CHAPTER ONE: I get Kidnapped by a Giant Chicken

"Boy, oh boy, what a day."

Cold wind screamed in my ears and slapped my cheeks raw. I let out the most convincing shriek my nine-year-old lungs could manage, which was fairly impressive, all things considered. Terrified child. Absolutely. That was the performance.

The talons clamped around my midsection were less of a performance.

Picture this: a beautiful afternoon, sun lounging in the eastern sky, clouds drifting pleasantly overhead. Now add a bird the size of a passenger plane carrying a nine-year-old boy in its talons like a bag of overpriced flour, ten thousand feet above the ground. That's me. That's my situation. I planned it.

Allow me to explain before you have me committed.

My name is Michael Ansah. Travelling hero, monster hunter, warrior, magic problem solver, vigilante, herbalist — I'll stop there before I start lying. Call me Mike. I am definitely not nine years old. I won't tell you my real age, but I'm old enough to drive, drink, and vote, and old enough to know better than to do what I'm currently doing. And make significantly better decisions than the one that got me here. 

Emphasis on 'significantly better'. This one was not my finest hour.

Which brings us to the talons.

For the past several months, children had been vanishing across the eastern province of Lionheart Kingdom. No traces. No witnesses. No evidence. It started quietly — kids straying from home to play and never coming back. Then it got strange: children disappearing mid-errand, mid-walk to school, mid-game in broad daylight, all while screaming. Over fifty of them, gone. The King sent me to find out why.

Three days of tracking magical signatures at every disappearance site later, I had my answer: invisible birds. Enormous ones. Rocs, to be specific, veiled by powerful magic so complete they left no feathers, no droppings, not a single disturbed blade of grass. Whoever was behind this was clever.

They just didn't account for someone cleverer.

Here's the thing about the Roc veil: it was designed to hide them from adults. For children, they were perfectly visible — which meant the moment a Roc made contact, the child could see exactly what had taken them. Deliberate, probably. Terrifying children is presumably part of the exercise. Presumably for maximum psychological damage, because whoever designed this operation had opinions about children's mental health that i found deeply objectionable. 

So I did something clever. Or stupid. The evidence is still pending.

I brewed a transformation potion — three days of work, not easy, don't ask, and certainly do not attempt at home — reverted myself to age nine, walked into an empty field, and waited. Simple enough. The plan from there: get taken, locate wherever the children were being held, learn what i could about the enemy, then revert to my adult self and dismantle whatever nightmare operation I'd infiltrated. Clean. Efficient. The kind of plan that writes itself.

The Roc found me within the hour.

Now I'm here, dangling ten thousand feet above a mountain range whose peaks look like pins from this altitude, and the only complaint I can lodge is that the talons could stand to loosen up. Whose fault is that? Mine entirely. Any regrets? Absolutely not.

"Hey, KFC, what's up? You mind loosening the grip? You're squeezing the life out of me."

I craned my neck to get a proper look at my captor. It resembled a cross between a crow and an eagle, with a long metallic beak that caught the light like polished silver. Its feathers were rough and shiny and — I'm not making this up — reeked of vodka and palm wine. Someone's been having a very different kind of morning.

The Roc bent its massive head to look at me. Bloodshot eyes fixed on me like searchlights. Not glowing — just reddened with inflamed capillaries streaked across the sclera like lightning. The eyes of someone who has been smoking something inadvisable for approximately two hundred years.

It screeched at me, sending a gust of fish, cigarette smoke, and vodka directly into my face.

My eyes stung. My nose filed a formal complaint and a formal letter of resignation. 

The Roc screeched again — shut your mouth and face forward — and resumed its flight without loosening the grip. I filed the talon complaint under problems to revisit later and did make the mistake of looking down.

We flew for four hours. No in-flight meal. Worst airline I've ever used and i once took a cargo ship steered by a blind sea-witch who navigated by smell. 

My stomach made its feelings known around hour three. Loudly. Then, as if in solidarity, the Roc's stomach growled back — a genuine thunderclap of a sound — and for one deeply undignified moment, we were two hungry creatures at ten thousand feet, sharing a problem.

"KFC, how about a lunch break?"

The Roc cawed — weakly, the bravado of a kidnapper significantly deflated by hunger — and veered left, banking toward what looked like a valley studded with pale stones. As we descended, I noticed the stones moving.

Not stones. Diamonds. Raw, uncut, scattered across the valley floor like gravel, and worth more per square foot than most kingdoms.

And winding between them, fat and lazy and enormous, where snakes.

Every species I could name was down there — boas, pythons, cobras, rattlesnakes, anacondas, and several I was fairly certain science hadn't gotten around to documenting yet— all winding lazily between the diamonds as if this were a perfectly ordinary place to spend an afternoon. All of them lounging in a diamond valley like they owned the place. Which, to be fair, they probably did. 

KFC's beak dropped open and out came an excited series of caws. A string of slobber caught the wind and disappeared into clouds below.

I had been brought to a Roc's personal restaurant. Table for one, Bring your Own Cobra.

The Roc touched down on the rim of a massive nest perched atop a hill, gripped the edge with one talon, and — with surprising gentleness — lowered me onto the floor below.

"Such a gentleman. Truly. The kidnapping was a bit much, but the landing? Five stars. Thank you."

I hit the woven twigs, kissed the ground, and would have hugged it if it didn't smell so strongly of mint and roses which made zero sense. The nest walls rose seventeen feet on every side. Intricate, deliberate, built by someone who clearly had no intention of making it easy for small boys to leave. The Roc spread his wings — blasting me with a wall of air that knocked me flat — and was gone.

"Hey! What about me?!"

The valley answered with the distant sounds of a very large bird looking for lunch.

I sat up, dusted myself, assessed the nest, and resisted every instinct telling me to scale the wall and run. You're on a mission. Then i sat down in my nest, in my nine-year-old body, in the middle of a diamond valley full of snakes and waited. 

He was back within the hour, landing on the rim with one talon and dropping something at my feet.

A basket — actual woven basket from God knows where — containing bananas, apples, pineapples, and avocadoes, arranged with a care that made absolutely no sense coming from a giant bird of prey. The fruits seemed to scream at me, Yes eat us please. 

The Roc watched me with those bloodshot eyes, beak slightly open as if to say Where's my thank you?

I looked at the basket. I looked at the Roc. Then I looked back at the basket. 

"Did you," I asked slowly, "just bring me a fruit basket?"

Right. So my kidnapper was also, apparently, a host.

The gesture hit somewhere I wasn't expecting. I was touched. Underneath the kidnapping and the vodka breath and the fish smell, there was something almost — the word I kept rejecting was sad. This wasn't a creature acting on its own agenda. A creature acting on someone else's. Something being used by someone. Something that brought stolen children fruit baskets and waited to be thanked, because this was the closest thing it had to a choice. No one ever accused me ofbeing rude so I said, "Thank you, KFC. That's very thoughtful." 

KFC cawed a bit louder,made a few quick flaps with his wings and opened his beak in a wide grin. He flapped his wingslightly and rose into the air and left again, this time definitely to eatlunch.

I set that thought aside and did what any reasonable person does with unexpected food from a morally ambiguous source: I checked it for poison.

I extended my palm toward the basket, closed my eyes, and pulled a thread of psychic energy from somewhere deep and quiet within my mind. This particular ability i have — I call it Minds-eye — works like developing a photograph in reverse. Project the energy at an object and an image forms in your mind: the negative of a photograph, white and black only. Colors in that negative mean something's been added that shouldn't be there. Toxins, drugs, active spells. They show up bright and wrong against the white. The kind of thing that really ruins a perfectly good avocado. Minds-eye has saved my life mor times than i can count.

The basket's image came back clean. Both times I checked. KFC had not poisoned my fruits. 

I ate the avocado first, because I have standards.

Suddenly, a loud screechbroke the silence, followed by a louder shrill hiss. 

KFC came back from the valley looking extremely confident about the enormous cobra in his beak.

This confidence was, in retrospect, premature.

He rose into view beside the nest with the cobra coiled in his beak, the snake still writhing, and for a moment it looked fine. Normal apex predator activity. Under control.

Then the cobra struck.

It hit the Roc's neck with the speed of something that had been waiting patiently inside a giant bird's beak for exactly the right moment, which was honestly impressive planning for a snake.

 KFC yelped — a sound I didn't know a bird his size could make. He lost his balance entirely, and crashed to the ground with the full weight and seismic impact of a small building that's decided it's done being a building.

The earth shook. A column of dirt and dust erupted outward. The nest relocated itself several meters to the left, with me in it. I hit the floor hard, the back of my skull bouncing once against the twigs, and the world went white at the edges and then went away. I was knocked unconscious.

I have a wake-up call.

This sounds more pleasant than it is. The logic is sound: in my line of work, being knocked unconscious in the middle of battle or in any situation can kill you. So years ago, I worked with a psychic ally to wire an emergency reflex into my mind — something that forces me awake within a minute of losing consciousness, regardless of cause. Drugs, blows to the head, magical sleep. It catches all of them. Nothing could knock me out for long.

The price is that the trigger for the reflex has to be scary enough to work. Scary enough to wake you up screaming in terror. Worst alarm clock ever. And the only thing scary enough to yank me back from unconsciousness, was a memory I'd been carrying since before I became any of the things I listed at the beginning.

So the moment my eyes closed, the memory appeared in my mind. It all came back to me.

I was back in the swamp. And i was an actual nine year old.

Dark fog in every direction, moonlight on the water, something vast moving in it. A pair of pale reddish glow of two eyes were hovering above the surface in the fog, fixed on me. I couldn't move, a chill went down my spine, my heart hammered against my chest and tears rolled down my cheeks. Swamp water to my knees, cold and thick and smelling of rot. The eyes came forward through the fog and the thing that owned them stepped into the moonlight: ten feet of lime-green muscle, the upper body of a man built for war, fish scales shining along his arms, the lower half a crocodile's. It grinned at me with a mouth full of shark teeth.

So you're the new sacrifice. You're scrawny. But you'll have to do, It said in multiple voices.

It lunged at me.

I screamed for my mother at a volume I had not achieved since actual childhood and woke up on the ground. The nest had been blown away from me and laid several feet away.

My skull ached. My vision sparkled. For a moment — just a moment — the fear from the memory sat in my chest like something real, and I had to remind myself what I was and when that was and that the thing in the swamp was gone a very long time ago. This was all from a time long gone; when i was younger and weaker.

I slapped myself hard across the face to snap out of the fear, got up and assessed thesituation around me.

Move.

KFC was was in a tough tussle withthe cobra; he was bitten all over his body but he didn't seem to beaffected by the venom. However, he was losing the fight. 

The cobra had found its way around KFC's neck, thick coils locked in tight, and was squeezing with the patient, methodical commitment of something that had done this professionally before. The Roc's eyes were going pale at the edges, his beak opening and closing around sounds that were getting smaller and more desperate by the second. The cobra looked comfortable, like it had done this before and had a good feeling about how this would end.

The pity came back, uninvited. Why should I feel pity fora creature guilty of aiding and abetting kidnapping? 

He'd brought me fruit. He'd carried me gently. Whatever he was doing here, I didn't think it was by choice. He was probably forced to do someone's else's bidding.

Also, my plan ended without him. I needed to save him.

Saving a Roc with a nine-year-old's body isn't usually a good idea. I went through so many ways I could help him. Usually fighting a giant creature as an adult went fairly well for me, but that's obviously not an option. I did bring a magic weapon, but I only wanted to use it for an emergency and when I would return to being an adult. But since that can't happen now, that's also not an option.

 Shocking news: I can't switch between adult and child form whenever I wish; the potion will let me stay as a child for just 2 days.

 Mind control is the most demanding application of psychic magic that exists.. The headaches afterwards last for hours and feel like your brain is trying to leave through your eye sockets. The nosebleeds can be spectacular. But it's faster than anything else, and with animals, the resistance is lower. But it still required concentration, proximity, and the specific kind of willpower that comes from having no better ideas. 

I needed to get within ten feet.

I crept low across the ground, keeping to the snake's blind side. When I was close enough, I fixed my eyes on the cobra's head and went to work — pulling psychic energy from somewhere deep, directing it outward, pushing it across the gap and into the serpent's mind.

My vision blanked.

When it returned, I was looking at the Roc's face from below, close and enormous, screeching and thrashing. Strange cold adrenaline moved through me — not my adrenaline, but rather the cobra's — along with a bright spike of fear and the total animal conviction that survival was the only idea that had ever existed. I looked down and saw scales where the rest of my body should be.

Work fast.

  I immediately went to work; lest I'd spend the rest of my life crawling on my belly and hissing every two seconds orworse, suffer brain damage. Yeah, I forgot to mention – the longer you spendinside the mind of another lifeform, the more dangerous and harder it becomesfor you to leave safely or return back to your own body at all. 

I uncoiled. The cobra's body wasn't enthusiastic about this plan but it cooperated in the way that minds under psychic control always cooperate, and I steered it back and away from the fight. Through slit pupils I watched KFC collapse sideways, gasping, pupils blown wide, and begin to recover and tried to remember how lungs worked. Not far off, my own body lay on the sandy ground, eyes open and blank, pupils completely absent.

I was also drooling, not a usual side effect of mind control. Ignominious. Absolute undignified. Truly a horrible sight,I've got sand all over my body and in my perfect dark hair! Yes, trulyhorrendous! 

KFC wasn't suffering from any effects of the cobra bites, perhaps he was immune to the poison naturally or his masters had made sure of it.

KFC spotted the cobra — spotted me in the cobra, which i acknowledge is a strange sentence — and his eyes went from dying to furious in under a second. I evacuated.

The return always comes with a cost. I snapped back into my own body just as the Roc's beak snapped at the cobra's neck. The world lurched. My ears rang sharply with the sound of every debt I'd ever collected at once. Nausea moved through me in a slow, deliberate wave.

"Here it comes," I said, to no one as the banging and clanging began in my head.

KFC hit the dazed cobra with everything he had, which turned out to be considerable. The fight lasted approximately four seconds. The ending was not appropriate for a general audience. I turned away before my empty stomach could voice further complaints and listened to the sounds of a very large bird settling a very personal score.

Behind me, the sounds of victory: cawing, frantic wing-flapping, the satisfied percussion of a large bird celebrating its win by kicking a headless snake in a way that communicates How does it feel? Who's the apex predator now, I could have died —

"You're welcome, KFC" i muttered.

He cawed again, louder this time, and began eating. I stared at the horizon instead, where the sea glimmered silver and the sun was starting its descent. My head ached, my ribs ached, i had sand in my hair and twig fragments everywhere else and i had just spent six minutes as a cobra.

All according to plan. I was a professional. 

A professional who had just saved a giant bird from a cobra.

Using the body of a nine-year-old.

Because he felt sorry for it.

This was definitely not a terrible idea.

End of CHAPTER ONE