Duu gasped, “He’s a creeper!”

Fenri had invited Yaosen to stay in his home, but Yaosen had first insisted that they reconnect with his group. The idea of being alone with the bestial man sent shivers down Yaosen’s spine. The frost-rimed valley where glacial meltwater collected was a far more serene place to discuss Fenri’s crimes.

“A what?” said Fenri, sounding hurt, “What’s a creeper?”

Torun lounged beside the pool, a thin line dangling in the water for the leaping salmonsturgeon, “We were attacked by men like you in the badlands. We have it on good authority that they were the ones who choke the life from the land like a creeper vine on a tree.”

Fenri’s gaunt form seemed to fold in on itself.

Yaosen had no idea how Torun could be so relaxed with this creature in their midst. “Did you say we were attacked by… men?” said the monk, “They were no more than animals.”

“Hmph,” said Torun. It sounded like a refutation.

“No, he’s right,” said Fenri, the melancholy of guilt washing over him, “We’re called boneshifters. It's said that the only reason a man would take on the aspect of a beast is if they were no more than an animal at heart. The ones who attacked you are living proof of that. They develop a taste for human flesh and the more they feed the more they take on the aspect of a predator.”

Yaosen looked to Torun, whose face was unreadable, then to Duu who seemed to be considering.

Suddenly Duu burst out laughing.

Yaosen scowled. He had worried about Duu being present for this, in case it was all too frightening for a child. He had even almost sent Fenri away after Duu’s initial reaction. But this was certainly not what he had expected from the little treebender.

When the fit of laughter began to subside, Duu sat up clutching her side, “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

He had to admit that unless the boneshifters had all been cursed by a spirit for some reason, that did seem a bit ridiculous. Yet, Yaosen couldn’t quite put his finger on why it seemed impossible.

“Why is that ridiculous, Duu?” the monk asked.

“That's like saying trees grow branches because they’ve developed a taste for mushrooms.”

“Hmph,” said Torun in agreement.

“I… don’t understand,” said Yaosen, clearly missing what Torun had already caught onto.

“Me either,” said Fenri. His eyes were no longer downcast, but wide. It was the same look he had worn when he had found out that he would not be put to death.

“Trees grow branches toward the sun so they can survive, right? So you moved some bodybranches around. So what? A tree with different branches isn’t evil and neither are you. Just because old trees have long branches and old trees have mushrooms underneath doesn’t mean the mushrooms caused the branches. It could be the other way around, or the same thing might have cause them both.”

“Shade,” grumbled Torun.

“Exactly!” Duu flashed the Meteor Knight a smile. Duu and Torun had been more and more on the same page lately and Yaosen was beginning to feel like an outsider, even amongst his only friends on the continent.

“So you’re saying… there’s a correlation between cannibalism and shifting, not a causal relationship.”

Duu stared at him blankly, then shrugged.

Yaosen was pretty sure they were saying the same thing, just speaking a different language: one using the terminology of the wilds and the other using words developed by scholars in clean, warm temples.

Duu was positing that being a boneshifter – as Fenri called himself – did not make one subhuman or evil, just as being a firebender did not necessarily make one prideful, passionate, and ambitious. But being born to a Fire Nation family, you had a pretty good chance of being able to firebend. Then growing up in the Fire Nation, you grew up in a culture that accepted and even rewarded certain traits, making pride, passion, and firebending a common concurrence.

But Yaosen knew cold, calculating or even carefree firebenders. They were never the best at bending basic flame, but they could often do more interesting things than the typical firebender. The first lightbender had actually been the product of a firebender raised alongside airbending culture, borrowing the nomads’ techniques.

This boneshifting had to just be another form of bending, somehow. But it seemed that the only culture of boneshifters – at least that Yaosen had come across, so far – was one of brutality, depravity, and animalistic behavior. It was an unfortunate development, and one likely brought on by the absence of bending knowledge and tradition.

Culture and the bending arts were so deeply intertwined it was hard to separate them sometimes, and it was hard to imagine what firebending would be without the Fire Nation. It could be pure and brilliant. Or it could end up more brutal than it had been in the Hundred Year war.

“All of this is besides the point,” said Yaosen, snapping himself out of his reverie with an effort, “The most important question is this: what were you on trial for and are you guilty?”

“Yaosen,” Torun interrupted, “The man’s already been on trial once today. Maybe give it a rest.”

Yaosen rounded on him, “Perhaps you didn’t hear, but Rook alluded to the fact that this man killed and ate a child. You really want to risk that happening again while we rest?”

“I didn’t do it!” Fenri cried, “I wasn’t even in the village when it happened!”

“Why did they accuse you?” asked Yaosen.

“Because I’m the only boneshifter they know of,” Fenri’s hollow shoulders slumped as if that alone were an admission of guilt, “And I started shifting the same night the child died.”

“Tell me… everything,” said Yaosen, a cold light flashing in his eyes.

Fenri withered beneath the Light Temple monk’s stare, and began speaking softly, barely audible over the babble of brooks and the splashing of spawning salmonsturgeon.

***

I was a hunter, alone in the woods. I had been alone since… well for a long time. I had heard that there were people in the north who would take in anyone and protect them as long as they followed the rules of Rook.

I didn’t need protection. But I was just so… alone.

I wanted to be by other people. I didn’t need much. Didn’t expect friends or a family or anything like that. I just wanted to see other campfires at the edge of the dark, hear other voices instead of just the howls in the wood.

A village sounded… nice.

So I followed the trails north. I saw the tracks at the edge of the badlands and knew to steer clear. I saw how the river ran through the rock and could smell woodsmoke when the wind blew down from the glaciers, not just volcanic fumes.

There were signs in the caves, too, though I guess Rook got rid of those now. I didn’t have to fight up the river or face the shadows’ test or anything like that.

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When I got here, Halvard showed me to a cave that didn’t belong to anyone yet. It wasn’t much but it was the first time I had ever had a home; I mean one that didn’t move with the herds and the seasons.

You have to know, master-

(“Yaosen will suffice,” Yaosen interrupted.)

You have to know, Yaosen, that I was not a good person. I had done terrible things in the past, to stay alive. They were the types of things that cause some boneshifters to start turning. So by the time I got here I was absolutely sure I was not a boneshifter, else I would never have come.

I had settled in nicely. I hunted snow goose mostly. Even bagged a few bisonbeavers and polar elk. Big game, you know. Enough to feed more than just myself. My new neighbors were happy to trade.

One time, a Bighorned Mountain Lion started stalking me in the foothills and I had to turn the trap on it. I normally wouldn’t think to go after one of them, but it was hunt or be hunted, you know? I brought the pelt and horns back to the village and Halvard even slapped me on the back when he saw it.

It was one of the best days of my life.

After that I would never, ever, want to do anything to make the villagers fear me, or risk the home they had given me.

(“So, what happened? Why did they accuse you? And how did you start to turn?”)

I had spent a while away from my cave – my home – on a long hunt. I had plenty of meat to salt and hides to tan, so I was up late when I heard them.

They might not have been so careless, or they might have come for me instead, if they had caught my scent. But tanning is foul work sometimes, and my scent was well masked.

By the time I stepped out of my home I couldn’t see them, but I saw the tracks and I knew them well.

I followed them to one of my neighbors, Bori’s house, and I heard fighting within.

I didn’t stop to think, I just rushed in. Bori’s husband was dead already; gutted. And one of them was trying to feast on him even as it fought off Bori. The other two were more… deliberate.

One was holding Bori’s daughter, Glyn, and she seemed unharmed, fighting and screaming with all she had, the little badgermink.

But the other rushed me.

It came straight at me like a Bighorned Mountain Lion who knows the taste of man. It was wary of my hands, you see, not my teeth.

It took me to the ground but… as soon as I realized it was kill or be killed, and that no one could help me now but myself.

Well… something came over me.

It was pain. Pure pain the likes of which I had never felt before. It burned my skin and cracked my bones but I couldn’t separate that pain from the teeth and claws that scored me.

We fought and rolled like a pair of mountain cats until I had no idea where we were or what I was but in the end I was the one that tasted blood.

It was meat. Fresh meat. The freshest I had ever had and I wanted more. I wanted to feast and feast until my gut was swollen and bursting. But I heard Glyn’s scream and looked up to find her and her captor down the main thoroughfare.

Spirits bless her but she was just a slip of a woman and she had nearly won free from a full-grown boneshifter.

I charged, not knowing how or why I caught them so quickly. But they had barely made it into the snow by the time I sank my teeth into the last boneshifter.

I caught him by surprise so the kill was quicker this time. Maybe he was too focused on Glyn to defend himself. Maybe he didn’t expect me to catch them. Maybe he didn’t expect me to… be what I am now.

The next thing I remember I was vomiting up blood and guts and raw meat in the snow and Glyn was long gone.

The pain in my face and bones was unbearable and I cried into the snow for a while. Eventually I slept, right there beside the ravaged body of the boneshifter and that’s where Halvard found me in the morning. I was cut and bleeding and almost as ruined as the two boneshifters I had killed. But by then, I was a boneshifter myself.

Halvard didn’t even recognize me.

***

“The trial began that afternoon and that’s where you found me,” Fenri finished.

He had slumped to a stone, the posture exposing his strangely bent and elongated ankles, like the rear limbs of a wolf.

Duu sat beside him on a patch of moss, raised above the frosty grass and meltwater. But Yaosen stood over the boneshifter, ready to strike should he find the man guilty.

Torun’s line tugged, but he seemed not to notice, so enrapt in the story was he.

Yaosen could feel his gaze softening, warming, but he snapped the icy mask of the light monk scholar back into place and asked, “So that’s your side of it. And the evidence against you?”

Fenri shrugged and gestured to the elongated fangs that had once been human canines, the grotesquely widened nose, the long bones of his hands and arms, looking more like the forelimbs of a dog than the hands of a man.

“Surely that’s not all of it.”

“That’s all they needed. That and Bori’s statement that she saw me among them.”

“But this Glyn,” Yaosen’s mask was unwavering. He couldn’t help but hope for a positive statement from the young woman Fenri had risked his life to save, “Surely she could vouch that you fought against the beasts, rather than with them.”

“It all happened so fast. Even I couldn’t rightly say how I fought the other boneshifters or how I defeated them. All Glyn knew was that one moment she was being dragged out to the tundra and the next she was free and running for her life.”

“But your wounds,” said Yaosen, almost desperate for anything that would vindicate Fenri, though he refused to show it, “You fought tooth and claw. Surely your injuries would prove that.”

Fenri shrugged off the overlarge cloak he wore. Beneath he was in little more than a ragged loincloth, as Yaosen had first seen him. There were no wounds. No fresh ones anyway. There were dozens of scars that could have been from claw or fang, but they looked weeks or months old. They could have come from any number of animals that the hunter had crossed in the past.

“Boneshifters heal,” Fenri said simply, “If anything this is more proof of my guilt.”

He pulled the cloak back around him. It was barely long enough to cover him, but it seemed twice his volume. “It’s not like it would matter anyway. Boneshifters — creepers as you call them — are as likely to fight each other for a prize as anyone else.”

Yaosen plopped down to the snow.

“But that leaves us with nothing then. It's your word against… well against no one else’s really. You’re barely more than a suspect. But who was the victim in the end? There was Bori’s husband dead. And Rook mentioned a child.”

“Quilla,” Fenri shrunk deeper into the voluminous cloak, “She wasn’t so lucky as Glyn. No one heard them coming for her. No one was there to fight for her. She was just a child and by the time they found her, there was hardly anything left of her.”

“But you killed all the boneshifters.” That was Torun, who had been silent up to this point. As if speaking had broken his reverie, the Meteor Knight finally realized he had a fish on the line and jumped to pull it in.

“That’s the strange thing. Well, one of the strange things. I did kill all the boneshifter’s I saw. Or at least I think I did. But boneshifters normally hunt in one big pack, no matter how many of them there are. They know how to work together just enough to bring down big game, or cull the weak from a large herd. But the way they worked in smaller groups to evade the guards and split the village’s strength. It wasn’t pack tactics, it was…”

“Strategy,” Torun finished for him, giving Yaosen a significant look. He punctuated the word by gutting the fish.

Yaosen’s eyes went wide and he looked to the scars on Headbutt’s ankles where chains used to be, “Like driving a bearmoose before you, to distract and cause chaos before the true strike comes.”

Torun turned to Fenri, “You said that’s not the only thing that’s strange.”

“The shifters have also never attacked a fortified camp before.”

“Never?”

“Not once.”

Torun nodded, “This stinks of Lu Gun.”

Yaosen turned back to Fenri, “Was anyone else killed, anything else damaged? Maybe some critical defenses sabotaged?”

Fenri looked confused but answered all the same, “There were witnesses to the other boneshifter attacks, but by all accounts they were smaller packs and the villagers fought them off before anyone else was taken. As for defenses… I really wouldn’t know.”

Yaosen nodded.

The boneshifting man had been through the ringer. Yaosen expected that Fenri was probably preoccupied with fighting for his life, grappling with the knowledge that he was a shifter, and then being on trial for murder twice, all in one day. Fenri wouldn’t have a moment to spare to investigate the bigger picture.

“We need to talk to Rook again,” said Yaosen, “We need to warn her that the shifters are the least of her problems. She needs to know how to stop Lu Gun and perhaps an entire Earthbreaker army. Come on, Fenri.”

“You’re not… you… you believe me then?”

Yaosen let out a sigh and then looked at the man, taking in the half-man, half-beast visage once more under new light. “You’re a bonebender, Fenri. I don’t know how or why you’re able to alter your own bones and not the minerals in the earth or water, and we don’t really have time to get into it right now. But what you can do has nothing to do with who you are at your core.”

Fenri’s eyes were wide again, like a puppy that had found a new home.

“But,” said Yaosen, “If Rook sees me without you, she might reconsider your sentence. For now, just stay with me until we can talk some sense into her.”

Fenri launched himself at Yaosen.

The monk almost called on fire to defend himself, before realizing that Fenri was hugging him.

“Thank you, Yaosen,” said Fenri, stepping back abashed, “You really have no idea what this means to me. But thank you all the same.”

Fenri smiled but it seemed more of a snarl, with his miss-shapen face and elongated canines.

Yaosen too tried a grin, but it came out a grimace.

This would take some getting used to.