And her name is…

Over the next few days Wulfric does his best to make sure I’m not bored. I don’t know what they’ve told the others I have, but whenever we leave the bedroom he insists on carrying me. Honestly, I’m not sure if it was even a part of Noryth’s story and I wonder if it is just Wulfric’s desire because he knows he can get away with it. We go down for breakfast because Ignacio and Helion have started eating that in one of the offices as they go over whatever it is they do, but every other meal we eat at the table in Wulfric’s room.

My keys have never been found, and after a couple of days I remember the last time I was in there leaving bloody clothes in the bathroom. I don’t know if it would start to smell, but I do also miss all the clothes that had been made for me. There was some consideration about breaking through the window, and we have checked a few times if the previous intruder has gone in and left one ajar, but no such luck. I might have killed them with the other servants that attacked me that day. We have no real way of knowing without any evidence.

Wulfric carries me to the library for books everyday, barely letting me out of his sight like he’s afraid I actually might have an expiring condition.How ironic that I’ll die perfectly healthy anyway.It’s too risky to return to training in the gym where someone could see, but we actively work out all over his bedroom which more than makes up for it. I still go out for walks, but we start them farther away, and I don’t shift. It’s not because I’m scared to do so, and I’ve asked Wulfric to show me his animal, but we’re both too… content to do it. It’s like the pair of us have never felt more comfortable in our own skin and we just don’t feel that restless need to let the shift out. Before he goes, we promise each other that we will. Yes I am curious, but a bigger part of it is being sure I can control myself before the only one who has been able to calm me down is out of reach. I can’t deny that logic, but with all of the time I have been spending with him, a small part of me sees this as one of the last walls between us.

Each night we fuck until I’m too exhausted for nightmares, or we try, but sometimes they still get me. Each time I wake up screaming he pulls me closer and asks, ‘which memory haunted you tonight, my Theo?’ I asked him to stop calling me a Queen after Noryth started giving me a too quizzical look.

I can’t help but feel like I’m falling for him, even if he treats me so well because he thinks we’re fated to be together. I can appreciate the whole idea that if someone wants to be kind they will, and he apparently wants to with me. So, when he asked Tiago to drop us in the middle of the mountain range and not return for two hours I wasn’t worried. He told me he was going to shift for me, and then he wanted me to try as well. Animals can communicate better amongst themselves, and though they can understand Orthoirian we could both talk if he was shifted while I was.

-

I’m nervous, I’m very nervous, but the beast under my skin is eager to get out now. I’m sure once I let up the reins that it won’t take much effort. He can see it too.

“I’ll go first,” he says softly, stroking my cheek. “I’m confident that you won’t hurt me.”

“You shouldn’t be,” I return, my mind wandering to the future. “If you’re not careful you could end up…”

“I trust you,” he interrupts me, kissing my lips.

“You shouldn’t do that either,” I lower my head but he kisses the top.

I see his pants hit the ground where I’m staring and then his other clothes land on top. My eyes roam his naked body with desire but he doesn’t let me distract him this time. He takes a few steps back and then begins.

His back hunches as his hands and feet become clawed. Wings sprout from his back as fur covers his body and seconds later he is vapula. I stare in wonderment at his lion body with the wings of a eagle. He roars inches from my face but I don’t move as a smile grows on my face. My hands find their way into his mane and I run my hands through the hair. It’s softer than it looks and I hum in approval. He pushes into my hand and I scratch to dig my fingers in deeper. Though the legend for vapula is not meant to refer to all who have the same shape, he’s really a griffin, I can’t help but look at him and imagine him as ‘the Duke of Hell’; a good fit for the former general.

He roars at me again and I roll me eyes. “Yea yea, I know, but I’m going to do this my way.”

I went to sit, the snow on the ground no longer something I need to avoid as the weather warms. I took off my out layer first, debating on leaving my remaining clothes. They would be impossible to take off, if I could control myself, after the shift but I wasn’t sure I wanted to sit naked. I resolved to do a little of both. I removed my pants and bra to sit in my underwear and a T-shirt. Then, I begin to meditate, letting my affinity creep up without looking to step back in my mind.

No siphoning anything today. It’s time to shift and stretch our abnormally long legs.

I hear that strange laugh in my head and I know this is going to work. It starts at the top of my head and I wonder if I could stop it there, with just the crown of deadly antlers, but let it continue. It isn’t long before I can feel my change in form, even with my eyes closed, and it feels like my conscious mind is sharing the driver’s seat with my instincts. My clothes shred off leaving me feeling both exposed and able to enjoy the wind through my fur. My chest doesn’t have full breasts like a female person, but my top half and hips are significantly wider than what I would expect a male to possess. I inhale deeply and grin at the smell of someone near me. He doesn’t smell like books now, because now smells like the grass, and sand, and the air above a drying pool.

My wicked grin doesn’t make him back up, even as I lear over him and laugh. I watch as he lowers onto the ground, putting his head down by his paws, and looks up at me. My mind is wiped blank on why any creature would so willingly supplicate themselves, especially someone as new to their form as I am.

‘What are you doing?’ I manage to form the words in my mind as a conscious collection of characters for him understand.

We may be different shifters, but all animals have this innate ability to understand each other. Long before Orthoirian’s developed a language they could understand, animals were already communicating, we’ve just never been able to understand them. Wulfric lowers onto his belly fully and I straighten my back. My legs are like deer, giving me still a sort of leering quality when I’m not trying, but I have something I would consider closer to feet than hooves, and no deer ever had claws on every appendage like me. I didn’t think to suggest doing this near water, so I’m forced to go off of the feel of my face and I feel… Demonic. My eyes are set more deeply into my face and my smile is wide, stretching across my face in a way that make me wonder if I could bite off someone’s head. The thought should have my stomach doing summersaults, but strangely it makes me drool.

‘I could have killed you,’ I retort, looking him over and snorting.

‘I knew you could do it,’ he returns and I get the impression that he’s smirking.

I roll my large eyes, that laugh peeling from my throat. ‘Not your smartest gamble considering I’m still mulling it over.’

I’m sure he’s smiling now and he gets up, circling me now as if he’s examining me. ‘You look like a sprinter. Do you want to run?’

The pain I used to feel everywhere disappeared after I killed all those people, and now I feel better than I ever have. I nod, an eagerness rising in my chest at the thought of actually enjoying running outside. I take off first, hearing his padding paws on the ground behind me for a while before he takes off to fly above me. I laugh loudly, seeing this move ascheating, but I was clearly much faster than him on land. We ran into very few other animals, all of which gave me a very wide birth, but a lot of them would still be keeping a low profile while they regained strength from the long hibernation.

I heard Wulfric roar before I translated his words in my head into understanding. “Watch out!”

I heard the snap of a trap as it closes around my leg and make a sort of muling sound. Skidding to a stop on my other limbs I keep weight off the injured one, and I start to snarl eagerly. There were hunters in this wood, and they made a terrible mistake hunting today. The slight rustling sound behind me has me turning slowly, cocking my head to the side as I do and looking for the eyes of the next soul on my list. My eyes meet the stunned but narrow slits of a woman with dull blond hair before swinging around to my other side to see a man with green in his hair, a long knife, and an eagerness she doesn’t have.

He says some gibberish with his wide smile but she shushes him before hissing, “cernunnos!”

That word I know, because it’s more of a name, and I laugh wildly at it. Their paces and circling end abruptly at the sound and the area beneath me starts to die as my affinity drains the life away. The husband tries to throw a knife at me but I move to stand straight instead, diminishing their forms with my height. I cackle my laugh again and approach the wife, feeling pleased when she drops to her knees and lowers her hands and head to the ground in a bow. She’s speaking to her husband, but he doesn’t seem to be listening.

I realize I can only presume they are together because there are two of them, but he doesn’t seem to be listening to her based on the pitch of her voice. Leering over him, I cackle again but he doesn’t get the fear I hope for. Delightful. I let my energy roll off me and he stumbles but doesn’t kneel, and that’s fine. Maybe he doesn’t know how. I swipe out, clawing both of his thighs open and he falls to his knees, screaming in pain. Meanwhile, I’m bending to fit my fingers into the trap and pry it open when I hear a click. I look up in time to see him throwing the knife at me and I catch it in the stomach. I’m yanking on his energy as I remove the knife, stopping the bleeding and turning him into ash, but the woman gasps behind me. Before I can take her in I hearing a growling approach and see Wulfric dragging a corpse by their shoulder.

‘Theo!’ He gasps, dropping the body.

I grin while I try to pry the trap off again. ‘Never a dull moment.’

He circles the woman and I can see her trembling but keeping her head down. He nudges her rump toward me and the woman rocks without the nerves to keep her in place. Slowly, she turns her head toward him and he gestures toward me. Her head jerks up to look at me where I’m still struggling to pull the trap free with my long fingers and claws, and Wulfric nudges her again.

‘What are you doing?’ I ask, though more looking for thewhy.

‘Well we could resign ourselves to killing her and I’ll shift back to get it off… ’ Wulfric begin, ‘or I can take this opportunity to remind you that there are good Sioga in with the bad, just like every species.’

‘I could let her take it off and kill her after,’ I mutter in return as she starts to stand to come over to me.

Wulfric chuckles but it sounds more like a huff and the woman jumps. ‘You could, but I think you like the message better.’

He was right, that I did like the idea of a hunter going back with stories of a new creature moving into their woods that could turn people to dust. With our presence around here, no animals would be picking apart their bodies for sometime, so there’s more than enough time for her to return with others for the proof. I look away from Wulfric to watch her as she approaches me, and I see her watching my hands scratching at the trap but every so often glancing to my face. Her glances make me more self-aware and I realize I’ve been so busy staring at her that I’ve stopped smiling. I move the sides of my mouth in thought, feeling like my mouth is now reduce to a small point under my nose. A start to laugh but I keep my mouth closed and it’s reduce to a strange garbled giggle in my throat that makes the woman flinch and one of my hands flies up to cover my mouth. She regains her grip on the side piece to slide out the lever and crank the trap’s jaws open.

There is a wet suction sound as the mental is pulled from my skin and I see her wince at it. She waits for me to pull my foot free and then releases the mechanism so it’s inactive. I pull energy from her as she’s looking at the damage done so she feels the exhaustion as she sees me heal. When there is no sign of the broken bone or wound she looks up at me. I can’t help it. I pull my mouth into a wide toothy smile, raise my hand to pick up a lock of her hair near the front and drain the energy, turning it grey, and then let out a soft, frankly creepy, laugh. Wulfric came up behind her when she wouldn’t stop staring at me and nudged her away. She watched us as she backed away to her bag, Wulfric moving to sit beside me, and then threw it over her shoulder and took off at a sprint. I followed the feel of her energy as she head toward where I presume her town was.

‘Did you take enough?’ Wulfric asks me and I put weight slowly on the foot, testing it out. There’s a faint ache but it healed pretty well with just what I took from her so I nod. ‘It was some bad luck to find hunters out here. How many did you kill?’

He growls, ‘two. I almost missed them in their giley suits.’

I chuckle internally. ‘That’d be bad. We’re pretty far from Orthoire to be just running and shifting.’

He nods. ‘We should head back. She seemed pretty scared but there’s no telling how her story will be received. We aren’t exactly a natural hunting pair.’

‘Agreed.’ We head back but I can’t help asking. ‘You can’t teleport?’

‘I’m shit at it, even before the magic started weakening,’ he admits. ’The one thing I didn’t get from my mom. Noryth isn’t much better. My problem is feeling the currents of magic and remembering a space well enough to get somewhere intentionally. Noryth’s problem is strength. I assume he’ll get better with age, but right now he can only get somewhere he can see. That’s how he manages to sneak around Kheliq’s so well, it’s doable once you’re already inside… also why his bag flew into you on the wall presumably out of no where.”

‘The magic is weakening?’ I question, sure that I haven’t felt different.

He gives me a look, even as we’re running together, like I should know. ‘Yes.. because of the blight. Have you really not been paying attention?’

I laugh eerily. ‘Not even a little.’

He gruffs at me but we’ve returned to our starting point and Tiago is there looking worried. As we approach together he relaxes and as I slowly start to shift back he turns away from me. I put on the clothes I left behind and sneak a glance at Wulfric. He catches me, so I lick my lips and smirk, catching the slight hardening of his dick before he has a chance to pull his pants up. I’ll lose him soon. In two days he’ll go to join the team entering Kheliq’s domain. I’ll be joining them for the party a couple days after that, but I likely won’t see him there. My chest clenches at the thought and I turn away from him as he finishes dressing to hide my pained expression from him.