The wolf dreamt.

Images, concepts, names, functions and definitions flashed rapidly before its eyes. The gray mice from before floated and flashed across its sight, and like an unraveling tapestry, split. Its fur, soft and insulative, was broken down, a combination of oily guard hair on top and a thick underfur beneath. The guard hair kept moisture from reaching the skin, and the underfur acted as an insulating blanket to keep the little creature warm.

Then in a dizzying flash, it split again. Its nails separated, and he saw the strands of biological material that created them. It split again, its organs, their purposes, even some names like ‘liver’ and ‘heart’ being embedded into its mind, knowledge so smoothly placed it felt like remembering something it had forgotten rather than something it just learned.

It split again, its muscles breaking apart, its bones splintering to reveal they were made of some sort of hardened connective tissue, its ligaments, joints and eventually, its brain, all being shredded apart and understood on an intrinsic level.

A vague notion of choice hung over its half-aware mind, and for a moment, the dream turned lucid. Its mind scoured through the options presented, yet none but one felt like it would be even remotely useful. Much like in a dream where it had no notion of questioning what was happening, it simply moved on, the consciousness retreating back to dormancy.

The six leggers.

Cockroaches.

The information was far, far more vivid this time, the names flashing in its mind along with every function and placement in a giant burst of information that nearly woke it from its slumber as it lodged into its mind.

The compound eye, the antenna, the metathorax, mesothorax, the abdomen, stylus, cercus, walking legs, wings, hind legs, mid legs, forelegs, laxial pump, cerci, maxillary, palp, tibia, tarsus, femur, coxa, the abdominal segments, and the trochanter, all the knowledge of their functions and their placement on the cockroach was absorbed. And then the cockroach split, its insides unraveling, its complexity almost painful to its mind to comprehend. The ventral cephalic trunk in its head, interwoven around the dorsal cephalic trunk, the thoracic and abdominal spiracles, the lateral, dorsal, and ventral longitudinal trunks that ran down its sides, the atrium, and a few dozen more organs flashed by in its mind, all fitting in such an incredibly small being with the utmost efficiency.

The choice hovered once more, and the dream turned lucid.

The amount of things this creature had at its disposal were numerous, and for a moment, the wolf simply thought of them all in awe.

Yet, the unspoken question it was brought there to answer still hovered. And the wolf hesitated, looking through all the organs that worked like bricks, one supporting the other, all useless without another.

All but two. The cerci, thin hairs connected to an internal organ that could sense even the slightest of changes in wind speed and direction. These hairs could not only easily blend into its own fur, the cost of the new organ was low. Of course, by what metric, or how any of this was happening, it didn’t know, but seeing as it was a dream, it was not particularly questioning of its circumstances.

Then, it turned its focus on the antenna, an organ that would connect to the brain and sense vibrations. It would probably look strange on its head, unless it used the much more effective antennae to replace the whiskers on its snout. With but an errant thought, it also removed the pain receptors from the antennae.

The choice solidified in its mind, and its consciousness sank back into sleep.

Yet at the same time, it didn’t. Sleep was once a complete darkness, coming and going in the blink of an eye, yet now the wolf was in an odd limbo between being awake and asleep, able to feel the sensations of its body, able to hear the sounds around it. Like a flitting, momentary dream, sounds and sensations were combed through and discarded if they were not alarming, and despite the tiny amount of mental capacity such a thing required, the wolf felt safer than it ever had in sleep.

In what felt like little more than a moment, footsteps neared, and the wolf’s subconscious jolted it, its eyes snapping open. Despite the usual drowsiness that usually followed its sleep, no such thing was felt, its mind and body instantly awake and aware. It turned and saw two small humans staring at it, and it jumped to its feet with far less pain and effort than what such a motion should have required. Not to say it was negligible, but quick movements were but a far off dream just two naps ago. Even its burned lungs seemed to be healing, slowly but surely.

The two two-leggers seemed to be paying a lot of attention to it, their eyes wide open and focused on it, so it bent its legs into a half-crouch, ready to bolt. The humans were small, but the wolf still barely reached their chest. The half-crouched stance made them stiffen instantly, the small male reaching for a blunt pipe that it had tucked into its skin layers.

“Holy shit, it’s still alive.” One of the humans breathed out.

The wolf didn’t know what the sounds meant, but the soft tone was sometimes used by the nicer humans who’d thrown some edible waste at it, so it tilted its head as it tried to understand their intentions through the contradictory sounds and body language. Which was something two-leggers did sometimes, it had come to find out.

“I mean, we could still kill it. It’s got a lotta energy compared to how it looks, but it doesn’t seem tough. And it will be a good meal, at least for us. Just uhm… distract it, and I’ll hit it on the head real hard, okay? Don’t get bit, it looks sick.” The male human whispered, touching the quivering, smaller human female on the shoulder.

The wolf didn’t like their body language, from the way their muscles were tensed to the nervous way they observed it. While keeping its eyes on them and an ear behind it, it quickly backtracked, keeping its body diagonal to the pair, and the humans hesitated for a moment. Then the thin male stepped forward aggressively, only for the smaller female to grab his arm and shake her head, saying something the wolf couldn’t catch with its single functioning ear pointing in the other direction.

The humans backed away as well, and the wolf’s muscles relaxed ever so slightly as their forms fled around the corner of the alley. Looking around, it realized that it was, once again, completely lost. Two-legger nests were too large and too complicated for it to have the mental capacity to map out anything more than a few spots, but simply by finding downward tilting roads and alleys, it could at least figure out how to go to the only place that had any food for it, which were the lower, dirtier bits of the human nest.

Part of it hesitated to return, remembering the rivers of thick burning sludge that separated the lower parts, yet it was too weak to go anywhere but there. Two-leggers were oddly wasteful, and while rare, it wasn’t entirely uncommon to come across dead bodies that had been flushed down from the upper parts of the iron nest. The variety was fairly large, ranging from winged creatures to two-leggers, to canines or scaled creatures. The small, squirming creatures eating them were even a decent snack, if a bit repulsive to its instincts for some reason. Maybe once it grew a little, it could hunt rats. Or an isolated two-legger, though it wasn’t sure if two-leggers were protective enough of their nestmates to hunt it for doing so, so until it knew, it would probably continue avoiding them.

With slow, careful steps, it slowly stalked through green and yellow tinted streets, under hanging signs and barking and howling two-leggers, squeezed through metal fences both bent and cut through, crawled under tightly pressed pipes several times larger than itself, lapped up some dripping water from one of the leaking pipes for a few minutes and rested, then continued until it found what it was looking for.

One of the giant pipes that led directly down to the green-brown rivers, diagonal, huge, and hanging over a complicated network of abandoned automatic factories, walkways, bridges, and cables.

After a bit of climbing and a small jump, it got on the pipe, tail tucked between its legs. It began to slowly, slowly inch its way forward on the downwards sloping pipe, the eroded nature of the metal being the only thing giving its paws any friction and preventing it from slipping off into the increasingly lifeless darkness underneath, lined with cold, dead metal.

Its instincts screamed at it, turning its limbs stiff with the fear of the giant stretch of air and cables separating it from the walkways underneath. Yet, it still inched forward, knowing it had to use whatever meager energy reserves it had to get to the only feeding ground that it had proven at least a little successful in.

Eventually, the pipe connected to a giant metal rectangle drafted onto a cylindrical pillar of steel that reached up and down beyond where its eyes could see, and the wolf had to jump to the metal walkway underneath to continue. If it could grip the metal bars that the two-leggers used to descend to the burning rivers, or use one of their hanging boxes that went up and down on one of the iron cables, it’s journey would be little more than a field trip, but it couldn’t.

Bracing itself on legs quivering with fear, it powered through the instinctive fear of the massive height underneath the walkway, reasoning to itself that it had taken such drops a dozen times before. Yet, the temptation to walk back up the pipe and take the long, long way down through the snaking alleys and stairways was still there.

But, it knew that that was the wrong choice. Its legs hurt, its deaf ear was slowly becoming itchy and attracted more and more flying tiny insects, its limbs felt weak and wobbly, its throat felt so dry it was worried it would start cracking like dried dirt, and its functioning ear was so swamped by the constant clanging, humming and shrieking of the shifting metal in its infinitely vast surroundings, that it was starting to feel a little dizzy.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

And the thought of getting dizzy when it was sitting over a death drop was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

With a timid shuffle that made its fur crack and split from where the sludge had solidified on its back, it moved to the corner of the pipe, and with a yelp of fear, allowed itself to slide off onto the walkway underneath.

Its legs crumpled underneath it like wet paper, and the walkway moved underneath it for a moment with the familiar rattle of failing metal, filling it with cold terror.

Yet even as the metal railing kept wobbling in its loose casing, the walkway stabilized. With a mild pant to its breaths, the wolf slowly got up from its bruised rib cage, and walked down the winding staircase that curled around the metal tower like a jagged metal centipede, bits of broken and bent railing being the only thing that stopped it from falling off to its death from a single misstep. Small, flat metal platforms were placed in front of heavy iron doors every few feet down, allowing it a moment of relatively safe rest on its journey downwards. The metal towers usually reached around some sort of two-legger gathering spot, and from there it was only a short walk to the burning rivers.

An entire hour of cautiously walking down stairs, resting, and repeating later, it finally reached the bottom.

A few two-leggers were drifting around the giant open area around the base of the tower, all covered head to toe in extra skins, with glass and metal coverings over their faces. Some of them were checking up on some of the two-leggers made of rock, waving their hands around and touching their glowing bits, repairing the erosion and cracks, before ordering them around to continue whatever it was those things did.

The wolf really disliked those things. They were shaped like two-leggers, but narrower and shorter, their limbs being able to shift and extend with a sound like grinding gravel, and despite moving, cleaning drains and hauling waste into the burning rivers like living beings following their instincts and orders, they weren’t alive.

They were just moving rock. It made no sense, and it was just unnatural.

But they weren’t dangerous. The few times it had seen some living things in the area attack them, they’d just ignored the animal until it gave up. So the wolf stalked around the edges of the square, avoiding the scant few two-leggers hanging around and repairing their deformed stone duplicates, and sought to find a place to rest for a while.

In just less than a minute of slow walking, the sounds of life and activity were drowned out under the cacophony of shrieks, groans and rumbles of the surrounding machinery. Bent pipes leaked foul-smelling liquids into the cobbles, exhaust pipes snaked towards the walls of the pits and shot upwards, hidden behind a mess of scaffolding and wires from which the humans repaired and maintained them. Barrels of dangerous green liquids were thrown haphazardly around every corner with space, waiting for a stone two-legger to come pick them up and empty them into the metal boxes that emptied their contents into the burning rivers. Some pipes would expel a fine, odd smelling mist with a menacing hiss, which the wolf avoided out of sheer caution. The humidity of the environment was staggering to get used to, but after a few minutes, it grew accustomed to it.

It found a spot relatively free of danger, hidden behind some sort of segmented cylinder surrounded in spiraling wires, and crawled under the half-hanging mass of wires that ran into it, appreciating the warmth of the odd machine. It fell asleep almost instantly despite the dirty water soaking into its paws and chin.

In what felt like little more than a few seconds, a crackling sound woke it from its sleep, and a menacing sound somewhere between a hum and a buzz made it panic, scrambling out from under its cover to run away. After it moved away a few meters, it turned and stared at the cylinder where the sound was coming from, the volume getting higher and higher.

And then, with a deafening crackle that made it yelp, arcs of white shot out from the top, flashing to the water with speed it couldn’t fathom.

And straight to its paws, still partially submerged in dirty water.

A pained sound like a high pitched yowl ripped itself out of its throat as its muscles seized, feeling like a thousand needles stabbed themselves into its hide and dug into its bones. Despite its seizing muscles that contracted and tightened without a goal, it managed to jerkily stumble and fall away from the puddles of water, partially due to how little meat it had on its bones, and it half-crawled, half stumbled away from the scene with its tail tucked between its legs, which were barely responding to its orders, still twitching and buckling.

After sitting panicked for a few moments as the shocks faded, it snarled, its head turning wildly to see what hurt it. After several moments of nothing, it relaxed a bit, its senses not picking up anything dangerous nearby besides the still oddly buzzing machine.

The wolf was about to continue, to go and find something to eat or just find some spot to finally sleep uninterrupted for just a few hours.

Until a certain sound pierced through the now faint buzzing in the background of its grimy path.

The squeaking of a rat.

It turned around, ready to bolt, and after a moment of confusion, its eyes wandered back to the machine.

In one of the puddles, a small rat was suffering in much the same way the wolf had, trying to walk yet twitching and rolling instead, the white arcs ravaging its soaked, tiny body much more than it did the wolf.

Despite the adrenaline in its veins directing it to run away, it slowly stumbled back to sit next to the puddles, its movements a little more even and controlled by now, and sat on its haunches, watching the rat, waiting for it to either stop moving or grow so exhausted it could eat it. After a minute or two, the rodent barely twitched, its chest pumping up and down as it hyperventilated.

After five minutes, shallow breaths and weak twitches were all that signified that the rat was still alive, and the wolf crept forward, wary and uncertain of if it would get shocked again. Slowly, it put a paw in one of the puddles, and a minor shock burned through its nerves as it yelped and jerked back a bit.

Its curiosity overcame its hunger for now, and it moved back to the puddle, very slowly putting its paw next to the water.

Nothing.

And then it slowly put its paw in the water, and despite being ready for it, the wolf was still startled by the shock, retreating a couple steps back as its mind struggled to understand why this water looked normal but momentarily took over its limbs and made them hurt. It stomped its paw on the ground a bit to get rid of the numbness, and it was fine again.

It moved to another puddle, and put its paw in it.

Nothing.

Puzzled, it tilted its head, trying to find some pattern to what was going on.

It took more than a few attempts as it ran around the area, shoving its paws into water with increasing fervor to try and understand what was going on, until eventually, the machine crackled again, this time much quieter, and white lines visibly flashed down from its top down to its base, and spread throughout the water that touched its metallic base that was bolted into the cobblestones.

The smell of charred rat confirmed that the rodent was definitely dead, and after a moment of staring, the wolf moved to a puddle that was isolated, carefully putting its paw into it.

Nothing.

And then, with extreme hesitation, it put its paw on a small puddle connected to the water that had the white lines through it a moment ago.

Pain shot through its front leg, and the pup snarled in response as it jerked back, experimentally moving the limb back and forth in the air to gain back the feeling. As its eyes settled on the rat, it couldn’t help but linger on the mystery of the sparky water, and after a couple seconds of thought, it realized what was happening.

Or rather, a rough approximation of it.

After bracing itself on its bad paw that had been shocked a bunch, it leaned forward over the puddle, and quickly put all of its strength into a swipe with its good paw, managing to batter the semi-fried rat out of the puddle with only a few minor shocks to its leg.

After another minute of waiting to make sure no more sparky water was on the rodent, which was about as large as its entire head, it poked it with its paw, and judging it safe, quickly chomped down.

In little more than a few bites that felt amazingly easy, it had devoured the rat, fur and all, and started licking the blood off the floor. Smacking its jaws shut with a meaty clack of satisfaction, it turned and walked off into the dimly lit undersides of the mechanical behemoths above, wondering why its teeth felt almost as much resistance when biting through the rodent as they did when biting through air.