The water exploded around Sorhafe’s body as she plunged through the surface. Surprisingly, where she had expected to sink into a bottomless abyss, she instead felt her face pressing into the soft mud that made up the bottom of the spring. Although the boiling surface had made the spring look quite deep, in actuality it was actually extremely shallow.
Unfortunately for Sorhafe, she didn’t have time to contemplate whether the unexpected depth of the spring was a fortunate occurrence for her or not, as she felt an immense pressure as her nose pressed into the mud below her.
Thrusting her palms into the mud, Sorhafe pushed herself up and felt her face breach the surface of the spring. Finding herself surrounded by bubbling, mooing water, she saw something very strange. At the bottom of her field of view, just out of focus, was a long object, black on both sides, with a white stripe running down the center.
Reaching up to her face, she felt her hand come in contact with an object that shouldn’t be there – stuck to the front of her head was a thick, furry wedge that seemed like some sort of weird muzzle. Even stranger still, she could feel her hands pressing against it.
Her tongue wiggled back and forth inside of her mouth, which was when she noticed just how much longer and thicker her tongue felt. Not only that, but her teeth felt different as well – while her molars were still there, all of her other teeth felt, well, like molars. Even the teeth in the front of her mouth felt wide and blunt.
“What…” she said, only to realize that her voice sounded much different than it had before. Instead of the high pitched, cute voice of a young elf, the sound that came out of her mouth was deep, lowing, and slurred – almost like what the stereotypical voice that cows often had in…
Cows?
Sorhafe’s body felt bloated as new layers of fat and muscle began to form on it. The world around her seemed to shrink a little bit as she began exponentially gaining mass and growing in the process. That feeling of bloated expansion made it evident what was happening to her – she was turning into a cow! A fat, disgusting cow!
Sorhafe’s mind began firing as she looked for a way out. To her side she saw a ramp leading back up to the entrance of the cavern, and without thinking she began thrashing her body through the water as she tried to reach the ramp.
Warm water pressed into her skin as her clothes melted away, only to be replaced by a fine coat of white and black splotched fur. She pumped her legs and more water splashed around her. She was maybe 10 yards from the ramp. She could do it!
A tugging sensation came from the area just above her butt as she felt a tail begin to snake out of her backside, rapidly growing until a thick tuft of black fur sprouted out of the end of it. More water splashed around her as she kept trudging forward, but the bloating sensation only increased as hundreds of pounds of fat began to swell out across her torso.
She was making good progress. Yard by yard, Sorhafe was advancing towards the ramp when a loud cracking rippled through her hips. That crack heralded her hips reforming to better support a quadrupedal stance at the same time as her knees reversed.
The sudden changes to her lower body, combined with the huge amount of new mass that had barreled out into her torso caused Sorhafe to lose her balance. Falling forward, she expected to come crashing down into the mud at the bottom of the spring again, but that wasn’t what happened. As she fell, Sorhafe’s arms crackled as they grew outwards, finishing her upper body’s transformation from being humanoid to being the quadrupedal forelegs of a cow.
Sorhafe felt her hands press into the mud at the bottom of the spring, but she couldn’t grip it. In fact, whereas her hands were once a rich source of detailed sensation, she instead could now only feel a dull sort of pressure signifying that her hands were pressed into something. She tried moving them, only to find that they didn’t respond, and it was then that she realized that she no longer had hands at all – she had hoofs.
Her body’s new massive stature meant that, in her four legged stance, most of her torso was above the water. Unaware that the transformation was already over, Sorhafe continued thrashing and splashing as she desperately made her way to the ramp, and what she thought was freedom.
It didn’t take much longer – a few seconds at most – until Sorhafe felt her forehooves leave the water and press down into the soft ground next to the spring. Heaving her body out of the water, Sorhafe collapsed onto her side.
Panting with exhaustion, Sorhafe’s body felt far more massive and cumbersome than it had just minutes ago. She tried to bend down or the side but found that her body just didn’t move like that anymore. The best she could do was to stretch her arms out in front of her and look down to see that they were… forelegs. Forelegs tipped with hooves.
“Nooooo!” she lowed out as though her mental unwillingness to accept her new situation would somehow make it less true. But as the rumbling voice of a cow escaped from her mouth, she was made painfully aware of just how true it was.