A Thousand Skins

A thousand skins in a thousand minutes — the night Camaleo wore every color it had ever been.

Once a year, on the longest night, the fireflies gather in the Kaleidoscope Grove to count. What they count is Camaleo — or rather, Camaleo’s colors, as the creature shifts through every shade it has ever worn, one per minute, from dusk to dawn.

The counting

Pip leads the count, flashing once per skin. The young shifters watch from the ferns, whispering the names of colors they haven’t grown into yet. Old Bark, who claims to have seen forty such nights, says this one “had a particularly good teal.”

The thousandth

At minute one thousand, Camaleo settles — plain leaf-green, the color of an ordinary morning — and the grove goes quiet. Then, in dawn-gold shimmer-speak: “A thousand skins, and every one of them is me.” The fireflies applaud in Morse. Nobody remembers what they spelled. Everybody remembers how it felt.

The morning after

Camaleo sleeps through the entire next day, curled in the Hollow Tree, faintly violet with dreams. The dew-ledger gains a new entry: night of a thousand skins — all of them, still me.