Perhaps I passed from my human form in my sleep, ripped out of my vessel by some manner of gas leak or explosion. Perhaps jokes I myself had partaken in had retroactively became foreshadowing as a truck turned my body into a cloud of viscera, leaving no trace of my now discarded body. Maybe I had been knifed or shot, maybe I tripped and snapped my neck or busted my head open, maybe some disease ran through my body silently and made quick work of my organs- whether conscious or asleep, whether it had been peaceful or bloody, whether it had been an inevitability or avoidable, on this night the human me died, unaware, and the Changeling me was born, in a quite literal sense.
I found myself entombed in green, filled with a newfound instinct to move a body currently unfamiliar to the conscious me, a body that some physical part of me now understood as my own, not in thoughts I could cling to but in automated action. I kicked my feet- hooves, now, and more numerous than I last recalled- out, breaking through the cocoon surrounding me before I process what I was doing, before I could ask myself why I was doing this. I slipped out in a cascade of goo onto the grass below me, my mind in fragments splintering apart. The fleeting, rapidly floating away human portion of me was absolutely gobsmacked by every single physical sensation that was assaulting my new highly sensitive body, while some animal impulse forced itself to the forefront of my mind, heedless of any confusion and focused on my continued fresh survival. This was my body, and much like any equine I had known in my life as a homo sapien, I was ready to stand and walk moments after "birth", which my mind distantly decided this must have been. It was some sort of sloppy wet beginning- if that wasn't birth, what was? I flexed my hooves, investigating the strange appendages and how comfortable I felt within them, my brain very slowly catching up with my already active form.
I was stark black where the green goo was slipping off of whatever hard material I was made of. I tapped what would have been my wrist if I were human to test the material, and my aim, for that matter, momentarily enamored by how I could well hold myself up on just my hind legs while manipulating my front hooves into the air, listening to the little 'ting, ting' of something thin and brittle. I was strong enough to be walking around on four legs, but not as sturdy as I imagined an equine ought to be- I felt a bit vulnerable, like a good healthy smack might make me splatter instead of thud- a rather upsetting mental image to procure. I was decidedly bug-like in nature, I surmised, further analyzing the holes that dotted my limbs which no other organic creature would likely have, leaving me with no room inside these limbs to have bones. That taxonomy would also explain why my birth left me with no mother. I checked back at the location of my emergence just to ensure I had not missed any creature who might have brought me into this world, and sure enough, there was only a thin green husk hanging from a tree, cracked open and leaking some remnants of green ooze. I was standing in a puddle of it, I only realized after setting my hoof back down, and drew it back up in momentary decidedly human disgust. The split in my mind deepened- how was I to be disgusted from what was only natural? In such a strange situation, I could not partake in the luxury of disgust and wariness. I had to investigate, I had to get a grip on what I had found myself lost in.
I sniffed my hoof, startled by some sort of... sensation it exuded. It was something like a smell, in the sense that an organ parsed some sort of stimuli it radiated, and it was very reminiscent of fragrance in how floaty it was, how it settled into the brain as pleasant, but I figured it could not literally be a smell, I could not connect it to anything I had formerly taken a whiff of. It was simply something extra, a sixth sense employed to tell me that this might be delicious. I nearly unconsciously clocked that I was not hungry- I felt much more in tune with the exactness of how full my stomach was and how energized my body was, reflecting that, compared to my former existence quantifying myself only as 'hungry' or 'full'- but I still felt the need to lick my hoof, experimentally at first, to confirm my suspicions.
Much like how interpreting the "feeling" of this substance was past smell, consuming it was past taste. I was once more at a loss for words on how to connect the experience of lapping at it to anything I had in the past ingested. It barely pinged anything within my mouth, but deep in my core I felt immense pleasure and a yawning desire for more, something like an artificial zing of serotonin. The human portion of me was pushed further and further from my mind and I leaned down and began taking in mouthfuls of the unfortunately scant semi-liquid. While a human would never stoop so low as to lick at dirty grass, I found myself uncaring given the scenario. There was no one here to judge me, as far as I knew, and any thought of sickness that I might pick up from the ground was thrown out the window given how unfamiliar my new form was. Hell, I was some sort of equine, as far as I could tell from context clues, despite the coloration and bug-like nature, so snuffling around in the grass was expected of me. In moments the grass was pristine, licked clean of any strange green slime. The only remnant of my birth was me and the cocoon... I considered it for a moment before leaning in, sniffing it to ensure it had the same "sense" that the goo did, then took a bite after I had confirmed that was the case. The "taste" was a bit less potent, thick with some sort of "filler"- I imagined it must be like what eating wood would be like, if I had to guess, though the impossibility of connecting these sensations were not lost on me.
Once I had finished my first meal, I took the time to actually lock in and focus on my surroundings. I was under some sort of large tree, and as far as I could tell, I was within a thick, dark forest. It was a bright sunny day despite the canopy above blocking some of the light, allowing me to see my surroundings well despite the pockets of darkness surrounding me where the layers of leaves fully obfuscated the sky. There were some bright green orbs exuding, vaguely, the "smell" I so hungered for, and the longer I considered them, the hungrier I felt; however, they were too high for me to consider grabbing. Actually, the silliest thought floated into my mind; couldn't I fly up and get them? My head whipped around to my back, expecting in my conscious mind to see a smooth back, but just barely in vision were two thin, transparent, hole filled wings. I really shouldn't be so surprised by how increasingly strange my body had become. I flapped them experimentally, actively pushing away my human thoughts about how hole-y wings could not lift my form no matter my lack of bones, yet when I kicked them into gear, I found myself flittering upwards with a buzz. The rapturous wonder of first flight ripped through me, and I found myself smiling, feeling so strange with my new long mouth, with my new sharp teeth. Still, somehow, it felt only natural- of course I could fly like this. I ascended to the level of the orbs, reaching out before stopping dead in my tracks. I felt some sort of valley of dread make itself known at the thought of scooping these things off their branches, regardless of how much I consciously wanted to consume them. Unsettled by this instinctual warning, I let myself float downwards back to Earth (if I could call it that!), pawing at the ground beneath me almost sheepishly.
Aside from eat, what was I supposed to be doing? Eating seemed like the only thing that made sense, though some part of me understood now what I could not eat. The still lingering human part of me wondered if there were others like me out there, and if I ought to try and find them. Perhaps then I could explain my ordeal to them- if I could still speak, if I could automatically understand them!- and they would help me, or at least set me on some sort of path. The part of me that instinctively understood what was happening, what I was, was further unsettled by the thought. Some distant, tiny part of me knew I could not be seen, that the populace of this land would not help me, though I could not argue with this train of thought given the current lack of evidence. I settled, then, on digging a small me-sized divet into the dirt in front of this tree and curling up within it. I would just wait. If someone found me, that would inform my next decisions, but first I must be found, and all I could do until then was submit to unconsciousness uneasily.