Darkness, and pain.

  I hadn’t really expected to wake up again. Given that, the pain was inevitable, but it felt wrong. I’ve been in the hospital before. Felt the dripping numbness of a spinal block, the hazy sensation of opioids that don’t blunt the pain so much as make you not care that it hurts for a while. And of course, in splintering moments before those times, I’d felt pain fresh: unveiled, un-diluted.

  This was none of those. My abdomen was full of a crackling heat—like all the flesh was superimposed on a blowtorch flame—wrapped up with something that felt like the echo of the injury. Breathing wasn’t as hard as it should have been. My lungs filled and emptied on their own, their capacity feeling almost limitless somehow, each breath smooth and extended.

  My eyelids fluttered a little, coming to terms with the fiery feeling’s continuation.

  A rustle of movement nearby, scuffing random crunches like feet on fallen leaves, and the hint of a shadow leaning over me accompanied an unfamiliar voice, speaking familiarly.

  “Hey, princess! Good to have you back finally.” A warm hand pressed itself against my forehead, rough and softened in a way that felt wrong. It stroked up into my hairline, smoothing and soothing and entirely unfamiliar.

  I blinked again, registering flickering firelight beyond a vague dark shape.

  “Who?” I breathed, testing my voice. Throat and mouth were dry, but felt funny too. My teeth felt wrong, tongue strange, maybe swollen? The word came out deep and resonant—hollow, like they were holding an empty coffee can in front of my face.

  “It’s Ever, silly. Just keep still for a while longer. You’re still healing. We seriously thought we’d lost you.”

  The nurse thought I’d recognize her name? Weird. But I was so tired still. The burning felt like it was drawing in all the energy I might have had to move or think with. Her suggestion was deeply attractive, but there was too much wrong with everything. Why firelight and the sound of crunching leaves instead of fluorescents and tile? And the smell…

  I took a deep, attentive breath, trying to notice smells I’d grown accustomed to while unconscious, and my mind went blank.

  What. The. Fuck.

  Not only was there no suggestion of antiseptics and stale air, but what was there was utterly overwhelming. This was the single smelliest place I’d ever experienced in my life! And yet it didn’t stink.

  Every other time I’d been overwhelmed by a smell, it had been a bad experience. Something nasty; rotting or fetid or just plain too strong, like a stranger’s excess perfume. And it had been singular. Or seemed that way? But this time, it wasn’t a singular scent that threw my brain for loops. There were dozens of smells. Maybe hundreds? Not just greenery, but ten or twenty different variations of greenery. Body odor, from several clearly distinct bodies. Blood, shit, and piss, in small amounts, but less gross than they usually seemed—whether that was just because of all the competition or not I had no idea.

  My lip curled, head turned away in instinctive retreat, although it did no good. What could possibly explain this? Now that I’d noticed them every breath was full of all the scents around me, and I had to concentrate to not hold my breath to keep them out. A few moments of focus on just the feel of air going into and out of my lungs helped settle me again, push the crazy nose-noise to the back of my mind.

  I blinked my eyes open again, raising a hand to rub the sand from them.

  Huge dark claws were reaching for my face, on the end of thick, hairy fingers.

  I shrieked.

  I tried to swat the monstrous paw away, flailing and scrambling on my elbows until the back of my head banged into something solid and rough, and about the same time I realized it had retreated.

  “Ow.” I rubbed at the back of my head, slowly sitting up and looking around to find the wide trunk of a tree where I’d tried to put my head. I shifted around to lean against it, looking back toward the light and the woman who’d spoken to me before my panic.

  “Kiri, what’s wrong?” The same unfamiliar voice asked as the shadowed shape approached me, silhouetted by the firelight and accompanied by a dim flashlight at shoulder height.

  I held up a hand again, trying to block the light and see the woman better, then just stared breathlessly at the dark-furred limb in front of my eyes.

  A gentle hand touched mine, pressing my arm down out of the way as the woman crouched in front of me. The flashlight illuminated her head and shoulders all too well.

  Furries.

  I’d been kidnapped and dragged into the woods by rogue furries.

  The person in front of me had the face of a tabby cat. Pointy ears, whiskers, big intensely green eyes with wide pupils in the dim light. Her figure was very human, although there was something odd about the way she was squatting.

  “What? What are you?” More awake now, I felt the deep reverberations of my strange voice vibrating in my chest.

  “I’m Ever, your Yellow. Your healer? We’ve known each other for years.” She turned, gesturing back toward the fire. “There are Fiddle and La'a, our adventuring companions.” The cat ears atop her head flicked forward and back, subtle shifts of her facial muscles indicating gentle concern. “Are you okay?”

  My heart dropped into my stomach, the ongoing fiery sensation imitating nausea somehow. That was no mask. They hadn’t slipped halloween costume gloves on me while I was unconscious. I raised a heavily clawed paw to my face again, looking at it more closely in the golden light of her flash. Black claws, thick-knuckled fingers and calloused palms. It responded to my intentions, just as my own soft, pale hand would have. Somehow, this was real.

  “No, miss. I’m definitely not at all okay. I’m afraid I’ve never seen you before in my life. And my name isn’t Kiri.”

  #

  The cat-woman’s gentle hand offered me help rising to my feet, and after a moment I accepted it. She leaned extremely far back as I started to put my weight on the connection, confusing me until I stood up—and up. By the time I stood firmly on my own, the top of Ever’s head had fallen to near the center of my chest, and I was re-evaluating my presumptions about her proportions. I’d assumed she was the same size as an average human woman, but if that were the case, my new body would have to be close to seven feet. That couldn’t be right. Perhaps she was a dwarf? Maybe a clearer look at the two by the fire would shed some more light on the question.

  I followed her the few steps back to the camp-fire, my entire attention on how I walked. I wasn’t wearing any sort of shoes, and the way my toes dug into the ground, the lightness of my heels as they touched down, felt entirely wrong. My balance was strange, and my butt muscles kept twitching irritably. As did my scalp. But the most obvious difference was the complete lack of any sense that either of my knees might choose to collapse out from under me at any moment. That was a welcome, if deeply confusing change.

  Ever crouched and shook out the rucked-up blanket I’d apparently been sleeping on, and then moved to the side, settling into a comfortable squat above bare ground. I cautiously settled down on the blanket, folding my legs up tailor fashion and staring down at my thighs, furred and muscular. All I was wearing was a loose shirt, open-necked and hanging down to about the top of my thighs. I fiddled with it till I had as much modesty as I was going to get without pulling the blanket around myself.

  “So, um.” I glanced uncomfortably at the other two people sitting by the fire. The smaller of the two—also furry and generally human-shaped—was in a relaxed squat like Ever, his arms resting on his knees, his head and torso framed by the fluffy cloud of a huge squirrel tail. The larger lay sprawled on the ground like a sunning alligator. The comparison didn’t end with their pose, as they were covered in scaly hide, with a long, reptilian head turned toward me, small curved horns rising from their forehead.

  “My name is Anne,” I ventured.

  “Anne?” The lizard repeated. Their voice was low and liquid, not anything like I’d imagine an alligator sounding. “Cute. Where’d you get that, a barmaid from the last town?”

  “La'a, don’t tease her, please,” Ever chided. “This must be very difficult.”

  “Difficult my ass. She’s just pulling our legs again, cat.” The lizard rolled from their stomach onto their side, facing me across the fire, and displaying a paler-scaled underside with no sign of sexual dimorphism I could make out. A leaf green light appeared from under them, floating into the air to hover a few inches above their head. “Although I gotta admit, amnesia is a new game.”

  Ever sighed as though it came from the soles of her feet. “You saw how badly Kiri was injured. I almost wasn’t able to bring her back. That’s not the sort of experience to prompt game-playing, no matter one’s temperament. Give her some slack, will you?”

  “Come on, Ev, you know how this is going to go. A couple hours of increasingly confusing runaround, followed by her laughing at us for another hour after she finally breaks character. Like that time she convinced you she’d managed to get drunk off her ass right before the welcome banquet for the High Prince of Sissellia? You were chasing her around for half a day before she finally ’sobered-up’ and she was still giggling halfway through the ceremony. Why would this be different?”

  I couldn’t see any sign of a blush under the cat’s thick fur, but the tilt of her head suggested this reminder hadn’t pleased her. “I hadn’t dragged her back from the precipice of death just before that, and you know it. Nothing was at stake but her dignity. She wouldn’t play games with her own recovery.”

  Their voices rose in further argument, and I felt my own cheeks starting to warm. I touched one with the back of a hand and felt the strange, directional sensation of fur rubbing against fur. The plane of my cheek was nothing like what it should have been either and I raised both hands to carefully trace out the shape of my skull, crossing my eyes as though that would help.

  It wasn’t entirely a surprise given the company I was in at the moment that my cautious probing led me to an inexplicable yet inescapable conclusion: I had turned into some kind of dog-person. My jaw was now a long, slender muzzle, with a pebbly leather nose at the end, my mouth full of conical predator teeth, and the final straw, my long skull was topped with a large pair of triangular, cartilaginous ears. Their restless movement was what I’d interpreted before as my scalp twitching, and I sat for several minutes just with my hands cupped around the ears, feeling them move back and forth, perk and flatten and sometimes even flick independently as I experimented.

  The argument continued without me, quickly making detours into what I could tell were long-running rough spots in whatever the cat and lizard’s exact relationship was. They sounded like an old married couple, or long time room-mates at least. I was surprised not to have heard a word about dishwashing yet, to be honest.

  Rather appreciating being ignored for a bit, I moved on to inspecting the tail that stuck out from the top of my ass, gently pulling it around one side so I could see at least some of the new appendage. It was mottled grey and black, lighter on the underside, fluffier than a german shepherd’s but not a huge fox-like poof of fur. I wondered whether I resembled a specific breed, and if I would eventually meet dog-people of as many different varieties as existed back home.

  And then I wondered if I was going insane and just imagining all this, or if this was somehow a part of the afterlife. It certainly didn’t feel like any variety of heaven I’d ever imagined, but neither did it suggest hell, despite my disorientation and the prickling pain in my stomach that was continuing to settle with time.

  “Idiots!” The new baritone voice raised in anger startled all of us into silent stares at the smallest fur-person. His voice was distractingly deeper than I’d have expected. “It’s not amnesia, and it’s not some Light-lost game, you dumbasses! Look at her!” The squirrel threw one hand in my direction as though unveiling surprise evidence in some courtroom drama. I suddenly felt embarrassed to be holding my tail in both hands. “Kiri has never been that un-wary in the field since she was weaned. She’s a warrior, just awakened after one of the worst battles of her life, and she’s sat there in a knot for the last half hour playing with her ears and tail. I don’t know what the hell woke up in her body, but that. Is not. Kiri.”

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  He popped to his feet like a spring and stepped around the fire, tail thrashing behind him, to grab a small dark object off the ground at the edge of my blanket. He cradled the thing in one palm and gestured between the other two with it. “Kiri woke up, but Peachy didn’t! We all watched her fade into lifelessness and that doesn’t happen while their Bonded lives!”

  The squirrel-man turned and thrust his open hand into my face. “Explain that!” he demanded.

  I looked down at his palm and saw a tiny stained-glass sculpture, something between a butterfly and a flower blossom. It was alien and beautiful. I met his eyes, somehow reading excruciating pain beneath the outward rage.

  “I can’t,” I told him softly. “I don’t even know what it is you’re showing me. If it died…I’m sorry for your loss.”

  I blinked slowly, as though trying to soothe a nervous cat, and kept my own body language as relaxed and un-threatening as I could. After a long moment his shoulders unwound slightly and he reached up behind his head with his empty hand. “Thoma, come. Dim please.” A faint blue light flickered from somewhere in the depths of his bushy tail and drifted onto his open hand. He brought it around to show me and I peered into the glow to see another flower-butterfly being, this one clearly animate, the edges of its many petals rippling slowly as though in a faint breeze.

  “Ooh,” I breathed, captivated by the tiny creature. “It’s gorgeous.”

  “I know she is.” He seemed oddly mollified by my compliment. “This is my fairy, Thoma. Peachy was Kiri’s fairy. An orange.”

  “How do you carry around something so delicate?” I asked.

  He chuckled. “There’s nothing delicate about fairies. Not normally, anyway. While their Bonded one lives, nothing else can touch them. Go ahead, try.” He lifted Thoma toward me.

  Checking his face to make sure I understood, I reached forward with one ungainly paw, holding up just one finger as though I were going to try and coax a bird from his hand to mine. The digit passed straight through the space Thoma occupied, my hand only stopping when the other fingers bumped into the squirrel’s. “Oh. Wow.” I wiggled my finger a bit, feeling nothing but perhaps the faintest tingle from the glowing being as it passed through, and even that might well have been my imagination. So his other hand, holding the dead fairy—I frowned. “May I?” I gestured toward it.

  He looked reluctant, but tipped the dull sculpture into my outstretched hand.

  “This is Nuum,” Ever’s voice drew my eyes away from the amazingly intricate shell in my hands and I looked up to see what I’d taken for her flashlight before dancing in little circles in front of her face. “My yellow.”

  The languid lizard heaved a sigh. “Mine’s Boomy.” The green light danced up and down like a conductor’s wand for a moment, clearly a greeting.

  “Hello.” I replied, “It’s good to meet you all.” My eyes drifted back to my hands and the endless detail of the tiny corpse.

  “I’m sorry, Fiddle. You’re right. This can’t possibly be Kiri can it?” Ever sounded despondent. “What happened? What did I do wrong?”

  The squirrel—Fiddle—had returned to his spot on the other side of the fire. “I have no idea, but we can hardly blame you for this. I’ve never heard of any such thing happening before.”

  “No, you’re right.” Ever had huddled into herself, still perched on her toes, but arms wrapped around her knees in a ball almost as small as Fiddle. Her tail draped the ground around her feet.

  “Well, so much for taking another run at the scythe-tail tomorrow,” La'a the lizard grumbled.

  “You were seriously considering it?” Ever sounded aghast. “That thing nearly killed us all!”

  “Eh, I was working up some alternative plays. We could take it in top shape, I’m sure.”

  “Have you started smoking Basmall again you crazy drake?”

  And they were off. I almost smiled at how natural the bickering between cat and lizard felt already.

  Meanwhile Fiddle had gone back to staring moodily at the fire. I carefully uncoiled myself (noting how accurate the “knotted” comment had been compared to the other mammals’ alert resting poses) and stepped around the lazing lizard to squat awkwardly next to the squirrel. He tracked me as I started to move, and gave a questioning look as I hovered beside him, but said nothing.

  I held out Peachy’s beautiful little body and asked quietly, “What do you do with them, when they pass?”

  He glanced at my hand, then back to my face, his chin tilted way up to meet my eyes, despite our similar stances. “Sometimes folk bury them with their Bonded, since they die together. Others prefer to return them to a grotto.” He saw my confusion and continued. “That’s the places in the wild where they gather. Always well-hidden, underground.”

  I turned the fairy body around in my hands again. “So, assuming I don’t manage to get killed in short order myself,” —potentially even by you folks— “Is there a grotto around here we can bring her back to?”

  He frowned in my direction for a moment, and I couldn’t guess what he might be thinking. “Not that I know of, but I can find out. I’ll check with the library tonight.”

  I looked out at the night-time woods, dark but for the faint stars and our camp-fire. “There’s a library nearby?”

  He chuckled again. “No, no. I’ll visit in my dreams.”

  “Oh.” I blinked a few times. “That’s convenient.”

  I flinched as Ever threw a pan across the fire at La'a. The lizard caught it one-handed with a surprisingly clear ringing sound. “Just for that you cook something up!” The cat snarled.

  In the brief silence afterward, my stomach made a noise on par with a grizzly waking up angry in February. They all looked at me. I felt my face heat up under its fur coat. “Sorry. Food sounds good. If you’re offering.”

  Ever was instantly kind and collected again. “Of course, K—Anne. You’ll be half-starved after all that healing. I should’ve thought sooner.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” La'a grumped, finally getting up off the ground and starting to sort through the bags laid out nearby. “I’ll make sure there’s plenty of steaks for you, princess.” They blinked, and snapped their mouth shut as they heard themself.

  I sighed, wobbling in my awkward squat and letting my knees drop to the ground. I offered Peachy back to Fiddle. “You should probably tuck her away someplace safe for now.”

  He nodded, accepting the small, glasslike body. His wrist turned in an odd flourish and his hand was suddenly empty.

  I nearly fell over from surprise.

  “What?” I stammered. “What did you do?”

  Fiddle looked confused. “Put her in my pocket.”

  “Pocket?” I glanced over his loose shirt and oddly fastened pants, not seeing any sign of pockets.

  “I may be a blue, but I’ve got plenty of indigo for a pocket.”

  My brow crumpled up. “I know what you just said, but I have no idea what you mean.” I frowned further, staring into the dark. “How do I know what you just said? We’re not speaking English. How did I not notice that sooner?”

  Fiddle contemplated me for a moment, his face going blank. “You speak like Kiri. Not exactly her cadences, or her word choice, but pronunciation anyway. I assume her speech came along with her body.”

  “I’m so sorry.” My eyes filled with tears and I collapsed the rest of the way onto my butt. “How can you even look at me? You lost your friend, and here I am wearing her around like a costume. How can you stand it?” Hot tears drew streaks in the fur of my face.

  His jaw clenched, and he looked away, into the night.

  I worked on collecting myself while he studiously ignored me. He didn’t look back or say anything till I’d been quiet and still for a bit.

  “Don’t see that we have much choice,” he finally offered. “You didn’t kill her, did you? You seem much too lost to be responsible for it.”

  “I have no idea. I certainly didn’t make a choice to be here.”

  “What did you—?” He paused. “Where were you just before?”

  “Home.” I hesitated. “Well, my home dimension, I guess, anyway. The last thing I remember was helping out with a book sale at the community street fair.” I stared up at the sky, picturing the last day of my first life, as best I could. “It was over, and we were just getting everything packed up. This Latina kindergartener kept pestering me about my cane all day. It’s metallic sky blue and she was just fascinated. Kept asking to play with it, and I had to say ’no, I need it to walk, it’s not a toy.’“ I smiled, remembering her three crazy-cute pigtails poking out in all directions. But what happened after that? “I remember the sound of an engine. Crunching like somebody’d hit a steel trash can or something, and then—” I shook my head. “I don’t know, nothing but pain and dark, and then I woke up here, like this.”

  “Definitely not your doing, then.”

  I sighed. I could’ve wished it was. I might have felt less helpless. Less clueless?

  “Can I ask you a really stupid question?”

  He gave me a quizzical look.

  “Are you tiny, or am I huge? I’ve got nothing to go by.”

  Fiddle burst into a full-throated laugh.

  “Oh, my dear Anne. You are decidedly huge. And it’s all Kiri’s fault.”

  “Huh?”

  “She’s—she was an orange, a body specialist.” His lip twisted at my blank look. “Gotta explain the basics don’t we? But the focus of her radiance was improving her own body and physical abilities. And for Kiri that meant being as big and strong and fast as she possibly could.”

  “Wait, she literally made herself bigger?”

  “Yep. Managed to talk the—her mom into letting her search out a fairy almost as soon as she started growing into a woman, only fourteen. And her first focus was making sure she grew as much as she possibly could.” His expression went thoughtful again. “Your family are known for being pretty big folks in general, but Kiri stands a head taller than her mother. I sometimes thought that was the most important part to her.”

  “Damn.” Huh, that was the English word, not a translation. While I considered that, the mouthwatering smell of meat cooking caused another monstrous roar from my gut. “Uhm. So what was that about explaining the basics? I’d be interested in that.”

  He smiled a touch. “So I imagine. Hm. The basics of fairies and their focuses. We have a nursery rhyme for that. Listen.

  “Refract the sunlight, see it shine

  Sliced into the colors nine

  Red for solid, rugged things

  Rocks or trees change into rings.

  “Orange for bodies, sculpt your own

  Refine control of mortal throne.

  Golden life sprite heals all wounds

  Gifts her friends with kindly boons.

  “Green are forces flowing fast

  Heat-cold, lightning flashing past.

  Blue for minds in all their facets

  Warping wits into your assets.

  “Indigo distance overlaps

  Folding spaces into traps.

  Violet the darkest hue

  Bends chaos all things to undo.

  “Last and greatest, pure white light

  Blended power and mounting might.

  “Only gained through time and toil

  And sewing seeds in fertile soil.”

  By the end of his performance, I was humming and nodding my head along with the simple, catchy tune. It reminded me of the ABC song, or Old MacDonald. Fiddle smiled back at me.

  Tapping out the lyrics on my fingers, trying to memorize them for future reference, I asked, “So what’s the other one?”

  “Huh?”

  “There’s ROY G. BIV, that’s seven, and then white light is eight, so what’s the ninth?”

  “It’s just seven. The reference to white light is—you could say it’s aspirational? As the refiner progresses, they collect more of all the colors of magic, no matter what they started with, and so the light of their fairy approaches white.” He chuckled again. “Not really, since your starting color will always hold sway, but that’s how we think about it.”

  “It’s seven? Why does the song say nine then?”

  He looked confused, then repeated the first verse for me. “Oh.” It did say seven. Nine and seven rhymed in this language we were speaking, and I’d misheard. This was going to take some getting used to.

  “Hey, princess, catch!” La'a called out suddenly.

  I looked up just in time to see a freshly fried slab of steak flying straight for my head. My right hand swept up and skewered it on thick black claws before I’d started to exclaim in surprise. “Augh!” I said anyway. “Thanks. I think? Could I have a plate or fork or something next time?”

  But I didn’t fight the urge to chomp into the hot meat right away. It tasted amazing, and the whole T-bone-like thing disappeared down my gullet in just a few bites. My new teeth were indeed well-designed for ripping, tearing and wolfing it down. Even the bone got crunched into pieces and swallowed.

  La'a waited patiently for the thirty seconds or so it took me to make the steak disappear, then answered, “Plate, for these? Great Serpents, no. Once we’ve mostly filled you up you can have a bowl of traveler’s mash with the rest of us.” They nodded toward the larger pot tucked into the heart of the fire, then tossed another massive t-bone into the pan they were holding. “What do you think, Ev, two or three tonight?”

  “Oh, three, definitely. She needed a lot of healing.”

  “Fiddle,” I muttered. “I’ve got an embarrassing question.’’

  He raised his squirrelly brows at me (a good trick, I thought in passing).

  I dropped my voice even lower, glancing across the fire. “Is La'a a man or a woman? Or other?”

  He kindly didn’t laugh at me this time. “It is hard to tell with drakes. La'a’s a girl.”

  “Thanks.”

  He shrugged, no big deal.

  When the second steak was seared to her satisfaction, La'a once again called out, “Hey, p-Anne, head’s up!”

  Forewarned this time, I caught the meat far less gracefully, bobbling it so badly I needed both hands to keep it off the ground. But it went down just as well. By the time I finished licking grease off my fingertips she had a third searing. I frowned, consulting my stomach and being forced to acknowledge that yes, at least one more steak would be much appreciated.

  “Dear God, I thought I’d turned into a wolf-creature, but it turns out I’m actually a bottomless pit.”

  That made the squirrel beside me snort. “Get used to it, new friend. Kiri’s basically a giant furnace for turning food into violence.”

  I startled. “Am I? A new friend, I mean? It looks like I’m going to eat you three out of house and home, and I’ve got no way to repay you.”

  His smile twisted, and he reached up to cautiously pat my shoulder. “Don’t worry a bit about expenses, Anne. We’re fine there. As for the other—” He stared at his hands for a moment, gathering his thoughts. “Well, when it comes to it, Kiri’s saved all our lives more times than I’ve kept track of, and there must be some reason—some purpose—that caused you to appear when her spirit was lost to us. So we’ll do our best for you in her honor for as long as you need.”

  “Hear, hear,” Ever agreed from the far side of the fire. “Clearly the Light finds you worthy of being here, with us, how could we think otherwise?”

  “Humph. Here. Eat up, furnace.” And La'a raised the third steak to toss to me.

  “Just relax and let instinct guide you,” Fiddle suggested.

  I looked from him to La'a, nodded and exhaled, trying to relax and let ’instinct’ flow as the meat came sailing at me.

  This time I bobbled it so badly it ended up in the dirt at my feet. “Well, that didn’t help,” I sighed.

  Fiddle carefully picked up the dirty meat by the end of the bone—the flesh was very hot, which was part of why I’d dropped it. He cupped his other hand next to it and frowned. The blue fairy that had been perched invisible in the top of his tail began to glow and a trickle of water poured out of his palm, quickly rinsing the steak off. He handed it back to me once he was done. “Just because we’re not strapped is no reason to waste food, “ he said.

  I accepted the slightly soggy and lukewarm steak and chomped it down almost as quickly as the first two, if not with quite so much relish. I’m sure some of that was just being less hungry, and not only its condition.

  Their assurances gave me more of a sense of satisfaction than the food.