Who am I?

Date [standardised human time]: April, 2124.

(12 years, 5 months before the invasion of the radji Cradle).

The fire has burnt low, and I am cold. Winter digs her teeth deeper and I curl into my bedding, longing for a deep sleep but finding only empty questions. My head feels… muddled. Poorly defined. Unresolved.

Who am I, this scrappy naked thing? Daughter, sister, pupil, friend; am I solely defined by the eyes of others? Most would call me monster, Mama says, and even the Priestess screamed when she first saw me, so long ago. But no one sees me here, in the mountain den; who am I when I am alone?

What am I? Pyq? No, not that. Not like them.

Radji? Well…

I feel the tug of my claws on the rough spin of my bedding, too tall and too sharp. The fingers aren’t flat enough, the paw too narrow. I lack Mama’s warm fur, or Baba’s wide strong arms. I am not one of them either.

Am I but a shadow of them? I didn’t grow in Mama’s belly, and the creature that laid me left me for naught, forgotten on a distant speck in the sky. Who was she, I wonder? Did she love someone as Mama and Baba do? Somehow, I doubt it. Pyq are monsters, everyone says so. How can I be of them, and not one of them? Am I something else? Different and new?

I am changing. My bones ache. Ache from growth, from this change. I feel tired no matter how long I sleep on a bed now too small; hungry no matter how much I eat. I… I want to stay here, where it is warm, but… the hunger. I am always hungry now. They would offer to help me, my family, but… I will have to hunt.

The air tastes thin and stale about me as I dance across the chilled stone floor, shaking out the stiff coldness from my poncho and shuddering into it. The fabric sits tighter than it did at winter’s onset. The opening into the den seems to have shrunk too; I have to slide through on my belly.

My breath slips between my teeth in a mist as I look about the hills. Snow sits in a thick crust atop the land, covering the high eastward peaks of dark, cragged rock in heavy dollops, and neat, narrow dustings upon the nude, shivering branches of lifeless-looking trees. Bracken and bramble lie half sequestered beneath the tide of frost, the rivers and creeks I travel so oft now frozen solid. Even the sky is soft and overcast, my poncho the only shade of grey in this world of black and white. I pull my scant covering tighter, and wade down the slopes.

I pad about the riverbeds looking for fresh prints, finding none. Further upstream, the stiplet colony sits, sequestered in the frost, emptied in the autumn by the vexise. The clever little predators could squeeze down into the burrows, finding a warm room and a warmer meal, but I would find no prey here. Frustrated, I push into the forest. Knowing there will be no nests to pilfer in the trees, I seek out grubs and larvae hiding in their roots and fallen branches. Their bitter taste is revolting and does little to sate my hunger.

An awlet calls out at my passing, circling high above. A bristle-tail fans its namesake back and forth on a crooked branch, another tiny pair of eyes in a long, beaked face watching out from a narrow slit in the tree trunk. The male pauses as I pass; whilst these scansa lack wings, they can scurry about the branches as fast as a bellboy in flight. Not worth the chase, I leave them to their dance.

Down in a weathered gully, I find a great leafless tree overlying the smooth stones of a creek that has been reduced to a slow-moving trickle. Pausing to drink, I take scent of the barren packed soil. A rubbery taste unfolds into pleasant memory; a tullipet must have burrowed into the mud below, trying to sleep through the long dark. I know she’ll be buried too deep and taste foul, so I let her rest.

As I turn up the slope, I notice that some of the frost has been pushed away, the sodden fronds beneath chewed to the roots. Vyrryn. Some trace of prey quickens my heart. Most would be seeking shelter eastward into the dense merryling understory where I could not hope to reach them for days. This one must have been a straggler trying to hunker down where the gullies protect it from the windward chill. I’ve been holed away for days, when was the last snowfall? The gully affords little opportunity for ambush, a fact made all the harder for my dark hide. It is late in the day, nearing nightfall. I could still head back, curl up by a renewed fire…

But I would still be hungry.

I clamber up the tree, drawing myself into a nook where a nice thick branch overhangs the riverbed. If I curl in tightly, I might not be seen by the vyrryn’s sharp eyes, should it even return tonight. Mama and Baba think them wild, but they aren’t. These creatures are plump and satisfied; they fear nothing. Sure, near the roads at the forest’s edge they know terror. They’ve learned to fear the metal roar, the flash of light too bright on a ground too firm and flat. Roar, squeal, and splat. But here in the deep forest they are cocksure, self-certain. Long ago they may have feared the jaws of roht, and a dozen other deaths besides. Now nothing stalks these woods. Except for me.

Darkness has always been my ally. If I go out on a warm night, I can walk so close to them. Stay low and still, let them pass me by. The wily ones, they can tell… something’s near, and their eyes look out into darkness, their ears scanning desperately…

Most nights I leave them to their nightmares, but tonight I may have little choice.

What little warmth Kay-ut still offers vanishes as the sun is swallowed behind the mountains in a final gasp of pink light. Darkness descends, and the word ‘cold’ finds new meaning. I try to close my mind to it, remember why I’m out here, but that only makes the gnawing in my stomach all the worse.

Nothing comes to drink from the stream, nothing more than a stray awlet calls out in the night. More than once, I am nearly blown from my perch by a gust of chill wind that bites through canvas and hide and sets my teeth chattering. It is a dark, moonless night with only the stars for company. I start to count them, trying to find that little yellow one Yotun pointed to before he left. The memory provides a small comfort as my claws dig deeper into the wood for purchase. I hope he’s warmer than I am, wherever he is.

I close my eyes, listening to the wind’s whining breath. My mind lifts me up and over these hills and frosted peaks, drifting far across the skin of the Cradle, scarred by roads and the tilling of the earth. Somewhere far to the north, I find a warm city of orange brick I have only seen in pictures beside a vast inland sea. I begin to drift across the surface… and rise up, and up. I cast off my simple cloth, my skin and flesh, rip out my despair and anxieties leaving nothing but the naked heart of Me. I drift up into the night and find the darkness to be warm, for I am warm, and I am made of darkness. I am vast and indomitable, and spread out across all of creation. The stars themselves are naught but the sheen of my scales, and every world moves to the beat of my heart; my shape is writ in the constellations.

I wake stiff and shuddering, chilled to the core. Though numb all over, the tendons of my forearms still throb dully from being latched into the wood, the nails coated with clotted blood in places. I know I have stayed too long, and in the dimness of the night without my nose to guide me I fear I will be lost. A fire… warmth… I must…

There is something moving beneath me. Stay still! My breath catches in a groan, a surge of vertigo making my head spin, but somehow I hold fast. Steadying myself, I peer through the darkness. I struggle against the dim night, against the contrast of deep shadow across amorphous mounds of snow until the shape resolves to me; the vyrryn, lapping at the trickling stream. And like that the hunger bubbles up, a fire that rushes forth from some place deep and primeval, melting the chill from my body in a tingling ecstasy. My vision sharpens, the gnawing pain in my arms falling away. It feels like any other night.

As the animal moves closer I see he is a young buck, his coat still tawny and short. He stumbles as he crosses the stream, the rivulet numbing his footfalls. Young and clumsy. There is a moment of indecision, somewhere between disappointment and relief; I barely made it through my first winter alone, it hardly seems fair to take him on his. I… I should let him go.

Still, I find myself drawn to his every move, pulling myself close to the branch. The animal looks up from the stream, his rounded ears twisting about as he glances across the shadows. I inch along the bough, as far as I dare without making it groan. I look to the ground, all gnarled roots and soil frozen hard as rock. A fall from such a height could shatter my joints and leave me lame. This was foolish. I would be better off leaving right now.

But I don’t. I don’t want to; the hunger bids me stay. Trudging up and around the opposite slope, the foal noses through the snow for any fronds he may have missed in his last visit. He slowly makes his way toward the embankment beneath me, picking his path lazily, perhaps wearily—I give him all the time he needs. The wind blows through the treetops but fails to move me. I am still, I am patient. I hold. He stops beneath the tree, shaking his tall, arcing muzzle with a snort. He could still get away…

He takes one step too many, and I drop, a moment of weightlessness as I slide through the icy air with claws out. He cries out once as his back breaks under me, my teeth already in his neck. He dies quickly, blood melting the snow. I swallow his still living flesh willingly, eagerly, and it is warm, so wonderfully warm. I am so grateful, but I don’t stop to thank him.

~*~

It is spring now. The trees have regained their leaves, a green renewal on every branch. Gone is the still silence of winter, for every river, creek, and channel flows with melted frost. The rich sunlight slips between every scale, and I relish the warmth.

There is so much life again! Some thistle-tails move about the undergrowth, their long sharp faces tilling the soil for grubs and seeds. The young laid in winter cling to their parents’ backs, small ugly things with pink skin stretching beneath patches of fuzz. The adults feed them gingerly over one shoulder, fearing a peck in the eye for all their efforts.

The lodge is as I left it, moss-ridden and wind weathered. Mama spots me through the kitchen window; I can see her smile from the forest’s edge. But when the door swings open to meet me, she greets me with a strange look. I have eaten better than I would admit, and she can see how much I’ve grown—her head rests on my shoulder where mine used to rest on hers. If that is pride I see looking down at her eyes, why does it sting?

Brother dear comes barrelling up the hallway, laughing as he collides with a hug that still manages to move me, just a little. I give him a chitter, lifting him up and a gentle nip on the ear for good measure. He only giggles. Brother never saw me as the others did, he only sees my teeth as play. He should know better by now.

I ask my mother when the Priestess will be back; I’m as eager for lessons as Imdi is for play. But Mama says that my teacher has been busy in the city, that she hasn’t called. Instead, she insists Imdi and I both go out, take in the good weather. I had wanted to just talk to her… but I suppose that could be okay. Besides, I may have missed him too, just a little. He’d just bother me anyway.

We walk the old routes, the game trails and playing paths—the ones we’ve travelled so long that we could follow them blind. It starts beneath the wide boughs of the platan tree, the trunk scratched heavily by our claws from years of clambering up it and drawing on the bark. Imdi insists we go all the way out to the sparkling pool, knowing full well that’d take all day to get back again, but he bounds off quite merrily. Sorely tempted to leave him on his lonesome, I follow.

The irruta mound is on the way, spread out to have engulfed the whole trunk of the tree. Mama and Baba can’t figure out what’s keeping them alive through winter. We leave another stash of berries for the creepy-crawlies as we pass. Then the stream where we find the smooth stones and play poo-sticks at branch-over-brook. He tries to get me to play hide-and-sneak in the bramble patches that grow thick in the highlands, even if I can always hear him stomping about like a lost foal.

Brother dear has been growing too. He is longer and stronger of limb, and squarer in the face, although his snaggle-toothed grin is much the same. He looks less and less a child each season, yet he seems younger every time I see him—the distance between us growing like a gulf. Perhaps I will grow old, and he will always seem a babe to me.

We find the sparkling pool just before midday, a shallow basin of brilliant blue in a secreted forest clearing. The rock about its edge is a soft, crumbling yellow clay, the water ever so slightly warm in the sun. Two grislets bob about one another on the water’s surface, each one about as tall as Imdi. Their long, feathered necks twist about looking in one another’s eyes before quickly spinning away again. They only look up for a brief moment as Imdi splashes into the pool; he at least remains oblivious. I chuckle at him, giving him a splash of water. We sit by the edge and watch the pair paddle away from us.

In the midday light, the water is lit from above, showing the waving, reddish vegetation growing in the ponds base. It’ll start soon.

Imdi asks me about my winter as we wait. I tell him it was hard. He says I must have been lonely. I tell him I don’t want to talk about it.

“I was lonely,” he says in a quiet voice.

The first of the agora crawls out from some deep crevice. Then another, then another, before in short order several dozen begin spinning through the water. They’re about the size of a fist, squat and oddly cute for such a soft, segmented creature, with their odd, undulating trot that slowly meander across the pond. They clamber over one another, struggling for the highest vantage they can find. More than one are knocked from their perch by a neighbour, slowly falling deeper into the water.

As high noon crests overhead, they all shudder, then go still. Their soft, pale colour sharpens, then shifts; green, blue, red… green, blue, red. Even in the midday light, their wonderful shining casts refracting, iridescent light throughout the water, up across the surrounding trees.

The grislets duck their heads in confusion and Imdi giggles, pointing at the way the light dances across my scales. My stomach wobbles with a strange uncertainty, anxiety at his pointing, so I splash him playfully with my tail. He splashes back, and for a little while all is forgotten. There is just sun and play and family. But when the water settles, the agora have ceased their display. It is finished. One by one they begin to sink, lifelessly, into the bottom of the pool.

For the first time, the sight causes the wobble to solidify into a pit of dread.

When we return, Baba is out in the yard chopping wood to build out the pens yet again. He greets me with a big toothy grin, and an even bigger hug. Perhaps by habit, my father still tries to lift me as we embrace. I stretch on my toes to give him the illusion of a little lift, but I don’t think he’s fooled.

Imdi points right at my face again, asking our father if he sees how ‘big and scary’ I’ve become. This time I bat his paw away, snapping at the air by his face with my crinkled snout. But he just giggles at me again, and for a moment I want to grab him–!

Baba steps between us, sends Imdi off to his room. I shy away, frightened of all this… feeling. Baba puts a paw on my shoulder, turning me to him with that careful, tender expression. He was always a big man: in his arms it always felt like he was trying not to break you, and there was such safety in that. He asks if I’m alright. I hate that he can tell; that he can see straight through me. It’s almost as bad as being seen for what I am.

I tell him about the new ache, the one not in the bones but in the flesh. He asks me what it is that I feel. I don’t know how to tell him. It is not hunger, at least not of the kind I know. I thought I missed my family, a longing for company, but… it’s not about them. It’s all undirected, anxious energy.

Baba nods like he’s known all along, sitting against the fence line, and again there is that strange look, the one Mama had. What is that? Doubt? Worry?

“These feelings are natural, sweetheart,” he says with an arm around my shoulder. “It’s okay. You’re only growing up.”

I’m not an idiot, I know what ‘growing up’ means. I’ve seen all the creatures of the forest, I know how life ebbs and flows. I tell him I’m worried I’ll lay an egg. I don’t want to. He tells me that won’t happen and explains why not. The explanation makes me feel sick, disgusted. If the pyq are anything like me then I wouldn’t ever want to touch one.

He hugs me again and tells me that he loves me, but this time he doesn’t try to lift me. Instead, for the first time, my father doesn’t feel all that strong. These changes only hurt.

~*~

It is summer. If the Pyre’s touch was gentle in spring it is a massage now, a touch most fine as I linger on the high ledge outside my den. Scansa chitter and dance in the sky above, casting shadows on my sealed eyelids as I doze in the warmth. The spring ache has waned, and my head is less clouded, but… I still feel myself being pulled about by desires.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

I want… I want to see my teacher, my mentor, my… friend. She has given me hardly a word since we last spoke, only a few terse apologies and mentions of clergy and trials, and the promise of some lessons soon. The only lesson I have learned is that soon is always close, but never here.

Down in the valley, I see the lodge, the new rows of pens slowly spreading out like trails of silk. I have not seen my family in a week or so. In winter I must range to survive, but not seeing me in times of plenty worries them, I know. I just… cannot stand them seeing me now. I cannot be home, and I cannot be away; I am stuck.

I’m not the girl I was. Brother will be back at school in the new year. I cannot wait. He seeks me out most days, even crawling into my den without asking a few times. I do miss him, or rather, I miss who I was with him, but I can’t be that anymore. I have changed.

I’m not as delicate as I was, instead I am stronger, surer-of-foot. My jaw is broad and strong, my back firmer. The hunger comes and goes in waves, but it has become easier. I can wrestle even the heartiest of vyrryn bucks to the ground now, no need for clever tricks. It is… good, I suppose, to be better like this. It could be easy, but I still make it fair. Perhaps I step on an errant branch, or approach upwind, pounce a little too early. They have to have a chance.

A need to range takes me, so I leave my den, no poncho or equipment needed on so fine a day. I wander up the old trail that cuts eastward, the one Yotun first found when I was still a hatchling. My legs are longer, so it doesn’t take as long as it used to. Warm air lifts bellboys high over the mountainside, little membranous wings billowing like some wanton sheet in the wind. Chenopods, grasses, and succulent leaves crack and burst forth in colour, leaving an olfactory song like crunching paper in the air. It is all texture, all a taste in my mind.

Mid-way up, I come across a thistle-tail lying flat on its back in the dirt. I give it a prod with my snout. It doesn’t move. Glancing up at the branches overhead, the nest is wedged in a fork, abandoned. Mother’s work is done. Full of stomach, I return her to her bower, and leave her to rest.

The path through the mountain pass affords a glorious view of the whole of the northern forest, a dense green canopy of mixed heights, broken here and there by an eruption of slab-grey rocks. The snows have retreated to the highest mountain peaks, where they await winter’s cold command once more. Water flows freely in rivers and streams or thrown out in a scattering of misty waterfalls.

And here you are, the broken body of that first buck still resting where I left you years ago, if a little scattered by the wind. I gather you up again, lay you back in your bed of long-rotted grasses. You’re missing a foot, it must’ve fallen into the valley below. Sorry about that.

We had both been young. Baba had caught stiplets for me, and I had chased many of your brothers and sisters, but you were the first, the first willing kill. Had you ever had friends, other than I? I’d killed you after Yotun asked me if I liked it, liked hurting. Afterward I’d found that I couldn’t eat you; perhaps I was trying to prove something. Perhaps I still am. Why? Is this not what we are? I am your predator, and you my prey.

I turn your sun-bleached crown over in my hands, peering into the gaping sockets. I had long ago sent in my tongue and claws to pull out the dried, wasted brainflesh from your skull. I hope you didn’t mind; you keep better this way.

Your head is empty now, whistling like a conch shell in the wind. Is that all we are? A mind of soft meat in a cage of flesh and bone? Is identity truly skin-deep? If so, friend, you are no more. You ended here on this ledge, with me as death and witness. I don’t think I was good company. You had been in the throes of your first rut, that deep ache. Sorry again; I guess you never made it through that either.

I… I am alone, talking to a broken dead thing. The rotted bed of grass feels coarse as I rise, my legs carrying me further and further east.

A few boughs and branches still bare scars, slashes long faded into soft shapes from whosoever carved this path so long ago. The trees stretch and twist, then wither as the path winds higher, skirting around precipitous drops and gullies. Yotun walked this trail the most, showed it to no one but me—and the girl, Callio. She… trusted him, to lead her through this narrow gap between the mountains, clambering between slabs of slick mossed rock. I wonder what that trust was worth.

The ground tilts up then down, passing over a crest with a gust of warm air that would lift me were I to have wings. I pause on the precipice, and imagine soaring far away… The trees eventually return to form a leaning woodland—tree roots lifting from the soil in silent bracing steps—broken here and there by plateaus of granite and dropped boulders. I find the one I’m looking for, the one with the high view of the world beyond the woods and the little clearing beneath. The hollow tree I used to hide in is still there, so is the log Yotun used to sit on. I rest on my haunches beside it; no use hiding now, I guess.

Yotun’s house looked like a toy from this distance, nestled beside its many lines of miniature vines and crops, about to be quashed by the Brackwood’s eastern escarpments. Even from here I can smell the acrid spray of pesticide and rich loamy fertiliser. A radji scent wafts up to greet me too, unfamiliar and strange. Danger, comes the old warning. Stranger. Foe—but it is too distant to truly worry me. I peer over the edge, straining to see any movement. There, between the vines, the minute shape of a young man… Yotun?

A rock tumbles from high above me in an arc of dust and scree, the fear that I have misread the winds taking hold. Instinctively, I duck low to the log, lying still. I know well that one can look down on this escarpment and remain hidden from below, but no voice booms out to greet or curse me, there is no clap of thunder nor the metallic punch of a firearm. Just stillness. Silence.

Unpeeling myself from the log, I slink into the woods anew, scrambling up into the trees, but the overhang is unoccupied save for moss-capped rocks, discarded leaf litter, and some late-blooming spring bulbs. I chitter quietly as I return to the ground, wondering if this is how Yotun had felt.

The path he used to take down to his home is still faintly visible, so I take it. It twists around blackened roots below and a rounded, leafy awning above that let in little light. The coastal rains drop good moisture here, supporting the farmers in the valley beyond. It is, in many ways, as lush and—were I prey—as plentiful as the woods on the western side of the mountains. But nothing without roots or wings truly lives here, and even the latter are vagrants.

The vyrryn do not journey over the mountains, and the brynn wouldn’t be tolerated where they would trample and desolate the farmers’ crops. Any stiplets that once lived here have stripped the woodlands bare and burned themselves out or carried on into the valley to plague the vines. Were I to dig down into the soil, I would find next to nothing wriggling about in my paws. The roots are not strong; they crunch and squelch underfoot.

It is a cold, quiet place. A hollow skeleton of a forest, devoid of meat and heart.

A small amount of shrubbery and brambles holds sway at the forests edge, the last border before the wild runs out. The wind rustles through the canopy, carrying the far-off sound of ground cars on highways further east. I peep out, low to the ground. Yotun’s family’s house is massive compared to the lodge, all above ground with flat concrete walls. Nearby there is a kind of shed, with walls of weathered wood, a wide door swinging ajar in the wind. There’s no sign of movement, but the unfamiliar scent lingers. Again, it pulls me on. Keeping to the undergrowth, I swing south to where the vineyard borders the forest and spy my quarry, just visible in a crouch where one plot of vines end in the middle distance. He rises, turning away from me as he carries on away. Taking a long pause to ensure no one is watching, I dive beneath the vines in two bounds.

Before, when I had snuck up to this house, I had been able to move undetected beneath and between rows and rows of vines, ducking beneath the wooden trestles. But that had been in the dead of night, when I was far smaller. Thin beams of sunshine filter through, lighting the way. The rough, splitting wood scratches against my scales but I take my time, sticking to the densest sections.

I freeze as a deep whirring signals the advance of a six-limbed metal machine, striding along the vines with nimble grace despite being as tall as I am. I scramble backward into thicker cover, watching this strange creature.

This… thing gives off no smell save that of oil and grease, shaking near imperceptibly from some hidden dead heart. It’s shining chrome carapace is broken here and there by red diodes, a mass of fibres directed forward in its ‘head’ like a pair of massive eyes. The crimson gaze sweeps over where I had been a few moments prior.

It picks a direction, the union of a dozen motors and servos whirring and whining as it continues its march. I wait a short moment before trailing along parallel to it.

This metal beast is a strange construct. Two pairs of dextrous limbs fore and aft reach down and pluck out the ripe fruits or spray a fine saccharine mist across the greener bulbs. The fresher fruits are thrust into an opening in the creatures back like a great cavernous maw.

Ahead of me, I can see a pair of feet waiting at the end of the line. I stop, not wanting to get too close. I watch as the machine deposits its bounty into a wide woven basket at the rows end, then stalls. The young man grunts, reaching up and swatting the side of the drone. It makes a mechanical groan as if in protest, then rights itself, and marches away.

At the same moment a voice calls out from some way out, both the lad and I flinching. I steal a glance at his sheepish expression as he turns to the side.

No… not Yotun, this boy is darker, squatter, his snout rounder and more pronounced where Yotun’s is squarish. The farmhand wears an old, tattered set of cream-coloured overalls smeared with greasy palm prints. He hefts up the basket filled with rounded, reddish fruit, hurrying off across the yard. In the distance, by the barn, a man stands with a wide stance and his paws on his hips.

I double back, back to the trees, slinking along after them. A thick patch of bramble blocks my path, dense and thorny from years of overgrowth. Finding a path through them is slow going, lest I make a noise or get a thorn in the eye. I see patches of reddish paint to my right as I approach the barn, loud voices echoing around it’s wooden walls. The sound draws me on.

Pushing through the last of the brambles, I find myself in a patch of thin saplings, retans growing on a small ridge overlooking the barn. They sprout in an artificial circle around a pale wooden bench, neighbouring branches above cleared away to give them light. The sight is so strange it distracts me, and I linger for moment. I hear the latch on the barn’s rear door shift below, and I scarper backward, holding myself low. I’d be exposed from above, but below I should be invisible.

The man who was waiting before—Yotun’s father, I realise—steps out, the younger man trailing after him.

“The skin might look normal,” Arrut grunts, “but the flesh inside will be rotten.” He hands one of the reddish fruits to the boy, pointing out blackish spots on its surface. The man tells him to do better, that not catching a mould can blight the whole crop. The boy nods, casually tossing the fruit over his shoulder. It arcs through the air, landing only a short distance from where I crouch. Arrut looks ready to snap at him but resists, telling him to bring it back for mulching, then turns and marches off toward the house.

Brush and snapping twigs tell me I only have a few seconds, so I dive behind the bench, curling my larger body up as tight as I can. A moment later the boy comes scrambling up the rise, scuffing his feet and mumbling curses. He steps so close but does not see, senses dull and soft. I could reach out and touch him, and he probably wouldn’t even notice. I could snatch the fruit away. It’d be so easy.

Be like them, a little voice says, soft as a whisper. Let them see. I could do it, be vulnerable. Yotun was a good friend, why couldn’t I make another?

The moment draws out, and out… and then passes as he snatches up the fruit and takes a bite out of it. He quickly spits it out, cursing again. He tosses it down, crushes it into the dirt, and stomps off down the ridge.

I peer out around the edge of the bench, watching him go. The impulse to give chase tickles at my spine… but it would lure me too close to the house, too far from the trees. This moment too fades away, and I am angry. This was stupid, I chastise myself. I am being stupid! Reckless and foolish, even for me!

The barndoor groans, and a moment later I see the farmhand marching off toward the house again, muttering and wiping grease off onto his overalls. He’ll be back, I don’t doubt, so I seize on my chance to escape. I creep backward slowly, pulling back from this pale patch of trees. As I draw myself down to press through the brambles again, some movement at the forest’s edge draws my eye. A small figure, his fur in tattered tangles, half tumbles down the slope.

I recognise the little one at once. Brother dear. Confusion takes hold, stills me, snares me in place. What? What’s he doing here?

Unable to pass the brambles, he blunders out into the open, looking about as he crosses the yard. The farm boy could be back any moment! Should I leave him? It would be better if he were found alone… I… I could try to get to him… A glance upward tells me what I already know; the branches above wouldn’t support me, would be wasted effort. The ground cover would also be futile, too sparse for us both. Imdi calls out my name as loud as a whisper. The fool must’ve been following me, must’ve been what startled me back on the rise! The stupid, stupid fool!

My body moves in the same instant decision arrives. I spring down the slope, colliding with Imdi, snatching him around the middle. Ignoring his satisfying puff of surprise and confusion, I drag him around the edge of the open barn door. I choke on a gasp myself as we round the corner, meeting the great metal eyes of one of the vine-striders, backing into the door on instinct. But it does not move or react, and no light shines in the dull, fuchsia coloured, compound-diode eyes. A glance up shows that it is suspended from a massive metal arm with some of its own limbs partially disassembled, its mechanoid innards spilling in a heap beneath it. Dead.

Gathering myself, I pull the door quickly shut and latch it. Glancing around the rest of the barn, I find the open front door, a cluttered workbench, and a myriad collection of unfamiliar equipment. A set of crooked wooden stairs leads straight up to a second level that skirts the perimeter of the barn. Contrasted against the glare of the blue skies outside, the level is a gloomy, railed platform looking down into the ground floor. The ground floor is mostly clear save the odd loose piece of metal plate or bolt, and the slightly slicker patch beneath the machine my nose tells me is oil without any conscious effort.

Imdi starts to ask me something, but I shush him. Outside, I hear the other boy’s muffled voice again, watch the latch rattle but hold as he pushes against it. I shove Imdi up the steps, stealing after him. The wood, old and rotted, creaks and gasps noisily beneath my new weight, and I have to spread myself wide to stay quiet.

In various corners old buckets, brooms, ploughs, loops of chain, and discarded batteries lay half forgotten; little in the way of shelter. The metal harvester hangs from a spool jammed into a crossbeam, tied off to a hook on one of the railings. A window sits half-ajar on the wall to the right of the backdoor, and I quickly jam it open. A stolen glance tells me I can make the jump easily were I alone, but I have to deal with–

The front door grinds open, rattling against its hinges. Imdi and I duck down as the boy slowly creeps in. He calls out, his voice wavering and uncertain. My own heart wavers: I know I cannot be seen.

The boy unlatches the door, frowning, sticking his head outside. I take the moment to lift Imdi up and dangle him onto the window ledge, my brother’s eyes wide as I leave him to hold himself with nothing but a silent promise. As I duck down again the stranger pulls his head back in, glancing up the stairs. My dark scales save me, a coiled shadow pressed low and flat against the wall, but I cannot stand up without being seen.

I need something, a distraction. To my right, I spy the one of the hooks the dangling machine has been affixed to, jammed into a metal beam. I start to slowly reach for it, keeping myself as still as I can. The first stair groans as the boy starts moving upward, then the second. Outside, Imdi will be running out of strength. I stretch out as far as my arms will reach. The third step creaks, and I can see the boy’s flat, broad nose scrunching up in indecision, smell his heavy breath. My claw brushes against the chord once, twice…

In the distance, someone calls out; a man or a woman I cannot tell. The boy falters back a step, just for a moment, leaning backward to look out, and I capitalise on it. I snatch forward, my claws cutting through the cord. The whole machine falls an arm span downward, the closest side smashing down into the floor with a resounding Ka-crash! Dust and metal sparks are thrown up in all directions, the metal beasts limp torso shuddering atop its carapace. The boy falls backward down the stairs. Winded and coughing from the dust, he rolls onto his front.

I don’t stop to see if he looks up again. In one practiced movement I leap up and out of the window, arcing through the air without touching sides, Imdi’s face puffing and straining with one hand on the ledge beneath me. I drop down, years of hard landings making it silent, and ground myself in time to catch my stupid brother who falls like an old rotten branch.

I turn and run with him in my arms, scampering up into the empty woods. Partway up, I glance over one shoulder to see that the boy is now standing out the front of the barn, talking with two other figures. I decide to put as much distance between us and them as possible.

When I pause again on the high ridge, I am fuming. I drop him to his feet and skulk about aimlessly. Imdi asks me what I was doing out here. I call him a moron. He laughs and says I wasn’t exactly being clever either, but that just makes me angrier. I call him many names, and though it stops his laughing, I only feel worse at the look on his face.

And so, I turn away, stomping uphill. I try to set a hard stride, but he follows pace. The child won’t stop talking. He asks why I hide away from them, even during summer. Why we don’t play like we used to. Why I don’t talk, or laugh, or look the same. He wonders where his sister went. And I am angry, and sick of the questions. So, I grab him, throwing him up against the nearest tree trunk I can.

“Why can’t you just leave me alone, you brat!” I snap at him.

Imdi winces, then whines a long breathless wheeze. We both look down to find my claws digging into his torso.

The next instant he is in a heap upon the ground, clutching at his sides with a confused expression, and I am stumbling backward, looking down at my blue-tipped talons. The bottom drops out of my stomach, a lurching despair. No… no, no! My vision is blurred, a thundering in my ears that drones out all sound. I reach for my belt, but I never put it on. No radio. No help. No hope.

I don’t know what to do, so I just scream. Rage, frustration, terror, it all comes out. I am so angry with him for following me, with the whole world for making me this way, and furious with nothing and no one more than me. And all the while Imdi just sits there, looking at me blankly. And I wonder, what does he see?

I… I… am what they see.

I have to do something, so I fling him over my shoulder and start to run. He grips around my neck with an arm, and I bound across the land with him riding atop my back, just as we used to. I throw myself back the way I had come, back through the secret path. Imdi is mumbling something inane, some jest or jab half-realised, but I am too blinded by panic to notice.

I run for what seems like days, lathering and foaming at the mouth from the exertion. This lifeless forest fights me, mocks my every effort with joints grinding and twisting over the uneven ground. The world has gone cold, sapping at my strength with every footfall. I scramble uphill and stagger down the other side, sliding on loose gravel and over twisted root.

At one point, I lurch as my arm gives out beneath me, Imdi nearly spilling from my back. In catching him I am rewarded with a face full of sticks and dirt. As I right myself I find my own flanks have gone sticky with his bluish blood. He says something quiet and weak, insisting he’s fine. I snatch him up again with my other arm, hiding my wretched long snout. I don’t say anything, there’s nothing to say. The run is all there is; if I stop, I’ll fail.

The mountains and their caps of snow, the high reaches of the trees and all of their leaves, the scansa and the clouds and the whole horizon itself, the brother in my arms and the tears on my face, we’re all splashed in the crimson of the setting sun. My whole head is throbbing, screaming in my skull. It doesn’t want to be here anymore.

By the time the valley and the lodge draws into view I am stumbling, barely managing more than a trot. The backdoor swings open as we approach, Mama stepping out. She waves to us, but her smile faulters in a moment. A slow step toward us becomes a run, yelling for her lover over one shoulder. I lay Imdi down as gently as possible as she reaches us, her paws searching carefully, but wasting no effort. She asks me what did this, but I don’t reply.

Baba comes hobbling out of the lodge then doubles back, seemingly losing his limp in the time it takes him to fetch the med-kit. Brother dear tries to whisper something to me, grabbing for my wrist, but I pull away. Making space for my father, I pull back, taking some small solace that he still responds to their touch.

I don’t belong here. I turn and walk away, finding the only shelter I can in the forest’s embrace. I am almost to the treeline when Turin notices I’m missing.

“Ki-yu? What happened?!” she calls out after me, but I am already gone. “Ki-yu, come back!”

---

When I run through the deep dark forest long after this begun

Where the sun would set, the trees were dead, and the rivers were none

And I hope for a trace to lead me back home from this place

But there was no sound, there was only me and my disgrace

– Wolf by First Aid Kit.