Her favorite paint was sun-yellow, the color of the flowering weeds that crowded against the sidewalks and pressed upwards against faded brick walls. The paint was thick and took days to dry when she pasted it onto canvas, smearing her padded fingertips across off-white stitching, singing nonsense songs in the back of her furred throat.

A Failed Experiment, they called her, not sure if she could understand the words but certainly not caring enough to hush their melodic, machinae voices. She only tensed her haunches until they cramped, careful not to let them see any tremors in her thin arms, in her sweeping hands stained a cheerful gold. Her ears never fell so much as a single degree. She knew the cameras were there, even when her masters were not.

When the yellow dried in its myriad patterns, she dipped a curving clawtip in primary blue and etched scenes into her sunlit setting. Never figures, not even objects – those could be interpreted, analyzed, used against her – but only symbols. She created a set of characters that meant other things, and she knew she was making language under her masters’ disinterested eyes, but without a reaction from them, she did not know if this was a surprise or the lowest possible achievement.

A new person came in, as occasionally happened, and she ignored every sign of presence, outwardly enthralled by the incomprehensible marks she made on oil-caked canvas. But a faint clicking sound reached her keen still ears, and though the lighting in her single room never changed, the entire atmosphere lurched with a sudden difference. She didn’t let herself pause in her painting, but every molecule of her being strained to identify what had stopped, what had come into being– strained so hard that the person coming to stand over her was not noticed until its shadow blocked the light on her immature, ungrown art.

She looked up, fingers ceasing, and in the silence left by her stillness, she realized that a soft whirring that had underlaid her entire reality to date had gone away. The space she was in felt colder and bigger and bleaker for the lack.

The person stretched its face wide and did not show teeth, gentled its staring eyes by half-closing them. Hello, it said. How Are You.

She stared at its mouth, at its rubbery lips and distinct lack of whiskers. She watched it with all the fascination a curious animal can give to things that move in a world that is otherwise motionless. She knew this game.

But the person knelt, bringing itself to the ground and to her level. I Like Your Art, it told her slowly, enunciating the words. The notes of its voice slipped from pitch to pitch like a slide whistle, like a siren approaching and then receding. She remembered what those things were like, from the early days when they thought she was still worth teaching. She kept watching its mouth, but her eyes flicked away when it moved a hand towards the glistening canvas and its symbols.

I Think I Know What This Says, the person whispered, mouth forming the syllables awkwardly around its binary-regular breath. This One, it pointed a flat, squared fingertip to the first symbol she’d etched, Means Frustration. This One, it continued, moving to the symbol opposite the first, Means Outside.

She wasn’t sure what to do. The person wasn’t completely correct, but it wasn’t completely wrong, either. Perhaps it was guessing, wanting to see if she would react and be lured out into confessing her craft. Would she be rewarded or punished if she admitted? Or if she corrected it?

She stared at its hand, then gave a perfunctory low growl when its finger clumsily smudged part of the thick paint. The person did not shout at her for the warning noise, like some of the other masters did; it simply drew its hand back and tucked it against its lean, suited torso. Its skin was grey against the grey of its clothing, but the spot of sun-yellow stood out brightly, a trophy, a scar.

The person extended its other hand, slowly and steadily, soft palm upwards and fingers closed flat like a plank. Can You Say Anything Anymore? it asked, still whispering, still hard to understand without its voice powering its breath. I Saw Tapes Of Your Younger Days. You Were Like A Little Parrot. You Tried So Hard.

She watched its hand, glancing up to its strange dark eyes briefly, then to its half-curled mouth, then back to its waiting palm. Her ears quivered with uncertainty, with the effort required to hold them aloft and unresponsive. Her whiskers tingled, electrified by the nearness of the person.

Neither of them moved, and she got tired of waiting, her inner reserves no longer lasting more than a few minutes of company. She reached out a paint-soaked hand, the yellow so common on her skin that the blood in her fingers was surely colored like sun, and drew a tiny symbol on the person’s palm. She was very careful not to use her claws, only touching the blunt overcurve against the wrinkled skin.

The person looked down. Hello, it said thoughtfully. I Think This Means Hello.

It did, but she didn’t give any indication of it, watching the person lip its words like a horse might lap up an apple in bites. The base of her ears was sore with straining. She was tired of the game now and wanted to be done with it, so she uncurled her lithe body and stood, bounce-balanced on the balls of her claw-toed feet, half a tail making half a circle behind her thighs. Even standing while the person crouched, she was not much taller, the top of its gleaming scalp even with her heart.

Thank You, the person told her, looking from her face to her canvas to its palm again. Would You Like Me To Come Back Again?

She didn’t respond, moving away in a crescent, never fully turning her back on the person. The silence in the room was echoing without the familiar, almost cozy buffer of the whirring machines.

When I Am Here, the person said, I Will Make Sure They Keep The Cameras Off.

One ear twitched like a fragile bone snapping, nerves flushing with blood as it turned to face its listening cup to the person. Her eyes followed her ear, and she stared at the person with its stretchy mouth and dark gaze and did not know what to do.

The person stretched its mouth more, like an upside-down horizon. I Thought You Might Like That, it said softly, placing its hands on its slackclothed knees and standing stiffly. She wondered if she only imagined the faint whine of gears and old joints in the base of its spine. I Will Be Back, it said, nearly dusting its legs off before remembering the bright paint on its finger. It looked curiously at the yellow stain. Be Well, it finally said, turning to leave the room.

As the door sealed shut behind the person, the background whirr of machines slowly spiraled into hearing, an incoming helicopter whose sole purpose was to watch her with all its encircling eyes.

She walked back to the painting, straightened her skewed ear, and dipped her fingers in the color of the sun.

Without a word, she set down the ruined parchment, finishing her stacks on either side. They swayed, almost weightless despite the paper’s thickness, air pressed between the sheets like mortar in a column. Her work was done. The library had been infiltrated and destroyed.

A shrill gasp shattered the silence of the immense chamber; she turned, feathered cloak rustling softly, to see one of the aliens staring in horror. “You… you…” It lifted a long, knobbly arm and shook it at her, its myriad joints rattling like a fleshless human spine. “Why would you do such a thing!”

Time to go. She nestled into her cloak, shrugging it close until the gap showing her bare chest and stomach was closed by red and purple feathers. The hood draped low over her brows, and she lifted an ink-smudged hand to secure the clasp of a beak-shaped mask across her nose and mouth.

“No!” the alien cried, shakingly distraught, as she spread her arms like wings. It jolted forward, an unnaturally quick motion, but stopped as she sprang upwards and left the ground with the first downstroke of coalescing pinions. Her feathered tail fanned, her shrinking legs tucked up, and she was ten feet above the ground as the alien watched in shock.

The light streaming into the room from the skylight changed then, hue swinging from natural yellowed sun’s-breath to a deep, bloody ruby. She sucked in a deep breath past her sharp-edged beak and flew for the sky, the glass an illusion she left in her wake when she broke into the library. She knew no one expected her to succeed, let alone return alive; the pomegranate light staining every surface agreed with her poor odds.

She risked a glance downwards as she flew at an angle, checking to see if the alien was going to intercept her– and yes, it was already moving, its four stilted legs a biomechanical blur as it hopped long tables and hammock-like chairs below. She was twenty feet above it, ten feet below the faintly arched ceiling with its luxurious murals, but she was still thirty-five feet away from the round eye of her only exit.

The alien kicked off of a table, its bony weight not even rocking the heavy construct, and the color tinting the sunlight swept towards its sailing body like reverse-filmed ink in water. As soon as the room was gently yellow again, the alien’s fog-colored skin was painted a vivid burgundy, and it no longer had a care in the world for the gravity that she struggled against in a still-aired room.

Still, she had one advantage: the alien thought her target was still physical glass, not a generated hologram. It aimed its leap to land against the glass and catch her up when she attempted to dive through it, but unfortunately for it, it sailed cleanly through the broken skylight and into the windy atmosphere beyond.

She had to fight the breeze pushing into the room, but once she, too, was free of the library, the air was her friend and no longer an obstacle. She spread her bright wings wide, flared her tail, and tucked her bootless talons to her body; the sky tasted sublime to one who narrowly escaped death.

When she glanced back, just enough to catch the library’s white-tiled roof in her periphery, she could see the alien slowly drifting back down, the red draining from its skin, whatever uncanny biology or magic it used to defy gravity being released so it didn’t continue soaring to deadly heights. It was waving both arms vehemently after her, but she only kept flying.

Step one in securing human freedom: complete.

Magic makes a thing powerful, intelligent, magnificent, and then breaks it down and takes it all away, so that it is even less than whatever it started out as.

We’re on the decline, too. My people, us shapeshifters– once upon a time, we were werewolves and werecats and were-whatevers, but after our peak and our age of glory, magic began smashing our races together, and now we’re unholy mutts. No one would mistake us for any natural animal, and even our human bodies show the melding; we’re all brown-skinned, brown-haired, an average height and a thick build. No timber wolves here, no, and no blue-eyed blondes.

Just us. Just monsters.

Each generation is a little shakier than the one before, especially as Western society advances. Most of us don’t live in North America, not with its shrinking wilderness and ever-increasing technological security, but some of us are still stupid enough to stay.

Try dealing with the internet, with a keyboard to type on, when your hairless human skin can barely contain the mutated beast within. It’s like wanting to vomit out your own inner body.

Shapeshifting itself, by the way, isn’t pretty. It’s not painful, and it’s not a long process, but it’s not pretty.

So we hide. Most of us live feral and never interact with humans; it’s easiest that way. A few last, strained bloodlines try to run double lives, men by day and monsters by night, but you’ve read the books, you know how that goes. Either they go crazy and their own kind kills them to keep the secret, or they go crazy in public and humans kill them without ever realizing their secret.

No one speaks of wanting to come out to the humans. In every population large enough, there’s one or two of us who still feeds on human information– newspapers, books, anything we can unplug and still use. I’ve read the books, fake and speculative and almost-real alike. I know what happens to not-humans. It’s messy.

I saw, once, someone mention wanting to go out, to make contact. It was just me and our chief and her. She broached the subject as carefully as one would handle the tiniest of breakable bones.

The chief killed her instantly. No conversation, no nothing. That’s apparently the well-hidden punishment, passed down from leader to leader. If I hadn’t been the swarm’s reader, he probably would have offed me too, to preserve the secrecy, but as the reader, it’s my job to understand how things work and never explain it, only to guide as necessary. Of all the swarm-mates, only I can be trusted not to speak.

We don’t have a lot of contact with the other centers of population for our kind. The Atlas Mountains out in Africa are huge and largely empty of humans, and we thrive there, but we stay the hell out of the rain forests because damn, the natives and local animals are more dangerous than we are. We don’t do so well in open and hot and dry areas, so much of the world barren of humans is barren of shapeshifters, too.

We aren’t super-human, let alone invulnerable or immortal. We’re not sub-human, yet, although that’s probably where the entropy of magic will take us– slavering, mute, unshifting creatures that break into the civilized human world like a surprise plague and are, unequivocably, destroyed to the last.

We have some time before that happens. Granted, we have no idea how to prevent it, or even stave it off. Only the readers and the chiefs have a sense of timeline; the rest of us only know what they witness personally. I’d like to see a swarm who all have reader education, and I think some of the swarms who still maintain double lives have that, but for us, our chief will kill whoever gets out of place.

Which is why I have to find a way to kill him, instead.

Everything in the bar, except for the glasses and the booze, was made of wood. Walls, tables, chairs, stools, floor, plates, pool tables. Old wood, cracking wood, wood in desperate need of a good dusting and oiling; it was worn smooth from so many years of being touched and abused, like the faces of the regulars. In some places, wood and faces alike were stained with signs of cigarettes and beer. In others, they were broken in fits of rage or grief. Every piece of furniture and every body in a seat had a story to tell.

It was a low-talking crowd, people minding their own business, burying their faces in their glasses and trying not to think. A haven and a home to many, a last-ditch resort to the rest. The occasional younger patron flirted, flashed white teeth and bright eyes, but their efforts went largely ignored. No well-muscled chest or long leg could entice the regulars from the solemn contemplation of the bottom of their glasses.

They weren’t here for sex. They were here for booze, and for music.

Old Tom sat in a rickety chair on a stage barely higher than the floor, an old mic whining in front of his mouth, a might-be-antique guitar cradled in his lap. The black fedora hooded his eyes from the slanting blue lights; the trenchcoat and trousers hid the rest of him. He was a stocky man, not tall but quite broad, with plenty of muscle and fat bundling his frame up in thick rolls.

The fact that he was a bulldog didn’t seem to matter to anyone. His voice was made of gravel and tobacco, and his paws were hand-like enough to play his old six-string, and if his jowels flapped when he thumped his booted heel on the floor to keep beat, no one complained. They’d learned to sit far enough to dodge the occasional splash of drool.

He sang about them, their woes and miseries, their hardships and their failures, his eyes closed like he was communing with everyone in the room. Sometimes he would name one of them in a song, and it became theirs – Marcy’s Song, Dave’s Song – or sometimes they just knew without the name being necessary.

The newcomers to the bar would sometimes stare, wondering how such thick, stubby fingers could make chords and strum. One of the regulars might provide a helpful elbow to the ribs and a muted glare, if a glass was empty and one happened to glance up to catch the stupor. But at the end of the night, when the last chords were dying away in the poor acoustics of the smoke-filled room, every man and woman in the bar would file past the bulldog and drop money in his guitar case.

And every night, Old Tom was back to sing them another round of comfort for their misery.

It was as far from a glorious job as it was from an easy one. Lamps hung just above passers-by, high enough to avoid even the taller rarras’ sharp-tipped horns but still within arm’s reach; there were lamps on every street throughout the town, lanterns dangling from well-wrought iron posts, a hook and a loop making a simple system. Every fifty feet, there stood a lamp.

The lanterns were glass and dark, ornate metal to match the posts; the lamp inside was a carefully-carved crystal, faceted to shed light as efficiently as possible. Each crystal would last from the longest evening shadows until the sun was visible on the horizon, roughly an hour more than true night.

Perran had an hour to cover the entire dusty town and light every lamp.

He had been offered a wheeler to save time and his legs, but like the other lamplighter who worked when he did not, he refused. Fifty feet was too short for a wheeler to be of use, compared to the time wasted leaning it onto and off its stand, mounting and dismounting, starting and stopping.

Every other night, Perran walked the quiet border town, the desert encroaching with thin layers of sand on the outskirts.

The lamps’ crystals were powered by magic, like nearly everything in rarran society. Even in the dusty pockets of less-civilized areas, like this town, magic fueled the technology they used to survive and eke out a living from the dunes. Hooded cloaks that reached past fingerlessly-gloved hands and leather-wrapped soles shielded the body from the ravages of wind and heat like magic and technology shielded the people from the ravages of the world.

Come twilight, the hood was made optional, the sun low and heat draining from the air. Perran walked bare-headed, long ears upright and free of the heavy fabric. At every lamp, he would remove the lantern from its hook and slide away a glass panel, reaching in a paw-padded fingertip to touch the crystal. Automatically, so well were they designed and carved, it drained exactly as much qki – physical energy, the complement to magical energy – as it could hold. He had a moment before the qki was stored in the natural latticework of the crystal’s structure, before it started to heat up and glow; he replaced the glass paneling and hung the lantern on its hook again.

One every fifty feet. The town was only a few miles from edge to edge, a grid-worked amoeba with uncertain edges, but the streets were close and the buildings were small between them.

It took him a week to learn the timing so that every lamp was lit by nightfall and none faded away to artificial embers before dawn broke. But once he found the pattern, he kept it.

And every night, when he got home, his body was nearly drained of qki, the energy that kept his heart pumping and muscles flexing. He fell into bed nearly senseless, lacking the energy to even think, and slept dreamlessly until the next dawn.

He twisted, scraping his palms along the softer skin of his body – the underside of his arm, his stomach, the creases near his hips that led lower – until all of him was flushed as red as his face. He tried contorting his mouth, baring teeth, curling lips, tightening his jaw, but none of it gave surcease of this madness.

The last grain of sand fell when he killed his girlfriend’s dog. It grieved him, when he stopped and looked at the unmoving lump of poodled fur– when he realized that his vicious kick had done so much more damage than intended. Surprise flooded him at first, rinsing away the red tinges in his vision; he knelt, touching hesitant fingertips to the soft flank. No breath stirred the body.

And he left his home, shaken, no longer optimistic about his fraying self-control. What if he had hit the woman he was starting to love? What if he had broken her bones, instead of the bones of an animal?

Two days later, he stopped seeing a difference between humans and beasts. Men accosted him as he passed, stumbling slavering and twitching; he walked hunched, hands shaking uncontrollably, and whether his attackers were officers or thugs didn’t seem to matter. He struck at them, eager to have a target that deserved to be hurt. Gnarled knuckles broke noses. Bare feet split kneecaps. He stopped himself from killing anyone, but only just.

His vision was fading, the sharp lines that bordered shapes becoming vague and uncertain. Some colors became intense, while the rest gradiated into a dull brown-grey spectrum. His ears replaced his eyes as useful, sounds jarring, specific, comprehensible. He knew what made the sound and where with unerring accuracy. The sighted world was a jumbled monstrosity of inexorable blindness, but he could hear the people and cars around him.

Scents, too, rose to prominence in his nightmarish state. He could smell more than just the city-soaked stench of humanity and machines– he could smell that this person was a woman. That one was a young boy. That one had eaten fish. That one used Old Spice deodorant.

He caught a scent that turned his head, nearly-blind eyes shrunken and reddened, to stare. That one was a woman, and she was bleeding. That one smelled, faintly, like him.

And when he approached her, hulking and lurching, she screamed and fell backwards in a wounded panic. He crouched over her, heedless of the cries of the nearby men, and – as gently as he could – took her face in his malformed hands and held it close to his.

Yes. The scent was there. Stronger. Specific. It told him a story that leaked past the haze of his deteriorated thoughts.

He let the woman go, as gently as he had touched her, and stood. Humans surrounded him, shouting, shoving; one of them hit his shoulder with something heavy and solid. He stumbled, and he left, and the men declared themselves heroes as the woman shook on the sidewalk.

He kept going, following her scent, walking the way she’d come. The smell of her blood was thick enough that he could taste the iron in the back of his throat.

The alleyway was dark, but that hardly mattered; with the loss of most of his eyesight, the dimness was easily managed and, sometimes, clearer. The scent of blood overwhelmed everything else– her scent, perfumed and clean, terrified and adrenaline-soaked, vanished beneath its murky weight.

He hadn’t tried to speak for days. He worked his mouth, uncertain, long tongue licking against grotesque teeth. “You?” he managed to choke out, the word nearly unintelligible.

The shadows behind the dumpster paused their rummaging and built up into a looming shape that stank of blood. The two men paused, regarding each other, one lost to madness and the other in full control of his disease. “Yes,” the shadow-man said after a long moment, his voice a liquid growl.

The madman contorted his face into a rictus grin, then threw himself forward, warped hands clutching at the throat of his sire.

“Wait up!” Girque hissed behind her, walking with his hands and feet all down the same branch. He was weighed down by a full basket strapped to his shoulders, the bulk resting between his gauzy wings.

“No~” Tinwit sang back, pausing only for an elaborate twirl before flouncing off. “I have to open the door~”

Girque mumbled something uncharitable beneath his breath, antennae drooping in annoyance, as he continued to trudge along the two-inch limb. His pack was full of broken weapons, blades and arrows and shortstaves, to be mended by the armory’s smiths and woodworkers. And it was blasted heavy.

But of course, Tinwit wouldn’t help him carry any of it. She had to open the door. Feh.

At the end of the branch, where it dove into the network of other boughs that would combine to comprise the trunk, a light billowed into existence and brightened slowly with a not-quite-audible hum that made the bark shiver. Girque stuck sharp nails into the branch for traction and kept moving, hands and feet together, eyes averted from the growing luminance.

The tree whimpered through his fingertips when the door opened, allowing the two Zeri access to its hollowed, honeycombed interior.

Tinwit pirouetted back to him, smiling with all her needle teeth, faceted eyes reflecting the now-fading glow. “I opened the door~” she purred triumphantly.

“Thank you,” Girque grunted. “Now will you help me wi–”

“I’m going to tell the weaponsmen we’re here~” she interrupted, spinning and buzzing her wings briefly, just enough to give her momentum to bound gazelle-like along the bough. She vanished into the tree’s aching doorway, ignoring the aura of unhappiness hovering at the threshold.

Girque squeezed his eyes shut, counted to three, and opened them again. Zeri magi were becoming less and less lucid as generations went on; Tinwit was a young, talented little waif, but she was as reliable as a leaf blown by the wind.

He sighed, plodding along until he reached the entrance. “Sorry,” he said to the tree, touching a hand briefly to the threshold and snatching it away just as quickly when pain shot up his arm. He did it every time, penance for the door’s necessity, even though all the other guardians had long since abandoned the old tradition.

Girque and his bundle stepped inside; he felt through the shadows for the weed-woven ladder and began his blind descent, the weight hanging so heavy that his body canted at an unnatural angle, his back aiming for the floor. His feet tangled in the fraying rungs; he tightened his jaw and moved more carefully.

There was light at the bottom, set well into the tree’s slope-buried base, a great hollow that shook slightly with old pain. The Zeri who manned the armory bustled around, ignoring Tinwit dancing in spirals around them; one grizzled woman stopped when she saw Girque, no welcome or smile softening her soot-smudged face. “More?” she demanded, somewhere between resigned and frustrated.

“More,” Girque confirmed, pitching his tone to be apologetic. He unstrapped the bulging basket from his back and handed it off, straightening gratefully while the old woman huffed and dragged it off towards the repair quarter. “Tinwit!” he called, muscles burning as he stretched them. “We can’t stay here.”

“But I like the smells of iron and sulfur~” she sang happily, her scarves already darkening like sullied smoke.

Girque winced; his lungs were shutting off in protest of the atmosphere already, and this youngling liked it? With half-hidden exasperation, he trotted over to her and captured her wrists, then tugged her towards the ladder. “We’ll be back soon enough,” he muttered, wishing it weren’t the truth.

“I love the war~” Tinwit crooned sweetly, kissing his cheek before swarming up the ladder ahead of him. “It paints everyone such pretty colors~”

Girque stared after her, shook his head, and began to climb.

We’ve adapted. Of course we have, scientists and survivors all, this motley collective of mothers and soldiers and sick little children. When we’ve reached the point past which our bodies and minds begin to unravel like so much loose thread, we choose our fate and our future: an animal.

We get spliced. It’s a harrowing, intensive procedure that no one in their right mind or hale body would ever voluntarily undergo, but when it’s transformative surgery or death, well, the choice is a little easier. We pick an animal, and scientists and doctors mix their genes with ours.

We keep some necessary human attributes: opposable thumbs, vocal chords, diurnal vision, bipedal stance. We stay within a reasonable size range. Only mammals for us – reptiles, amphibians, and birds are left for the truly desperate, and insects and arthropods just don’t work.

If a person gets spliced early, they keep a little more of their humanity. Maybe all they have to deal with is a coat of fur, some claws, different ears, a tail. The sickest of us, well, we have less that’s worth keeping, so more animal gets spliced in. Some people can’t walk with their backs vertical anymore. Some people have completely animal faces, molded around a human braincase. Some people look like damn Hollywood werewolves, hunched and gnarled and desperate.

The more animal gets spliced in, the riskier the surgery, the higher the mortality rates. As it is, you only get a one in three chance of surviving and not rejecting the new hybrid genome. That’s purely physical, of course – everyone tries to ignore the odds of going insane after you heal. Or feral. We’ve got monsters roaming the tortured world that used to walk strollers down the street and shop at Walmart. And we all pretend that the ones who don’t go nuts are okay, but we’ve got new and burning instincts inside our half-human bodies, and our societies are fraying quickly with the pressure of being civilized.

Some humans – some rare, rare few – are immune to this genetic plague. They can stay human for what used to be a normal lifespan – seventy, eighty years – without dissolving into some hellish combination of leprosy and cancer. Scientists are working like mad to figure out what makes them different from the rest of us, the ones who have to get spliced to survive. They still have no idea.

They say it’s only a matter of generations before our lifespans are so short that… well, we won’t be able to pick an animal ourselves anymore. Parents will be picking species for their five-year-olds, and who knows if a kid can survive transformative surgery. The few that’ve needed it haven’t.

We’re sterile, of course, us spliced ones. Every human who hits puberty contributes sperm and eggs to the banks, hoping they’re donated before the disease really spreads, hoping those cells might turn into one of the unaffected. Extremists think it’s time to start turning our medical and scientific resources to making us hybrids fertile, rather than clinging to the last vestiges of real humanity.

Maybe they’re right, but then we run into a new, awful problem: can someone who is half-dog breed with someone who is half-goat? What do those kids look like? How do you mix bastardized genomes of entirely different species?

Some say we’ve doomed ourselves by allowing diversity, by allowing choice. We should have all been dogs, they say – dogs are the best choice, mentally compatible with humans, socially similar, physically familiar. But dogs are carnivores, and the world doesn’t have as many real animals to eat as it once did. A lot of us became omnivores or herbivores to keep the balance, to not bleed the earth dry of its children.

Maybe the human species is dead, and splicing is just a death throe. Those of us left are just a fraction of the billions that were here when the condition first began.

Or maybe this is the phoenix’s ash, and all we’ve got to do is hang on before we can fly again.

Ears twitched. A massive head lifted. A body shag-furred in shadows and steel rose, turned, paced forward. The eyes stayed closed, velvet lids offering a blank slate to the surrounding forest. Ears alone guided the heavy-clawed feet.

The screaming continued.

Time passed: hours, days, some uncounted ticks on a clock that didn’t exist within half a season’s slow walk. The screaming stopped sometimes, started again later. The sound weakened, thinned, frayed like a worn thread.

The high wail snapped in twain as soon as the gnarled paws stopped.

The eyes opened. Featureless ink-black reflected the scene along a curving surface.

One of the Sivas stepped away, lifted an empty hand in warning, and said something in a trade language. Another hand pulled a thin knife and held it over a third wrist, ready to spill blood to power battlemagic; the fourth hand hovered over a pouch of reagents.

An Ipyan struggled feebly in the many arms of another Siva. Two of the People, looking like two-armed Sivas with muddier skin and softer eyes, stood near a makeshift alchemy table. They all stared at what had emerged from the forest.

Blood stained the air with its starkly metallic scent, a cry of agony to a sensitive nose. The Ipyan shook, a number of neat, shallow incisions along its flat torso already bled dry, its arms marked with uncounted slices. The enormity of magical potential in the vials of blood on the table pulsed like thunder too low to be heard, only felt through bones and the shuddering of the heart.

/Help,/ whispered the Ipyan, a word universal to all the great languages, its slit-pupiled eyes staring wildly. /They’ll kill me./

The other words should not have been understood, but the ears twitched, and the face with its jutting tusks turned. The whiteless eyes met the Ipyan’s panicked gaze.

/Help–/ The Siva holding the Ipyan cupped a strong hand over the wedge-shaped mouth.

The Siva in front said something again, meaningless, its slanted face intent. A warning was in its sibilant tone, slicing through the breathy syllables like the delicate knife in its hand would cut into its arm and loose enough magic to destroy the intruder.

That which came from the woods moved, and screams rose anew from the clearing.

…

At dawn, the vials and decanters of blood were untouched on the table. No blood had been spilled into the earth. Five bodies lay unmoving on the loamy soil, and the Ipyan huddled around itself, rocking, its long tail wrapped around its ankles and its arms encircling two of its knees as it sat on its other two heels.

Its mind blurred, smeared like the skin of the People while they slept, hazing in and out of focus. It had lost so much blood. Almost too much. It clung to rational thought, ran basic arithmetic through its head, holding so tightly to the surety and solidity of numbers that it nearly lost sense of the pain warming its flesh.

One of the bodies stirred, ears twitching, nostrils flaring. The Ipyan froze and stared, then unfolded unsteadily and crawled over. It rested a sleek three-fingered hand on a fog-and-shadow flank, the fur coarse and thick, and waited until huge eyes opened and met its slitted gaze.

/Thank you,/ the Ipyan said, exhaling, feeling the weakness pooling in its solar plexus.

The head lifted, a foreleg pulled beneath the deep chest, and the creature propped itself up stiffly. The gaze never wavered, even when pale membranes washed over swamp-dark eyes and obscured their murky depths.

The Ipyan stared, shivered, wanted to laugh. Its savior was a mad beast, and it itself was barely more stable. So little blood. So little of the magic that its people scorned. So little grasp on sanity left. /You are shapeless,/ it said, almost begging for some word to the contrary.

The membranes washed the eyes again. The ears quivered.

The Ipyan touched the tusked face, too dazed to be afraid. Ragged whiskers scraped its fingers with miniscule serrations. /Thank you, shapeless,/ the Ipyan murmured, bowing its head and tucking its narrow snout between the soft rolls of flesh around the beast’s neck.

The low croon was startling, but the sound continued like a morning aerophone’s drone. The Ipyan found its body relaxing against the breathing mass of its rescuer, fingers loosening, tail going lax. It slept for the first time since its capture three days prior, breathing so shallowly as to seem dead, lulled by the smooth call of a mother to her long-lost son.

…

The dreams drove the Ipyan awake time and again, sobbing, wailing, flinging out a weak hand until it hit the rough pelt of the shapeless. But wakefulness was never truly achieved, the veil of dreamscape shading the sharp yellow eyes, and even a touch from the shapeless could not pull the Ipyan from the haze.

The madness was taking hold. It had lost too much blood, and with that blood, the magic that held its brilliant, complex mind intact.

The shapeless rose, left the Ipyan writhing in another dream, and stared blankly at the vials on the alchemy table. The People had probably intended to drain the Ipyan dry, extract the magic from the blood, and replace the blood in the failing body: all the necessary tools for such a lengthy, agonizing procedure were set up. The body still had enough blood to function, but the mind didn’t have enough magic, and the Ipyan would be lost to madness under the moon of the next night.

The shapeless studied the table for unmeasured moments, comprehension drip-dropping like a river-smooth stone through a series of waterfalls. Eventually, it took a stoppered vial in its jaws – carefully, so carefully – and brought it to the thrashing Ipyan.

It pressed a talon to the Ipyan’s scarred chest, some of the incisions trying to bleed anew from the dreamer’s violent movement. Gently, the shapeless pressed its wide muzzle to the Ipyan’s angular face, holding its head still, its face to the sky.

And the shapeless crushed the vial in its jaws, blood spilling between its teeth and past the Ipyan’s parted lips.

The Ipyan swallowed convulsively, unable to jerk aside, unable to draw breath to cough. It drank its own blood, the shards of the vial too large to drop into its small mouth, until there was only reddened spittle dripping from the shapeless’s muzzle.

The gold eyes cleared. It stared upwards as the shapeless pulled back, dropped the rest of the shards, coughed, spat, hissed like a gale through a canyon – the blood sprayed, a fine mist. It would only ingest a tiny amount.

The People didn’t need blood-magic, after all, and even the wild shapeless were still the People.

But the gods… ah, the gods can dream.

That’s why I’m here.

I’m just a dream, one remembered upon awakening, one dwelled upon at a titanic breakfast table, one mused over while sipping a lake-sized cup of coffee.

A tiny speck of imagination seeded into something different, something Other, something no longer bound by What Is but rather by What Might Be.

I am a god’s dream, run away after that vast mind turned to more mundane things like sweeping and laundry, feeding the mountainous chickens and milking a sea’s worth from a cow larger than the moon.

That’s why it was so easy to jump over, if you were wondering.

I find myself here, now, wondering where this ‘here’ is and when this ‘now’ is. The mysteries are even more obscure to me, made by minds foreign to what I called a womb; I am a dream attempting to understand other dreams, but you are not aware of your origins as I am.

You think yourself made of star-stuff and dinosaur-blood, not understanding that it’s only so because a labyrinthic brain half the size of your country decided to hit the snooze button one more time and dream a little longer.

How little you understand, yet how much more you know than I.

Would you teach me, if I could explain to you that I am not just a voice in your head, a lull of thought replaced by fabricated fantasy? Would you listen to me as you would a person, for such is what I am, if I could evoke your belief in my existence?

I am a mote in your eye, fleshless and pale, but I am as real as you.

Tell me stories of your cities, minuscule in comparison to the mice droppings in the corner of the god’s kitchen. Explain to me your rolling contraptions when I know you could fly, given half the chance and a little kick off the edge. Clarify why you live in seething masses of separate bodies when you are all the self-same dream, split apart in artificial honeycombs of your own design.

When did you decide to stop being whole?

And I will tell you about the colors of the nebula just outside your back door, the winds that blow through airless vacuums, and the song of the stars. If you lean just a little forward, a little to the left, I can tilt your head and let you hear the whisper of shuffling paper a thousand miles away, where a ghost and an angel are signing a deal with someone who just wants some company. If you let me, I can close your eyes and show you the face of the god that dreamed me alive.

It’s a very large face. You could count all the pores if you wanted, since they’re big enough to be swimming holes for a body your size. But the god’s hair is certainly an attractive shade of purple, fancifully styled with braids and knots. If you wanted, I could teach you how to weave such a style for your own hair.

But, for any of this to happen, you first have to put down your tea and believe that you’re hearing me, not another version of you. And then you have to really listen, like you’ve never listened before, like you may never again.

And if you do, I’ll tell you the truth of everything I’ve ever dreamed.