Turn 3 of 7

Try to speak and discover how your voice has changed

You try to say something — anything — and what comes out stops you cold. It's higher, yes, but that's not the thing that steals your breath. There's a texture to it now, a resonance that sits differently in your throat, like the sound is being shaped by new architecture before it reaches the air. You cough, startled, and the cough is softer too, less percussive. The word you'd been reaching for — "Julia," maybe, or "wait" — dissolves into a sound you don't recognize as your own. Your vocal cords have already been rewritten, and they haven't finished yet.

Julia's head snaps toward you, and for a half-second her expression is pure surprise, like she didn't expect you to try speaking so soon. Then the delight blooms across her face, bright and unguarded. "Oh my God," she whispers. "Say something else. Say my name." Riley glances up from the grimoire, her lips still moving through the incantation, but her dark eyes find yours with something that might be curiosity or might be sympathy. The spell's rhythm doesn't falter, but there's a pause in it, a held breath, as if the magic itself is listening.

You swallow. Your throat feels different when you swallow — the anatomy rearranged, the larynx smaller, settled into a new position that changes the way your own breath sounds inside your head. "Julia," you manage, and the name comes out in a voice that's warm and clear and completely unfamiliar. It doesn't crack. It doesn't stumble. It arrives fully formed, as if it's been waiting for you to find it. The sound hangs in the candlelit air between you, and you watch your sister's eyes go bright with something complicated — triumph and grief and wonder, tangled together.

"That's —" Julia starts, then stops. She presses her fingertips to her lips. Whatever she was going to say, she swallows it. When she speaks again, her voice is carefully steady. "That's really good. That's exactly right." She turns to Riley, and the motion is too quick, too deliberate, like she's hiding her face. "Keep going. Do the face next. I want to see her." The pronoun lands on you like a dropped glass, sharp and cold, and you realize it's the first time she's used it.

Riley nods and turns a page. The incantation shifts — same language, different cadence, the syllables landing like hammer strikes now, precise and deliberate. You feel the pressure concentrate in your skull, settling behind your cheekbones, your jaw, the bridge of your nose. It's not pain, exactly. It's the feeling of being clay on a wheel, and the wheel is turning. Your glasses slide down your reshaping nose, and Julia reaches into the circle without hesitation, plucks them off your face, folds them, tucks them into her back pocket. The world goes soft and blurred, but you can still see her outline, standing close, watching the magic do its work. "Almost there," she says, and her voice is very gentle. "Almost."