As it turns out, Popinjay is actually still a horse.

She is something else, now, as well, something that she had never known was possible. The bird within her is a creature more serious than she is by nature, and she feels it in the sharp watchfulness of her own gaze as it scans horizons and horses alike. The bird bleeds into her, is part of her rather than a separate entity, and the pieces only blend together more seamlessly as each day passes. She still weaves through the Taigan trees on four legs like a ghost, though, caped in black, only the bright star on her brow and dark glittering eyes catching the light that filters through the trees and the fog. The bird cannot navigate the trees, it is too large, its broad wings able to pull saplings from the earth, but not to pass between them, but she does with ease, her reactions faster than ever as she gallops between trunks and roots and fallen logs.

Poppy no longer needs to run and run simply to feel the wind on her face, she can conquer the clouds if she wants to, but she is as reckless as ever, testing the quickness of her reflexes as the bird settles into her brain and her bones. The shifting is clumsy, still, slow, but it comes more and more naturally, wings unfurling at her shoulders, talons where hooves should be, and feathers. She hadn't known they would be so much work, though, that they would need such care and preening to keep them in their best condition, and that it would be a job she was so thoroughly unsuited to in horse-shape.

When Aten's call comes, Poppy is slow to respond, unwilling to be drawn from the ridges that trace the redwood country's northeastern edge, but he is family and the loyalty that that demands pulls her away from her reckless place along the precipice. She pauses, head tilting to listen to the silence that follows Aten's call, listening for Turul's cry, for the answers of others, and then she turns abruptly, leaps from the height that she has scaled, trusting brashly in a task she has barely mastered. For a bare moment, the young bay soars easily into the air, forelegs curled neatly to her chest, the faint curls of her mane and tail streaming behind her in the breeze, and then, she plummets.

She is falling, falling, not in the sick, spinning way when she fell from the Fairy's Mountain, but giddily instead, and the rush of it brightens her eyes, draws a manic grin across her lips. Her body shifts, bone and muscle contorting, hooves split to claws held back against tail feathers kept tight and narrow, her forelegs pull up and back unnaturally, sprouting the sharp-edged feathers of her wings which bend and tuck neatly at her sides so that her dive accelerates. The tree-tops grow ever closer and she is a missile heading for them. At the last minute, the bird flares out its massive wings, throwing its great shadow over the woods. Her trajectory changes whiplash-fast and the wind left behind tosses the branches of the highest trees as she soars close enough to grab their crowns in sharp black talons.

There is no way to hide her coming in this form, she is neither silent, nor stealthy. Her wings sound like thunder and her shadow darkens the small meadow where Aten stands, the meadow she circles before coming in for a significantly more practiced landing. The air billows around those who have already arrived to the meeting, lifting leaves and dust from the ground, and if any of the others wince in memory of recent landings, Poppy does not bother to see. Her legs extend, claws wide and gripping, but when they touch the earth, they are nearly horse-sized rather than those of an enormous bird, and wings melt away to hooves that press firmly into the soft, loamy earth. She is running when she lands, fully horse once again, a run that slows to a ground-eating trot and carries her quickly to Aten who dwarfs her even now that she is nearly grown.