Everything was in place, ritual candles lit, incense smoking, and Terry had donned the serious face of someone about to speak ancient, powerful words. The ritual circle was set up much like I remembered, I couldn’t see anything odd or out of place about it, making me wonder just what was so different that my method would have been outdated.

Terry shuffled up to the edge of the salt circle and pointed a golden ritual dagger towards me, before beginning the ritual by walking the edge of the circle was keeping the point of the knife focused on me. Once he had completed one full revolution, the fire burning the incense next to me sputtered and popped, the flame growing. Connie let out a surprised sigh, her eyes wide and trained on the flame. Terry continued to circle, until he had completed nine revolutions, the flame growing slightly with each completion.

Stepping into the circle, Terry moved to stand directly in front of me, sweeping the dagger dramatically to the side, then lifting his hand up and fearlessly, slicing his palm with the sharp blade. Blood trickled down his hand and wrist, he held the stream directly over me, the blood dripping and soaking into my thick fur. I began to feel strange, like an itching sensation beneath my skin. My entire being began to feel wrong and uncomfortable, much like how I had felt after I had first transformed and had yet begun the transformation process. I ventured a glace at Connie, who had stood from her seat on the otherside of the room. Her eyes were wide, showing an uncomfortable amount of the whites of her eyes as they darted between Terry and I.

“Shake off your animalistic form!” he commanded in a booming voice. “Remember your humanity, choose your true form and transform claw and fur to nails and skin!”

The itching intensified to a point where I could no longer avoid wriggling and claws at my fur. Large chunks of hair came away from the areas I scratched, revealing the pale skin underneath, thought that was pinking to a more realistic human hue. So intent on trying to stop the maddening feeling, I got lost in the agony of the itch that could not satisfied and paid no attention to what was happening to me. I dropped to my side and began to roll around, letting out a long meow of displeasure. Tossing and turning, loose fur began to pile up around me and I could feel fresh air, for a the first time in a long time, blow gently across my skin. Suddenly, the itching stopped and I opened my eyes, letting out a gasp of excitement at my hands being the first thing I saw.

“It worked!” I said, startling myself with the sound of my old voice. It seemed that I had no real memory of what I had sounded like. Without thinking, I hopped to my feet and began to brush away the layer of fur I had coated myself with. “This is amazing, I can’t believe it was that easy!”

“Yes, it was,” Terry said with a rumbling laugh. “We need to get you a ritual robe, though.”

My head snapped down and I flushed realizing that I had, of course, not transformed with clothing. I had been standing in the middle of the circle baring it all for them to see. I looked towards Connie with the very edge of my vision and she was respectfully finding the wall behind her intensely fascinating. Terry swished the salt circle in front of him, breaking the circle and the ritual, then stepped over to a storage chest and rummaged through the container until he found a long, forest green initiate robe. I was certainly not an initiate, but I graciously accepted the robe in order to cover my embarrassment.

“You look no worse for wear, my friend,” Terry said with a twinkle in his eye. “Looks like you get to be young and handsome again, I almost wish I could have done the same.”

Looking over my hands, arms, and body, it indeed looked like I hadn’t aged at all, but could that really be possible? “A mirror,” I blurted out.

“Upstairs, through the kitchen to the right,” he instructed.

I flew up the stairs two at a time, the shock of being a human again yet to sink in. Following his instructions, I found the bathroom and slammed to a stop in front of the sink. In the mirror I saw my own shocked face, looking exactly like I had remembered in my minds eye. Despite the time that had passed, my youth was still with me and my twenty-five year old faced stared back in wonder. I had been allowed to keep my twenty years of learning and experience without having to pay the price of aging. The scruffy mess I called a beard was even still just as I had left it, the embarrassing wiry caterpillar on my top lip as misshapen and ragged as the day I had transformed.

Looking in the mirror closely one last time to make sure I wasn’t just seeing what I wanted to see, I walked out of the bathroom like a zombie, in shock that my twenty year ordeal was over with a few simple ritual actions. Why had I never succeeded if I had had the tools all along? Had magic really changed that drastically since I exited the human world? It seemed completely impossible given the long history of magic, surely if there had been easier methods, they would have been discovered and passed along long ago.

“Feel like the old you?” Terry asked with a chuckle. “I have to say that I’m kind of jealous. Well, not about having to spend a couple decades as a cat, but going back in time to my twenties would be pretty nice and I’m sure my wife would appreciate it too.”

The fact he had a wife briefly made a joke tick through my mind, but I was still in too much shock to voice it and instead filed it away for later. Instead, I looked down to my hands again and turned them over slowly, as if I still couldn’t believe that what I was seeing as real.

“It’s real,” he assured, clapping me on the shoulder. “Guess we’ll have to figure out an identity for you, don’t think anyone’s going to believe you’re supposedly in your mid forties now.

“That is as problem,” I admitted. I had always held the belief that I would simply pick my life up where I had left off, only older and wiser, but there was no way anyone was going to believe that twenty years had passed and that I looked no different. Even though I would, of course, look exactly like my old id and pictures, I couldn’t blame anyone who would assume that I was trying some weird form of identity theft.

“It is, and to be honest, I didn’t consider this possibility either,” he admitted.

“What do I do?” I asked. I had usually been the one with the plan, but my mind was a blank besides the continuing disbelief that I wasn’t just having a hyper-realistic dream.

“Well, obviously we’ll need to find someway to get you some sort of identification. You’ll want to eventually get a job, insurance, a car… you know all the things you need in this modern world. The hardest part is probably going to be getting you some kind of documentation, we might have to go through less than legal means.”

Connie appeared in the doorway of the staircase that lead down to the basement. Her eyes were still wide, the white’s glinting in the sunlight streaming in front the window. She met my eyes, but quickly looked away with a blush. I felt my lips form the goofy, embarrassed smile I tended to display when I had no idea how to get out of an awkward situation.

“I might have an idea,” she said, barely loud enough to decipher. “We will just need to take him to a doctor and prove that we found him somewhere with amnesia and have no idea who he is.”

Terry turned his head slightly to the side in thought, before giving a nod of his head. “That just might work and you’ve fallen into a perfect situation. My wife is a general practice doctor.”

“You not only found someone to put up with you, but she’s also a doctor?” I turned to him and gave him a disbelieving look. When I had last seen him, he was about as adept with women as a fish trying to play baseball. Though I supposed that there had to be someone for everyone out there.

“Weird, right?” He grinned and shook his head. “I look around a lot and wonder how the hell I got here.”

“That’s so perfect,” Connie said, her voice becoming louder and the redness was fading from her cheeks. “If we can get her to write a report on his status, maybe we can get a new identity created for him with the government. Then we just have to worry about where he is going to live.”

My mouth opened to tell him that I was already living with her, of course, but I was quick enough to clamp my mouth back shut and not say it. Of course it would be inappropriate for me to just assume that that arrangement would continue as planned. I know that society had really advanced since I was last a part of it and that it was commonplace for men and women to live together in a purely platonic relationship, but It would be ridiculous for me to assume that even though she was fine with living with a cat, that she would also be fine with me as a man.

“We’ll wait for my wife to get home and then we’ll ask her if you can stay here,” Terry offered. “I know better than to just offer something without going through her first.”

“When will she be home?” I asked.

Terry looked to the clock above the kitchen sink, then responded, “A couple of hours, her clinic closes in an hour and then she has to get through traffic. We can always use this time to get to catch up, I want to know what your time was like.”

“Sure,” I agreed, “but might I be able to get some real clothes first? I like this new feeling of being free again, but it’s a bit drafty.”

“Right, follow me.” Terry led me across his house to a large bedroom and threw open one of the closets. “Here you go, take what you want. I honestly only wear a few things over and over again. My wife just wants me to have nice clothing for any time we go out to dinner, a charity event, or anything like that.”

“Thanks,” I said and began to rummage. Terry left me to change in privacy, closing the bedroom door behind him.

It seemed as though fashion had really changed in the time I had been away. It used to be that our style was more towards distressed jeans and bright shirts with a loose fit, but everything in his closet was subdued and tailored with less overall give. This made sense once I thought about what I had seen people walking around on campus wearing, but for some reason I had a very different image in my mind. I chose one of the few pairs of jeans in the closet and a black flannel button-down shirt that looked like Terry had tried to hide between his other clothing. It was a shirt that I could have sworn I had seen him in before and it was definitely old, with fraying along the bottom hem and at the button holes. Fully dressed, I turned my attention to the full-length mirror on the inside of the closet and tried to come to terms with the new, but old, me.

My image was so foreign, yet almost uncomfortably familiar. When I moved my head at all, it felt like I could almost see the thick, black fur covering my body again. I didn’t know if it was some lasting effect from the years of magical transformation or if I my brain was just filling in the gaps with what it thought I should be seeing. I ran my hands through my unkempt beard, feeling strange that I no longer had the sensitive sensory hairs that had taken so long for me to get used to. With a shake of my head in an attempt to shake off the weird feeling of being human again, I stepped away from the mirror and closed the door. It would just take time for me to adjust again, there was no way around it and no reason to drive myself crazy from it.