Ryan’s body recoiled as the object shot out of it, causing Ryan to lurch forward until he landed on his hands and knees. Still panting, Ryan opened his eyes and felt an awareness of his surroundings begin to return.
The first thing he noticed was his hands – splayed out on the ground in front of him, they were far thinner and… daintier than he remembered, and then there were the feathers. Thin, whispy white feathers covered his fingers, growing larger and denser as they progressed further up his hand, until they formed into the thick plumage that adorned his wrists.
Ryan was still trying to figure out why his hands were covered in feathers when he heard the wizard’s voice to the side of him. “Ohhh, that looked like a big one. Was it as agonizing as it sounded?”
Still on his hands and knees, Ryan looked over towards the wizard and managed a “Bukwhat?”
“You still don’t understand what’s going on, do you?” the wizard replied, gesturing once again to the portal and the chicken girl within. Now she was on her hands and knees, with a gigantic chicken egg laying on the floor behind her. Ryan just kept looking at her, trying to piece together who she was and why the wizard was showing her to him, but he just couldn’t cobble any of what he was seeing together.
“That’s you.”
“Bu… bukk…” Ryan began to stammer in response, before managing a shrill, clucking like “whatkuk?”
“That’s a mirror.”
A mirror? The wizard was pointing at a… mirror? Still on his hands and knees, Ryan crawled towards the portal, watching as the chicken girl inside of it copied his movements. Once he got close enough that he could see the beady black of her eyes, Ryan almost didn’t want to reach out in case… in case…
Lifting an arm, Ryan reached up towards the chicken girl’s beak, all the while praying that his hand would pass through to the other side.
*Thump*
Ryan’s hopes were dashed in an instant as his feathered palm pressed into the cool glass, obscuring his view of the chicken girl’s head and, with it, came the realization that the wizard wasn’t lying. Ryan hadn’t been looking into a portal. He’d been looking into a mirror – he’d been looking at himself.
The wizard let out a brief chuckle, before adopting a much more serious tone. “I’ll bet your wondering how…”
What followed was a long explanation involving words that Ryan couldn’t comprehend and concepts that seemed far too complicated for his mind to grasp. After a few minutes of it, the wizard noticed the dull, zoned out look in Ryan’s eyes and paused.
“Oh, I suppose that’s all far too complicated for your feathered brain, and I’m sorry to say that many things will be for you, from now on. Though I should tell you that you’re lucky for that last lyric you managed to spit out. I think you probably meant for that to make me stupider, but it actually gave you back the ability to understand human speech, as well as to speak yourself. Although… from those clucks you keep making, I’m guessing that your ability to speak is at least somewhat limited.”
Brushing his pants off, the wizard seemed to take a small amount of pity on Ryan. With an aura of mercy, the wizard continued, “I suppose an easy way to put this is that I cast a mirror spell that reflected your own spell back at you. Everything that you tried to do to me was done to you and, I have to say, you did a far better job of punishing yourself than I could have done. To think, I was going to let you off as a breeding bitch… I was even going to let you keep your intelligence too!”
Ryan’s heart sank into his chest. He was a… chicken girl. No, not just a chicken girl, THE chicken girl that he’d tried to turn the wizard into. What were the lyrics he’d sung? Most of them seemed to fade into a blur, but he distinctly remembered the last words he’d said, ‘spend the rest of your life laying.’
Laying. Was that… was that really going to be his life? Laying more eggs like… like…
Ryan’s body seemed to reinvigorate himself as he stood up, before fearfully pressing his back against the wall. Taking a look towards the center of the room, Ryan saw the… the… the egg.
Ryan saw the egg that he’s just laid, and that was what truly terrified him. In every respect it looked like a normal, white chicken egg except, of course, for the size. Nearly as big as a watermelon, Ryan felt his tailfeathers shiver as he realized that, despite its size, it had somehow managed to come out of him. And even worse, more eggs, each just as big as that one, were going to keep coming out of him for the rest of his life. It was the horror that he’d intended the wizard to live, but now it was dawning on him that this was going to be his life.