20

"Okay... not today... then we'll kiss hotly..." the lake spirit said excitedly. "To strengthen our friendship... I need to know you."

His tongue quickly slid into the young man's mouth and started a crazy tango there for a couple of moments.

"What the scared expression in your eyes?" Triton grinned. "I like your scent. Now it's clear to me who you will turn into?"

"And who?"

"Well... I don't want to ruin the surprise... but you'll like your new look."

"I hope I don't become an octopus like you!" Kiri was indignant.

"Oh, what a rude person you are! Am I really so disgust you?"

"Explain better why you are harassing your friend's husband? Of course, I'm not happy with our get-together."

"Do you want to remain faithful to him? You don't know Ingris well... Perhaps now he is somewhere having fun with someone, but you don't even know... According to your human standards, he is very dissolute, it's even strange that he needed a permanent partner from the human race."

Erloki freed the young man and he, exhaling in relief, rushed to run away from triton, who threw after him with a sly grin:

"If you will be boring, come..."

Ingris did not appear in the following days, and in his unexpected loneliness, Kiri began to think that the forest spirit had played with him enough and had finally abandoned him. However, he left without saying goodbye. It became a little offensive.

Perhaps he has found another person to vent his passions and is currently busy seducing someone. It's time to find a way to return to his native village - the thought of long-awaited freedom could please him, but Kiri realized that he was no longer able to return to the human environment, too irreversible transformations began to occur to his body. 

In just a few days, his skin was covered with shiny pearlescent blue scales, his nails sharpened, turning into black claws on his hands and feet. He wanted to check what happened to his face, but the descent to the lake was fraught with a meeting with the lustful Ertaky, so the young man left the house without looking back and set off through the thickets of the forest in search of a different fate.

He had to get used to living independently in a forest full of dangers.

Having freed himself from the remnants of old decayed clothes, Kiri wove a belt covering his crotch from strips of fabric and stems of climbing plants and attached them to his hips. Due to the mutation, his body no longer needed heating, and at night, perched among the branches on the tops of the trees, he did not feel the cold.

To his delight, he noted that the creepy Gorgs creatures of the night did not notice him at all and ran past him as if he did not exist. Has he really become invisible for them? However, other peaceful, cute animals saw him and voluntarily came into contact, caressing him so that he would scratch their fur.

At first, Kiri spent a lot of time in such relaxation, until he realized that the fluffies were offering themselves as sacrifices in this way so that the newly minted forest spirit would not remain hungry. But he did not dare to do this with them and had to be content with only fatty tree grubs and nuts. Everything would have been fine, but terrible attacks of bloodlust began to torment the young man. And why did he bite Ingris then? He sank his overgrown fangs into the juicy pulp of the fruit and drank their juice, imagining that it was blood, in order to alleviate his thirst a little.

Kiri saw his new face in one quiet pool and was shocked: the huge dark blue eyes of an incomprehensible creature looked at him in the reflection. How quickly he has changed! Who would have thought? He furiously kicked the surface of the water and cried in despair, covering his face with his palms that human form would no longer return to him.

 Suspicions about his transformation into a humanoid insect were confirmed when unbearable scabies on his back forced the young man to rub himself against tree trunks for hours. Thin iridescent transparent wings, like those of a dragonfly, attached between the shoulder blades, separated from the skin of the back one morning and Kiri tried to use them, but apparently they were too small in size to flutter upward.

Because of their transparency, they seemed fragile, but the sharp branches touching them did not cause damage to the fairly strong shell of the wings.

Kiri's mood improved significantly when, a couple of days later, he managed to take off with a slight buzz over the treetops and enjoy a full flight. This means that he will be able to cover long distances to return home. He wish he knew which direction to move.

There was still a concern in his soul: why Ingris left him and doesn't even appear in his dreams. He talked so much about love and disappeared in an unknown direction. Kiri thought about this every day as he traveled towards the setting sun, stopping for the night and food in the nearby forest. In one of them he sensed the presence of some spirit, which immediately appeared before him at dusk.

Flying like him, but not an insect, a black-haired young man with expressive violet eyes and membranous bat-like wings flew out from the top branch and sat down next to him.

"I'm Riu," the creature introduced himself. "Are you looking for a mate?"