The figure was tall and slender. He looked almost like a human male. His skin was smooth and tan like honey. He wore simple green pants and a white linen shirt. He had a small bag slung onto his back and a sheathed knife on his belt. He wore thin leather sandals on his feet with straps wrapped around his ankles to secure them.

The shocking thing, however, was his head. Sprouting out of his long blonde curls were two ribbed and twisting horns, it was like someone had ripped them off a gazelle and then delicately planted them in his skull. They spiraled elegantly into the air, slowly swaying and bobbing as he stalked up the hill. They were the color of ash and smoke, glossy and polished. The stranger’s eyes were a verdant moss green color, slit vertically like a cat, with a curved upward slant to his sockets. The rest of him was “normal”, aside from his long and pointed ears. He had two arms and two legs, he stood up straight, and he walked like a human. His eyes constantly flickered back and forth, observing everything around him.

The stranger had the same energy suction Aris had seen around the other animals in this world, but it was drastically stronger. Other animals pulled in energy that passed within half a foot of their body, less if they were small like the rodents, with no sphere of influence around any of the insects he had seen so far. Around this stranger, Aris saw energy being affected over three feet away from the man. The stranger was aware of it too. Aris watched him walk towards more dense clouds of golden light, but only if they were slightly out of his way.

The stranger was silent. He didn’t speak, hum, or sing. The only thing Aris’s soul-strands could hear was the sound of his breath, smooth and even, and his sandals as they scuffed on the stone and dirt. (This area of the forest was drier, Aris had noticed. There wasn’t as much underbrush and mulch under the conch trees.) He was very close to Aris’s hiding spot in the hollow tree, which Aris had slipped back into while watching the stranger’s ascent. As Aris watched, the man finished climbing the small neighboring hill and started descending it.

If the stranger continued his course, he would never see Aris. The ground bordering their two hills was smooth and level – with the occasional tuft of grass or small bush – and it looked like the stranger was making his way there so he could follow it, almost like a road, somewhere else in the trees.

The question was, did Aris want this opportunity to pass by?

‘He almost looks human. I bet we could speak, maybe I could learn his language? There must be some civilization nearby if he has fabric, leatherwork, and a knife. Maybe he would help?’

Aris considered his options while the stranger silently continued his journey. If he stayed hidden, he doubted the stranger would find him. They were nearby, but he would still miss the hollow tree even if the stranger continued straight and didn’t follow the flatlands.

But what would Aris gain from that? More solitude in this strange forest? This could be a great opportunity to learn more about where he was. If this planet had people that looked like the stranger, that meant it almost definitely had other creatures bigger than the birds he had seen so far. The forest may be less safe than he thought.

Aris lashed his soul-strands nervously while using his fingers to pick at a wood fragment sticking out from the tree’s wall. He felt flustered and out of sorts.

A new race of sentient beings was right in front of him. All he had to do was walk out and meet them…while fully nude. ‘That feels like a damn nightmare,’ Aris thought with a grimace.

On the ground near his hollow tree was a broken tree branch. It had fallen recently. He could tell because the leaves on the branch were vibrant and lifelike. Aris carefully left his hiding spot and picked up the branch. It fit comfortably in his hand. It was straight at the base before forking into smaller branches and twigs, each of which was covered in wide and dark leaves.

It would be the perfect cover for his groin when he introduced himself to the stranger. ‘No need to get that personal so quickly,’ he thought to himself with a small smile.

His decision made, Aris stood up straight and hefted the branch in his hand – feeling the ridges of bark and dried sap – before positioning the branch firmly in front of his lower body, the branches and leaves sporadically brushing against the ground as he started walking towards the stranger.

He was on an intercepting course, walking to where the stranger would be instead of popping up behind him. As he quickly moved down the hill, curving towards the flat area, his soul-strands observed the stranger’s long pointed ears twitch and flick. The stranger frowned, evidently hearing Aris move through the trees and light underbrush. (That was understandable. Aris was not particularly familiar with how to walk silently in a forest, just how to walk where there was the least filth. He had some remarkable hearing, though.)

The stranger slowed his pace, reaching up with his left hand to grab onto the strap of his bag, which was sitting on his left shoulder, while his right crept down his left side until it rested on his dagger.

‘Well,’ Aris thought nervously, ‘someone’s a little on edge.’ He had reached his target point.

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If you viewed the scene from above (like Aris was currently doing), you would see a small hill surrounded by other small hills, all covered in conch shell trees. Weaving between all the hills was a smooth dried riverbed.

From what Aris could tell after looking around, this riverbed led down through the hills for miles. It looked like there was a clearing far in the distance. (Aris had to use his highest strands to get an elevated enough viewpoint to look that far. He felt like a lookout in a pirate’s nest scanning the horizon.) It might be the end of the forest, or it might be a larger-than-normal field of grass.

‘What’s he headed for in there, I wonder?’ Aris thought to himself.

Back to the hill. When viewed from above, the hill was a misshapen circle. The ancient, dried riverbed touched the top of the circle and followed the curve of the hill down until it shot off into the distance on the right. Aris was standing at the edge of the hill on that dried riverbed.

The stranger was currently coming down a second hill, stacked vertically onto the first hill like a decapitated snowman. He was slowly walking down the right side of his hill, curving downwards to meet the riverbed.

He would see Aris within a few seconds.

Aris’s heart was racing. He felt a dull thump in his chest. Nervously, he adjusted his grip on the branch, double-checking through a nearby strand that the leaves obscured his critical bits.

The stranger’s dagger was still in his sheath. He hadn’t pulled it out, but his eyebrows were furrowed, and his ears were twitching trying to catch any more of Aris’s stray sounds.

Then, it happened. Contact. The stranger had just threaded through the last few trees and started walking down the riverbed before he froze, only about ten feet away from Aris. The stranger’s eyes widened, his mouth opening faintly in shock.

Aris cleared his throat, opened his mouth, and, for the first time in this new world, spoke to another person.

“Hello, my name is Aris Kontos. Can you understand me?” He smiled widely at the stranger, thrilled to finally see someone in person after so long.

At the first sound of Aris’s voice, the stranger’s face paled. His mouth opened, and he whispered something lightly in a musical language, something Aris could not understand. Then, unexpectedly, his face twisted into an expression of fear and anger.

In a flurry of abrupt motion, the stranger threw off his bag and unsheathed his dagger, pointing it outwards as he sprinted towards Aris, and, with every step, the stranger changed.

First, his body swelled with muscle. The growth cascaded through his body, starting in his torso before swiftly flowing into his legs, arms, feet, neck, and hands. He suddenly looked like a freak bodybuilder in a matter of moments. (He was now five feet away.)

When the growth hit the tips of his fingers, Aris watched those slender pianist’s fingers twist into pitch-black talons. His strands saw the same thing happen to his toes, they quickly morphed into talons, digging ferociously into the soil through the opening of his sandals before he kicked off the ground, hurling himself towards Aris. (Three feet away.)

The final change Aris saw was to the stranger’s teeth. Currently, his mouth was wide open in a shout that had deepened into a bellow, so his teeth were on display. As Aris watched, teeth that originally looked very similar to a human’s teeth – a combination of incisors for ripping and tearing, and molars for chewing and grinding – were now morphing into pointed savage teeth, each one razor sharp. (One foot away).

Then there was true contact.

Aris had stood frozen throughout all of this, clenching his branch, paralyzed at the drastic and explosive action. When the stranger hit him (dagger into the stomach angled upwards and wiggling towards his heart), he felt nothing but shock. He didn’t feel the second strike either (the stranger’s massive shoulder catching him in the chest, knocking him backward toward the ground, wedging Aris’s branch between their bodies), but he felt the third (his back connecting with the ground, the corner of a sharp rock scraping from the middle of his back to his tailbone, driving the writhing dagger deeper into his chest).

Rage as hot and furious as the sun bloomed inside his soul. Yelling loudly, Aris grabbed the side of the stranger’s throat with his left hand and clenched, digging his fingers in as deep as he could (his right hand was pinned between their bodies, still gripping the branch) before ripping and tearing away.

It did nothing.

The stranger’s face was strained but focused when he hit Aris again, this time digging his talon fingers into Aris’s shoulder where they sunk in like Aris was made from butter.

Aris screamed again, his right hand scrambling under the stranger looking for anything to grab, anything to hurt. But he couldn’t find anything.

In a blind frenzy, Aris thrashed and whipped the stranger with his soul-strands. Tens of thousands of strands ripped and tore and pulled to no avail. They couldn’t affect anything real; he already knew that. But he didn’t care. He was incoherent, the need to strike back, to make this stranger hurt in a way never seen before consumed him.

The stranger pulled out his dagger, giving up on his first strike, before burying it in Aris’s gut again, and again, and again; stabbing and cutting and slashing Aris wherever he could reach.

Suddenly, one of the strands felt something. Buried deep in the stranger’s body the strand brushed against something, something it could feel.

Aris screamed again, this time in triumph. The stranger’s cat eyes flicked up to make eye contact with Aris. The man’s face had small flecks of pink flesh on his cheek, a small glimpse into the damage he was doing below. A flash of confusion showed in the furrowing of his brow, a slight pursing of his lips around his mouth of shark teeth, but he was too late to do anything.

Aris’s soul strands surged through the stranger’s body, finding that small piece of him they could interact with. A collection of them wrapped around it, constricting like snakes (a moment of pain and terror covered the stranger’s face, his mouth twisting in the beginnings of a grimace), and then, they ripped it out.

The stranger arched his back, twitching and screaming an earsplitting shriek, before spasming and collapsing onto Aris like a marionette with cut strings.

Aris panted, air whistling out of a puncture somewhere in his body. He looked up at the sky, faintly obscured by one once beautiful, twisted horn, now evil to his sight.

As he desperately sucked in air, he whisper-shouted into the air, “What the FUCK was that?”