Julien goes still, though he's panting, and stares up at him as if transfixed, his eyes wide-set and cartoonishly huge, his face grotesque. There's a slight vibration to be felt through his cheekbone. The way his skull connects to his first vertebrae has to change, and his head is being pushed further away as his neck grows faster and starts to curve. It has to become longer than a human spine. His neck thickens, making an elongated pear shape as feathers form and mature upwards.

"I don't want this," he says in a small voice, pleading in exactly the way he'd been trying not to before. Tears soak into the feathers blurring his hairline, into the holes where his ears had been.