Alikne'ar had known nothing but solitude since it reached maturity.

Where others of its kind formed groups, stuck together, and created homes, it was alone, and lived in a tree's hollow remains, where once crows had nested. It adorned itself with the feathers left behind and remembered the days when it had similarly adorned itself with its mother's molted scales.

Its mother was gone now, and it had been alone a very long time.

Alikne'ar, in the others' eyes, was useless. It could not hunt, it did not wish to produce offspring, and it was not skilled with healing or caring for the sick and elderly. It was only dead weight.

Dead weight will always be cast away.

Alikne'ar understood this.

So it lived alone and accepted the loneliness as its penance. The days passed quietly and slowly. It ventured into the bogs and the forests and fed on berries that grew from bushes and vines. It drank from a small, cheerful rill. And it returned home to sleep.

Today was different.

Nearby, beyond the bogs and the forests, no more than half a day's journey, was a human village. Sometimes Alikne'ar settled in trees close to it and listened to the sounds of the humans. They, like its own kind, were social creatures and lived in groups. When it sat and listened to their sounds, their conversations and laughter, it could imagine what life would look like if it had been able to stay with its kind.

It had seen many human young in the village. Sometimes they strayed into the woods and it would become a fox or a raven and nudge them gently homeward. There was one child whom it had frequently helped back to the village.

The child was back.

But they hadn't come here of their own volition.

Upon the young one's forehead was a mark drawn with charcoal and lamb's blood. The humans drew this sort of mark on sacrificial offerings.

This child, like Alikne'ar, had been abandoned.

Alikne'ar took a human form. Its skin mottled, black and grey, patched with scales. In some places its body became only threads of flesh that wove into something limb-like. Its face had no features, only hollow sockets for eyes and a wound of a mouth. With these unfamiliar hands, Alikne'ar took the child in its arms and wiped the mark from their forehead.

"You will be called Lietni'en."