Yvie looked long and hard on the skin. It was mesmerizing. She hadn't quite been able to see her own reflection when she was a snake, nor did she care to look much at her body otherwise, so the skin was quite interesting to her.

'I must be quite the beauty' she laughed as she thought about this, while caressing the white and glistening dead piece of skin she was holding in her hands.

'For now, I'll cut out a piece for a necklace' she decided, as she was quite adept at jewelry-making. As she had a lot of time for herself, and often had been locked inside with nothing else than things that would keep her fingers busy, this was one thing she had practiced.

She quickly found a silver thread she could use as base, as well as an old broach she didn't really like, but had gotten as a present at some point, never knowing what to do with it.

She sewed on a piece of snakeskin on an embroidery plate, where she did some finer details to highlight it, making it seem a bit less like dead skin as well. It wouldn't be good if her parents found out, after all. Then she clipped it on around the edges of the broach, which she modified a bit first, to better suit her neck.

After putting it all together she tried it on, admiring herself in the mirror.

'This is so pretty!' she thought proudly, puffing out her chest, as if this was her child. Having spend some time with the snake-skin, Yvie got the urge to go outside again. However, it was always harder to go out at night. For some reason it was harder to change back to a human once she was a snake, and the feeling of humanity tended to blur a bit in the moonlight.

'Oh, right… Moonlight!' Yvie got reminded, as she thought about the pros and cons of going out at this time.

'Moonlight might really change me back…' Yvie worried. The full moon was in about two days. Yvie had no intentions of actually doing what she was told, but she also couldn't disobey. Her hands were tied. She had multiple times thought about pretending that the curse was broken, but no matter how much she practiced her lie, it never sounded right.

'I also don't know enough about the curse…' Yvie thought as she pondered on what to do. The only thing Yvie had ever been told about it was that some evil people had cursed their family, and that it just happened to hit her.

Yvie hadn't been told how many others in their family had been hit by the curse, nor if there even was any. She didn't know if one of her parent's had been a snake once. She didn't know anything other than her love of being able to turn, and how natural it felt to her.

This lack of knowledge had never bothered her much before, but Yvie began to realize, that the less she knew about the world around her, the less she could do.

'If I knew about the curse, I might know how to keep it…' She thought, petting her necklace a bit, letting her fingers slip over the surface.

'If I knew why my parents hated the curse, I might be able to do something so they would like it…' Yvie continued to feel herself speculate in ways she hadn't done before, as she kept stroking the necklace.

'If I knew why it was a bad thing, I might want to…' Yvie stopped herself from thinking that thought to an end. Her abrupt stop of thought left her in a bit of a dazed condition. Thinking so much har tired her out, and she felt exhausted. She flopped on top of her bed, necklace now in hand, going straight to sleep.

Her mother woke her up in the most unpleasant way Yvie could imagine. Not only did she knock hard on the door, she also bursted in yelling.

When she saw Yvie, she got mad.

"DEAR, THE CAGE. WE HAVE AN ANIMAL IN THE HOUSE!" Her mother yelled as Yvie slowly awakend enough to know what was happening. She tried to rub her eyes a bit, as she felt like she couldn't see properly, but quickly found out she was in snake-form.

She wanted to escape, but there were no holes she could slither out of. No openings she could move to. Nowhere to hide.

With no other choice, Yvie got dragged into the cage her father had brought. The grid was small enough for her not to be able to get out, but big enough for when she turned back. At least it had been. As she looked around, she wondered how much she had grown.

The cage seemed small, even from her snake perspective. It even looked new. WAS it new?

A sudden sense of dread overcame Yvie as she frantically slithered and hissed around the cage. She was sure she wouldn't be able to fit inside once she transformed back. She was sure it was a new and smaller cage. But why?

Her brain gave up as she got to that question, and she tried to calm down. She didn't understand anything, but even with her limited thoughts, she somehow knew she couldn't transform back. The very thing that would otherwise give her a way out of the cage.

So was she entirely trapped? How long did she have to stay here?

Panic rose in her long body once again, making her tail slam out to the sides. She couldn't control it. Yvie simply acted on instinct, feeling scared. This had never happened before.

As she kept slamming the cage, the sounds got louder and louder. A rhythmic sense of footprints came her way, and she calmed down a bit.

"Calm down" Her mother said, with no feeling of emotion in her voice. She scowled at Yvie with utter disgust.

"Just stay there until the full moon. We'll come with food for you. A mouse or whatever a being such as yourself eats" She said, scowling down at Yvie who suddenly felt even smaller.

"We found a little present from you in the bush. A shed skin. Now, how can that be, when you know you're not allowed to transform into that… that THING!" She shrieked, raising her voice of disgust.

Yvie couldn't do anything other than stare.

'Another shed skin? How did that make sense?' Yvie thought. She had only just shed her first skin while sleeping the day before, so how was there yet another one, which had to have happened before that?

How come she had never shed before, but suddenly did it twice in a day? How come she suddenly kept trying to find reason behind every little thing that happened to her?

Yvie was tired. She knew she wouldn't be getting out. What should she do now? With the full moon coming, her only choice was to go along with it and hope it didn't work.

But somehow, an instinct called out to her from inside. Something told her this would remove her blessing. That this would work. She had no idea why, nor did she know where it came from. The more she tried to rationalize it as fear, and that the full moon wouldn't work, the stronger the instinct became.

'Isn't fear and instinct kind of the same thing?' Yvie wondered, as she laid down in the metal cage.

'Is this instinct a human emotion?' Yvie started asking herself, as she closed her eyes.

'Or is it the instinct of an animal?' She finished thinking before she dozed off in a hibernating sleep, lasting for two days.