"Expulsion! Do you even know what that means?" he asked as we came out of the underbrush and onto the thin trail.

"In this context? I can't say I do."

The Watcher of Dreams slapped his own face with both his hands. "You are so stupid! Stupid, stupid, stupid!" he muttered to himself. He gave me a pleading glance. "Tell me you did not steal it."

"I did not."

"Realm almighty, I'm being expelled." He shook his head.

I motioned into the brush, stepping off the path. "Given a scenario in which I had stolen this knife, wouldn't I be the one getting expelled?"

He glared at me. "Punishment by association. I'll have my property revoked and my line of credit rescinded, and you'll scarcely be permitted to do business with, not only Stock, but any village at all! Ever again!" His hands motioned to the sky, flopping down to his sides.

"That seems a bit harsh for theft," I said. "You'll be fine, Watcher. The shopkeep refused to sell it to me on account of it being useless—" Unless he wouldn't sell it to me because he knew what it could do…

"What?"

"Nothing." I hope that isn't the case. "Look, I'm sure he won't even notice it's gone."

"Then you did steal it!" The man brought a cloth from his vest's front pocket and wiped off his brow.

"Oh!" In the distance, I spotted the ridge under which I'd stashed Keeper. "She should be here, look around."

"We'll get back to this later!" And then he ran along the small overhang.

It took a few minutes before I came across the smell of dry blood. It stirred a primal desire within me. I wanted to hunt. I knew she was there, maybe asleep, maybe not. But to this primitive part of my mind, it mattered little. I would wrestle her to the ground if needed. Gods, this has gotten worse.

"Watcher! I found her!"

By the time Watcher came sprinting, I had backed off a fair distance from the smell. I pointed him in her direction, and my eyes lingered on his neck. It had never looked so red before. Another while later, I sat on the ground, holding onto my knees. I hadn't noticed I was doing it until the tone of Keeper's sleepy voice carried to my ear with the wind. I stood quickly and dusted my rump off, as little as it helped my appearance.

"How'd you sleep?" I put on a fake smile, but as soon as the blood-soaked cloth that covered most of her body came into view, the smile was very real.

Watcher immediately interrupted with a slew of questions that prompted Keeper to recount the details of that night. Watcher listened closely, gasping at certain parts and interjecting when needed. Once Keeper had finished, the both of them jumped into a conversation that soon shifted to argument.

And while I couldn't understand most of the context, Watcher's conclusion piqued my attention. "If a Mauler can venture as far as the Forest of Green, the villagers will cease to afford us these benefits. Things are changing, Keeper. Soon," and when Keeper simply brushed him off with an excuse of poor luck, it only brought me to wonder one thing: Am I the change?

All the while, I'd found myself hovering closer and closer to Keeper's side. As if, with each passing moment, the smell of her blood grabbed my restless tongue and pulled it in, ever closer.

Following a short stretch of silence, Watcher brought his finger into the air and waggled it. "I'd almost forgotten! This brat has something to confess," and he looked to me expectantly.

"I'm not sure what you're talking about," I said. "I didn't steal the knife."

"You stole what?!" Keeper shot awake, louder than she'd gotten at any point in her argument with Watcher. "For the love of God, please tell me no one saw you."

Her comment had almost insulted me enough not to notice her odd turn of phrase. "God?" I asked.

"The gods, whatever, I don't care. Did they see you?"

"Of course not," I spat. "Where does this God nonsense come from? Have you picked a favorite? Is it Delilah?"

Keeper stopped in her tracks. "What the hell are you talking about?"

I faced her. "That! I'm talking about exactly that! Hell, what even is Hell?"

Her eyes went wide. Watcher was backing up when Keeper tapped at his side a couple of times. "Ferro, you're getting worked up—"

"Worked up!" My neck craned back and a belting laughter flowed out of me. It was almost as marvelous as Keeper's iron-rich scent. "You think I can't tell? Of course I'm worked up! I didn't know I was travelling with a couple of one-god money-loving bastards!"

"It's just a phrase, Ferro. You're hungry, that's why—"

"Yes! I'm hungry! Do you have any clue what it's been like to incessantly lust after your battered body? I've not stopped thinking about you. I dreamt of you when I slept and when I laid awake! The thought of that delicious cut across your calf hasn't left my mind every since I painstakingly covered it from myself. If I were to consider any one thing the worst decision of my life, it would be that," I growled and tried to step forwards, but both my hands laid leaden behind me. They had grown massive, black claws. "What's next, you tell me to return the dagger? My dagger?"

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Keeper nodded and then stepped in front of Watcher. The man yelled, "SHAKE!"

The ground burst into a violent earthquake. But not just the ground, it was as if the air shook too. If my claws hadn't been so heavy, I'd have fallen over before I knew what was happening.

"Jump." Keeper shot into the air, leaving the spot in front of Watcher. He sat on the vibrating ground with his legs crossed and eyes closed.

Kill him first, then I eat the girl. I dug my left hand into the ground, steadied myself with it, and hauled out a chunk of earth with my right one. I heaved it at the man sitting peacefully amongst the chaos. From above, Keeper slammed into the boulder and shattered it under her weight. The sight of her sent me into a bloodlust. I could feel the last shreds of empathy tear out of my mind and then, my legs crackled. I shot off towards my next meal.

"Delay," Keeper said.

Quickly followed by Watcher's "Boom."

The girl floated in the air for a beat, and then, holding her shears in front of her, shot out like an arrow. The clean tip of her blades met my outstretched palms and pierced the both of them. She stopped my momentum clean, and we plowed through three or four trees, a wake of dirt and dust kicked up behind us. Then, she wrenched the two blades of her scissors apart, while they were still pierced into my hands. They ripped, and piles of dark slop splattered across the forest in opposite directions. I screamed, and before I could recover from the dizzying pain, the girl's scissors had surrounded me. But instead of cutting me in two, Keeper pressed them hard against my chest and pinned me to the ground.

Consume. I morphed into a shapeless mass of tar, a hole opening to finally eat the thing I'd fantasized over for so long. But I was still sat between the blades of her weapon. They sliced my formless body clean in two.

I reverted to something sort of human, only now I was missing my bottom half. It sat, intact, on the other side of Keeper's closed blades. The girl plopped down on one of my arms, which I'd only now realized had regrown claws, and she tossed her scissors to pin down the other one. It weighed about fifteen horses. "Not bad." She wiggled her head proudly.

I shifted under her weight as much as possible, but the more I moved, the heavier she got. Repair. But my body only momentarily turned viscous, before Keeper's weight crushed me and I returned to the same half-bodied state, only now dug slightly further into the ground, and slightly hungrier, and slightly more tired.

Watcher came up to us slowly. He nudged my lower half with his foot. "Seems about the right punishment for that knife."

"I wonder if we'll get him put back together," Keeper said.

----------------------------------------

"Million Eyes, what is taking him so long?!"

Keeper laid sprawled out on my hand, keeping me pinned. All either of us could do was watch the fake sky. I hadn't looked too hard at it until now, but the thing seemed to hold a rough texture past its faint uniform luminescence. Irregular shapes of shadow played along its surface, trying to peak through, only for the dull blue sheen to crush down their attempts at standing out. It's okay little shapes in the sky, I see you. Now, would you give me some blood?

"You know, I've been meaning to tell you. Eater probably wouldn't appreciate your use of his name."

My head thrashed against the floor. Then I lay panting for a moment. "It's more of an epithet, really."

"Right…"

"Wouldn't it be alright if I only tasted your blood? I'll be fully satisfied after Watcher gets here and I promise I won't go ballistic—"

Then, a wonderous wall of pure, fresh, straight-from-the-vein blood wafted in with a gust of air.

"Calm down. You're going to pass out if you keep sniffing that much." After that, I'm sure Keeper laughed, or cried, or whatever. For all I know she could've stripped naked and flaunted her injuries, I wouldn't have noticed. All that I could focus on was the thick smell filling the forest.

Soon, Watcher arrived with a bucket of cow's blood from the village. The rest was a blur. I don't remember if Keeper let me go to drink it myself, or if Watcher poured it down my throat while I lay there, but what I do know is that after the fact, my chest was stained red and I was significantly more lucid.

As soon as I came to, the first words out of my mouth were "Where are my legs?" Luckily, an especially exhausting Repair fixed that issue. My next set of words were vehement apologies. Both Keeper and Watcher relished in my regret for the length of the journey back to Stock, and I was fortunate they didn't hold any grudges from my altered state of mind. Unfortunately, once we'd arrived back to Watcher's home, they brought the other issue to my attention.

The man tugged the pile of bedding from the floor, revealing a scuffed wooden box wrapped in a red ribbon. "You are returning it."

I let out a sigh. "Do you want the shopkeeper to know it was stolen? Look, he won't even notice it's gone, and by the time he does, there's no reason he would suspect I took it," I said. "If I did, which I didn't."

The man rolled his entire head. "Keeper, would you talk some sense into him?"

There was much more back-and-forth argument, and when I finally gave up and agreed to returning it under the dark of night, I was certain it would be enough to convince them. They'd put in the effort and finally won me over.

That night, I left the house and made my way across the village. I took careful note of every accidental nook and forgotten alleyway, until I found one I liked, and there, hidden in a barred-off windowsill, stuck between two buildings far too close to one another, I placed the box. The knife slid comfortably into my hidden sheathe, and I returned to Watcher's home where I received plenty of praise and acted forlorn for a good while.

I lay in the same spot as I had the first night, on the floor with blanket and pillow. Keeper slept next to me, on the bed my legs had once been trapped. As I tried to doze off, happy and full, the rigid pattern of wooden planks embedded into the ceiling held my attention. After a while, I noticed there were two colors of plank in use. One darker than the other. The darker one made a specific pyramid from left to right. Starting with one, and then branching off into two, three, four, so on.

"Keeper?" My voice pierced the silence.

"Yes?"

"That counted as step one, right? What's next?"

The silence grew louder for a while, and as I started to wonder whether the girl had fallen asleep again, she answered. "Climb a tree. A very big tree. And return with a gift for the Seers."

I perked up. "How big?"

She thought a moment, but not a long one. "Big enough to pierce the sky."