent.
    “Name me not.”
    The sun smiled warmly. His hands stroked new skin, making magic between and below, stopping her breath, filling her with jubilation.
    He laughed.
    “Okay. If it looks like a girl, feels like a girl, and smells like a girl — what else matters?” His mouth tasted of berries.
    Ecstasy tricked her into acceptance, assurance. He left her body only long enough to name the pool, rocks, and plants. The glade hardened and became hostile. The trees and the small creatures shunned her, now bearing labels to secure their place. Even pebbles in the earth rejected her, damaging the velvety covering of new contours.
    He altered as before, filling her again.
    “Sweet-thing,” he said, moaning, blithely christening the unnamable.
    The thing, that she wasn't, toughened like a shell. Soon, she'd have no choice but to stay. The un-thing, that was truly she, burst forth from the confinement.
    She fled on the breeze with a sigh.
    Her enchantment passed away…
    Another rumor on the wind.

The End