Cornered, some heroes do not stand and fight — they stop being one thing and become another. In Apollodorus's Library (a Greek mythography compiled in the 1st–2nd century CE), when Hercules storms Pylus he kills Periclymenus, "the most valiant of the sons of Neleus", a warrior who "used to change his shape in battle" — a body that will not hold one form long enough to be struck. Later, wrestling for the hand of Deianira, Hercules meets Achelous, "assumed the likeness of a bull"; the contest ends when "Hercules broke off one of his horns". In the served text the shape-change is told almost in passing, a power as ordinary to these figures as strength or speed, and undone only by a grip or a blow that outlasts the final change.

The Egyptian record keeps the fuller drama. In a tale from the papyri, Egyptian Tales (c. 2000–1200 BCE), the murdered Bata does not so much die as move house from body to body. He warns his brother, "I am to become as a great bull", and as that bull, led before Pharaoh, he speaks: "Behold, I am alive indeed". Killed a second time, his blood becomes trees overnight — "They grew as two great Persea trees" — and even felled he recalls each earlier skin, taunting the wife who has hunted him down: "I then became an ox". The Persea is a tree of Egypt; the lesson is that no death is final while some fresh shape waits to receive the fugitive soul.

Is a being who can become anything truly deathless — or has it only never yet been caught in the one shape where death can reach it?