Prologue
Uhh...what happened? My eyelids lifted up, only for my eyes to see my blurred surroundings and drifted up to the ceiling. I cradled my head, still dizzy from the torture that I had endured a few minutes ago. Where am I? I thought.
Placing my hands beneath me, I tried to sit up when I found out that I couldn't for some reason. And that wasn't the only weird thing I noticed. "Is it getting hot in here?" I muttered, barely hearing my voice over the roaring noise that seemed to be everywhere.
I rolled over to push myself up, but when I took a first look at my hands, they seemed to be...different and had those brown things on them with white dots. Taking a closer look, I reeled back in shock. They were feathers! What's worse was that where my arms were, there were wings. I raised them up to my face, already feeling myself hyperventilating.
Oh no no no no no! Please no... I looked down at my feet were but instead, what I saw there were claws and talons.
Suddenly, the room started to become unbearably hot, and the walls then caught fire. Galvanized into action, I ran out of the room as fast as my new clawed feet could carry me...until the edge of a very short branch. "Ahhh!" I cried, stopping myself at the edge of the branch. Looking down, it was then that I realized that I was way high up above the ground, and it was burning everywhere. Flames were covering everything in sight and plumes of black smoke were rising into the air. Oh God no, I cried silently.
Stepping back in fear for my life, I turned around to see that the 'room' I was previously in was a hole in a tree that was on fire as well. Flames had already covered the room and was rising up the trunk and also creeping up the branch. Soon, I knew, I would be caught in it as well.
"Help! Help!"I screeched as loud as I could, doing my best to not breathe in the smoke, but it was too late. The smoke had already surrounded me and were draining my strength bit by bit as I retreated to the branch's edge and fanning the fire and smoke away. "Help! Please, someone, anyone, help me!!" I shouted, hoping someone would hear me amid the roars.
It was a futile effort. As my consciousness began to fade away, I was about to fall onto the burning land below when I was lifted by my wings. Looking back wearily, it was beginning to fall over, covered in flames. One of my saviours, the one with a missing talon in one of his claws spoke to me, "Just in time too, eh." Looking up to him, I saw an owl with one of his eye in a permanent squint before hanging my head limply. As if in the distance, I heard the strange owl talking to the other, saying "We'd better take him back to the Great Tree. He needs medical attention immediately". That was all I heard before darkness enveloped me.
Yet, just before I fell unconscious, in all of the confusion and events that had happened in just mere minutes, I realized two things. The first was that for some strange and bizarre reason, I was turned into an owl and placed in a burning tree in the middle of a forest fire in the middle of a land that I know it was breathtaking for me to know that it existed. Second, the owl who had talked to me, the one with a missing talon and a squinty eye, was Ezylryb.