FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Why, let the stricken deer go weep, The hart ungalled play;

For some must watch, while some must sleep:

So runs the world away. _________ William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene ii

West of Asheville the Appalachians rise wild, cutting, jagged amidst luxuriant, thickly wooded forests, and on either side of the road out that way - headed to Tennessee up into the most dismal stretches of Virginia's far southwest, toward the coalfields of West Virginia - they seem to gore the sky, great granite tusks from an unthinkable beast long dead in epochs unfathomable to man. It always made James McCall feel small, even someone like he, mountain-born and doomed to mountain-die...small, for the mountains are beautiful but they exact something from you when you see them, they demand a price - a cost and an obeisance for gazing upon their grandeur. Older than you, more patient than you - for you, as James was that day, are a mere tourist upon the Earth: their Earth. They, unlike you, have learned to wait. Yet there he was - down the highway he drove, the comforting drone of his Wrangler's engine and the fresh Autumn air. It was cool but not cold, not yet, the Land of the Sky in Fall. The mountains were crowned and feathered with incandescent autumnal foliage, the slopes bursting aflame, phoenix-like, a last gasp before the Winter. A few days ago he was in Florida, and it was still hot down there - first week of October and it was a totally different climate, different place, mentally, geographically...he hated it, he would never go back. The only reason he was there at all was because his grandmother, Mamaw, had died, at her age having had quite enough of the unpredictable North Carolina winters, moving from Durham to Saint Petersburg for more predictable Florida Winters instead - eight years later last Tuesday she was dead in her sleep, Papaw sleeping in death three years before her and waiting on her in Heaven. He ran lodges in Asheville and could have been a rich man, but he moved to Florida, forgot he was from the mountains, and satisfied himself with a single fleabag motel on Clearwater Beach, so that their fortune was just the little house they lived in, with its ugly Norfolk Island pine out front, waiting to be pillaged by his relatives - all his cousins, aunts, uncles, all to see this woman get buried in a state she was not born in. But his family was always like that: rootless, shiftless, going wherever the wind took them. Before James left for Florida he had the Wrangler looked at, after it broke down, by a guy in some tiny town in West Virginia where he was hunting - coming up short, like usual - the weird_White Things_, cryptids from that part of Appalachia. The guy - Bligh, they shook hands, a firm grip - had an accent James'd heard nowhere else, unique as it was to the most Medieval parts of America. He'd tuned James' Jeep so it ran like he didn't believe, better than it had in years. "Gonna take it out camping," James'd said to him, idle chatter, revealing his next destination after he was done with family business in Florida. "Out past Boone - Carolina, yanno." "Then ye'd better be careful down yonder," the West Virginian had said, tossing James his keys back. "Ain't tellin what ye find down ere in em woods." And then he - grinned...and James swore his teeth were sharp, way too sharp, dog's fangs in a human mouth... Now James caught himself shuddering at the memory - he was glad he was out of West Virginia, out of Florida, he was glad he was back in his state, even several hours from Charlotte he was still, here, home. This trip was to clear his head of the whole ordeal, and it was an ordeal, of being in Florida, seeing people in his family he never cared for, burying his grandmother, the oppressive heat even in the midst of the Fall down there - and that guy who fixed his car who had colored the whole thing before he ever left for Florida, so nice and so excellent with his car until he'd smiled, with those awful, awful teeth... He had to put that all behind them - he was here, he was going to have fun, and do what he loved doing most: hunting for hidden things. James had the look of a happy hippy, which he had cultivated with a full beard and moustache and long, straight, chocolate brown hair that fell to his shoulders, some of which was tucked under a woolen cap for the weather. He had dark brown eyes he had inherited from his Mamaw, but like his Papaw he was slender and he didn't retain heat well, so for this trip he wore a flannel, loose on him, and an undershirt, some jeans, a pair of good boots - nothing showy, only worn to get the job done. The drive took him up - up, further and further into the mountains. The narrow road was bracketed by a thin gravel siding and past that the trees loomed. It was old growth, trees that had been alive when his ancestors came to these shores - the forest itself was far, far older than that. The Appalachian slopes had been dark with forests since some dim antediluvian age...yet now it was sliced and cut, crisscrossed by roads and interstates, paltry ropes stretched across a slumbering giant - here and there the asphalt dissolved into chunks torn up into gravel, tufts of grass growing through - it seemed the ropes were fraying, where the giant slept uneasy. And here he was, driving up these slopes, the prehistoric rock finally worn to see the air. The trees leered as ancient relics, remnants from an unremembered past - the latest incarnation of an unbroken strand of life, things that had grown and crawled upon this land, birthing and dying in eons long before humanity. The Sun itself, starting to wane in the late afternoon, seemed to wobble unsteady in the sky, and shine too bright, then not bright enough... ...and then he would blink - hard, twice - and back to normal it came. He shook his head - driving fatigue, highway hypnosis, how long had he been on the road, anyway? Didn't matter - he'd sleep good tonight. The approach to where he was headed - into Macon County through the town of Franklin, where a great uncle of his had shot a man over a pittance owed to him for moonshine - was easy enough, and not soon after he was there, his destination: Nantahala National Forest. As he slowed down and drove through the winding roads and hills to the campsite he was struck, as one is struck hard like a blow to the head, with the unfolding and unending kaleidoscope of Autumnal colors, all around him, what he had seen from the road now vivid, achingly intense, enveloping his vision. He checked in at the ranger station, and the woman he spoke with - plump, glasses, called him honey- had given him an odd look when he mentioned which campsite he was headed to. "Ain't nobody been up there for years and years," she said. "We had to shut it down on account of nobody was going up that way." James furrowed his eyebrows at her, but he hid a smile. "Why? That don't seem right." But he knew full well why. "People would come up there and say couldn't nobody get no--" And then she paused, and laughed to herself, shaking her head. "Couldn't nobody get no sleep, they'd be tellin us they'd be hearin weird noises, seein weird shape n'all this..." She paused, and the hum and rattle of James' waiting Wrangler seemed uncomfortably loud in the sudden silence. "Course when we sent up the rangers weren't nuthin up there. But people talk like they do, so - we shut er down." James nodded at her. "Gotta say - seems a little spooky." The woman shrugged. "Way folk get on round here ye'd think there's nuthin but spooks." "Ha!" James allowed himself a little laugh before catching himself. "Nah ma'am, yanno - I think I'll be fine." The woman tilted her head away, conceding the point. "Just in case, yanno how to get in contact with a ranger if ya have any trouble?" "I do indeed." Then with a final smile, she motioned off to the distant campsite: "Well lemme know how your night is, y'hear?" "Yes ma'am - yes ma'am I will." "Ya have a good'n now, young man." And with that, he drove on. He made it at last to where he would be spending the night, the old campsite, that had been leveled off next to a creek, where reedy saplings as tall as he was sprang up in the shadows of their elder fellow trees. As soon as he dropped out of his Wrangler, stretching, his muscles taut from the long car ride, he breathed deep of the air around him. He had experienced it, like the view, from a distance - but now, with the rolling hills leading exquisitely to a mountain before him, and the gentle babble of the creek beside him, he felt it, in him the air actually cleaning his lungs. "Al_right_--" he murmured with satisfaction. It took him no time at all to fetch his tent, set down his thermos and his camera, and dig into the bear-proof canister which held his dinner, breakfast, and lunch for the next day and a half - all sandwiches, ham and mustard - he would eat a quick snack before he could set up the tent and write in his journal. He ate light when he was working, what he considered his real line of work, why he was here. The Sun was wavering, it would set soon, the Autumn evening would come and it would turn colder, he would lose daylight, he needed to write while he could. He opened his journal, the pen in the spiral spine ready for him, he turned to where he had left off. The last time he had been able to take off work - call center, Wells Fargo, unglamorous but paid the bills and left him enough to travel and drink decently on - before he had gone to West Virginia and then to Florida, he had gone to the other end of North Carolina, in the Great Dismal Swamp, searching for ghosts there, and he had seen strange lights that seemed to float on the cypresses but nothing concrete, nothing that he could turn in as proof of the paranormal or supernatural. This - and magic and witchcraft and cryptids, spooks that went bump in the night, so the cliché went, his co-workers called him Agent Mulder and so it was because why the Hell not - he took on as articles of faith, but which others, outside of the fringes on the Internet, needed convincing. So convince them, he would. He was determined to find something groundbreaking, shocking, incontrovertible - if not this trip then another, and another, he would never give up the search. He paused, a fleeting moment, as he remembered that mechanic's face, his grin, those teeth. Might Bligh - that was his name, again the memory of James shaking his hand flashed in his mind - might he_have been some sort of cryptid? Something that walked amongst the teeming crowd unnoticed, in a masquerade with humanity? And if so - _what was he? Normal enough to be just another good Samaritan who offered to fix his car when it broke down...but--? What if he didn't have to haunt strange and remote places to find what he was looking for? What if they were all around him, all around everyone, and no one, least of all he, actually knew? He hesitated - he thought to make a note about it - he hadn't yet, maybe he should - but shook his head at last, not now, not at the moment, he had to focus on where he was now, for his journal - a book he may one day publish. Up here on this particular campsite was a popular urban legend which was based in fact: it was never used because campers would feel an unease when they slept here, often reported nightmares, strange visions, weird noises, odd shapes in the woods...people quit going there to the point that the office in Franklin ended up closing it, reopening only just two years ago from an unexpected budget boost and a major uptick in camping and hiking out that way. That was the rumor anyway - the woman at the ranger station had repeated it because she had probably heard it enough times. It seemed silly, not to say actually theatrical, the stuff of campfire lore...and yet it was all true, as true James could see it himself right now, this place, so lonely and untouched... James stayed his pen - he glanced up and around him, seated where he was next to his tent. It was true, he felt like an intruder here, an interloper...he had suspected the feeling - that feeling of unbelonging, if such a word for such an abstract emotion even existed - that others felt was a classic symptom of being haunted, but he had only read it, academically, he had no experience with it, even when he had seen strange things himself. Now he did. He took a deep breath - trying to stave off the creep, wordless, that he did not belong there...when his eyes drifted to the treeline, the old campsite giving way to a wall of woods: dark and thick, shadows swallowing up the nearby creek. If he was the interloper, he was gonna see just what he was interloping into. In the early evening light the forest was already dusky, a place of silhouettes and near-stillness: there was the burble of the creek, the whooping wail of the mourning dove, the rustle of an unseen animal on its blind path up the hills, into the mountains that now James could not see for the towering trees. To accompany the feeling of - how else to describe it, perhaps, wrongness, unwarranted and inchoate solitude, the feeling that he was being watched - there was an impulse to stare back, to watch the shadows and the stillness in the forest. For what, he did not know: but that was why he was out here, after all, to find out what. Picking up his camera, he began to walk. He followed the old path, easy at first, but then steeper, overgrown - how long he hiked, he couldn't be sure. The forest was all around him, massive hickory trees whose trunks had fattened mightily over untold years and decades, the colors of the leaves swirling above him, falling to be crunched underfoot, susurrating where they were still affixed to branches high above. The sunlight, now dying fast, haloed the canopy above, rich red glow pouring in shafts all the way down to the forest floor. Despite the crispness and the falling temperature he was flushed by the time he'd nearly reached the next crest, sweat trickling down his back and sticking his flannel to his skin, woolen cap hot on his head, camera in hand. He huffed, breathing deep of the air, grinning at the dimming light. The eerie feeling was all around him, watched and watchful, but now it made him smile, then grin, then laugh, at how immersively spooky these October woods were. "That - that's_some good shit." Dusk would be coming soon, and he was tired, still not altogether whole from the long trip here, there was no sense in freaking himself out so soon and so suddenly. Eight years at this, at least seriously - at twenty-seven he should have known better and have been a little more jaded, but the thrill was always fresh. Twilight was all around him now, the sky in lovely violence above him, sunlight dimming to thin shafts through the leaves that darkened with the vanishing light - with it came a flit of worry about getting back down to the campsite before night fell at last. Yet as the thought hit him it was driven away: he smelled something. Something _strange. He inhaled deeply his nose - and his mouth, he swore - was assaulted by a plethora of smells, the acrid redolence of the Autumn season, all of it, woodsmoke and ground-up leaves and earthy spices, the whiff of hazelnut and the juice of the pumpkin, what one tackily associates with the Samhain season in the commercialized vivified zombie of the European's pagan roots. He took in several breaths of it, mesmerized. Where was the smell coming from? ...woodsmoke, burnt hickory, the poetic odor of the campfire, and spices, so many spices, that peppered the air - dark smells, of the witch's Sabbath, of the warlock's coven, of the Halloween ghost story. The hill he was on, he saw now, was no hill at all: its sides were too sharp, and it curved around in a most unnatural fashion, still clear even with centuries of trees growing upon it. He hustled up the final few steps, now with the sunset catching strange lights swooping up the far edge as he came to the crest, dropping down low to avoid being seen by - whatever was making that smell. There he could see, his eyes adjusting: a wide circular mound, the center hollowed out, and in the hollow there was... ...his eyes still blinked against the oncoming darkness, and through the blur, becoming clearer, there looked to be in the very center of the crater in the mound a herd of elk around a smooth stone, bonfire burning bright at its base. Or, maybe, no, that wasn't it, it was a circle of people wearing animal masks - they were standing, walking... But no - not that, either? What - what was he seeing? He focused on one of these not-elk, amongst his other five fellows, and saw how its muscles bunched and shifted in ways no animal should move...it rose, standing up, and in the flickering firelight James saw it had hands - four-fingered, thick and gnarled, and tipped in short, curving, sharpened nails, not like a hand at all but a clawed hoof, surrounded by fur that crept up to its shoulders, which were fluffed-out, shaggy with the same. Almost upright did it lumber, proportions wrong for an elk and twice as wrong for a human - limbs all the wrong lengths, bushy hoof-like feet where the toned, muscled, furry legs_terminated, below a small, tufted tail. Between the hirsute head and shoulders and the bestial bottom, was smooth, human-like flesh, crisscrossed with veiny, sinewy muscles, a gymnast's body, were it a man. A muzzled face twisted down as it stood higher, crowned by - yes, there was no mistaking it now - _antlers, magnificently wide, bone, ivory, stretching from either side of its head. In the firelight the beast cast a long, uncanny shadow, drawn out to monstrous proportions up the side of the hill, flickering and darting as the bonfire popped and crackled. "Oh--" James murmured into the night. "Oh - oh my God--!" For so how long - for so, so long - James had been chasing this. This. Proof, empirical, impossible to disprove, that cryptids were real, that all the weirdness - the unexplained events, oddities and mystery all across the globe - that it was real, that the world we lived in was a façade for something deeper and darker. "Jesus--" he whispered. "Jesus - Christ." He watched them, he watched this - this herd of creatures, not quite elk, but not quite human, yet something overlapping both, something truly monstrous, neither twisted nor ugly but transcendent in a beauty so pure it was, like the strange way their bodies seemed to be made, a deformity, unto itself. For James, all the abnormal, the supernatural, paranormal, lived behind glass: visible only through a spotty video or blurry photograph, on the farthest shore of a gulf dividing the world of the quotidian, the mundane. This was his world, this_was his quest - and here it was, here, he had succeeded, in front of him. All he could do was watch - these strange creatures moving, moving rhythmically, around the fire, the bonfire that danced impious near the stone - _watching it happen for him, right now. "Oh - fuck--!" This was it, this was his big break, nobody would ever laugh at him or question his sanity or think he was wasting his time, ever again. Proof - he had it! All he had to do was take some pictures, stalk these creatures close, but careful, careful, not to disturb them, as they circled round their fire, sometimes on all fours and sometimes upright, circling - circling, circling, around the bonfire that was lit by the smooth stone. He stood watching them, again, having taken only a few steps forward. Round and round they went - the six of them, silent, trotting and then walking upright in a rhythmic pattern that James detected at once...these were no mere cryptids, no random weird animals, these seemed to be - intelligent. "Wha--?" No sooner had he thought it, and said it, then the group of not-elk stopped - stopped and rose, all of them, their hairy muzzles thrown back, bellowing into the night. James' bowels turned to ice at the sound - colder than the night already, ghastly in the Appalachian October. The sound had been the most eldritch noise he had ever heard another animal in his entire life make - it contained within it something so primally sorrowful, an ineffable, cosmic sadness...a call, James realized, though he could not know why, to one recently passed on. The mere vibrations it made in the air, perfumed with the smells of what he now realized was being burnt in the fire, the smells of Autumn that engorged his nose and filled his head with strange and fleeting synesthesia - the mere act of it hitting his ears made James want to cry, to mourn, to grieve with these misshapen half-human things that he had, not minutes ago, just discovered. The camera was still in his hand but he had yet to take any pictures, too distracted, too agitated, but he let out a stifled cry of fear, and dropped it, to the ground - the sound of the lens cracking rang out, a shattering echo. James' breaths were heavy, his body immobile and paralyzed with fear, as he watched - out from the crawling shadows of the centuries-old hickories a new beast appeared, alike the others in visage but obviously older, shaggier, his movements were slow and patient - in his mouth was carried an object, and James strained to see what it was... ...a woven, complicated thing, rustic craftsmanship, made of wood - a nest, nearly, of briars, and laden with a great pile of hazelnuts inside a small hollow in the middle from which arose a single large antler-point, the whole of it wrapped with maple leaves. This beast, the not-elk, held this thing in its mouth, and the others bowed to it, as though in a fetish-devotion - and then, out of its mouth, dropped the thing into the fire. A great crackling hiss erupted, sparks flew from the embers of the fire, and out poured from it a vast cloud of dark, obscuring smoke, a pillar billowing up into the starlit sky. James' hands shook - and then his body shook, more than mere shiver from the cold. He could feel it - something was wrong, something was very_wrong, he was suddenly, with no warning at all, torn into by dread, a sensation that everything he saw, felt, smelt, was some wrenching nightmare that leered at him in the waking world. He tried to step back - but his foot caught the fallen camera, and down he came, hard on his ass, to the ground. He shouted out in pain, and like the sound of his lens breaking it echoed, over the sound of oncoming night, cutting into the final knell of a new, lowing cry of the creatures some distance before him. They stopped - all of them, all six and their elder too, looked at him, turned their cervid faces and _looked at him. And in the firelight, their eyeshine smoldered aglow. Panic set in - he remembered the time he was in the Smoky Mountains, hunting Bigfoot, and there was a bear roaming near his tent and he was certain he was going to be mauled - the same fear, fight-or-flight, crashed into him. He scrambled up - and slipped again, faceplanting to the cold grass. There was a noise behind him, all six of them, a bugle that sounded from an animal mouth, first with one, then another, then a third, by and by until all of them were making the noise together - a clarion, an announcement. James rose, slowly, never more bewildered in his life - his mind raced. What were these things? They had done a ceremony, a ritual, but they were stags - elk - prehistoric creatures, had they evolved into something intelligent? Hybrids, with humans - somehow? Fleeting he remembered something horrible he had read about just how it was that the Roanoke Colony ended up disappearing... ...then the wind turned, a rattling breath through the canopy, and the dark smoke twisted and expanded, rushing toward him - James was suddenly in thick fog, fumes burning his eyes - the shapes around him wraithlike, ghostly. He held up his shirtsleeve, trying to cover his face, but not before he swallowed a mouthful of smoke, burning down into his lungs, and he gave a rough gasp, futile, sputtering. He hacked, the reflexive inhale burning his throat and sending him into a coughing fit, on his knees in the grass - he staggered to his feet, certain the ghostly figures in the clearing were all staring directly at him, animal eyes luminous through the smoke. He stumbled away from the clearing and the stone and the fire and those things, and he ran - eyes burning so he could hardly see, ears hearing nothing but his own hammering heartbeat and the rasp of his breath, every motion around him in this fearful blind delirium making seem the beasts were giving chase, looming, out of the dark, in the smoke, just behind him... Eventually his terror spent itself, leaving him panting, drenched in cold sweat, barely aware of the dull ache in his muscles from the sudden expenditure. His breath was loud in the cold, a desperate pant that seemed like it must be audible across the entire forest. He looked about him. There was nothing coming after him. The shadows were just trees, the rustling was just the wind. A look over his shoulder saw no elk-people, the fire put out, the smoke vanished into the night stars appearing bright and clear - where had it all gone? No - he was still coughing, that smoke was certainly in his lungs and had scorched them because he had breathed in too much...that, all of it, had been no illusion, no drunk backwoods hayseeds dressed in animal masks. That had been - that had been-- He didn't know what it had been. He hardly knew how he found the campsite again, he was dazed and he was weak in the aftermath - his skin crawled with shivering tremors. It was all he had in him to throw open the door to his Wrangler and clamber in the driver's seat, amidst the broken vagaries of trying to leave, to go to a hospital because he could barely breathe, wheezing, straining, his lungs still feeling as though the peculiar smoke had blackened it. There was a vain struggle for his key - keys - where the fuck were his keys? But the strain was at last too much - he collapsed onto the steering wheel, unconscious. Unconscious - but still able to dream. The dream was fitful - there he was alone, a dirt path, he could smell the fresh Autumn rain. And then he looked up - there was his granddad, dead but just as James remembered him, turning to him in a hilly cemetery somewhere that the dirt path led to, mountains beyond it full of mist and fog. He was shaking his head - slowly, disapprovingly - knowingly, as if he, James, had failed him, had failed him as his grandson. His eyes - the dark brown he had genetically gifted James - were narrowed in disappointment and shame. Shapes, neither human nor animal, lurked in the trees, tombstones shifted seamlessly into forest, clawed hands and hooved feet pushing and erupting from the ground, rotting, skeletal, with a vibrating earthquake beneath it, a long muted bellow like wind rattling through branches. James wanted to cry out, to demand what was happening, and ask where he was, but a dread welled up and roared inside his still-dreaming head - the faint unease when he was awake was now all-consuming, it was so potent and drilling that he surely would die of it: the elk-creatures without flesh or fur but stark, ivory skulls, empty sockets glowing brilliant yellow, boring into James' mind. Lucidity came back to him, slowly, very slowly, fragmentary pieces of awakening, and James tore his way back to waking like surfacing from a lake, dreams shattered into fragments of incoherent sensation. It was still dark outside - how many hours had he passed out for? And why--? His drowsy thoughts were destroyed in his own head as he felt something - something between his legs - something under his ass. Something gelatinous. Something slimy. He thought for a second that he'd eaten some bad food, as if the sandwiches he had picked had spoilt unaware to him, and he shit himself in the night - he dry-heaved in immediate revulsion, and he moved, gingerly, to open the driver's side door, too-aware of the liquescent mess in his underwear every time he moved. But then the smell hit him. It was a heavy, numinously woodsy scent, blossoming thickly in the too-humid air inside his Jeep. It stirred the still-forming memories of last night, the bizarre ritual on the hill, the...things - the things he'd seen, fuller, more realized, than the paltry faintness of the scents through the air only some hours ago. His thighs were wet with the stuff, leaking in fluid trails from his ass, soaking through his underwear, and he unzipped his jeans to swipe his fingers through it, and bring it to his nose, sniffing. Rich - amniotic - musk, almost rancid, in its animal reek... ...before his sleep-fuzzy brain could catch up to what his body was doing, James parted his lips, tongue swiping across his slimy fingers. The flavor burst over his tongue, a thousand times more potent, and he groaned, shoving his fingers full in his mouth, his tongue laving over them in a needfulness he had never felt before, as though he were a newborn discovering milk for the first time. His mind went blank - utterly, completely blank. There was nothing in his head, nothing rational - for an instant, nothing human. He did not know how he fell out of his Wrangler, how he crawled away from it, how he found himself face down on the ground, ass in the air, legs tangled in his sodden underwear, clawing at his skin in his eagerness. His consciousness, robbed with the first thunderstrike of the taste, the first taste of himself, returned, slowly, his surroundings melding back into his awareness - the forest, a newly appeared Moon shining down on him, strange prints all around his Jeep, hand and hoof...the airish breezes that blew from nowhere... ...he found a messy tendril of slime from the furrow of his ass and slurped it up, moaning around his fingers, drooling as he rutted back against his other hand, two fingers jammed to the knuckle in his slick, dripping hole. There were - he felt it, he felt it - bloated swells inside him, a pair aching glands just behind his asshole, like he'd grown new prostates, and when he dug in, curled his fingers around their bulk, and squeezed, they splat hot musk, squirting across his knuckles, drooling down his balls. Some rational part of his mind was telling him this couldn't be normal, this was something serious and frankly terrible - that he should get up, get in his Wrangler, even with his ass squelching on the seat, to a hospital, a doctor, he needed help - he needed help... He should leave - he should leave... ...he didn't want to. Too consumed, too eaten, already, by his heat - a piece of meat in the jaws of the forest. Wonder, he remembered from his writings was part of terror, and part of terror, wonder. He licked his fingers again, he smelt his own blossoming odor, again, and his terror at his own body, his own ­changing body, was matched, equalized, by a fascination...by wonder. Immediately he thought of those inhuman, abhuman things in the woods. A sameness. A kinship. This - this felt right. But why? James had to stay. His whole body ached, that liquid - musk, he understood - rapidly pooling in his underwear, soaking through his pants so it looked like he'd pissed himself. The reek was getting stronger, awash in inexpressible, fleeting smells: overripe blackberry, burnt hazelnut, juicy venison...dripping from his asshole, flushed, leaking, flesh burning hot. His undershirt stuck to his skin, soaked dark by sweat, his flannel long since discarded in an action he did not remember. He was going - up, he thought, maybe, on all fours, hands padding the undergrowth like he was just another one of those beasts he'd seen, following the game trail that he feared - hoped - was not just a game trail. His scent trail must have been miles long, announcing to every tree, every dead flower, every creature of the wood that his was a heat cravenly, blindly aching to be filled. It wasn't long - there was a crashing in the underbrush behind him, and James turned just in time to see one of the not-elk burst onto the path, hands and hooves tamping the dirt as it swung around to face him. James groaned out, a pathetic noise, in relief. He wasn't going crazy, or if he was, the universe had gone crazy too - he vacillated between knowing, thinking, seeing...and a waking unconsciousness, an inexorable descent into bestial instinct. The beast slunk forward, cautious, out of the hickories. It snorted, breath billowing out in clouds of steam, its ivory rack of chipped antlers a messy palmate branching covering most of its face, wild and asymmetrical. Its hands were the same as the prints he'd seen: humanoid, with nails dark, thick, shining, chartreuse with trampled grass. From the vantage of being so far away, before, James could not have appreciated the unholy beauty that was the creature itself, an imperfect admixture of elk and man: Its head was like that of a great buck, eyes aglow as they caught the moonlight, with those formidable, but oddly asymmetric, antlers to match - what had to have been near three yards across. He was near a head taller than James who was six feet already, shoulders and forearms shaggy with hoary brown fur, messy with twigs and dirt. A tightly toned mass of leathery skin, near-human, in the way the muscles seemed to ripple with its slow, steady movement, made up its abdomen, showing four small teats. It walked on bent legs, terminating in strong, black hooves. A breath of steam poured forth from its muzzle into the night air. But what glinted most luridly in the moonlight, and caught James' eye, was the thing's grotesque, erect phallus - wholly animal, wholly monstrous, sharp tip aimed at the ground, constantly dribbling watery slime. For a moment - just a moment - James' stomach revolted, all his senses returned to him, all the horror of the situation he was in hitting him clearly. The grotesque drip of the beast's repulsive cock, so unnatural - or all too natural - it made him gag, the thought of desiring the beast like something from the nightmare of some depraved degenerate, churned sickeningly in his stomach. Some inner voice screamed at him that he was in danger - of what sort he could not think or know - and that he should run, he should tear away from this awful monster who clearly had unwholesome, nauseating designs on him - but he could not. His mind became cloudy again, and the beast drew nearer. The swells - the new glands inside his ass -expelled a near-fountain of juices, matched with a near-painful pang inside him, the winding-out of a muscle pulled too tight and just starting to yield. All he wished to see, all he wished to feel, was that cock - that beautiful, sensual, perfectly designed cock - inside him, mounting him, destroying him, all to pleasure this phantom-figure of bestial sex. He craved it - he craved this beast. In a frenzy he tore off his sweat-soaked undershirt, loudly ripping the fabric - he clawed off his flannel-lined jeans soaked to the thread already with the musk he was producing, sticky, down his hairy legs. James was naked, naked as this beast was, he was a part of the forest, he was the very woods itself. The beast inhaled deeply, nostrils flaring as it soaked up James' scent, and its cock twitched, slapping up across its underbelly, erupting in a gush of rank precum as though it were pissing - a seconds-long stream of fertility that splattered the ground. Now James realized he was drooling: mouth agape, spit streaming into his beard. He was snuffling too, a wet sucking from his nose and mouth, trying to catch the beast's scent over the overwhelming musk of his own heat - mere seconds passed when, with a roar, the thing dove at him, knocking James onto his back, its muzzle digging into his ass. An animal bleat-scream of euphoria tore out of James as its tongue speared his hole, leaving him panting, bleary-eyed, whining - he clenched his anus around the creature's tongue, sending a messy slurry of juices squirting from his ass, soaking the beast's long, tapered muzzle. The creature grabbed his thighs, its claws digging into James' flesh, a guttural noise of dominance resonating in its throat. James was being torn into, a broad tongue folding over itself in greasy furls as the beast lapped up his reeking heat-scent - he moaned, shudders wracking his body. He mindlessly rutted back against the beast's muzzle, mind awash in new bestial pleasure, and when he opened his mouth what came out was an animal paean, brother to the beast's own bellows. The beast's head twisted slow, magnificent antlers asway, its eyes noctilucent in a stray shaft of moonlight, burning, brilliant green-yellow fire reflecting back into James' vision as it voraciously, greedily, devoured the new musk James was producing. And then it kept moving, dark again, the wet slurp of its motions clear in the night, the twist of its tongue lapping deep in James' ass, teasing out squirt after squirt of slimy musk from his convulsing body, the afterimage of those gleaming eyes burned into his retina. James shuddered, back arching, dizzy explosions of pleasure inside him - ass squelching noisomely, panting like an animal. Heat swarmed over him, toes to crown, like crashing waves of water, ecstasy surging and ebbing. It wasn't until he tasted thick salt on his tongue he realized he'd cum, having sprayed a load in a dribbling line up his chest, droplets tangled in his chest hair and in his beard, dripping down his cheek. The beast pulled back, its muzzle tethered with cords of slime back to James' hole, hanging so long in the chill air that when they snapped the impact was cold: lines of icy fluid splattering back across the feverish flesh of his ass. Its head rose, breath steaming in the air, and it leaned forward, gnarled hands pressing hot across James' stomach, chest, shoulders, until it was on top of him, spit spilling over its dark lips and winding through its matted fur, spilling in syrupy lines across James' face, pouring into his open mouth. James panted, arching up - pinned by the creature's immense weight - and pressed his mouth to the great beast's muzzle, a feral kiss, his own musk mixed with the sharper, acrid taste of its saliva. His hand came to near one of the beast's soulful eyes he could see in the moonlight, and he pressed their faces together, tender, vulnerable - the exchange of tongues between the two, slowed, becoming less insistent, less hurried...James' breathing became less labored, his lips cherishing the taste, however putrid, of his newfound lover. They twisted around each other, the beast's tongue lapping over his shoulder, James' lips dragging through dirty fur, inhaling deep the dense odor of the beast, the woods, the patriarchy of animals. But this space of time - what James could feel was actually turning into malformed, hideous love - was not to last. The smell, the taste - it was too irresistible, and a need inside him rose, violent, immediate. The weight of the beast's cock bore down on him, unsheathed against his bare belly, hot in the chill air. James moaned into the creature's mouth, his tongue deep into its muzzle as he rocked up against it, hands reaching for its slimy length - he reached for it. It was slick, nearly slipping from his hands, but he grasped it at last, its heat like a burning brand pressed against him, red-hot. With a powerful vibration, a cry of perfect pleasure from the beast, out spurt a wash of watery ooze, so potent its fumes almost hurt to inhale, acrid and pungent. It was pre - yellowish pre that splashed up James' stomach and chest, matted his hair to his skin, pouring in rivers over his sides. At once he broke off the kiss - his ass ached, his hole clenching, then throwing itself open, once, twice, each convulsion in his rectum blasting his musk-juices - he cried out to the beast, futilely wordless but utterly enslaved: he needed this cock inside him - he needed to be bred. He nudged the beast back, sliding up slightly that they could make eye contact - what passed for eye contact in the half darkness. He groaned out his wish, he presented himself like an animal, lifted his legs into the air, on his back, ready to be taken. The beast bellowed out a call of triumph, grabbing him roughly, near-throwing him over to get a better aim to penetrate him - now he was sobbing out into the forest canopy, a torrid volcanism of unrestrained emotions. The beast entered him, spearing him like the piece of meat that, in his plummeting depravity, he was so desirous of becoming. And then - everything went white, his whole being now a blinding synesthesia of pleasure, so intense that for an instant he was certain that he would die this way. His newly formed internal muscles, another physical transformation, spasmed uncontrollably, slurping, up on the beast's cock. Each spasmodic clench sent a squirt of musk-juice spraying down the beast's length, easing the way for more to push inside. It was a pillar, powerfully thick, but it slipped into his heat-soaked guts with ease - the shaft filled him, slid frighteningly deep inside him. Even then James' body was simply too small a vessel: the final length of its cock remained outside, steaming in the night air, as it ground its cockhead against some internal barrier within him. Tears streaked his cheeks, his nose was snotty, his spit spilled over his lips - there, face-up on the ground, twigs stuck in his beard and grass in his mouth from the frantic journey here, petrichor and the dusty scent of crushed dead leaves dimming the overwhelming reek of their mating...there, second by second, was James becoming less, still less, a human. His very flesh reshaped itself as the beast fucked him, animal drives taken on a life of their own: he could feel, a transporting euphoria, the as-yet shallow transformation sunk down to his bones. The heat, his heat, twisted inside him like a living thing, the coils of a snake churning in his guts, heartbeat bounding under his skin - he screamed to the icy-diamond stars above him, even as he kept rutting back against the beast's shaft, desperate for more, for all of it, meeting each of the beast's brutal thrust with one of his own. Something like an old muscle ache, a newfound locus of pain, throbbed inside him, and each of the beast's thrusts rammed against it, against some twisted knot of muscle inside him, an exquisite agony that brought fresh tears to his eyes, a rippling pleasure radiating out afterward. And then - the beast stopped. In his consumed rapture he had not noticed the open flood of semen that had erupted into him, had not heard the victorious trumpet from the creature's muzzle - but he did feel, and felt miserably, with bleakest sorrow, the thing withdraw, the slurping sound of the cock leaving his ass final proof that the mating was over, that his anus had been used for its prime, sole purpose. James groaned aloud, long and low, a cry of despair. The withdrawal of the beast's cock had left an insistent, obtrusive need that pained him - an imagined wound inside his stomach that throbbed, vicious, incessant. His asshole was clenching, pulsing, as though there were a primitive consciousness attached to it - starving, famished, consumed with lust, even as he writhed on the ground. He had been taken, but it was not enough. He was not sated. He had been fucked - but not bred. James' body sang with a fever that the beast's semen, dripping slow from his abused asshole, stoked as though it were a raging flame, burning him, melting him, remaking his very flesh - he watched, dazed and delirious, as though he were in a lucid dream, eyes wet, lungs sucking in air - dark fur burned up across his forearms, prickling as it grew through his skin. His balls bloomed with the same hair, and his penis stood at attention yet again, with each heartbeat lengthening, slimming, tapering, taking on - although he could not see it - a hue of deeper red, scarlet, wettening, becoming moist and slippery. An abrupt, brief, but excruciating agony made his hands, and then his feet, seizure, nails shifting under his skin, the clear keratin growing thicker, cloudy-dark - the old growth snapped off, leaving him with ragged-edged claws...as above and so below, hands and feet, brown-black obsidian, near-radiant in the darkness. The hair across his thighs and rump grew with the same bloom, new fur pushing up from his sodden skin, already tangled in tufts down the backs of his thighs - a new tail, bursting from a descended coccyx, skin and blood dripping messily where it emerged, appeared just above his anus. All of this - in his amazement - was met with cries of transported joy...they were all what could pass for words anymore, his ability to use language, human language, annihilated with his first rutting. But a seizing cramp attacked his stomach, his bowels, and fell to the ground, curling into a fetal position, the cries of happiness morphing, as he was, into wails of bewilderment. He could feel - things inside him, opening, shifting, new passages forming, the whole of his internal design reborn. Now the image of the beast's cock invaded his brain, filled his head in violent hallucination, so strong, so large, so virile, so...fertile. Again he cried out, weak, a susurrus in the still Autumn night, his vocal cords strained now, strange now, he sounded - different, he sounded - in his quiet supplication to nothing, like one of the beasts. Hearing himself this way let the reverie break and in its wake, singing in his veins, every heartbeat, came the need - tormenting, dreadful - to breed. Where had the beast gone? He needed him - he needed that phallus, he needed that power, this new emptiness in his new organs filled, to the brim, with life-giving fluid. On all fours he dropped, and he began to crawl. Maybe, maybe the beast would come back - maybe it would fuck him again - he sniffed the air, helpless, trying to detect where it could have gone. Perhaps it was with his herd - yes, the whole herd could take him, then, one after the other. And if not them - some hiker, a human cock, too small, too puny, disgusting in its inferior design but it would do, anything, anything at all, to fill the aching void inside him. He could not say how long or how far he went, a dazed shamble, bashing near-blind against trees, whining and bleating, the moonlight his only guide. James was desperate, the heat in his ass at an intense peak, its constant waterfall of musk sopping his new fur - his breathing became labored as his despair grew and grew. He could not take it anymore - thick tears came to his face as the musk from his ass began to flow in larger and larger amounts, his arousal, his heat, controlling everything he did... ...from the corner of his vision he saw a solitary white pine amidst the thick growth of older, larger trees - there was a burst of activity in his febrile brain, a solution, ingenious and awful. He approached it still on all fours, and leaned into it, rump-first - his hole clenched and opened and he shuddered at the touch, the rough flaky bark scraping his assflesh, the very touch so sensitive and delicate that stars flew up in his mind's eye. Yes - yes - this was what he needed to do. James took his rear end, his new tail up, and moved it, up and down, down and up, against the shaggy bark of the pine tree, letting it scrape roughly against his drippy rear. Faster and faster he did it, harder, harder, pressing into the trunk so that his cheeks were splayed and near wrapped around it, more and more, the sensation of feeling so exultant - he did not last long - his first orgasm in his new, evolved form, built, and then erupted, spraying cum that started as normally human and ended, in mere seconds, as thin, yellowish, in tandem with a new slow churn of musk out of his hole. The tree was marked - it was his, lonesome forest doe. He would come back to it later. Others would follow. A lassitude overtook him and he stumbled forward, crashing to the ground, where he lay in a post-orgasmic cloud for - for how long? He knew so little, his sense of time was nonexistent. It was night when he set out, and it was still night when he rose, slowly, very slowly, and continued his blind journey to find the rest of the herd, and night yet still, when he emerged out of the densest heart of those woods, and into the clearing. The way was guarded with two craggy boulders, the ground underneath toothy with rocks, spidery lines of lichen along innumerable cracks - there were two of the elk-beasts in the clearing, bleating and hollering at each other. The pair of elk-things were at opposite ends of the clearing, their hands and hooves at the ready on rock. Their argument - or so it seemed - was concluded by the first giving a loud grunt, answered by a repeated, concurring noise from the second. And then - the way of nature, the way of the woods, the way of all animals this way - they charged towards each other, antlers lowered. They met with a crash, their bodies rebounded from the force of the impact, then shifted and swung around, and met again with another crash - horns locked together. They bellowed, terrifying, territorial, as they fought - one angling its head down, the other angling up, sending their antlers in a stalemated scrape together. And now one snarled, straining, shoving, and like this the two rose onto their hind legs, raising their hands to clasp together as they butted heads, a pair of classic wrestlers wheezing mightily so that their whole bodies became wreathed in fog. James was mesmerized by them - their gorgeous, relentless masculinity, the strength that was so raw and naked and displayed with such savage disdain for modesty and inhibition. His penis stiffened and rose with his breath, a cloudy vapor that fumed from his mouth in increasing puffs. He could not look away - there was a swelling in his chest, an attraction, a desire, so ferocious it felt as though his heart would be rent asunder, a gory disaster in his chest cavity. The both of them were half-hard, the swell of their cockheads jutting from their sheaths...wobbling, jostling, powerfully and wetly, with every athletic movement of their bodies. James wanted them - he wanted them both, to be mated to them in the mystic forest tradition that was stark and nameless and eternal as the mountains themselves, these masculine, virile stags. Without thinking he let out a long groan, digging his fingers into his anus, meeting a fresh dose of musk to dribble over his knuckles, and he arched his back, spearing himself in an obsessive desire - too hard, his vision whiting, blurring, a camera out of focus, around the edges. His own shuddering cry was indistinguishable from the bugling roars of the fighting beasts. One of the creatures jerked its head, distracted by James' display, and the other took advantage, hooves shifting under the flurry of churned up grass - they toppled, the one on top bellowing triumphant. James was trembling, shaking, with a carnal lust that waxed grotesque in a slow burning across his skin, in his body. Before they had even settled James was lurching forward, crawling on his hands and knees, desperate, anxious, to feel their strength, their power, to become joined with them - his asshole clenched, oozey musk dribbling down the back of his balls, before it opened wide like a hungry mouth. They were still fighting, antlers scraping with an ear-shattering din, the fight for honor and for mate, but James was blind to it: too focused, too ravenous, for anything but their cocks, drawn up tight against their bodies, so fat, so heavy, so fertile, the taut flesh of their balls rippling with each impact. He tumbled into them, sprawling them sideways across the trampled grass, green smears across their fur and his skin alike - their fingers brushed his flank and he moaned, eyes rolling back into his head simply from the touch...he moved into it, bearing down, guiding the clawed fingers to his ass, moist and hungry. They were both unsheathing, their beautiful, cervine cocks leaving slimy smears where they smacked against his thighs and belly, and finally - finally - one of them jerked up, the victor after all, spearing into him effortlessly. The stretch of his aching flesh made James go limp, dead weight sinking down onto the length of the phallus until he was pressed against its fat sheath, the whole of it still stiffening and lengthening inside him, the heavy drag turning into a sharper, fuller motion as the beast pulled him back, thrusting hard into him, snarling and bleating against his neck. The loser of the honor-bound match ground against his front, cock dribbling up his stomach, and James gave it a glassy-eyed stare, mouth slack, hands loosely circling its shaft, tugging it needfully, pitifully, to a full erection as its challenger pounded into his aching hole. The penis lengthened, longer, fuller, but it did not seem to come forth all the way - and shortly he discovered way. It chubbed, merely halfway, and from it poured a steady stream of acrid, near-clear yellowish fluid that sparkled in the moonlight. It splashed onto James' face, on his neck, down his back - the scent was noisome, a hideously aromatic bitterness, a near-physical force...but James relished it. He was being marked - in this awful baptism he was becoming a part of their tribe, true family, true kin...once more, the savage way of the Appalachian woods. Even as he stank of the thing's piss, James bowed forward, pressing his lips to its muzzle, a pathetic kiss that the beast met with a reassuring confidence, the other monster swallowing down his needy sounds as it kissed back, its tongue, thick, welcoming, lapped into James' panting, drooling mouth, its hips jerking under him as it began thrusting into his hands. The other beast snarled, twisting James' head around, breaking the kiss and shoved its muzzle into his face to obtain its own, tongue lapping from cheek to jaw before it, too, plunged its tongue into James' panting mouth. And now the first beast, the one who had marked James, rutted, the wet slap of its balls meeting his ass, James' musk spilling down onto the lap of the second beast below them, coating its unsheathing cock as James pumped it up and down, reeking bursts of animal pre gushing from the tip, splattering in an oily film across his belly and chest. As it rutted, it ground against him, snarling more - and like before, James was simply too small...the final inches of the beast's unsheathed cock slurped between his newly-furry cheeks, but this time James counterthrusted, bearing down with his rump up on the shaft, aiming for the twisted knot of muscle deep inside him. The beast's frenzied thrusts battered against it again and again, spittle flecking his shoulders, gurgling streams of pre flooding down his ass, as he, James, tried desperately to take the beast's cock. James was sunk in delirium - above him the moonlight seemed to bend and waver in his vision, he was transported; he was no longer a part of this world or this existence - it was though he was dead, he had died, killed by the unholy exquisiteness of wild, cervine sex. In this limitless moment, he could not feel, erumpent, branching, out of his head, pure bone, from new pedicles - his own set of antlers - could not see them gleam uncanny in the shafts of light from the Moon, and could not, also, see his two companion beasts pause in their respect ministrations to nuzzle at them, to bellow deep and proud that their new member had attained physical parity to them at last. The growth of his antlers, devoid of the fresh velvet that would make him closer to a true elk in the wild, but still dripping with blood from his abraded scalp, the skin hanging off in small clumps, ceased - and they were magnificent, a pointed, spiked symphony of ivory. The sight of him like this made the creatures' lust all the worse, and the one fucking him found itself in a paroxysm of newfound pleasure, as within James himself, a new passage had opened up, now violated, the beast's cockhead rammed straight up into his very core, bidding him open further - its dick slammed between his cheeks, bloated sheath flesh pressed in against his asshole. Back to consciousness James returned - his eyes rolled back in his head, wildly fucking himself on the beast's cock, grasping at fur and flesh below him - determined, his own cravings screaming at him, hands on his hips and shoulders, a muzzle pressing against his lips at the same time another laved across his chest, lapping and nibbling at his nipples. Another seconds-long gush of watery preseed, spraying up across his chest, trickled between them as the victor of the match fucked him, the steady crack of each thrust a drumbeat in James' head, counterpart to the racing hum that was his heart. James bleated - an animal noise, his throat warped, infected by his lovers' saliva and piss and semen, unable to make cogent human sounds. He sobbed, he convulsed around the beast's cock, spilling his own paltry cum across the fur of the beast below him, clenching to add friction, make each driving thrust hit him with the force of a blow, the rifled funnel of his anus savoring each spurt of feral pre until his belly began to gurgle. The two beasts grunted at each other - an understanding, a communication - and the second monster lurched forward, its penis a flaming sword from hips to chest...smoothly it jerked back, sliding through James' loose fist until the tip was under his balls - and his next jerk backwards buried the both of their cocks inside him. James tipped his head back, a scream that would not bear sound, hands seizing, digging into the fur of the beast beneath him so hard he probably broke skin. His heat-engorged asshole was hungrily yielding, swallowing up the twin cocks - the stretch his body was put through was unimaginable, but to his new, altered body it was so easy, two wrist-thick cocks inside him, to the sheath, even as the beasts squabbled and fought...James, between them, thinking of them equally, breeding him, taking him, again and again. One of the beasts bellowed in a triumph that echoed in James' ears, its cock throbbing inside him. The clearing was filled with the wet slap of their sheaths kissing his gaping asshole, over and over - syrupy lines of their yellowed pre and his own musk-juices smeared under them, drawn out on each withdrawal only to splatter across his haunches when they slammed back inside, jamming into the clenching tunnel inside him. They used him - he allowed them the privilege, the right. Now he was aware, subtly, the faintest sensation, as a breath upon the skin, of his teats opening, a slow dribble of milk dripping onto the ground - then two more, then two more again, until the ground below him was rich with the liquescent cream of his...yes, that was what it was, his maternal offerings, six nipples, four new, for young to nurse at. James' eyes rolled back into his skull, whuffing and drooling as he convulsed, asshole clamping and squirting around the phalli of the beasts as they hammered inside him, again and again, tongues lapped at his skin, down his shoulders, across his chest, teeth existing as points of pressure against his overheated flesh, new fur thickening down the back of his neck. Froth built between the three of them, ooze, grimy bubbles speckling their fur, soaking down to their skin as they mated as the near-feral animals they were. It was the victor in the duel who orgasmed first, its thrusts becoming short slaps, and it bugeled, its body tensing, cock twitching and shifting inside James just before it erupted, shooting with such power that it stung- hot, impossibly potent bursts of feral semen burst inside him, gurgling inside James' new and aching womb, swallowed and held safe in its destination. The beast came and came, unloading explosively until the pressure ached, an ocean of thick stag issue swimming inside James' belly. The beast finally pulled back, a single squirt of its load escaping with it, gushing in an opaque yellow-white rope down the twin shafts lodged inside him. The second beast, its sliding through the stretched passage, made its final few thrusts, churning the load already spilled before it, too, came with its own roar, hosing down the walls of James' uterus with its half-elk semen until it churned and sloshed, burbling noisily with each fresh pump, flesh aching and stretched. James' clenching new cervix, the opening that had been forming inside him all this time, hungrily drank down the beast's issue as it pulled back, only smears left on its shaft as it spilled out, the final dribbles grey-yellow in the moonlight, across its underbelly as its cock slipped between James' thighs. Now he was splattered with pre, oozing from his gaping ass and whisked into thick froth, but his body swallowed their loads hungrily, becoming a heavy wet weight deep inside him, sloshing and gurgling nearly with each breath. James slumped forward, his heat ebbing for the first time - not sated, not yet, but its fire guttering for the first time since he'd woke. His milk did not cease its flow, but still slowed, reflecting the half-satisfaction of the rest of his body. He was aquiver, exhausted beyond words, and he fell - not into sleep, precisely, but a restless kind of waking dream, aware of his body sprawled on the matted grass, of the elk-beasts who bred him leaving...and then, slowly, of phosphorescent eyes appearing at the edges of the clearing: first one pair, then another, soon the whole herd coming to him, drawing ranks around him. His half-sight caught the watching, glimmering, gemstone-luminous eyes, because he opened his own eyes as he awoke - perhaps it was just the sounds of their approach, the clatter of hooves on stone and fallen leaves, the softer tread on grass, the gentle, paper-leather sound of their clawed hands curling over rocks and roots as they gathered around him, ringing the clearing...seven, yes, such a small number... ...an endangered species. When he became fully conscious the Moon was almost directly overhead, turning where they were gathered into a play of light and shadow, the very faintest tinge of color, ghostly-grey at the edges. And standing before him, slowly emerging from the shadows, was the final beast he'd seen in the ritual: the one that had been holding the wreath. His antlers, lit by the moonlight, seemed to curl into existence, revealed as distinct from the thicket of crisscrossing branches behind his head: the yellow-brown bone nearly ivory in the moonlight, and slowly unfolding into the light. This was the eldest of the beasts - the ancient patriarch of this tribe - an elk of Pliocene proportions, so vast had James stood on two legs - had he still found it natural to stand on two legs - his head would have been level with its own, horns cracking the sky, blotting out the stars, cutting the Moon into crescents. When he'd seen the old stag before, in the ritual, it had seemed alien, almost deformed in its white-furred gait - now it seemed nigh-divine, the ascendant paramount of the herd, the eldest, the master, the one who demanded service, the one who needed neither fights nor bellows to prove himself. James was hypnotized by him, his heart singing with a passion, a desire, that transcended anything he had ever known in his human or brief half-elk life - as much as this perfect, woodwose creature demanded to be adored he wanted to adore selflessly, attracted and in love, at first sight. The beast's phallus was vaster yet still than the animal lengths that hung from the herd around him: the size of James' leg, even the thin tapered tip fatter than his fist. James swayed, crawling forward, everything else whirling around him as he sunk beneath the grand beast's bulk, lapping at the filthy fur around its unsheathing cock, the tip of his tongue scraping away mouthfuls of gritty old musk. Its penis was a treetrunk that twitched and slapped against his side. James sprawled to the ground, hands planted in the muddy mess he'd made in his last mating, hooves spread wide, turning around to grind back against the length of its cock, his overwhelmed mind possessed only of the heat spanning from his tail to his shoulders and needing it sunk inside him, needing his body speared through by this utter pinnacle of these elk-things' warped masculinity, that grand stag's erect length a profane natural god in its own right, speaking of some neolithic fertility ritual...mating, in the dark, aeon-shadowed meaning of the word and concept. His ass was grossly distended, a thick ring of heat-engorged flesh, supple and oozing as he rutted against the beast's underbelly, knocking its shaft against his puffy flesh and sliding up until he captured the tip between his cheeks - its watery pre flooding across his back and licking down his sides, pouring like rain to the ground below. The patriarch's pre was infectious and mutagenic, throwing James into the final stage of his transformation and his evolution - the ties with his humanity severed forever...were it not for his still-fair, still-handsome face one would never know he had been adopted, and not born, into this forested clan. But with the pre entering his abused, puffy anus, his nipples swelled up at once, adipose tissue rapidly building with new ducts for even more liquid, and he took a free hand to clutch them and scream in ecstasy as they bloated obscenely, a torrent of milk spilling out of them, onto the ground, out of him - he, James, future mother to the next generation of an elder race. James shut his eyes tight - the pleasure from his new, animalistic teats growing, the mammary glands preparing him for the life of a mother to a new herd, was shocking and intense - he bellowed, his cock hard and straining, still outwardly a male like his new brothers and lovers, but with the added perfection of being a gorgeously fertile doe. His mind exploded with debased, mindless lust - the depths of his depravity to consummate, to have his womb swell with this elder beast's progeny, erasing any other thought in his head. James shoved himself desperately backwards, nearly hanging limp from the spire of the almighty penis, the grand beast's hooves unmoving around him - its legs were like unto pillars fixing the ground to the sky, so magnificent and perfect and masculine was this creature's form. The broken ring of James' ass smeared onto the length of its phallus, twinges of pain breaking through even the euphoric hunger of heat. Each burst of pre felt like it was pissing inside him: a long, shuddering torrent of watery slime pouring inside him, pressure rapidly growing until it squirted from his hole and painted their respective haunches, the shaggy fur of the patriarch's underbelly hanging down in long tassels, soaked to James' skin, wiping back and forth to coat him fully in its own precum - James made choking, inchoate noises back, his teats giving off a fresh eruption of thick milk. He had a hungry mouth inside him that only the elder beast could fill, the muscle blooming open like a flower in a sickening gush, the fertile issue from his prior suitors drooling out around the patriarch's shaft oozing in grimy tendrils to the ground...rejected refuse, unworthy to be mixed in. His muscles gaped around its cockhead - each flex of its phallus rippled through his body, its urethra flexing open like a kiss against the deepest recesses of his being, bidding his new teats, having swollen so, to pour out milk, yet more milk, heavy cream, deliciously aromatic of wood, grass, fresh verdure in the dead of Autumn. If he had only merely felt like a doe before, he was charged, electrified, by the thought - primal, insidious - of bestial submission, of longing to be dominated, impregnated, married to this patriarch, so much older, so much superior, to he. James' womb ached from the sheer volume of the patriarch's gift, wetly gurgling and churning with each new blast of pre, bursting inside him and gushing out around the patriarch beast's cock: watery fluid streaming in burning rivers down his insides, building up in sloshing reservoirs and erupting from his ass in messy runnels, splattering the ground beneath with his milk, the soil churning into tarry mud as he forced himself back on the grand stag's cock, his new uterus nearly filled completely by the beast's solid cockflesh. He arched against the beast, taking on a new obsession, until the beast finally rutted back against him, implacable flesh boring deep inside him, gushes of pre gurgling inside him and pouring back out, upwelling around his achingly used body. James groaned, nearly collapsing bonelessly from the single thrust. The beast bellowed, head tipped up as if to drink from the Moon overhead, and its phallus convulsed, each pulse nearly painful as its tissue swelled and receded inside him. A half-second later, came what James had wished for - a scalding rush of heat burning his core. James panted, a feral whine guttural from his mouth, stuttered and trembling as the beast filled him with its issue. His body was overwhelmed, aching against the implacable pillar of the beast's cock. Seed filled him in pulses, distending his womb, filled beyond capacity, his body appearing nearly pregnant already before his hungry cervix stretched and parted, a solid gush of grimy off-white cum erupting from his hole and splattering across the beast's haunches, each new gush inside him met after seconds by a eruption between their bodies, the patriarch's load already so much more than all three of the other beasts combined, sluicing down his still-newly furred legs and webbing in messy tendrils between them...yet still the beast's ejaculation went, on and on, until the ground beneath them was sloppy mud, the soil rich and dark with the beast's excess. The final pulses kicked deep directly inside James' womb, and, exhausted, he slumped, weakened and anemic, off the beast's cock, falling to a pile into the rich mud below - a wet slurp echoed from inside him as he fell to the ground, ass gaping, cervix deep inside him slowly pursing closed, a messy noise of semen squirting across his inner walls until his aching uterus slowly sealed shut in a final frothy gush of bestial cum, sticking the fur of his tail to his rump. His asshole followed seconds later, musk still squirting across his cheeks, forming runnels through the mass of semen coating his lower body, new fur matted flat to his skin. He was dimly aware of hooves on the ground next to him, a thick layer of cum floating atop the mud, and of hands, claws, grasping his sides and arms, slowly shifting his delirium-stricken body. His eyes slipped closed, only catching snatches of muzzled faces lit by moonlight in flickers as he was lifted by many hands, before he was finally laid down in a readied pile of fallen leaves bordered by thick hickory branches, where he could rest at last. A furry body curled around him, muscles strong against his aching flesh, large and powerful, from its scent James knew at once it was the patriarch who had just taken him, and as its warmth soaked deliciously into his bones. Ambiently, in the night, he heard more noises, and felt bodies shift around him. Inquisitive claws dragged around his flushed ass, peeling away crusted layers of semen, pushing inside his hole, and James groaned aloud, twisting to the side to give the beast - the patriarch, his new husband - better access, moaning softly in his half-slumber as his new beloved lapped at his ass, coaxing fresh musk even as he dreamed. The lapse in time became complete - it was no longer a matter of waking, dreaming, and breeding, but an impenetrable surreality that he was disallowed, forever, for the rest of his mortal life, from comprehending. The days passed in a haze - he would wake, crusted with issue, skin tacky and fur matted, to the foul, reaching tongue of his mate, the patriarch, elder and father of them all...he would present himself and be made love to, over and over, insatiable and savage, the awful conjugal rights owed to his husband that he wanted nothing more than to give, and give again, feeding the heated hunger inside him, even though he knew by now he was thoroughly bred. He was filled until it drooled down his thighs, and he would be given rest, the patriarch nuzzling his long hair gently as they parted - then he was served, in a respectful, regal manner, a platter of choice grass and ripe berries glued on leaves by the semen of his tribesmen, and he would munch on it all with omnivorous human teeth. And this would go on - he, once human, afforded a life of privilege and respect in a tribe that had adopted him and married him to their elder - until dusk, and then again, repeated and permuted, day after day for a full week, perhaps, before the haze of his heat even began to ebb. The breeding had taken, as the weather grew colder and they would all huddle together for warmth, safely far from the campsite the intruding humans had built - James knew even before he began to show, that it had been fulfilled, his purpose, his mutation, his change, for the good of an endangered and deleteriously small herd. He would be a mother. It was like a second heart inside him, a pulsing core of new life: a new fawn for the herd, the first in a time that would remain, for humans, for the world that James had forcibly abandoned, immemorial, for the semen of the patriarch dwarfed and embarrassed the seed of the other herd, and so it was that he was impregnated, immediately, impossibly, with the last of whom his musk-laden rear had craved, who had married him in the Gothic ways of the Appalachian apocrypha, far, far away from mankind. How many seasons had the creatures held that ritual, baying up at some feral god? Waiting for him - for someone like him, for James. This was the inescapable, the complete, the utter truth: his arrival was purely by chance and need not have happened at all, yet, for James, this was a peculiar destiny... ...he was always going to end up like this, somehow. He had chased after the beasts, the cryptids, the unknown, and eventually the unknown caught him - and now he was amongst them. Now, soon, he would be heavy with child, or rather fawn - it would quicken in the night as the Autumn drew on to Winter, it would rouse him from his slumber. Sleepily, in the nightvision that had possessed his eyes with his change, he would grip his hands over his stretched belly, bigger by the day knowing that the fawn of his new wild spouse that had bred him was nestled there, that it would come out of his readily gaping, loosened rump, and be unsteady on its feet before he would lick it with his still-human tongue, laving it in tender baptism, and love it, as his own...his newborn son, with a cute little muzzle, who would grow antlers like his uncles, and James and his new husband, the patriarch, would raise him to be strong, loving to his mother, loyal to the herd... ...the thoughts filled his heart with a joy no human would have words for, and he would make a soft bugle of happiness, quiet enough not to the wake his sleepy, slumbering brothers - something to express how perfect things were, how happy he was, his belly bulging and swollen with a new a life inside him. Some mornings he would awake, sick and weak - he would vomit, and cry out, but the herd was there, his husband always first and always loving, to lick him tenderly, to nurse at his teats when they became uncomfortably swollen, bring him obscure herbs to calm his upset stomach as the fawn grew and grew inside his belly, bigger, bigger every day. There would be months to go, he knew, before Spring, before he could birth this beautiful new creation to the world and raise it with love - then, he knew, somehow, would come the heat, once more, the craving and the need and the expulsions of his delicious, spiced, meaty musk...he would be ready for the herd, bred over and over again until it took. He would beckon with an animal bugle from his unchanging, still-human lips the patriarch, the eldest and the wisest and the greyest, his eternal mate and companion, and be rewarded with thick, rich, delicious, ever-fertile seed, inside him, his body now built to keep it all, and swell with progeny, season after season after season. The bonfires would be burnt again, the old and inscrutable ways blessed to begotten for future generations - and the strange spices dug deep from the soil would be thrown into the flames and spill forth the witchy smells of the autumnal season...the ones that had so entranced James an interminable lifetime ago, when he had first seen what would become his new herd. Here he was, his new life, his new family - as James' human existence had been, going where the mysterious wind had taken them, he had reached a destination, one he could not, would not leave. He was nature, the wilderness itself - he was a part of a herd of uncharted, unknowable creatures. James was now what he had always been seeking.