Lips Touch: Three Times

Druj magic must be spoken aloud. Most commonly it`s whispered. The magic is in the breath, and the shape of the breath as pressed by lips, tongue, and teeth into words determins the shape of magic. It is an important peculiarity that only the mouth of a Druj in human cithra is physiologically fit to shape language. Thus, a Druj can shift shape, but once shifted must trust to another to whisper him back again or risk eternity as a crow, or owl, star, fox, magpie, viper, or in the case of the Naxturu, a wolf.

Every village in the foothills of those varied mountains has its tales of Druj stalking among them. They come as crows and owls, foxes and magpies, stags whose antlers carry the moss of centuries, and wolves, huge and hunched, padding silently through the center of town. Whatever cithra they keep, their eyes are always the same, that desolate blue, and that`s how humans know them. When they come as animals, they perch on rooftops or at the market`s edge and watch in their terrible unblinking way, and the villagers go inside and bar their doors to wait until they leave. They might fright a young girl or boy by following them home, but usually in animal cithra they don`t do much more than that.
When they come for mischief, they come as humans.

Twice yearly, on the equinoxes, village elders tend to the meadows. It is only the hunched and white-haired who will go so near the forests, and for good reasons: Druj aren`t tempted by the old. So while the young wait in the safety of the villages, the old go forth and scorch the boundary meadows with firebrands. After the black grass cools, they walk across it, feeling it crunch and crackle under their soles, and they leave their tithes just under the forest`s first shadows for the Druj to come and carry away. Brendy, break, dried fruit and meat, sugar, knives, baskets of new kittens with their eyes still tight. Tales tell that the Druj don`t eat, so the humans don`t know who the food is for and they don`t ask. They simply do as their own grandparents taught them, leave the baskets and keep their eyes down, no matter how great the temptation to peer into the forest. They don`t want to see what might peer back.

Kizzy wanted to be a woman who would dive off the prow of a sailboat into the sea, who would fall back in a tangle of sheets, laughing, and who could dance a tango, lazily stroke a leopard with her bare foot, freeze an enemy`s blood with her eyes, make promises she couldn`t possibly keep, and then shift the world to keep them. She wanted to write memories and autograph them at a tiny bookshop in Rome, with a line of admirers snaking down a pink-lit alley. She wanted to make love on a balcony, ruin someone, trade in esoteric knowledge, watch strangers as cooly as a cat. She wanted to be inscrutable, have a drink named after her, a love song written for her, and a handsome adventurer`s small airplane, champagne-christened Kizzy, which would vanish one day in a windstorm in Arabia so that she would have to mount a rescue operation involving camels, and wear an indigo veil against the stinging sand, just like nomads.
Kizzy wanted.

"What, you told that girl that butterflies rape?"
"Yeah. Well, they do. Some kinds, anyway. The males will, like, wait for a female to hatch out of her chrysalis and rape her before she can even fly. Like, welcome to the world, lovely butterfly. Then, as if that`s not bad enough, they secrete this stuff into her that hardens like a plug, so she can`t mate with any other males -- though, after her first, you know, date, I don`t know why she`d want to. Then the males adapted these things on their feet for gouging out the plug, so they adapted again, and started secreting, like, a whole shell over her abdomen, like a chastity belt that can`t be gouged off. Isn`t that insane?"
"Did you make it up?" Jack Husk asked, looking a little repulsed.
"Could anyone make that up? There`s crazy shit in nature, like these spores that invade a caterpiller`s body and turn it into a vegetable, and then cannibals use it to make tattoo ink. How sci-fi is that?"

Kizzy was so busy wishing she was Sarah Ferris or Jenny Glass that she could scarcely see herself at all, and she was certainly blind to her own weird beauty: her heavy, spell-casting eyes, too wide mouth, wild hair, and hips that could be wild too, if they learned how. No one else in town looked anything like her, and if she lived to womanhood, she was the one artists would want to draw, not Sarahs and Jennys. She was the one who would some day know a dozen ways to wear a silk scarf, how to read the sky for rain and coax feral animals near, how to purr throaty love songs in Portuguese and Basque, how to lay a vampire to rest, how to light a cigar, how to light a man`s imagination on fire.
If she lived to womanhood.