First of all, I want to clear something up.
They don't work.
I mean, I can move them, and flap them, and they sort of help me steer in high winds, but practically speaking, they are just for show, and there is no physiological reason for them to be there. I could fly, and probably better than now, even if they didn't exist.
So, there's that.
My wings have helped me to get to where I am now, though.
When I was born, there was a noticeable but apparently benign deformation of my torso. By the time I was 2 it was obvious that something was weird about me. To start with, the muscles around my shoulders and chest were oddly deformed, giving me a strange looking back, like I had a second set of shoulders without limbs attached. There were two large masses growing slowly just below my shoulder blades. Imaging revealed what looked like a pair of arms, with fully formed and distinct ulna, radius and humerus, along with attached muscle and hair clumps. The diagnosis was teratoma, or vestigial twin. The masses were supposedly some kind of remnant of a conjoined sibling that never completely developed.
So, I was a medical anomaly. I had pretty much constant pain from the growths and from the extra muscles that they were tied to. It sucked. I grew up feeling like a freak. There was no way to remove the masses; they were too interconnected and deeply seated in my torso to cut out surgically without killing me.
Then I turned 14.
Within about a month of this auspicious date, the masses began to grow at an alarming rate. The muscles across my chest were in agony all the time. The skin on my back would stretch and split, and by five months in, there was a renewed urgency to find a way to remove or reduce the presumed tumors on my back. I was on a lot of drugs for pain and inflammation at that point, and it still isn't clear in my memory, but I know the doctors finally decided to operate in a desperate attempt to save my body and possibly my life.
They got the shock of their lives when they made the first incision. Emerging from my back was a wet, bloody, small but fully formed feathered wing.
I suspect that if they could have, they would have removed the wings at that point, but they faced the same issues that were there from the beginning. Any attempt to amputate them was putting my life at extreme risk. What they did, in the end, was carefully extract them from inside my back, clean up the mess of excess tissue, and sew me up again. They washed the strange appendages, and bandaged the wounds.
Then they did what would now be commonplace procedure: they ran genetic testing for Firensces' mutation. No surprise, I was positive for 9 of the 12.
It changed everything.