FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"Yeah, just to, y'know. Flex a little. Been cooped up in here too long, doc."

"I'm not a doctor," responded a man in a white coat.

"You dress like one," said his patient, who was also his employee.

"That's true. Sure, live it up. Have your night out on the town."

"You got it." The second man licked his lips.

"Make sure to get at least one data point. Or at least do some recruiting. And this should go without saying, but don't fuck up. Your cohort has gotten small enough as it is. With Edgar gone, it's just the three of you."

"Sure, doc. Hey, ain't my fault they all go finding bad ends."

The not-a-doc glared at his not-a-patient. "Get out. Be back tomorrow."

And so, Thrace got his night on the town. It wasn't the biggest city out there. Technically, Easttown was on the border of "Out There," but that gets into local geopolitical semantics Thrace had studiously ignored all his young life. At twenty-two, he felt he had enough living under his belt to ignore little things like technicalities about what a place was called. There were more important things to tend to: namely, dinner.

--

Thrace wasn't particularly particular in his tastes. It wasn't long before he spied an appropriately unsuspecting anthropomorphic otter (Aonyx cinerea) stumbling out of a club into the nearby alley.

"Hey there, cute stuff," Thrace greeted.

The wolverine anthro (Gulo gulo) pressed his body up against the immediately flustered mustelid to trap him against a wall. He stroked his catch's chin, sniffed deep inside one ear, then loomed over him with a grin. He opened his jaws wide, wrapped his arms around the guy's shoulders to hold him still, and dove his head down over the otter. A yelp of terror found itself muffled in the wolverine's throat, then upper chest, then belly, as the predator's body stretched like rubber around his meal. Thrace crammed him ravenously inside, barely relishing the sensations - of stretching around, containing, claiming this entire other person - in favor of heeding his hunger, the need to push the smaller man inside him as quickly as possible, before anything or anyone could protest.

He gulped hard around wide, smooth hips, bolted down kicking knees, and snapped his jaws shut over the wriggling feet as they disappeared from the outside world. His belly contorted as the otter struggled. His meal's protestations were now completely muted from the alleyway as Thrace's body moved like living silicon, refusing the purchase of claws and teeth while restraining him steadily within a constricting, absorbing space that was already dripping itself into and through the otter's flesh, molding to him, turning him into more of the man who had just consumed him.

Thrace let out a long, slow, satisfied groan. He could feel the strange transformation his body had undertaken like a loose fluidity. He hadn't always been able to do this. Only a few years ago, he had signed up for a research study claiming to be testing "long-term beautification treatments intended to give one any body they wanted." Some edification on the wordplay and a series of injections later, Thrace had the ability to wholly consume other, living individuals and turn them into more of himself. It made his flesh where it showed under his thick coat of fur into a tar-colored, iridescent substance. It could deform obscenely both inside and out and was, after his years of physical therapy and training with the doc who had given him permission to go hunting tonight, at his command.

"That's all the proof I need," came a low, tired voice from the other end of the alley. The accent lay somewhere in Eastern Europe, but it was hard to place an exact country of origin. A tall man slowly stood from alley wall he'd been leaning against. He was a European badger (Meles meles) standing around 6'5". He wore sweatpants and a tee shirt that hugged the powerful chest and back all of his species seemed to have. Next to him on the wall rested a scythe a head taller than he was with a blade that had a ghostly yellow sheen to it in the dim lighting.

"Proof of what, asshole?" Thrace snarled. His pleasure from his meal had been interrupted. He could feel the otter's mass beginning to merge with his and he wanted to wade in the sensation of incorporating the other man, not talk to some weirdo. "Proof you've got a place to stay for the night? Give me a minute and you can come in, too."

"My name is Thirty-three Scythes and a Pen. There have been reports in my circles of voracious activity here. I was sent to accost you. The local authorities are currently indisposed and need not be involved. Release your meal and convince me I have no reason to make you my next one."

Thrace spread a sickly grin across his features, then flexed every muscle in his body at once. In an instant, the otter vanished inside him. Mass and life fired through Thrace's body like it had been infused by a cannonball. He grew immediately to over eight feet tall and tore out of his tank top. Shoulders practically creaked with strain as they and his back ballooned outward. His blue jeans shredded along the seams to release tufts of black-brown, bristly fur and around the mid thighs, ripped clean through. It was as though he was suddenly made of steel. "He's mine."

Without hesitating, Pen slammed the butt of the scythe onto the concrete sidewalk. It made a sound like a great, ancient bell tolling. Force pulsed from him in a sphere and there was a muffled commotion from inside the buildings on either side as people were knocked outside of its radius, but Thrace was apparently exempt. Pen hoisted the weapon high in the air. The arc of the blade - unmistakably bone now that it was easier to see - spun around the axis of the shaft to describe that same sphere of force such that it encompassed the two of them in its radius. The inhabitants of that sphere were simply and suddenly plucked from where they existed in the world and deposited onto a sloping, grassy hillside in a crisp, midmorning chill.

"Look around you," Pen intoned without giving Thrace time to get his bearings. "This is the demesne granted me when I joined the order."

"The order?" Thrace spat. "What cultist shit are you talking about?"

"Those Ever Enthralled to Hunger. Affectionately, the TEETH."

"I cannot accurately convey how little of a shit I give. Tell you what: You get inside me, I'll take you back to my boss, you take it up with him." Thrace did, however, take a look around. It was a mid-sized hill, maybe stretching half a mile in all directions from where they stood. Beyond, in defiance of conventional geography, were sweeping valleys amidst mountains, not in chains, but arranged in clusters. This hill was amidst the outer reaches of one such cluster. Some formed great plateaus with sheer cliff faces; some were craggy and pockmarked with caverns; others were ornamented with fantastical flora; and rivers of crisp water with many moods streaked the slopes. They didn't seem natural. They seemed... designed. Decorated. Like homes.

And there were, in fact, homes among them as well. Some were placed near to one another. Others were solitary. Mansions, hovels, even one skyscraper sprouting bizarrely out of an incline that couldn't possibly support it. And near the homes were... people. Dozens of them. Hundreds. As Thrace's eyes strained for details, there might have been thousands populating the variegated country he now found himself in. But on this hill - Pen's hill - there were only the two of them.

Thrace glanced at the sky beyond the hills, then dropped his jaw as he began to take in exactly what was up there. The great, pale blue expanse he took for immutable fact each day was filled with enormous, impossibly close moons so large they had to be planets in their own right. The blue could somehow be squinted past, to see the great, infinite blackness and spray of stars, but the planets, or moons, or satellites, filled the entirety of his attention. Great, pastel spheres so near it made Thrace's knees quake to even consider and not nearly as motionless as one expects of a planet.

He turned his eyes back to his immediate vicinity and adjusted his calculation of how many people were on the hillside. There were three people - himself, Pen, and some unlucky otter businessman (Lontra canadensis) who was standing up from behind a small boulder - and one Assistant. The Assistants were, for all intents and purposes, mindless golems in the shape of diminutive anthros, and they were - out loud, explicitly, and unapologetically - not people. They were perfectly obedient and tied themselves to their owners or contract holders like an extra limb. This one was a beautifully colored Malabar giant squirrel (Ratufa indica) by the name of Witness, whose insect-black eyes hid in their depths a tiny, emerald pinprick of light. It was fastidiously adjusting the otter's clothes as that otter stood up and gaped at the world around him.

Pen seemed to finally notice them. He clocked the Assistant and nodded with an aggrieved sigh, as though acknowledging a mistake he had made. He then said to the otter, "Pardon, sir. You were not intended to come here. I should expel you, but the means used to bring us here are too stringent." He gestured at the scythe he held, which was now dull, as though that explained anything.

"I... I don't..."

"We must leave," the Assistant said, surprising everyone. Its synthetic voice brooked no nonsense, but held no anger. It was simply stating facts. "My deepest apologies, sirs. My master has been brought here unwillingly and is in mortal danger if I have correctly assessed our location."

"What?" barked the otter. He stiffened, eyes wide, then glared and composed himself. He was used to commanding a space and used to using his voice as a weapon. His eyes flicked back and forth between the badger and the wolverine and he adjusted his demands on the fly to suit their obvious gulf in power over him. "Send me back to Easttown immediately. It is clear this is a mistake. I will see you compensated for the inconvenience as you obviously have urgent business with this... man." He hesitated and tried not to look at Thrace's hulking form.

Behind his mask of managerial calm, the otter was terrified. He was a high-powered marketing executive named Raided and Weathered* who had simply been enjoying a night at a club to sample the younger clientele and possibly find an interesting conversation. He was in a snappy, but casual vermillion dress shirt and black vest. His Assistant, Witness, had been there as ornamentation and was dressed appropriately: in a matching, low-hung loincloth tied under its tail that showed off beautifully broad thighs on either side, bracelets and anklets, and nothing else.

To hear his pet-servant-golem-escort-bodyguard express concern for his life was no small thing. The Assistant had demonstrated itself more than capable of handling mundane threats. In fact, it was the nature of its hard, dense body that had likely landed them here, though Raided didn't know that: Pen's pulse of energy, intended to push innocent bystanders out of range, had not been prepared for the weird gravity Assistants used as part of their day-to-day function as small servants in a world not built for them. More than that, they possessed a wealth of mysterious knowledge that, for the most part, went untapped. If it thought he was in danger of dying here, he was truly, deeply afraid.

"Witness, report." His voice shook on the second word. He hid it behind a cough, but poorly.

Pen spoke first. "This demesne extends to the base of this hill. It is linked with the many others that you can see here. The option exists, to all predators like me and like yourself, Thrace, to place their victims safely here. It is a neutral zone established many thousands of years ago and guarded by forces I will not name." Instead, he pointed to a peak so high it defied sight. Thrace and Raided both squinted at it. Independently, they realized it wasn't impossible to imagine the peak reaching up and touching one of the terrifying planets. It defied reason, but their eyes couldn't unsee that surreal reach.

The badger continued. "People here are safe while their predators and keepers gain the satiation of having consumed them completely. Here, they are far safer than day-to-day living in the world you know and they have the option of re-entering the material world through totems we can teach you to make. Those Ever Enthralled have our own network of demesnes." Here, he gestured behind himself at the great cluster of nearby mountains. "I have been newly inducted and have but a handful who have chosen to live within me. They were safely expelled before bringing you here, Thrace."

The wolverine grinned enormously. "Why? Afraid to give me a smorgasbord?"

"It is the way of the TEETH to never unfairly impose the consequences of one's own morality on others." His voice at last hardened as he came to those words. "To let there be fairness, as much as is possible, in a world with no objective restraints on morality. And it is unfair of me to risk my life while they are still within me." His lips peeled back in a smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Besides, I will relish bringing them all back home."

Raided broke in, his face creased in a worried frown and one hand unabashedly fiddling with his pocket stone - all otters carry them - which was a garnet sphere he rolled among his palms and fingers when he was nervous. "Why send you to handle this threat when it might kill you? Why not send one of them?" He pointed up at the many, much grander demesnes beyond Pen's.

"That would be an imposition of morality. Here, I have chosen that my morality dictates I would rather risk death than allow Thrace to continue predating on hapless, helpless others. If there is no risk to oneself or one's community or ideals, then it is simple bullying and predation. As such, it is my duty to inform you that you have as much command of the laws of physics in this place as I do. Please take a moment to acclimate yourself."

"That's idiotic," Raided sputtered, bewildered.

"Might cannot be permitted to make right," Pen retorted in a tone that suggested he had said those words a hundred times.

Thrace frowned. "The way you talk... do you know Forty Days Fasted?"

Pen was taken aback. "He's a friend, and a dear mentor. Has he come back into the world?"

Thrace shook his head. "That's need-to-know only. My boss is gonna be pissed I killed you instead of bringing you back for questioning." Then, he snorted. "It's a food chain, not a philosophy class. If we're fighting, let's get on with it." Muscle rippled across his body as he flexed, testing his enhanced size after his meal. "I need dessert."

"More simply stated," Pen answered, his gaze even, but kindling anger, "You consume and destroy the unwilling and the underserving. I do not. I would rather die than live in a world that permits you to continue. Defend yourself."

At the last two words, Witness swung its small body up and around Raided's in such a way and with such a use of its unnatural gravity that the otter was yanked well out of the reach of both other men in an unlikely series of stumbling steps. The Assistant would not permit its master to become collateral. To Raided's surprise, the scythe was simply planted in the ground like a grim, skeletal standard while Pen marched forward, slow and steady.

Witness murmured in his ear to fill him in. "Sir, I do not know Thrace's method of consumption, but the cultist's is prehistoric."

"Is it like what the wolf does? Forty Days Fasted?"

"I surmise yes, it is at least related. Pleasant to know they are acquainted, isn't it, sir?"

"It's incredible something this ancient even survived." Terrified as he was, Raided could not help but be awestruck at what he was witnessing. "So... you're implying they'll try to eat one another? What would happen here, since here is where all the prey live?"

"We were brought here by..." It paused and vibrated. The vibration, Raided had learned, happened either when the Assistant was confused, which was rare, or was suppressing a deeply felt emotion it wasn't supposed to have. Its gaze focused on the planted scythe. "I think we were symbolically consumed by whatever that scythe is made from."

"I think" was a rare phrase for the Assistant. They didn't truck with uncertainty. They either knew or did not. "Which means...?" Raided prompted.

"My assessment of the cultist's language suggests that because Thrace was not brought here by the conventional route, the conventional safety does not apply. Whichever of them prevails here will survive. The other will die. If the cultist dies, this demesne will collapse. Presumably, we will be ejected back to the material world to face Thrace ourselves."

Raided took a deep breath and unclenched his jaw. "I should intervene."

"I do not know."

"Could you?"

"I could distract him for a time, and perhaps confuse him into a lucky happenstance. His magic is unfamiliar, though, and while I understand my abilities are opaque to you, for which confusion I am deeply and sincerely sorry, sir, I am young and merely a servant."

Raided and Weathered let out a sigh and raised a conciliatory hand to rub Witness's ears. For the moment, they simply watched.

Thrace sneered. Phosphor had prepared him for interlopers. There had been more than one, each now safely dealt with and existing only as a good memory and a cache of power. He summoned up combat magics: a hazy shield around his body, a shot of supernatural adrenaline, and his personal favorite: an aura of heart-stopping rage. It was the frenzied, violent fury of a barfight; it was police brutality; it was battlefield bloodlust. It was both infectious and paralyzing as it rolled outward from the depths of the wolverine. He flexed his muscles, pumping them inches broader as he activated his stores of victims, rolled his shoulders back hard to face the sky, cracked his joints, and wheeled his fervid gaze on his opponent.

His opponent met that gaze with a calm that snuffed out the rage in a moment. There was magma behind his eyes. Both combatants were mustelids and in that way were distant cousins. Both were well-acquainted with the overwhelming, mind-erasing rage that came over much of that clade when it came to food and fighting. Perhaps, Thrace thought distantly, it was that very combination that had led both of them down the path of predation in a world that had obsoleted the practice and made it unthinkable.

But Pen didn't ostentatiously flaunt his fury in his bearing and voice the way Thrace did. Pen was his battle rage. When Thrace looked at him, he found that the only thing he could see was the badger's gaze. Those eyes took up the entirety of his mind. And within that fury, there was more - there was hunger. Pen wasn't just some self-righteous fanatic willing to kill and die for his beliefs. Pen was deeply, primally hungry, and in that laser-focused ire, Thrace felt, for the first time, like he was prey.

"Stop it!" he bellowed. "Get that mentalist bullshit out of here. I eat because I can. They're meat. You're meat. If you're still fucking asking permission, you're a step down from me on the food chain, and there's only one way this ends." He darted forward, hulking mass driven by colossal, muscular power.

Pen punched him so hard in the gut he coughed blood on contact. The fist came up, under his sternum, and lifted his enormous body up and over the badger in an arc. Thrace slammed into the mountainside and rolled.

"You're all so young," roared Thirty-three Scythes and a Pen with unleashed frustration.

Thrace scrambled to his feet, but Pen advanced on him and launched his considerable weight into the off-balance wolverine so they both tumbled to the ground. "You're!" he snarled out, "Barely thirty or I'm a canary!" He scrabbled for purchase, but the badger was locking his joints into place with elbows and knees that were far sharper than they should have been and weight far beyond what his form should hold_._ More than that, spikes of bone jabbed from his joints at his target, whose shields struggled to hold against the multiple fronts of attack.

"Consumption is the origin of all life, all things, all motive," Pen grated out between savagely bashing pressure points on the bigger man, keeping him pinned to the ground. "And for you it's a shot you can take once in a while, something you can jack off to alone at night."

With a howl of rage, Thrace forced a growth spurt on himself that doubled his size and shredded the remainder of his clothing. Unthinking, uncontrolled, he snatched at the badger and flung him one-handed down the hillside. Pen hit hard, rolled, then recovered with unnatural grit and speed. The two combatants came together again to exchange blows. Despite the difference in size, Pen gave as good as he got - mostly. However, within only a few moments, it was clear the master of the demesne was on the backfoot beneath the raw power of Thrace's form.

Raided flinched as he heard bone meet muscle, ribs crack, and jaws bruise, but otherwise tried not to move. He, too, was of the mustelid lineage, so he knew what this kind of rage was like, but he hadn't weaponized it the way these two had.

Witness chimed in softly, right beside his ear, "It's less tied to their lineage than you might assume, sir. Any animal knows primal rage and fear. This is something they believe in. As much magic as there truly is in the world, it is still tied to the user's will." There was a tone of admiration to the little golem that made Raided raise an eyebrow. That was a vanishingly rare nuance for it. And, of course, Witness seemed to feel the curiosity, so it explained, "Assistants rarely get to witness something so pure and well amplified as this."

"The badger can teleport people between planes. Why is he tackling and using emotion magic? Why not lightning and portals? Why not come with a gun?" He wished he'd ever actually taken a class in gunmanship. Instead, he had a pistol he'd forgotten the name of in a lockbox in his condo.

"A bullet wouldn't take down someone like Thrace, sir. I have watched closely. The strength of Thrace's body is not in its physique. It's in its makeup. He is not made of the same muscle and bone as you, sir. It is, I hypothesize, somewhat similar to mine. Besides, he is clearly versed in magical combat."

Raided let out a shuddering breath and posited, "I suppose there's also a world of difference between wanting to just kill someone and wanting to eat them."

Witness nodded. "Consumption is deeply personal. It is not something done at a distance. You, sir, know this well."

Raided grinned out of one corner of his mouth despite his fear. He and the Assistant had experimented with its own synthetic, shape- and size-changing body on their first night together and many times since.

The duel raged on. Pen had positioned himself with his back to the slope, forcing Thrace to climb to reach him. It was a subtle tactic, and of minimal effect given Thrace's enormous size. The difference between them made it look like an adult fighting a child, but Pen moved like he was combatting someone with nothing more than a mild weight class advantage. His blocking arms deflected swinging kicks off their line of momentum; when he gripped Thrace's wrists, he was able to make the monster stumble; when he managed to slip in a blow to the thigh or belly or foot, Thrace howled in pain. But the badger was slipping. He was panting with exertion and had taken hits that would have broken normal bodies. He fended off a one-two combination of overhead haymakers, but opened himself up to a knee to the chest that sent him flying up the hillside again.

Pen was also coughing blood by now. He righted himself and didn't bother to wipe the stuff off his chin while he heaved to catch his breath. What Raided couldn't see was the psychological toll of the fight. The conversation had gone mute, but the contest of wills raged on, and Pen knew his resolve was cracking. Thrace's body didn't break the way it should, and so his confidence also seemed unshakable. His blood was thick and felt like it was sinking into the badger and enervating him from within, as though preparing him for Thrace's body.

The badger had known he had been chosen so that the fight would be fair, but it was finally becoming clear to him that what this man was using wasn't the same as when Pen had been sent to clean up a demon or some novice hedge mage or someone born with the right body and the wrong mind to manage predatory capability. This was a fully aware person augmented by a new magic. Force of will alone could cow demons, whose bodies had become little more than shells in which to walk. Physical prowess and spell craft could similarly do away with jumped-up mages and born carnivores. Thrace seemed to be a little of everything. He was eager to eat, needed to use what he had been given to remain an apex predator. He had prepared himself for combat with physical and magical training. He blocked blows with magical shielding, diffused withering touches, and fired back with crushing gravitational magic. And within all of it, seeping in through every crack, boiling over with every breath, was that urge, with the certainty that at the end of this, he would swallow and destroy Pen and everything he had created.

That meant, Pen supposed, that it was about time to accept the fight was over, one way or another. The next time Thrace charged, clearly intending to simply tackle the badger to the ground, pin, and consume him, the young cultist met the enforcer head on, hands to hands, head to head, and eyes to eyes. They grappled, motionless, as the combat once again came down to defiance and certainty.

Raided finally spoke up. When he did, he used the voice that shut down rancorous businessmen who thought they could cheat him. "Put that monster in the dirt," he shouted.

"You've no part in this!" Pen shouted back, straining as his concentration was pulled. "You'll tip the scales! It will make this," he cried out as Thrace crushed his fingers together, "an imposition!"

"I am under your protection, and your stance holds that I should not be overwhelmed by some beast! I will be if you lose here! Kill him!"

Thrace shot back, "Your stance will be picking this fucker's clothes out of my teeth on your way down my throat, you afterthought." The emotional force of the retort sent Raided stumbling to the ground to quake and cower, hiding his face from that fury.

"They are not... we are not..." Pen hissed through clenched teeth.

"You're not what?! Big enough? Strong enough?" Thrace screamed with effort and strained again, then jerked a hand back, and forth, and crunched Pen's arm into his shoulder socket with his elbow locked, getting an answering roar of pain. Pen had to twist to keep the force up even as bone ground against bone inside his shoulder. "You're not a real predator? You're not worth a vote on what happens to you?"

"We are people."

All at once, splinters of bone shot from Pen's hand and tortured arm into Thrace's. The monster shrieked in sudden pain and twisted to get away. Pen followed the momentum with a leap, wrapped one leg behind the wolverine's, and with inertia and angle, tripped and slammed him to the ground again. With a cry of pain, he forced the bone to grow wide, like an enormous thorn, and then cracked free of his arm and rolled away to leave the mangled forearm there as a skewer. Thrace's hand remained pinned into the mountainside and once again, though the size should not have allowed it, that splinter of bone immobilized the hand entirely while Pen staggered to his feet.

The beast whipped his hand over to grasp at the bone. When he did, using magic that had not been taught in schools in centuries, Pen pointed at the bone shard and it stretched up like a spear to pierce the other palm, burst through to the other side, and cinch Thrace's two hands together to be immobilized on the mountainside. The wolverine's feet scrambled for purchase against the slope to free him, but there was none. Pen advanced again. His teeth were bared. The look in his eyes was the wild, feral frenzy of an animal about to tear into its meal.

"You can't eat me!" Thrace shouted. "You're too small! You don't have the magic I have. You don't have the ability, you don't have the will, you don't have the strength to eat me." He got his feet under him at last. Pen picked up a small boulder in one hand and hucked it like a shotput to smash into Thrace's knee, sending him back to the ground with a yelp.

The badger seized control of himself with effort, perhaps realizing that his body didn't have the elastic properties of Thrace's despite his desire to engulf the much larger man. He staggered up the hillside away from him until he reached where he had planted his scythe. "You're pinned. I pinned you with my body and skill and strength of spirit." The badger used his remaining hand to wrench free the great pole arm, and the ground rumbled. "By your own ethos, you are my prey."

A face took shape in the hill above Thrace. Caverns opened, revealing three pits of deep blackness, steadily widening as the earth itself molded and warped to reveal the eyes and mouth of a great badger whose body would have been the size of the hill if the rest of it appeared. The wolverine looked up at it, but his eyes caught movement beyond, above, far past that. He saw the towering mountains beyond them shifting as well. Shapes of many species he knew and some he didn't all appeared in the rocks and trees and caverns, and as they did, people on those great mountains lined up to watch the combat come to a close, heedless of the shifting landscapes around them. And beyond that... he shivered in sudden, gripping, all-encompassing terror. The planets. The celestial bodies that were so close, too close, rippled and surged like they were made of clay to reveal eyes the size of continents.

Thrace was nothing.

"There's so much more than you in the world, Thrace. A shame you chose not to see it." Pen coughed up another wad of blood. The muzzle of the earthen version of him moved with his own. "But all the same, a delight. I don't eat meat often."

"You can't eat me! It's against your ethos! You don't kill people! You don't eat people!"

"Not people, no."

Pen walked back down to the giant maw. He loosened the bony blade of the scythe from its haft and roughly installed it in the roof of the warm, musty-smelling cavern - and Witness told Raided, from their vantage point, how the position perfectly matched a missing tooth in Pen's own jaw. Thrace continued to babble pleas for mercy and nonsensical threats.

Thirty-three Scythes and a Pen opened his mouth. His avatar did, as well. It sank down the hillside in a surreal motion and smoothly flowed until Thrace was held in darkness, overhung by a moist, warm cavern of earth and stone and moss and, deep within, rushing water. He screamed. The scream was cut short as Pen closed his jaws, tilted his head back, and swallowed him whole.

"You, however," he said with a slow, grating, pleasurable growl, while one of his fingers played at the bolus of prey bulging inside his throat, "chose to be a beast." He gulped. A look of profound satisfaction and pleasure washed over him while he flexed his chest and shoulders, then licked around his lips and swallowed again. His eyes flicked up towards Raided and Witness. The hill shuddered, refusing to go still.

--

Thirty-three Scythes and a Pen used a jerking roll of his own shoulder to carry himself up the hill that was his avatar to where Raided and Witness sat. The haze of rage that had left Raided a trembling mess was gone, so the otter was now simply shivering and clutching the little squirrel anthro like a teddy bear while it hummed some comforting tune. He looked up and saw the badger approaching him. There was a hunch in the way Pen was walking and a feral look in his eyes. His body seemed bigger, swollen with vitality from having consumed Thrace. His torn shirt and pants showed cobbled obliques and trunk-like thighs that rippled as mass flowed into them. His remaining arm was lines of tendon and cords of muscle. His back was swollen with consumed size.

Witness put itself in the way of the growing predator. It said calmly, "Please take a moment to regain control of yourself. I will spare no caution in defending my master if necessary."

Pen cocked his head at the little creature. "I could simply command you to feed me," he said in gravely tones. His body heaved with shallow, needy breaths.

"You do not control my contract. It would sadden me to deny you satiation, more so than it does now, but it would sadden me more to betray my master. Please allow me to serve him well."

They traded gazes for the space of several breaths. To Raided's estimation, Pen was visibly resisting the emotional pressure that Assistants so capably used to overwhelm opposition before it became conflict: Witness' tone and phrasing - indeed, even its performative, broad, slow breaths - were designed to work on subconscious levels to make Pen feel relaxed and in control. The badger knew this and resisted with bared teeth for an entire minute before finally straightening his shoulders and taking a few deep breaths, in time with the little golem. He then moved forward again more carefully to take a seat a few safe feet from Raided.

As Pen approached, Raided snapped, "Why didn't you just do that earth shaping trick in the first place? Why the ceremony? Where's your arm? Let me get your arm, I might know someone who can put you back together, that wolf, Forty Feasts, whatever his name is."

"It is my own demesne. I can recover here." Pen smiled for the first time that evening and waved up towards the other nearby peaks. Distant sounds of cheering greeted him. For all that this group seemed willing to let their members die horribly in death matches, they - or at least, those living within them - seemed gladdened by Pen's victory. "Besides, the use of bone and blood and spit are well-known to us. It has been... a relief, to have the Disagreements loosened." His eyes narrowed and his pupils widened. Raided shivered. He would never forget that he wasn't dealing with just some vigilante of justice. He was dealing with someone who consumed people whole, and loved it. Pen, it seemed, was glad to be back in a world where he had prey he could justify consuming... completely.

"Loosened? All of that's still supposed to be impossible! I just keep finding things and people who don't care!" Raided fumed. His eyes kept going to the severed limb. It wasn't bleeding nearly as much as it should, and yet it was still bleeding profusely and its owner seemed unperturbed.

"The Disagreements have been breaking since they were formed. Your companion there is proof plenty. Even though these spaces became static during the embargo, and even though each of us signed just as we were asked despite our distaste, the demesnes remained, waiting to grow and change again. Like tonight, you are an unfortunate bystander while the world changes." It wasn't said to be mean, but it hit Raided hard.

"Well... I don't like that." The flat, simple statement sort of fumbled its way out of Raided's mouth. He reached into his back pocket and retrieved a business card. "Raided and Weathered, marketing division of Intelligent Design, Inc. I've encountered your mentor Forty Days Fasted before. He's in town. If you need a meeting, I can arrange one. And... look, I don't know why you're here, I don't know you at all, but things are happening in this city and it feels like the people in charge don't give a damn. Your people might. A whole house vanished two nights ago. It was all over the news. The whole city should be on some kind of lockdown and it's not. What are your people called? The Teeth?"

"Those Ever Enthralled to Hunger, yes. You said an entire house...?"

"They need to come here. They need to fix this."

Pen took the card in one hand, carefully, to keep from staining it, and nodded his thanks, but then put on a rueful smile. "Forty Days Fasted is in the city, and you want more help?"

"Yes! He's not doing anything! As far as I know, he hangs around and does stripteases for money!"

The badger sat in stunned silence, his eyes wide, and then laughed. The sound rang out like a golden bell and carried through the clear, open air. "I told you... hah! I said that he's a mentor to me, yes?"

"Yes, and you said he 'came back into the world' like that's a normal thing to say."

"The last time I saw Forty, he was there." Pen pointed up, up, and up, to where that single insane peak seemed to crest the sky and touch the nearest planet. "His demesne is there, though none occupy it." He pointed again. Raided's eyes found a towering mountain overflowing with lush vegetation everywhere except its highest cap, which was coated in snow and barely visible in local cloud cover. "Forty Days Fasted vanished from here when The Disagreements were signed, much like the rest of us, after transforming our understanding of our arts and designs for the first time in centuries. You have met someone who falls short of godhood only because he has chosen not to attain it." His body creased again with barely controlled laughter. "And he's decided to be a_stripper!"_

Pen pounded his knee with his remaining hand as his laughter pealed out over the mountain ranges. Raided and Weathered stared, his mind boggled. And Witness, perhaps most curiously of all, joined Pen in laughter, the chimelike voice filling the air with its joyful, synthetic sound.