My plan was going great.

Awesome.

Amazing really.

Some might even say that it was perfection itself. By now, every beastkin in a hundred miles had to know about me.

"Kill the spy!" Roared a beastkin within the crowd around me.

"Let's gut the bastard and watch him bleed out!" Yelled another.

"I have a message for Chieftain Kanieta!" I shouted from inside my cage, trying to redirect the attention of these bloodthirsty bastards. "And I told you I was a messenger! I fucking walked up to your camp, and you accepted it!"

"Death to the lying bastard!" Came a high pitch shriek from one of the short hairy men carrying my cage.

"Let's rip out the liar's heart and eat it!" Shouted another from the other side of my cage I was facing.

"I want to roll around in his entrails!" Screamed one off to the side.

"Aye~!" Cried out everyone around me, a disturbing amount of delight filling their voices.

"Let's roast him over a fire and eat him!" Shouted one.

At the words, the procession stopped. And all the short furry men and women around me looked at the one who had spoken. He was on the younger side if I was one to judge, and he quailed with the group's full attention focused on him.

"Get the fecker!" Shouted a high-pitched female.

As one, the hundred or so furry men and women charged around my cage and leapt at the poor young man.

Screams of pain and rage sounded, and more than one fight broke out at the edge of the pile between individuals, but eventually, the swinging arms, legs, and biting mouths stopped.

The group started pouring back, returning to their previous positions, slapping each other on the back like they were reminiscing about a good time. As I watched, I only saw a few of their claws not dripping with blood. Finally, the one in the center of the mass was revealed.

Hundreds of scratches covered the young man's body, and his clothes were now nothing more than strings almost pulled apart by their own weight.

"Throw the heathen into the cage!" Shrieked someone.

"Ayee~!" Shouted the bloodthirsty crowd around me.

Without hesitation, one of the short figures picked up the body and threw it at my cage. I watched in confusion as the body flew at the stone bars.

Eyes widening in alarm, I tried to leap to the side as the bars of my cage started to rapidly melt away like pillars of sand, but I was too late. "Hunn~!" I grunted as the leg of the mini mountain hit me in the chest.

There was this one time as a child when I tried leaping into a pond. My friends and I were progressively climbing higher into a tree, leaning over the water as we jumped off it.

On my final attempt, my leg hit a thick, low-hanging branch, and the branch won by breaking my shin. Though I did go back later and chop off the branch after I was healed, so who is to say who actually won.

Anyway, that small creature's leg hitting me was like how I remembered connecting with that tree. An object that refused to be budged.

Slamming into the stone walls of the cage, I bounced off them and flopped onto the ground. Only to grunt in pain again as the leg fell onto my chest, pushing out the small amount of air I had managed to suck into my lungs back out.

I watched, my vision swimming, as two of the stocky beastkin walked up to the stone bars sticking out of one side of the cage. With no sign of effort, they lifted up the bars sticking out of the floor of the cage and started walking.

I have been carried around by these creatures in this cage for hours. I could see the first hints of dawn’s light, so I was guessing around three, but I didn't know nor care. I was more focused on not being eaten.

It was a cage that was made of compressed soil to the point there was little difference between it and granite. Or so I assumed from my sword doing nothing to the stone as I hacked at it.

The cage was five by five feet on the floor and seven feet tall. All of which was made of compressed soil. The spacing between the bars was four of my fingers wide, and the bars themselves were as wide as my forearms.

If the cage weighed less than a ton, I would be surprised. And four of those creatures were carrying it like it was nothing.

I guess I should be happy that I didn't get dog-piled like the poor bastard in the cage with me and be torn limb from limb, but that was a small comfort.

They seemed so reasonable when I first approached them. They were marching up a road leading to the cradle heading toward the Northern Fort. And some of their numbers were beginning to turn toward me, probably picking up my scent.

I didn't really have a choice. Either I confronted one of the camps surrounding the fort with a fire, or I got caught trying to sneak up to the fort and killed out of hand.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

A rather small group that had no wolf or bird beastkin among their number and looked small and relatively harmless for beastkin seemed like a good idea at the time. The group was four and a half to five feet tall, with clawed broad hands and a tail that looked only slightly less wide than it was long.

When they hesitantly gathered around me and didn't attack me on sight while I explained that I was a messenger from the Triad, I thought I was in the clear.

They asked the reasonable question of why I didn't approach the gate directly, and I responded with the all-encompassing statement by saying, "politics."

The furry creatures nodded, in understanding, then the largest one said, "Don't worry, Laddie! We'll get ya to her!"

And then, the cage formed around me without giving me time to act, and they started marching with me, with them screaming about what they would do to me. Over the course of the march, the calls to eat, disembowel, and all-around defilement of my corpse increased until someone said something the others didn't like and got piled onto.

The whole situation had the feeling of a ritual to me. And I was in a fifty-fifty mental split on whether they let me live.

"Let's kill the fuckers!" Screeched someone.

"I'm gonna slit their throats and watch them bleed to death!"

"I'm gonna rip off their arms and beat them with it!"

"I'm gonna…"

Sixty-forty, I thought, trying to stay positive.

Ignoring the crowned screaming threats, I pushed the leg that probably weighed as much as my body off of me with a few curses and grunts.

Giving the young man — who looked about my age when you got past that hairy face — a once over, I saw his chest was moving and that his many wounds and bruises were closing before my eyes. Though there was still blood caked around the wounds, no more blood was leaking out as scabs had already formed. That's impressive.

I looked around at our procession and, not for the first time, wondered where we were going. At first, it appeared that we were traveling to the Triad, but instead of entering the gates, we skirted around the outside of the walls.

When we made it around, it was already past daybreak, and I could see and smell the smoke rising from the Western Fort. Any sounds were drowned out by the increasingly loud furry bastards and the growing procession of beastkin we were marching with.

Not to the forts, but away. I had to assume that the thousands of other beastkin were marching to the same place as us.

Which was… nowhere, as far as I could see. The only thing of note that we were fast approaching on the dirt road was the forest. And a couple of boulders I don't remember ever seeing before.

"Errg~." Groaned the young man next to me, his arms and legs shifting.

Suddenly, he sat up and shouted, "I'm gonna rip the tail off the next person who threatens me and shove it up their ass!" Though the cage might not have solid walls, he yelled it so loud my ears rang for a moment after.

Our portion of the road stopped, and all of the short creatures turned to look at the cage. A shiver of fear ran up my spine as the collective blood lust of a hundred bloodthirsty beastkin washed over me. Some of the eyes of those looking at me seemed to glow with an inner light.

"My hairy balls a whelp like ya can do that!" shouted a gray-furred old-looking beastkin.

"I'll rip that tongue out of ya’r mouth and use it to wipe my ass if ya say something so ridiculous again!" Screamed another beastkin at the same time.

The two insults broke loose the damn of building rage. Stones that were more like caltrops started flying through the cage's bars, impacting us and opening up gashes all over our bodies.

"Oww! Mother fuckers!" I cried out in pain from the impacts, trying my best to dodge and block them, but they just kept coming. Even my leather armor was being torn up from the beating.

But the beastkin in the cage with me just held his head high, ignoring the increasing number of cuts covering his body as he laughed madly.

"Hahaha! This is nothing! Am I supposed to be feeling pain!? Why don't ya start putting some effort into it, ya old bags! Or is that too much for ya’r bones to handle?!" The provocation caused the stone caltrops to redouble.

Falling to the floor, I curled in on myself, forming as much of a ball as I could as I covered my head with my arms. As soon as I hit the ground, there was a noticeable decrease in the number of projectiles hitting me. And those still hitting me no longer had the same force as before.

I still had scrapes covering most of my head, my arms to either side of my bracers were close to ground meat, and it felt like I had multiple cramps on my sides that were not going away, but at least nothing more was being stacked on.

The cackles and jeers of the beastkin in the cage with me continued minute after minute, his fur becoming matted down with blood. On the floor of the cage was a pooling of blood inching toward me.

Not once in all the time did the insults or projectiles stop flying, and those outside of the bars only became more riled up as they called for our deaths.

What was weird was that past the hundred short beastkin screaming their heads off, the other beastkin were giving us a wide berth. The few looks thrown at us were exasperation or a roll of the eyes as their faces radiated annoyance.

They might have looked like they wanted to shout at us to move out of the way, but no one said a word. They walked off the road and through the tall grass, looking to the sides to avoid eye contact as they got close to the screaming fanatics.

When the beastkin in the cage finally collapsed, no doubt from blood loss rather than lack of will, the other beastkins stopped, picked up the cage, and started walking, screaming about how they would smear our blood into the ground and make a painting for our families to look at.

I lay on my back in the cage, listening to the soft snores of the man beside me as he kicked out with one leg as muttered in his sleep, "I waitin' feckers…"

What. The. Fuck. I thought to myself, my body throbbing in pain.

The beastkins around me were as loud as ever, and I still had no idea what was happening.

I saw we were passing the boulders next to the road, and from one moment to the next, I was passing through a stone tunnel.

Sitting up on my elbows, I looked around in amazement, seeing a city stretching out before me. The beastkins carrying the cage might have been short, but it still placed me above most of the crowd in the square.

Just within the square, I saw buildings made out of stone, wooden planks, and some that looked like they were grown out of the trees themselves. Towers hundreds of feet tall stabbed into the sky, dwarfing everything around them. Entire sections of the tower's walls were missing, with platforms sticking out from their bottoms in evenly spaced intervals up its length. I could see the openings being used by bird beastkins to dive off of and land on.

While some of the wood looked freshly cut, and the stone didn't have the wear of time and usage, I would never have guessed this city didn't exist a couple months ago.

I remembered walking through this section of forest. All that should be here were trees and increasingly large rolling hills as you traveled deeper into the Northern Forest.

Everything around me had the hustle and bustle of a well-established city, going through its daily life, even at such an early hour. And we had no idea it was here.

On a visceral level, I finally understood. More than everything else I had experienced, this made me understand. We can't make them an enemy.

"Where are we going," I whispered to myself.

"The Conclave." Grunted the beastkin in the cage with me. "I didn't think my first time would be this fun!" He said, lifting his head and flashing me a fang-filled smile. "If only these squat-legged bastards could move without wiping their asses on the ground!”