Kyuse flicked his tail, yellow eyes glinting in the darkness of the forest, a slow appreciation growing within him for the difference between old growth forest, and the overgrown brush he had previously thought of as a "forest". It was dark, although his eyes adjusted to that easily enough; what he found more interesting was how clear the forest floor was; there were small scattered clumps of thick brush, lit brilliantly from above, visible for a surprising distance around - tree trunks were spread out more thinly than his previous experience would lead to expect.

He set his pack against a tree, turning in a slow circle, listening to the calls of birds, and the distant overhead rustle of wind unfelt in the warm enclosure of the trees, and the sound of water to his south. A river cut a meandering path through the forest, forming a semicircle here. A glade formed a barrier to the north, with relatively narrow trails to the northeast and northwest. The horizon was lit up in green in every direction, walls of thick brush lit up in the life-giving sun.

He'd settle in here. "Eruta nagistrias." A hum filled his mind, and information began filtering into his awareness.

Kyuse quickly reviewed his personal notes - it was a useful invocation, that came at the price that everything he "wrote" here was accessible to basically any scholar in the Three Isles. Thaumaturgy had been an excellent spell school, in that life. He wasn't living that life anymore. This being a forest, the natural spell school would be, of course, biomancy. He mentally pulled a student catalogue into his thoughts.

The immediately headache, he was quite accustomed to, but thaumaturgy proficiency was relatively simple by comparison; action, reaction, and an innate and intuitive understanding of the aether itself, the fabric underpinning the art of magic itself, into which all invocations were ultimately written. It had been quite useful.

Biomancy, by comparison, was ... huh. He was sitting down? No, laying down, that was the canopy. Biomancy was complex, and where the experience of expanding his knowledge of thaumaturgy had been like somebody writing research directly into his mind, biomancy was more like a dozen people drawing different pictures, that joined unexpectedly.

It was a fractal; he was vaguely familiar with them, they had been heavily researched during the early days of magical innovation. A pattern which, at any degree of analysis, was only a small portion of a much more complex version of itself. It felt like ... no, not like someone drawing into his mind, like an uncountable number of spiders crawling through his memories, weaving webs into bigger webs.

The feeling passed, the knowledge slowly integrating itself into his understanding. Kyuse took a slow breath, propping himself up on his elbows. Oh. Ow. Ow. He leaned onto his side, unpinning his tail from underneath his weight. Okay.

Now. He wanted... the ability to manipulate wood. That would be most useful here and now. He pulled from another part of the catalogue. This knowledge didn't hurt quite as badly; it was just a modification of the shape of the fractal. Woodwarp. He added a mental note. His knowledge suggested it was quite useful, but not quite everything he would need. He focused again, and this time, it was rather worse; he was overdoing this. But first, his notes.

Woodwarp: Creates an outgrowth of living wood at rapid speed, total volume determined by the number of spell layers.

Nurture: Increases the natural rate of growth, whether sprouting a seed, growing a tree, or spreading disease.

He'd need to do some testing with them; the knowledge that came with the spell formations was simultaneously vague and potentially enlightening; Kyuse was vaguely familiar that disease was something that was alive, but it was startling that a spell that caused seeds to sprout faster would also increase the spread of a disease.

Kyuse moved to a tree, and started experimenting. First he cast Nurture with five spell layers, the most he could manage; the casting wasn't anything like thaumaturgy, where it was a process of mentally creating lines and curves in the aether permeating everything. This was more like creating spirals within spirals within spirals. He couldn't direct the growth, as far as he could tell, and the tree creaked slightly, visibly widening. Alright. He turned his attention to woodwarp.

At five spell layers, his mind focusing on overlaying a shape onto the complex spirals of aether, the effect was quite dramatic. With an incredibly loud crack, a bark-covered cube exploded out of the tree, protruding from the trunk of the tree by a corner, of dimensions slightly shorter than the average human arm - his arms were somewhat longer, now, to go along with his generally larger proportions.

The two spells had consumed about two thirds of his mana, and he used woodwarp again with a single spell layer; this formed a cube about a third of the length of a human arm. He carefully broke the two cubes off the trunk of the tree, leaving scars in the bark, and weighed them experimentally in both hands; they were heavy.

The growth in volume was approximately linear with spell layers, at least going from one to five layers. Since the mana cost was closer to exponential, it was more cost effective to not add additional layering.

Kyuse set the cubes aside - he'd break them apart later, and dry them out for a fire. He then moved to the center of the area he'd chosen, judging roughly by the distance to the green-lit brambles in each direction, and hunted around until he found a trio of trees forming a roughly equidistant triangle, about ten paces apart.

He then moved to the southernmost tree, and began woodwarping, forming buttresses of wood facing each of the other two trees, about twice his height up - he had to touch the trees, and the potency of the spell seemed slightly attenuated by the distance up, but not by much. Two single-layer casts of woodwarp for each buttress, mentally focusing on the shape he wanted, and he moved to the other two trees in sequence, repeating the process.

He then knelt, landing heavily on his knees, mana and mind exhausted. He slowly went through the process, and then felt like slapping himself on the face - the last time he'd learned new spells, he hadn't had the experience of a craft. He should have used two spell layers, the cost difference was negligible with the craft augmenting him.

Kyuse closed his eyes and rested, mentally observing the slow growth of his mana reserves, and, with a slight strain from splitting his attention, brought the soulcrafted gem into his awareness.

His next casts - at two spell layers each - expanded the buttresses a bit more, forming sturdy supports that tapered down into the trunk of the tree. Next, he expanded straight lines, about the width of his arm, between the trees, meeting approximately in the center. The wood from the disparate trees refused to connect directly, so instead he grew them together in a very rough helix.

Kyuse then had to take a break - he went to the far end of the northern edge of his patch of forest, digging a small pit to deal with the necessary functions of biology, covering it back up when he was done.

When he returned, he headed to his pack and retrieved a rope, which he tossed over one of the lines of the triangle, in the exact center. Hoisting himself up it, he was pleased to find that it did, in fact, support his weight, barely creaking under the strain. Given the weight involved, however, he started casting again, expanding the helixes downward - a process which required a lot of walking back and forth between trees, at first, until he could reach up and touch them - down to the ground, and then out over it in a pair of interlocked spirals, forming a rough disc at the bottom of each of the three columns to help distribute the weight.

Kyuse stepped back a few dozens paces, looking over the odd-looking triangular framework. The height wasn't exactly level - he'd formed the buttresses of one of the trees a little bit lower than the other two - but maybe that wasn't a terrible thing. He had to rest again, and then returned, moving to one of the columns, and tossing his rope over it; catching both ends of the rope, he set a foot on the column, and started hauling himself in a vertical walk up to the top.

It was ... narrow. The claws of his feet dug into the wood, and he fell forward to use the claws of his hands as well, moving awkwardly down the length of the "board" towards one of the trees. Grabbing onto the tree, he stood slowly up, looking down at the ground an uncomfortable distance below.

Right. He thought about the next steps - he wanted an actual platform to stand on, and symmetry seemed better - he wasn't certain how much strain the additional mass would place on the health of the trees he had suborned for this purpose, but he didn't want to kill them. He planned to expand this, and the spell only worked on living trees. He could always nurture them if it turned out to be an issue, he supposed, but the less of that necessary, the better.

He chose a rotational direction - south, to west, to north, to east, to south again - and started using woodwarp to grow planks across the beams, about a hand's width wide, and a couple of fingers thick. He wanted thin gaps so rain wouldn't pool too badly - the bark on the top wasn't perfectly flat, so that would already be an issue. They were formed at an angle, cutting across the points of the triangle, extending from the top of one beam, resting on the other.

He had enough space to lay down when his mana was again exhausted, and light was getting scarce anyways. He climbed back down, collected his pack, and headed south, pushing his way past the brambles - his thick brown-gray fur was immensely helpful for keeping the thorns from cutting too deeply - into the slightly brighter light of the setting sun, clouds drifting overhead in a graying sky.

His feet - paws? - squelched unpleasantly as he pushed his way through the waist-high river grasses, to the river's edge. Kneeling, he swung his pack around to rest on his knee, retrieving a canteen and a pot, filling the canteen from the river water, and the pot half-full. His eyes drifted across the wide river - some kind of insect noisily buzzed in a series of swarms along both banks. The water was clear, the river perhaps shoulder-deep - it was hard to gauge depth - and fish swam amidst the rocks at the river's bottom. Fish might be a good source of food, later.

He squelched his way back into the forest. The pot was set to the ground, and claws tore through the ground easily, as he dug out a small pit, into which he started piling loose sticks and dry leaves.

The fire started easily enough - the air in the forest was dead, and the leaves lit after only a few dozen sparks from steel and flint. He sat beside the fire, the darkness around him growing more complete as the unseen sun set, until the flames were the only significant source of light. Not that he had too much to worry about there; his new eyes were pretty good in the dark.

He let the fire die to glowing coals, relaxing as he lay on his side - the tail was kind of inconvenient for sitting down. Kyuse set the pot of river water into a bed of glowing embers, and threw a few strips of dried meat and vegetables from his pack into the water. He was vaguely aware that he should have waited for the water to boil, but it would give the dried out ingredients time to rehydrate, maybe.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Dinner was more a chunky slurry than anything else, which he more drank than ate. His sight in the darkness was all shades of gray, color an artifact of light, and his ears were full of the screeching calls of tree frogs, and the nearly painfully high pitched cries of bats hunting overhead. There were probably insect noises, as well; he wasn't sure if it was his improved hearing or not, but the forest at night was quite loud.

Kyuse climbed back up onto the finished corner of his platform, and, laying on his side and curling up slightly, quickly found sleep. The nightmares that came with sleep didn't wake him; they were nearly familiar, now.

The next morning, after a quick breakfast of slightly moldy bread and some river water from the canteen, was spent expanding the platform, until a triangle of empty space formed in the center, each corner of the larger triangle formed by the frame filled with planks from the tree counterclockwise from them.

It was ... pretty large. Twenty paces - twenty of his paces - was quite a distance. He'd had to thicken both the support columns, and create a thicker vertical support down the length of the longest planks, until they stopped bowing as he attempted to put weight on them.

Kyuse rested, and started the entire process over again a little more than his own height up, creating a rough ceiling over it all, this one angled up as he approached the center, to direct water down to the sides - these planks were much thinner, about the thickness of his finger, and much wider, overlapping slightly on the edges. He initially intended to leave another triangular hole in the center, but decided against it, after deciding the center triangle would be where he put his rope ladder when he put the walls up.

The walls took another day, and he left gaps as windows. These, he formed more likely intertwining vines - it took more effort than the planks, initially, but he quickly found a pattern to the work, and he was pleased with the aesthetics. Wide gaps formed windows, about two thirds of the way up each wall, running nearly the length of each, the weight of the upper portions, unsupported from below, instead hanging suspended from above. He had to extend the support columns up, however, as the weight started to bow the ceiling.

He looked around, grinning widely; the sensation felt odd, as he had more of a muzzle than a mouth, and his lips didn't quite ... feel the same, anymore. He hadn't had cause to smile much, in the year since ... he'd been in this form.

The grin slipped, when his eyes, following the wall ... back to where it started. He had closed off the area he had been climbing in and out of his living wood structure. He had one rope, not enough to make his planned rope ladder.

He walked back over to the center hole, looking down. It was ... a long drop. Maybe his legs could take the fall, maybe not, he hadn't tested that kind of thing, and wasn't inclined to do so now, far from civilization and healing.

He moved to his rope, coiled up and sitting on the bark floor, and picked it up, experimentally dropping one end down. There was some slack, but not nearly enough to double it up. Kyuse sighed, and sat down next to the hole, studying the drop.

Well, nothing for it. He touched the floor, and started woodwarping again, forming a rough wooden ladder down to the ground, where he formed it into spikes, driving it down into the ground. A short time later, he descended, retrieved his pack, and climbed back up. The ladder broke off the wall after a solid kick to each of the poles connecting it; it remained upright, at a slight angle, supported by the poles still embedded in the ground.

Hm. Kyuse used a foot to hook onto the ladder, and with a heave, pulled it back out of the ground. He pulled it slowly up, breaking it apart into pieces, preserving each rung and a small section of the poles.

His afternoon was spent tying two of his three ropes around the rungs - and then untying and retying, as he couldn't get the two lengths of rope to line up quite right on any of the thirty two rungs on his first try, or indeed for many on the second, third, or fourth try, either. He did eventually have his rope ladder, with wooden slats instead of his original plan of just rope. Judging by the difficulty he had had with the lengths using the wooden slats, it was probably a good thing he had done it this way instead; he'd climbed a rope ladder once before, and even a properly strung rope ladder was difficult to climb.

He formed two thick knobs on either side of one of the triangles, wrapped one end of his ladder around both, tied it, and then for good measure woodwarped the knobs to engulf the rope as well. Kyuse dropped the ladder, and it fell in jerks and starts, uncoiling until it trailed the ground at the bottom. He pulled it back up, coiling it into a cylinder as he went, and tried it again. Alright. He dropped it once more, and descended.

The descent was ... unpleasant. The rope swung wildly under his weight, swinging away from his probing feet whenever he moved. But it did work.

Kyuse went fishing. This wasn't something he was prepared for, although he did manage to grab three up over the course of an hour and a half, which is when his patience ran out.

He cut the heads off, tossing them back into the water, filled his pot, and carried his load back to the pit he'd made. He had to scrounge a bit further for sticks and leaves to make this fire; he'd have to figure out how to split the cubes of wood he'd made pretty soon. His knife wouldn't cut it for the task.

He diced the fish up; bones, viscera, and all; and set them in the water of the pot, which was soon nestled in the dying embers of the fire. A few of his remaining dried vegetables - some kind of pale yellow root - were chopped and joined the chunks of bloody fish as the water slowly heated up.

The resulting slurry was ... unappetizing. The bones had mostly dissolved, but he still found himself picking fragments out from between his teeth with his claws. His teeth were more widely spaced than human teeth, making the picking easier, and all sharp; none were any good for grinding. Hence the slurry he made for himself now.

It took him a frustrating number of minutes to climb back up into his ... house, it was basically a house now. Sleep came easily, as did the nightmares.

Morning came, and he went fishing again, catching only two fish over the course of two hours. He then spent some time foraging, without much luck - he didn't recognize any of the plants, and certainly wasn't going to be eating any of the berries he saw.

Breakfast was therefore meagre, and hardly filling. The next couple of hours were spent growing and snapping twigs off a tree near the river - if he killed a tree through this practice, he didn't want it to be one of the tall central trees of his part of the forest - making a pile to be used for kindling. Then he grew larger pieces of wood, connected to the original tree by thin, easily-broken rods, which created a pile which could be used as logs.

It took three trips to lug the two piles back to the firepit he had dug, and another trip to fashion a pair of wooden racks, which he brought back. Kyuse sat down, retrieved his knife, and started stripping the bark from the thicker rods of wood he had created, making a pile of the bark next to the firepit, and placing the stripped wood onto one of the racks to dry. Not that there was any sunlight here, and the air was both rather humid and without wind to help the process, but he might as well start now.

When the rack was full, he dug the firepit deeper, piling the dirt up next to it, and started laying the rods into it, forming a dense lattice of wood, until he ran out. Then he went back to the river and created two tubes of wood - it took three tries, as bark kept filling the tubes - and dug trenches on either side of the pit, laying one end of each tube on either side of the lattice of wood. He covered the lattice with leaves, then carefully piled dirt over the leaves and buried the tubes, leaving the far ends exposed. His next couple of fires might dry out this wood enough to use to make another batch.

As he started the fire for dinner - four fish, and while he felt like he was getting slightly better at it, he had had no more luck with foraging - he had not been expecting the smell, as smoke started filtering out of the tubes. His relaxing time by the fire no longer relaxing, Kyuse stood up and went back to his house, climbing up into it in another frustratingly difficult process, and started forming some shelves on the walls, which he started emptying the contents of his pack onto.

Three books were unwrapped from the waxed paper he had held them in, and placed on the shelves; two invocation books that the Three Isles probably wouldn't notice the absence of, and one book on advanced thaumaturgical principles he'd never gotten around to reading, which they probably would eventually notice was missing. A small bundle of candles, four bottles of ink, an abacus, three wax-wrapped bundles of velum papers, and a pair of slightly bent quills.

A whetstone, for his knife and estoc, he placed on a different wall which he mentally designated his material workspace area, with his third rope. These were joined by two bottles of acid, each wrapped in multiple layers of leather to keep the glass from breaking, a similarly-wrapped jar of oil, and two bags of glass marbles. An afterthought, a small pile of copper, and four pieces of silver, joined these shelves.

The final wall, he formed larger shelves on; his folded spare cloak went on one of these shelves. The cloak was joined by a pair of simple brown skirts. He put his other clothes - pants and delicate buttoned shirts - on a different shelf; these, he couldn't wear anymore. He wasn't entirely certain why he had brought them, but he supposed he could cut them apart and make skirts and loincloths out of them. His fur didn't cover everything, after all, and there was no reason to live like an animal even if he looked the part.

The foul smell had mostly abated when he got back, although not entirely - the lack of wind could be a problem, there, which he'd need to figure out a solution for. The air in the canopy above him was hazy with gray smoke. Kyuse set the pot of fish and water in the embers, and sat down to wait.

After dinner, he headed back north, where he had been digging and filling in pits. A shovel would be nice ... ah. He formed a wooden shovel using woodwarp, and started digging. The wooden shovelhead turned the dirt over easily enough, but he knelt frequently to use his knife to clumsily saw through roots. He only managed to dig about knee-deep before he reached roots too thick for his knife to cut through, however.

It'd have to be deep enough. He woodwarped the roots to form walls around the pit, and then kept moving the walls up, forming two rails as a kind of seat - once again, his tail would get in the way. He ... tried it out, and it worked acceptably well. Kyuse sprinkled some dirt over the nightsoil, and headed south again, past his house, to the river.

He removed his cloak and spread it over a bush, unbelted his estoc from his side and set that onto the cloak, the thick canopy of the bush giving some way under the weight, and followed that with his skirt. Kyuse pushed through the grass to the river, looking down at his reflection.

Yellow eyes looked back up at him, large, tufted, furry ears spread out above a face that had more resemblance to a bear's than a man's, with a short muzzle. His face had fine gray and brown fur, hiding the skin beneath; a long mane spread out where a human's hairline would be, of a darker shade of brown, nearly black, tucked back behind his ears, and falling down around his shoulders, nearly halfway down his broad, furry chest, the fur of which was lighter, gray more thickly interspersed with brown there. The gray metal chain hung there, swaying slightly with his motions, fastened around his neck with closed links.

He was ... mostly human in shape, if not in appearance; his back legs were at least jointed in mostly the correct direction for standing upright. He tried a grin; the face peering up at him from the water bared its teeth in a predatory expression. He let the grin drop again. Friendly, it was not. He stepped into the water, which felt cold after the warmth and humidity.

He moved until he was waist-deep, claws scratching uncomfortably on the rocks underfoot with an unpleasant grinding sensation, and began methodically washing. His tail got the most attention, the wide bushy fur having collected detritus and burrs, which he used the claws of his fingertips to comb through. He should have brought a brush. His legs were next, almost as dirty as his tail, and his feet were difficult, particularly cleaning underneath the claws at the end of each of his toes.

Cleaning his genitals was done gingerly, mostly with the knuckles of his fingers, as best as he could - his claws were sharp - and he mostly used the pads on the palms of his hands to rub at his face. The mane at least wasn't too bad, only having a few snarls formed around burrs. Finally he washed his arms, and scrubbed out underneath the claws of his fingers, using other claws to do so, quite carefully.

He stepped back out of the water, feet immediately sinking into the mud that the thick river grasses grew in and undoing some of his work there - maybe he could make a wooden ramp tomorrow? He was heavy - fur held a lot of water - and paused to wrap his estoc and skirt in his coat, to carry back to the house a few feet away from his soaked and dripped body. As he approached the still-burning fire, he halted to form a somewhat lopsided stool, which he broke away from the tree he had formed it on. He formed a wooden hook on a nearby tree, and hung the bundle his cloak formed from it. And then Kyuse sat on the stool until his meal was complete, his gaze barely drifting from the fire until it was nothing but fading embers.

Yellow eyes reflected the embers as Kyuse stared down into the pit. He'd smell like smoke tomorrow, but there was no helping that, and it wasn't like there was anyone around but himself to smell it.