The Last Daughter of Bears and the First Son of Peace
A young Prince's wish to his gods inadvertently swaps his mind with that of a so-called monster; a half-bear half-woman living in the wilderness on the outskirts of his kingdom. Now these two must navigate their new surroundings, social roles, and bodies while trying to find out why they are where they are.
The Last Daughter of Bears
The Bear jerked awake, deeply aware that something was wrong. The bed beneath her was too soft to be her own, the blankets laid atop her much too heavy. As she rolled around, struggling to find an edge, more wrong sensations assaulted her. The hair on her arms didn't rub against the sheets as it should have, and her claws didn't catch on the fabric. Her ears felt strangely cold, and the growl she tried to let out was strangled, refusing to rise from her chest.
Finally finding her way out of the bed that Wasn't Hers, the Bear jumped to her feet, finding the floor beneath her cold and smooth.
The area she found herself in was elaborate and cavernous, the ceiling far above her, the floor filled with blue cloths and golden ornamentation. The bed which she had risen from stretched out behind her, easily large enough to fit herself three times over. As she tried to find a wall to put her back to, she found they were all blocked by strange furniture and adornments.
The wrongness that she was feeling persisted. Her feet were too cold, and fabric still rustled against her skin, though she had removed the sheets. She rubbed her arms, and found herself wearing something, a sort of loose shirt that fell to her knees. She tried to rip it off, grabbing both hands at the collar, but the fabric seemed even more resilient than leather.
As the Bear struggled with the garment, she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. Turning to face its source, she crouched low, once again trying and failing to growl. The sound that came out added to the wrong feeling. It sounded too high-pitched, almost childlike.
The moving thing revealed itself to be a human, and the Bear nearly stopped short. The person before her was massive for a human, several inches taller than the Bear herself. Dressed in the same blue-and-gold as the rest of the room, she had blended in until this moment.
"Your Highness, what is the trouble? Are you in pain?" The sound were strange, but familiar. The Bear went silent, trying to remember. She had heard sounds like those before, even spoken them once, though it had been a long time ago. She hesitantly tried to remember.
Those were words, and their meaning... she was being spoken to with deference, and that title, that was....
Slowly, the pieces began to put themselves together. Her alien surroundings, the size of the human before her, the pervading sense of incorrectness that accompanied her every movement.
Somehow, she was no longer in her own body. She was, according to this attendant, a human leader of some high station.
As she drew her conclusions, the Bear began to enact a plan for survival. Dredging through her memories for how to move her mouth, she spoke her first words in several years.
"Yes, I- sorry, I was confused."
The person before her sighed, seeming to smile a bit in relief. "That's quite understandable, Your Highness. Come, tell me what you feel, and we can see just what boon the gods have brought to you."
The First Son of Peace
The Prince woke slowly, nervously taking stock of the form that would define the rest of his life. He noticed that he was laying on his stomach, his head on the ground, and that his arms were sprawled, hand sticking out from under a small blanket draped over him.
He rolled onto one side, noting the hair on his new arms rubbing against his cover, and stretched his shoulders. Oh, there was power in that movement. Was this a warrior form, then? The last soldier-king had been some five generations ago, when his ancestor had been granted the strength to fend off the Western Invaders. If the Prince had been given such a form now, it could mean that bad times were ahead.
The Prince sat up, relishing the ease of the motion. Oddly, his feet found the edge of his bed much closer than he had expected. Had he grown that much? And the floor beneath his feet was rough stone, far from the polished marble he was expecting.
The Prince first knew that something was wrong when he opened his eyes. He was not in his bedroom, where he had gone to sleep the previous night. Where he was now could hardly be called a room at all, looking more like a dimly lit cave. Something like this had never been mentioned in his history lessons.
He stood up to look around, but the motion brought with it a flurry of new sensations. A pair of breasts bounced slightly with the motion, causing him to gasp. The sound that came out was deep, resonant in a way he couldn't immediately qualify. It sounded... Husky? Like it could belong to a woman or a man.
A change in sex was one of the boons he had heard about; when the gods had decided the kingdom needed a queen, his grandmother had been transformed to fit the role. Still, he hadn't expected to deal with that himself; each generation's boon was more or less unique.
As he looked down, the Prince became increasingly sure that the musculature and the breasts were not his only changes. The hair on his arms was thick, completely obscuring the skin, and only thinning out towards his torso. The torso in question was still hairy, but only as much as a hairy human's. Rolls of fat covered his gut, and looking down at them, he felt a similar roll form beneath his chin.
Continuing on to examine his hands, he found that his fingers were proportionally slightly shorter, but that each was tipped by a curved claw, maybe three inches long and coming to a sharp point. Bringing those hands to his head, he blessedly found that his face was still human in shape, and mostly hairless, but his ears were much further up his head, and also covered in what he was now sure was fur.
The prince had been turned into some sort of animal-person, and he needed to figure out why.