Mmmmmm Travis having a basic demonic form and a 'true' demonic form. He doesn't ever use the true form except as an absolute 'someone I care for dearly is going to absolutely die if I don't do this' last resort, partially because he hates looking like a demon if he can help it and partially because he shreds his clothes every time he changes and partially because there's a certain mindset that comes attached to it that really unsettles him deep in his core.
His true form is bigger than his father's and it feels unstable thanks to his human side. It's fucking horrendous, twisting your guts into shapes they don't want to be in, your shape bubbling out into something too big and familiar for you to properly process. You don't know what this one looks like; it's the only skin you have that you don't know inside and out and it terrifies you beyond belief. What dark corners are hidden away in the body handed down to you by the being that killed your mother? You can feel the thoughts, the urges of something you can only define as animal (that's not right that's not even close but it's all the words you have what else could it be) creeping into your mind, and one day will they take over? Will the sharp claws of a thing that is both you and the being who cursed an entire sea to stop your people from escaping and an unknowable third thing too sink into the crevices of your humanity and peel it away from you layer by layer?
Slipping into this skin is different than the rest (is it?).
They all hurt but this is worse than any (are you sure hurt is what that feeling is?).
It feels like sickness, like fever, like freezing to death as you're boiled alive (like coming home, like breaking free, like knowing who you are after ages of wondering?).
Your bones crack like fireworks exploding in dark skies, you can feel them growing sharp and jagged like the clumsy knives you carve from the claws of things that snap at your throat. Every notch in your spine is a knife; every fang; every talon. Your horns creak and ache in the way old wounds twinge with the coming rain, curling like livestock's, branching like the many limbs of a great long-dead tree. You've not enough space in your mouth for so many teeth and tusks, until suddenly you do, and not enough tongues for the voice that rumbles through you like an avalanche, until one splits to two splits to forked ends too. Your legs are like a goat's, like your father's, tri-jointed and hooved and monstrous, and so too is your spiked tail that lashes like a whip of its own accord. You tower over imps, over allies, over the small mountainside cottage you once shared with your mother. Its supports still bear the scars of when this skin was unleashed upon the world while in the warm confines of its safety.
You look down on your father, and his smile is full of knives when he calls you son. The bile and anger that claw up into your mouth taste like hellfire. There are embers burning in your throat and smoke in your lungs when you twist your tongues around the words I was never your son and spit them back at him.
When the moment is over, you collapse back into your human skin despite your wounds, a house of cards folding into slim parts to fit back into the box. You swear never to use this skin again.
(That's what you say every time.)