There is more strength in you than you realize.

Above the forest, the sky spun. The canopy warped above the forest. The world seemed to move at an amazing speed, like a child who opened her eyes on a merry-go-round... Jupiter was that child.

The world spun around her and she did not hear herself cry out, feel herself crumble to the flowers she had just been dancing in. The graceful twirling and dancing turned to a sickening ride that she just wanted off of. Then again, Jupiter knew what was happening and she wanted it more than ever.

The fawn wanted nothing but to retch, her body trying to break free of itself like a person's brain if they were upside-down for too long. A million butterflies, birds, worms crawling around in her body. Under her skin they moved, trying to break her at the joints, at the seams. It ached, it burned, it tore, and the fawn screamed a silent scream.

Her body convulsed.

The fawn was going through not only a change of body, but of mind. Her mind was reeling, trying to understand and trying to adapt as her vision blackened, golden specks became the only idea of how to tell shape from a tar-colored world. Her brain had to re-wire.... and her body went lax.

No breath for seconds, minutes. The fawn appeared to have died, the coat-coloring spreading over her body like rot, as if she would disappear in the black-purple smoke that signified death among her fellow deer. But... as the last hair turned color, a heart-wrenching scream of terror burned through the body of the animal, and she grew in that breath.

Jupiter grew, sprouting horns and long hair, body stretching to accommodate and bleeding yet wounds closed at the same time.

This was the price of her gift.

Jupiter finally sighed. It was over. It. Was. Over. The fawn opened her eyes, now opaque, and saw the world as she would forever on: A million names not yet given, pollen floating on the air and sticking to the world. Gold and black like a bumble-bee. Little lights in the darkness. She saw a world of names, a world of words, a world of potential children and potential life... an eternal spring beneath a new moon, an eternal galaxy surrounding her.

The doe called out no words in to the darkness, but wondered if anyone was there to witness the transformation.


The doe's hair pooled around her legs, down her sides like a waterfall of copper. She seemed exhausted and confused, ears pricked as if held taut by string. Elegant, twisting horns curled up from thick bases just above the bases of her ears, above a forehead pocked with two blue spots below. Yellow smears of color blanket her eyes, which are foggy and green like a marsh mist, oval pupils barely visible beneath. And beneath them lay a mess of golden freckles fading in and out of a deep raven-blue background. Lips lay below those freckles and a velveteen nose, relaxed in to a smile despite the pain she recently endured.

As the doe sat, silent and still, she wondered: What would someone say if they saw? What would their face look like? Would they be scared?