The first thing he knew was pain. His eyes were held shut tightly and everything hurt. He didn’t want to open his eyes, but he knew that he must. The quiet whisper of sleep and comfort was gently tugging at him, but he was injured, this much he knew. There was no quicker way to die then to let sleep take you while you were injured. He had to move.
His senses erupted as he tried to stand up. His nose stung with the scent of rot and decay. He was familiar with the smell of neglect and death, but never had he encountered it in such a concentrated form. He raised his nose to the sky only to find that the wind itself carried undertones of the same smell giving him no respite from the revulsion that the scent caused in his gut and mind.
His legs felt odd somehow and his arms were moving oddly. He let out a soft whine as he tried to move. He forced his heavy eyelids to open wide and blinked as his sight came into focus. He didn’t know where he was. The ground here was hard and cold, much like the way it was in the place where he had come from. His head hurt in ways that he had never felt before as memories flooded back to him, the man who called himself Tony, the hard cold cage which kept him from roaming. The cold dead meat that he was given to eat that somehow didn’t taste right. The other strange man who he could feel inside his mind from time to time. All those memories came back and then Tony holding that strange thing in his hand, the dark part in the middle, the sudden flash of light and exploding sound, then nothing.
His claws gripped his head as something painful pounded inside him trying to escape. He stopped and looked around. He focused on his arms, how they had gripped his snout. He expected to have two forelegs and paws. What was held in front of his face now was something that resembled what Tony looked like. His claws were more defined and he could move them in ways that his paws never would have been able to match. He was able to open his claws fully and close them in a round shape that he had never thought about doing before.
He looked up half expecting the sky to be the color of blood and deer flying through the air in imitation of the winged ones who gave the signs of the seasons changing. He saw the great silver ball and the stars in the sky. The silver ball was full and bloated hanging low in the sky, the night had only begun a short time ago. The stars were familiar to him and their positions in the sky told him that it was close to the hottest times of the years. Hunting would be good at this time, if he could find his hunting grounds again.
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He tried to stand up and he was able to get up on all fours, though it felt…odd. He took a few steps he could walk like this but his hind legs seemed to be too high to do it comfortably. Remembering how Tony and the other humans walked, he stood up on his hind legs. He had stood on his hind legs before, but this was also very different. It was like his body was actually meant to stand like this. He felt more in balance and more at peace with his physical form standing like this. He didn’t understand it, nor did he really want to think about it too much. This was alien to him; perhaps this was a curse that the natural order had damned him with. He would find a way to go back, he had to.
Suddenly a pain racked his belly. He had to breathe deeply and gripped his midsection, also in a very alien way, but it felt natural for him to make those movements. The pain ebbed slowly but didn’t go away fully. He was hungry and would have to eat.
For the first time he took a good look at his surroundings. He was standing on the hard stone that reminded him of the small cage Tony had kept him in. It smelled of death and disease. The hard stone was smoother than anything he had encountered when he was young, but his outstretched claw felt the rough texture of it. The stone inclined sharply over his head and stretched out away from him in the other direction to raise steeply again. It reminded him of the way two mountains would cradle a fertile valley of trees and prey in between their sharp peeks, stabbing high into the sky above. This stone only reached two or three time higher than he stood now, he could scale them easily. In between the two sharp rises, there was standing water in shallow pools. He would have drank from them, he was thirsty. But the smell of the putrid water told him only of death and he knew to stay away from them.
He pushed upon his hind legs and quickly ran up the sharp incline above him. His claws gripped the stone but found no real purchase. It was only with the help of his forepaws that he was able to grip the stone enough to climb over the sharp rise and place his paws on level ground again.
The sight that met him was one of brilliant starlight and dazzling images. The stars were so close to the earth it was impossible to believe that he was alive and not dead already. His ears could hear distant thunder and high-pitched whines and noises, sounds of humans and their machines. He had heard these things from his cage where Tony had cared for him but never like this. It was night but the starlight all around him made it look as if it was day.