“Why do you have that?”

  Azalea looked at the signed pencil-sketched portrait of me and then back again. “Never mind that; does this help or not?”

  She and I sat cross-legged in the cave we’d thrown our—my—things in earlier. I’d shed my silken guise and scattered scraps of further attempts lay around the fire. I was still getting used to how I could see the entire cave and the entrance at once. It made me dizzy, but only whenever I thought about it.

  I closed all of my eyes and sighed. “Azalea, I don’t… my lips aren’t like that at all!”

  She sighed. “Really? I always thought… I asked the artist not to take any liberties!”

  “You cannot possibly think that was what I looked like! It’s not nearly boorish enough!”

  “Boorish!” She gasped. “Oh you poor thing!”

  I opened four eyes to glare at her. “Yes, and I would very much like to not have an unrealistic pencil sketch with a forged signature shoved in my face while I’m trying to visualize my body.”

  Azalea just shook her head and mumbled something I couldn’t hear. “It’s not forged, by the way.”

  “What?” I hissed, the sound low and threatening in the small cavern.

  She rolled up the picture and quickly stuffed it in a pocket. “That’s… not important right now.”

  “Oh it very much is.” I debated snatching it, but she’d stashed it deliberately in front of her injured shoulder, fresh blood already staining new bandages. “How did you get that? Have you collected my signature for anything else? Do you even know what sort of havoc you could cause? It’s no house seal, but—”

  “I slid it under an exam you were signing, then filled in the impression your pencil made.”

  “You did that without me noticing?”

  She shrugged, then rubbed at her shoulder. “Ow. And yeah, this was… the first exam you had after I’d gotten you to study with me. You were still pretty, uh…”

  “Weak,” I finished staring into the fire. “I was weak. If anything, that signature of mine you have proves I shouldn’t have been heir.”

  Azalea shook her head. “You definitely should be heir.”

  “I won’t be if I can’t figure this out.”

  She yawned, wincing. “...do you want to see the sketch again?”

  My stomach turned. “No.” After a moment, I added, “you should rest. I’ll watch and try again in the morning.”

  “You need to sleep too.” Another yawn.

  “No, I don’t—” My own yawn cut her off.

  Though it hardly sounded like a yawn: a hissing pop of fangs upon fangs as my jaws opened fully, tongue sliding far out and down well beyond where a tongue should stretch. Even the spider legs on my back twitched. Quickly as I could, I snapped my jaws back, expecting Azalea’s wide-eyed stare to turn into fear.

  Instead, she shook herself out of staring and chuckled. “Wow that’s a heck of a mouth. Like a… lamprey bug spider thing. I’ll take second watch, okay?”

  “Fine,” I lied.

  Truth be told, there wasn’t much point to taking watch. On this side of the mountain, the dangers were rare, particularly those that could kill what I was now before I woke up and ate them. Azalea, by that metric, was the only one who needed to stay wary.

  Of the mountain’s dangers, that is.

  There was always a chance that we’d be found by whoever was truly in charge of that illegal mining operation. In that case? Taking watch didn’t matter. Awake or asleep, we’d be dead in an instant.

  My instincts gave me an idea. I stood up.

  “Going out?” Azalea mumbled.

  I looked back; one of her red eyes was cracked open. Her hair was starting to fall out of its drills into a lavender mess, and she’d taken every bit of everything soft and nested into them like a pack rat.

  “I’m setting web. I’ll feel it if something’s trying to get the jump on us.”

  She mumbled something about “spider” and some words I certainly misheard.

  Pushing any thoughts about that aside, I stepped out and started setting lines of silk. Like tiny tripwires between branches, the strands were almost invisible. These weren’t the sharp kind, at least not intentionally so. No sense in killing wildlife or further injuring a half-asleep Azalea wandering out to take care of needs.

  Back at the cave, she’d fallen asleep, the sound of her steady breathing barely audible over the stream outside. I put the fire out and sat down cross legged. My spider limbs splayed out behind me, each attached to a strand. Wind, something small moving up a tree—I could sense every vibration.

  That and my own fatigue kept slipping me away from my own self-image. I also couldn’t try endlessly—each failed attempt to craft a human guise that actually matched who I was took a little more vitae than the mountain’s ambient concentration was giving me back.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Once the vibrations had faded into a background pattern, I felt myself slipping away toward sleep. Something told me I’d wake quickly if needed, so I let it take me.

  I dreamed of my room at home. Even in the mirror, my face warped into Silk’s over and over again.

  ***

  Just before dawn, I awoke to a rabbit in my silken line. Thankfully, it hadn’t started screaming, and I cut it loose without issue. It stared at the long black limb that had severed the line, shaking, black little eyes staring up at me as though I were a specter of death.

  If we’d needed food, I could have been. But I didn’t know the first thing about skinning, and we had enough left of my supplies to make it back to civilization. Only after it’d finally gathered up enough courage to scamper off, trailing a gleaming strand of my silk, did I remember that I couldn’t yet go back.

  I hissed, stopped myself, and swore, staring down at my hands. Sharp black nails seemed to suck in the light even as my porcelain-pale skin glowed in the red of early sunrise. Halfway back, I realized I’d gone barefoot.

  All this was too… comfortable. Even if my presence silenced the nearby birdsong. What’s been done to my mind?

  If I could just figure that out, I could get my old appearance back.

  Azalea was still sleeping like a log—we’d need to change her wound dressing when she woke. I stared out of the cave at the trees swaying gently in the wind and turned my focus inward. When I opened my eyes again, I was in my garden.

  The tree was larger now, but still just as ethereal. I leaned myself up against it, running hands down a simple robe of undyed silk. Beyond the garden fence, the latent vitae of the mountain loomed like twisted, ancient forest, foggy and indistinct. I relaxed my spider legs, stared up into the tree’s black-leafed canopy and tried to focus on my true self.

  Still, it slipped away. Jaw too strong, worse when I tried to put an unshaven appearance over it. Below the head, it was even worse, distorting into a jagged-shouldered board. I cursed myself for having avoided mirrors.

  Although…

  Mother and Father were not exactly privy to all the details of my body. Just my face. And if I’d achieved First Ring, it wouldn’t be uncommon for there to be changes. Androgyny wasn’t terribly uncommon among cultivators after all. All I’d need would be to flatten my chest and smooth out the waist-hip curve my transformation had given me. Perhaps widen my shoulders a touch.

  All I needed was a guise of silk for this as well, nothing so difficult as an actual transformation. That thought alone lifted some weight off my chest. This should be instinctual. Doable.

  Body first, then try to hold the face.

  Here in my Garden, I wouldn’t be expending so much vitae to try. So I tried again and again, eventually finding success when I focused on my shoulders first. Now when I looked down, I saw familiar skin, familiar hands, and a familiarly flat chest, though perhaps a bit more slender, fingers thinner.

  I stood up, stumbling against the tree when I forgot that I had eight missing limbs. The garden had no pond, no fountain, but a wave of my hand changed that, a small pool forming in a clearing. I kneeled in the dirt at its edge and stared at my face.

  The face of the demon staring back at me, aside from the eyes, and the lines on my cheek and down my chin that hinted at the monstrosity within, was… rather pretty. I had to admit as much, it was a simple observation of fact. Conventional attractiveness, of a sort. Sculpted cheekbones, a delicate nose, and a regal sort of air.

  Like a sister to how I’d always looked, just a bit other.

  For what felt like hours, I tried to get my face to shift. Unlike what the technique would create from silk, in here my form was an extension of my sense of self. Changing from an objectively more pleasing face to an objectively less pleasing face was difficult.

  Though the eyes and… mouth parts were easy. Human silk came quickly, and from there the brows were the next simplest. Turning thin, arcing lines into horizontal slabs wasn’t too hard. After that, progress slowed. Even once I’d figured out how to guide the changes, I just couldn’t get the look quite right. Too much or too little, I kept trying to tune my face.

  I was still adjusting my jawline when I felt movement.

  Immediately, my Garden fell away and I snapped eight eyes open to stare at Azalea. She was halfway out of the cave, looking back at me guiltily.

  “Sorry!” she whispered, as if that would make any difference to my already shattered concentration. “I had to pee. I tried to walk around your silk, but the strands are really hard to see. And there are so many of them!”

  I rolled my many eyes.

  “Did you set this up as a trap?” She gingerly touched a strand, and I felt the vibration in my second from lower-left leg.

  “They’re not sharp.” I watched her pluck it, then shivered from the vibration. “And they’re a detection system. Don’t do that.”

  Azalea pouted. “Fine. Since you’re up anyway, do you want to help change out my bandages? I think we’re gonna need to use your silk.”

  “Didn’t you have to pee?”

  She blinked. “Oh, yeah. I still gotta.” Her foot caught in the strand.

  Before she could fall, I leapt up and caught her. Azalea’s foot, however, still came down on the strand, pulling it and the others together and raking them across our fire’s coals.

  Immediately, the strands caught. Reflexively, I dropped Azalea and jerked back, legs pulling in on themselves. For a second, all I could see was the fire. The burning edge raced down the strands and into the underbrush, thankfully damp with morning dew.

  Azalea managed to catch herself. Now, it was her turn to offer me a hand up.

  “You alright?”

  I nodded. “Yes, just… frightened. Instincts, I think.”

  She kicked at the coals, picking one out. “They’re not even that hot, not really.”

  I grimaced—this was a problem. “My silk’s flammable, then.”

  “Looks like.”

  “I presume that includes my disguise technique.” There’s the weakness. There’s always a weakness. “Well, I suppose that’s easier to hide than a visual trait or an unpleasant smell.”

  Azalea furrowed her brow. “A what?”

  I dusted myself off and flexed my chitinous limbs. “A weakness. Demons almost always have a human form, but that form is never perfect. In my case, it means I light up like kindling.” Just to check, I fought through the lingering fear and plucked the coal from Azalea’s fingers. “Seems like it’s just my silk, thankfully.”

  She took the coal back. “Might want to keep that away from your robes, then.”

  I looked down. “That’s going to be an even worse problem. There’s got to be a way to mitigate it.”

  She shrugged and tossed the coal back into the pit, then started to kick the loose bits back inside. “Get stronger. That always seems to work, right? That’s how things work.”

  “I… perhaps.”

  “Or maybe try some elixir or a coating. If it’s clothing, there’s probably something anyway—fire techniques definitely exist and so do silk clothes and I don’t know of any stories about naked, burning fights up in the sky.”

  “...That’s one way to look at it.”

  “Sure is! Anyway, I really do need to go. Be right back!”

  She scampered off and left me to my thoughts. Unsurprisingly, I’d rather face the morning chill than get a fire going. We’d head out soon anyway, if I could just get the face right.