AN: This is going to be a collection of stories focussed around a series of prompts; one prompt per day. Today's (yesterday's actually -cough-) prompt inspired me in a strange way... and the result is a truly twisted fic... in a very weird, weird way.
31 Days #1
pink ribbon scars that never forget
Don't Forget
emclar
She was never, ever able to forget.
Shapeshifting was like breathing to her; essential, necessary and powerful. For as long as she could remember, she had been taking the shapes of the People, living among them, celebrating their births, mourning their deaths bitterly, but she had never forgotten what it was that had made her human: the ability to see the greater picture, the ability to love like only a human can, the ability to be her.
Her wild magic tied her to the People, her essence tied her to humanity and the many, many lessons given to her by her parents; never forget yourself, you are who you are, you are a two-legger who can take the shape of a four-legger... like the crows of the Copper Isles who can take the shape of two-leggers, despite being People of the Sky.
When the spirits had come, when the dead had crashed the barrier between the realms and flooded into the bodies of the living, turning their bodies, their once pink, living bodies, into grey copies of their former glory, her wild magic had protected her... her and her mother both. Sarralyn didn't know where her mother was; she'd fled as Sarralyn had fled and they'd lost track of each other. Every now and again, Sarralyn heard through the whispers of the forest that the People had sighted her mother, always searching for the husband that had been taken from her that fateful, fateful day.
Sarralyn rubbed the grey scars that ringed her upper arms, grey amongst the pink flesh; ribbons on a cane, linking up to a marionette. They'd tried to turn her into their own puppet, dangling her limbs on marionette strings, but failed as her wild magic had driven them from her body. With a vehement cry, they'd exploded out of her and crashed into fragments of an almost-dissipated barrier.
No, she mustn't forget.