Limitless Evolution As a Snake

My spiral is mesmerising. It’s even more gorgeous up close, every fleck of dark red in each coil, the sickly shimmer of a snake-oil rainbow. The way it keeps spinning, faster and slower, never quite matching my heartbeat, which is currently pounding like a broken washing machine in a laundromat full of steroids.

The urge to look away gets overridden by some primal part of me that wants to see what happens next. So I just stare and stare, helplessly transfixed by my own damn skill, like a guy at a wedding who can’t stop watching the open bar even though he knows it’s going to end in regret.

It doesn’t even feel like time is passing. Just spiral, spiral, spiral, and the gentle, insidious sense that my head is filling up with insulation foam. Like someone took my brain out, sprayed it solid so it was like a bowling ball with that stuff you use for wall cracks, and put it back in upside-down. I try to look away, but the spiral pulses behind the clear scales over my eyes. I try to pull more air into my lungs, but my whole body feels packed with feathers, and now I’m panicking—why feathers?

In the background, from some infinite sub-basement of my skull, Old Mate is absolutely delighted.

[System: Oh mate, oh no, oh this is so beautiful.]

I still have control of my fangs, technically. Could bite my own tail and maybe shock myself out of it. But some traitorous snake-brain subroutine takes over and decides, with perfect cold logic, that what’s needed is not violence but full poultry response. So I start clucking.

Like, actual clucking. It sounds like a rubber chicken with a sinus infection, but it’s clearly coming from me. I try to stop, but the spiral says no. I continue to cluck louder.

Somewhere in the alley, the two elephant henchmen are deep in snake-induced hypnosis. They’ve slumped against the bricks, glassy-eyed, each softly repeating ”yessir” and ”it will be done, sir Matt” like they’re in a cult and I’m the chicken-worshipping founder.

But that’s not the main event; the real show is me, Matthew Vane, Mafia prince and current demon snake, reduced to a writhing, spinning, clucking mess on the grimy alley floor.

And Old Mate is loving every second.

[System: BAHAHAHA mate, MATE you hypnotised yourself! You actual drongo.]

He’s not wrong. I feel my coils twist into a perfect loop, tail tip flicking just beyond the reach of my own jaws. I chase it, mouth open, actually trying to catch it like an idiot ouroboros with ADHD.

My motion sensors tell me I’m compressing the dirt into a small, sad crop circle. I race myself faster and faster, hoping I’ll black out and wake up in a different city.

”Bwork,” I cluck. That’s the only word my brain will let me have.

”Bwork bwork”, I cluck again, gaining speed, spinning so fast that the world becomes a melting watercolour around me.

The taste of alley air is pure humiliation. The heat pits in my snout start picking up faint signatures from above, mostly because the braking friction is turning me into a space heater.

A distant voice vibrates through my jawbone—maybe one of the elephants, maybe god, saying ”is he okay?”—and then fades out again.

Old Mate spams laughing emojis in my vision.

[System: I’ve seen glitches, mate. I’ve seen bugs that’d make god cry into his energy drink. Never seen a snake self-hypnotise as poultry. This is going in the bloody hall of fame. I worked out how to send you emojis; do you like it?]

There’s no escape from this. The spiral is inside me now. It’s the only thing in my head. I’m a snake, but I’m also a chicken. Is this a new evolution path that Old Mate didn’t tell me about?

Somewhere in the haze, the two elephants begin a slow, zombie shuffle toward the alley entrance. They obey the last command perfectly: Report back to my uncles, and beat them close to death, then forget everything that happened. I’d be proud of myself, but I’m too busy pecking at my own tail and making new sounds no reptile should ever make.

Every time I try to resist, the spiral gets brighter. Every time I try to look away, it stretches itself across my whole vision. My tongue flicks out, but instead of analysing the air, it just droops, like a sad old chihuahua.

Eventually, the five-minute debuff runs out. My coils slacken, my tail flops, and I collapse in a heap, a thin trail of venom leaking from my fangs as I twitch.

But at last I’m not actively clucking. I lie on the cold, damp ground and wait for the trance to wear off. The moment it does, all the embarrassment, the shame, the physical sensation of having spun myself into a knot returns at once like waking up from anesthesia with an instant hangover and the world’s worst headache.

I don’t even want to look.

But I have to, because there’s someone else in this alley now, and my jawbone just picked up the sharp click of shoes on concrete that definitely don’t belong to an elephant.

I lift my head an inch.

There’s a girl standing over by the two elephant bodies, and she’s looking down at them with this horrified expression like she just found a dead bird on her porch.

She’s got wings. Actual wings, folded up behind her shoulders, pale pink and layered like sakura petals caught mid-fall. A harpy, maybe, except no harpy I’ve ever imagined looked like this.

Blonde hair, long and wavy, catching the one working streetlight like she’s got her own lighting crew. Skin so smooth it doesn’t look real, like she’s never once had a bad day or a sunburn in her life.

Honestly, she looks like she got cloned straight out of a magazine; some Sidney Sweenei fever dream wandered into the wrong zip code.