I expected the change to be more painful.

You hear about the agony of a body changing. A heart slowing to a stop, the blood in your veins replaced with something else, something ancient and evil. Bones and sinew cracking and reforming, ready to transform, to become something else. Pain in your jaw as teeth grow. Nerves burning and boiling around the bite, like sepsis, like a curse.

It was nothing like that. More like a hangover, really, and even that’s making it sound worse than it was. Have you ever woken up in the wrong part of your sleep cycle, interrupting a dream? Something like that—discomfort, and a moment of distress that subsides pretty quickly, leaving a lasting fog.

I was relieved, for a little bit. A painless transformation is good news. But then I started to wonder why it was so easy. It didn’t seem right. Shouldn’t I be undergoing a radical transformation? Shouldn’t that hurt?

Unless… I don’t like to think about it.

But it’s the obvious answer.

What if I didn’t have much changing to do in the first place?